Standing at the Corner of Community and Nation

Adam Hochschild's The Mirror at Midnight: a South African Journey (1990; 2007) continues to bear fruit, uncomfortably strange as it is at times. I would say the same of the 1992 Misha Glenny book I read last year, on the former Yugoslavia, and what followed from that country's dissolution after the fall of Soviet Communism. Two countries with more than a couple of nations tucked into them. 

The Mirror at Midnight settles into a pattern of alternating past and present chapters, culminating in a specific retelling of the 1838 Battle of Blood River, where the invading Dutch Voortrekkers' war with the Zulus ended in a combination of conquest and coalition. In a sentence: 464 Voortrekkers led by Andries Pretorius took a stand at the Ncome River in what is now KwaZulu-Natal and killed approximately 3, 000 attacking Zulus from an army of between 10, 000 - 15, 000, led by King Dingane.

Hochschild is strong on the topic of Voortrekker mythology. For example, we learn that the "pledge" taken by those 464 Voortrekkers in the days leading up to the battle -- to "forever honour the day," should they survive it -- was more or less forgotten for several decades after what later became known as "the Vow". Only near the end of the 19th century, when the Voortrekkers were more commonly known as Afrikaners or Boers, was the Vow activated in the face of the same competing British interests that caused them to push north decades earlier, in search of new, tax-free lands on which to farm. The difference now was not the land, per se, but what lay under it: gold. And the British, whose currency was based on it, wanted it. All of it.

In the double-colonial Canadian province of British Columbia, the narrative is more commonly seen as a binary: you're either Indigenous or a non-Indigenous settler. Doesn't matter how you or your family came to Canada -- on a slave ship, as a refugee, as a well-intentioned farmer -- you're a settler, first, and you have no moral rights to land that was never taken from you or your people in the first place. Doesn't matter if you are a Finn-dian who left the coal camps of Dunsmuir's feudal Nanaimo in the late-19th century to found Sointula on Malcolm Island, or a Black person who identifies with the Black families who, with Chinese, Italian, Portuguese and Jewish families, lived beside the Pacific Central train station in what was known as Hogan's Alley, until its demolition in the later-1960s to build the Georgia Viaduct. What matters is that amidst all binaries there are resonant exceptions, both "good" and "bad", communities based on shared experience, meaning. Within three years of the Battle of Blood River, the Boers, as pledged, built a church, re-named Church of the Vow near the end of the 19th century, even later to become part of a larger commercial complex, only to be taken back as the Voortrekker Museum at a time of rising Black nationalism, and now a more progressive museum -- the uMsunduzi Museum -- with a larger, more inclusive mandate.