One Year of Silence

Tags

Afrikaners, Donald Trump, South Africa

It is true that I have had one year of silence on this blog. In December of 2020 I published my last entry on the AmaBhulu blog. Roundabout that time my mother’s newly returned cancer hijacked our family. She had originally been diagnosed with oral cancer on 1 October 2016, but fought that into remission in 2017. By end 2019 it was back and they could only provide limited radiation treatment, which pushed it back by about one more year.

Given that this last stage was during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown here in British Columbia with the hospitals in a crisis, it was decided that we would nurse my mother, Nickie, here in our home. We thought this both sensible and considerate. Hospital beds were scarce and most attention went to the crisis stricken terminal COVID patients. Cancer took very much a second seat. I’m sure time will tell how many postponed cancer diagnoses and treatments led to preventable deaths.

In the very last week before her passing we received round-the-clock nursing attendance. By far the best nurse we had was a black lady from Jamaica who took one look at the situation and took command. I was 100% happy to follow her instructions. She did things “softly but firmly with a smile”. Along the way, we also had in-home support staff from Nigerian immigrants, who were great fun to deal with under terrible circumstances. One lady was called Lobola and I could explain to her what that meant in isiXhosa (bridewealth”). Her eyes went wide and she said that in Nigeria it meant “wealth”. So, Africa is a small place. I could speak to these ladies in a way I could not communicate with regular Canadians. Their faces lit up the moment I started talking to them. It was a small point of light in a dark time.

It has taken a long time to adapt to the sudden quiet in this house. After all, there are three relationships among three people, but only one among two, so there is now one third of the previous joint activity. Nickie’s influence on this home and on the community was huge. The Sunday after her passing, the sermon in our church was pretty much based on “What would Nickie have said?” After all, she had pointed out Biblical facts to the minister and to the assistant pastor who led the Church Meet. Condolences came from Canada, the United States, Britain, Germany and South Africa. She had touched many people’s lives.

Having shared almost every moment of the last months of her life, I can tell you that my mother gave up on life the moment Donald Trump lost the election in the USA. Until then she was quite lively, and asked every day to see what he had done that day and which of his demonstrably evil political enemies he had “slammed down” that day. She equated him to the character Trompie in South African culture, a very naughty boy with a heart of gold. On the other hand, she often said, “No, my child, he should not have said that.” The next day she would ask, “My Child, what has Trompie done today?” However, she even shut up her Church Meet group when they launched into their unthinking knee-jerk anti-Trump rants, which many Canadians seemed to think their duty. Facts did not seem to mean much to them. I do not think South Africans are capable of believing what extreme garbage was dished up to the lamentably unthinking North American public. It boggles the imagination and revolts me to this day. And much of it is now being revealed for what it really was by the Durham Probe in the US. Nickie is probably smiling in vindication.

I think I have now dwelt enough on the passing of this special lady who commanded so much respect from everyone she touched, the Afrikaner Farm Girl who had literally jumped over a cobra, who had broken the glass ceiling, who had won her own face-offs with both the Church and the Police, who had survived a terrorist attack by the ANC, and who outlived both Mandela and his terrorist chief, Joe Modise. I only wish the circumstances of her passing were more positive and that we could have had a proper funeral service. COVID made it impossible.

I am ready to proceed with the AmaBhulu Blog again. I am starting with a recent livestream with Scott Balson of Loving Life and with an interview with a great friend of civilized South Africans, Alex Newman, on his Sentinel Report.

— Harry Booyens

The Early Booyens Family Revisited

Tags

Batavia, Boijens, Cape of Good Hope, The Netherlands

A few weeks ago I presented a Blogpost about the Booyens progenitor possibly spending six months on the infamous Robben Island. Since then I have had help from Corney Keller, an experienced Dutch genealogist with serious skill in deciphering the often bewildering Old Dutch East India Company documents from the 1600s and 1700s.

Two things became clear in the process of investigating the Booyens Stamvader in South Africa, Pieter Boijens and his father, Joen Pieter Boijens:

Firstly, the man who spent six months on Robben Island (above) was indeed Pieter Boijs van ‘t stigt Bremen, the bishopric of Bremen, but he was not Pieter Boijs/Boijens/Boeijens, the son of Joen Pieter Boijens. Pieter van Bremen was  employed as a woodcutter at the Cape by the Dutch East India Company and appears on the muster roll of that company at the same time as “our” Pieter Boijens appears on the Freemen muster roll. The Company eventually records Pieter van Bremen as “deserted” and they suggest he absconded with a passing French fleet. The two Pieters are not the same person.

