The Cape of Good Hope (Dutch: Kaap de Goede Hoop, commonly De Kaap) is the southern promontory of Africa and, by extension, the British colonial possession — the Cape Colony — that grew up around it. In Van der Kemp’s monograph the Cape figures only in the closing pages, as the place where D. P. Faure edited the Volksblad, a Dutch-language newspaper in which he published his recollections of the 1884 Transvaal negotiations.
The Cape had been a Dutch East India Company station until its capture by Britain in 1795 (restored in 1803 and retaken in 1806), and was formally ceded to Britain by the London treaty of 1824 and subsequent conventions. By the late nineteenth century it was a self-governing British colony with a substantial Dutch-speaking settler population, and its press was a natural venue for discussion of South African affairs. Faure, having returned from accompanying the Transvaal deputation to London, wrote an article in the Volksblad — Van der Kemp quotes from the issue of 17 April 1884 — declaring that “the suzerainty is abolished. This, as we understand, was the opinion of the Transvaal republicans; and this, the most painful of their grievances, has now been removed” (Van der Kemp, 1900, p. 239).
Van der Kemp introduces the Cape reference to corroborate Faure’s later testimony to Joseph Chamberlain. The fact that Faure’s account had been published immediately on his return, before the suzerainty question had become a “burning question of the day” (Van der Kemp, 1900, p. 214), is presented as evidence that his memory had not been reshaped by later controversy. The Cape, in this respect, serves less as a place of action than as a documentary vantage point from which the historian can triangulate the truth of the Transvaal negotiations.
See Also
Source
Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819, by P. H. van der Kemp, in Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië, 6e Volgr., Deel VII (1900), pp. 159-239. Universiteitsbibliotheek Vrije Universiteit, LS.08781.