Even more outrageously, there is a third Pieter “Boijens” at the Cape over the same period, and he stays for several years longer, also as an employee of the company. He is Pieter Booij van Holsteijn, with the same basic origin as our Pieter’s father. He serves as wagon driver for the company. It is rather ironic, given how rare the surname Booyens is in South Africa, that there would not just be four men named variations of “Boijens” at the Cape in early 1714, but that three of the four would be named Pieter, all mutually unrelated.

Such is genealogy. It pulls these oddities out of old records and produces intriguing conundrums that somehow always seem more outrageous than fiction. And they will mislead one.

So, the end result around “our” Pieter is that we still do not know how it comes about that he appears on the 1712 Muster roll of Free Men at the same time that his father is at the Cape. It is still quite likely that he came to the Cape on the same fleet that the Huis te Hemert, Pieter van Bremen’s ship, sailed in. This would mean that two men named Pieter Boij(en)s arrived in the same fleet.

Secondly, the life of Pieter’s father, Joen Pieter Boijens turns out to be vastly more interesting than we ever thought. Not only does he marry twice more when Pieter’s mother dies, but he loses both those wives while away on Dutch East India Company journeys or duties. Over his lifetime he sails from the Netherlands to Batavia at least three times, and once from Batavia to the Cape and back, and then dies in Batavia, shown below. In the process, he spends first 3½ and then, much later, five years at the Cape. He eventually dies in Batavia, leaving his estate to his son Pieter at the Cape of Good Hope, who appears to be his only surviving child.

While stationed at Batavia, he serves on at least two more ships, and we have no idea where they sail, because those logs have disappeared. One should remember that, for a long time, the Dutch had sole rights to trading with Japan. They were allowed to use the tiny island of Deshima in the bay of Nagasaki. It would be interesting to trace the movements of the three “missing” ships in books other than the missing logs, for example the Daghregisters. Who knows, perhaps Joen sails to Nagasaki Bay on one of the seasonal trips. The Dutch would dominate the trade with Japan for 218 years.

The whole story of Joen Pieter Boijens may now be read on the Genealogy web for the Family Booyens of South Africa.

— Harry Booyens

My Blood on Robben Island

Tags

Cape of Good Hope, Dutch East India Company, Nelson Mandela

—Given the seven years of hard work that went into the subject of genealogy in order to write the book AmaBhulu, I felt as author that I owed it to readers to share the Booyens genealogy in more detail. After all, they had spent good money to purchase the book and it relies on that genealogy. That genealogy now exists on its own website, as reported by an earlier post on this blog.

Last night I discovered, to my horror, that the Dutch Nationaal Archief has changed the website of the “VOCopvarenden” database so that all the Cape arrival links I have so carefully provided on the Booyens Genealogy website for the Stamvader are now defunct. I shall have to redo them all. However, I also discovered that the good folks of the archive have scanned the original documents so that we can see what the Dutch East India Company wrote about these men back in 1710-1715. And it is interesting indeed.

Conundrum

Ever since realizing in 2013 that Joen Peter Booyens did not remain at the Cape of Good Hope, and that he was almost certainly the father of Pieter Booyens who was born in the Netherlands and DID remain, I have wondered why it is that both men stayed with the Erasmus family of Drakenstein, but that Pieter was absent in December 1713. See the table below, in which the information comes with the courtesy of Richard Ball.  Since the muster rolls pretty studiously recorded all the non-company folks at the Cape, this was a bit of a conundrum. Why would the son, if he were really the son, appear and disappear?

I may have found out, and it is intriguing.

Date	Parish	Person	Where listed and/or with whom
31.12.1712	Stellenbosch	Joen Pieter Booijns	p.247
31.12.1712	Drakenstein	Pieter Boeijens	NOTE: Both men listed as Freemen at the Cape in December of 1712
31.12.1713	Drakenstein	Joan Booijen	p.266 Pieter Erasmus & Maria Lijsebeth
31.12.1714	Drakenstein	Pieter Booijs	p.297 Pieter Erasmus & Maria Elisabeth
30.04.1716	Drakenstein	Pieter Boijens	p.333 Pieter Erasmus & Maria Elisabeth Jooste
30.04.1717	Drakenstein	Pieter Booijens	p.361 Pieter Erasmus & Maria Elisabeth Joosten
30.04.1718	Drakenstein	Pieter Booijens &Geertruij Blom	pp.387 Pieter Erasmus &Maria Elisabeth Taken from 30 April to 2 May 1718

Clarity

The newly scanned documents at the Dutch Nationaal Archief show an entry in 1714 stating that Pieter Boijs, the putative son, is sentenced to six months on Robben Island (below), future home of Nelson Mandela, somewhere between August 1713 and August 1714. There is also an earlier 1713 entry recording him as being present at the Cape. This checks with an arrival of 29 November 1712 on the Huis te Hemert.

In 1717 Pieter Boeiens marries Geertruijd Blom, and the church book reads:

“den 30ste Maij -Pieter Boeiens van Blokzeijl jonghman met Geetruijdt Blom jonge Doghter van Cabo”

That just so happens to be the daughter of Pieter Erasmus’ neighbour. Given that Pieter’s putative father, Joen Peter Booyens, is a Dane, it is also significant that Pieter Erasmus is also known as Pieter den Deen, “Pieter the Dane”. Other research has shown that Pieter den Deen’s wife is related directly to Pieter Booyens’ mother-in-law, and both ladies are of mixed descent. So, we have here a little ex-Dutch East India Company Danish community at the Cape of Good Hope.

When his fourth child is baptised in 1723, the entry in the church book reads,

“Den 21ste Maart – Catharina, doghter van Pieter Bois en Geertruijda Blom. Getuijgen Lucas Mijer en Agata Blom.”

The surname in this case is written almost identically (minus the “j”)to the Pieter Boijs that is used on the Dutch East India company documents for the man arriving on the Huis te Hemert. It is exactly the same as the surname used for Joen Pieter’s son baptised in Blokzijl in 1695. On those company documents, however, they say he joined the Company from the Bishopric of Bremen. But, that may merely have been the first place he went to look for work, given that the major harbour of Bremen is close to his father’s origins in Nord Friesland.

Dutch experts have confirmed the fact that whoever Pieter Boijs was who arrived on the Huis te Hemert, he definitely served his sentence on Robben Island between August 1713 and August 1714. They are not yet convinced he was the same man as the Pieter Boeijens/Boijens/Bois/Booijs/Booijens (Booyens) who is the confirmed progenitor of the Booyens family and son of Joen. However, there were awfully few men of that name who served the Dutch East India Company, and only three men of that surname show up at the Cape in VOC shipping registers. The third is Jan Boijens of Blokzijl, who was most likely Pieter’s younger brother. He shows up after 1716. There was no other Boijens family in Blokzijl…. pretty much ever.

Closure

Having struggled several years to figure out the comings and goings of the first Booyens in South Africa, I go to sleep tonight realising the route likely runs through Robben Island. And what was a problem, has become in part an apparent vindication of a set of conclusions I made several years ago.  That is, the Pieter Boijs who arrived on the Huis te Hemert in 1712 was likely the son born to Joen Peter Boijens in Blokzijl, The Netherlands,  in 1695. And they ended up together in the home of Pieter the Dane at the Cape, where young Pieter remained until after his marriage. His father left the Cape in 1714 and his trips on VOC ships are well-recorded.

The above, if correct, would make him the second of my family to be consigned to the island. The first was Autshumao, better known as Harry the Strandloper, Khoekhoe clan chief at the Cape. He escaped. He was the uncle of Krotoa, my Hottentot forebear who turned interpreter for the first Dutch commander at the Cape, and who married another Dane, the doctor/explorer Pieter van Meerhof. She also spent time on that island, but as wife of Meerhof, who was the head there.

Is it not ironic that I apparently got my family name from a man condemned to Robben Island and my natural licence to be in South Africa from another party who was a forced resident on that island, only to be denied that licence by the followers of a  third person who was also forced to spend time on that barren piece of rock: Nelson Mandela.

My blood seems to be on that island.

Tell me that bit again about genealogy being boring.

— Harry Booyens

The South African Family Booyens

Tags

Cape of Good Hope, Dutch East India Company, Genealogy

The writing of AmaBhulu required a massive amount of genealogical investigation. Since the publication of the book, the author has been working away at compiling the Booyens genealogy. The building of the family tree is largely complete, filled in up to the early 20th century. This is often enough for interested descendants to recognize where they fit. Work is continuing to add “flesh” to the bare bones of the tree itself. A new dedicated website has been created to serve as online home of this effort. More detail will be added over time. Visit  the Blog Page of this work and follow its links to the genealogy.

—  Harry Booyens