Category: history

White Man’s Burden

(Content warning: historical racism)

I’ve been thinking about whether to write this blog. Whether it’d just be to patch my own soul, or whether it could actually contribute something. While not denying the former, I do think that there’s something that can be learnt from it. Where we are now, the Western world needs to change. There’s a lot of anger, a lot of misunderastanding and a lot of mistrust. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. And if the horse starts kicking, what are you going to do then? The problem, as it were, is that the horse may well think that the water is poisoned.

Whenever you’ve got a movement like #metoo or #blm you’ll find two main antagonising groups. Firstly, you’ve got those who are ideologically against (male chauvinists, neo-nazis, whatnot), and then you’ve got the people who don’t have a firm opinion but are alarmed because (as we say in Dutch) “what the farmer doesn’t know, he doesn’t eat.” There are a lot of people in that second group.

When you look at society as a whole, you’ll still see a lot of segregation. Sure, formally everyone is equal and has the same rights, but socially the communities where people of different backgrounds, and skin colours, are living together are a minority. In the cities you’ve got ‘white’ and ‘black’ neighbourhoods, and in the countryside you’ll still have villages where there are non-white families.

Cartoon characters Sjors & Sjimmie in their first incarnation in the 1940s and their modern version.

When I grew up, and I’m in my mid-40s now, we had a village school with about 50 children, of whom 3 were non-white. They were adopted from Bangladesh and Indonesia if I remember correctly, by what we’d consider people from the ‘better middle class’. Aside from that, it was not until the Millennium, and the coming of an Asylum Seekers Centre, that the village saw a significant amount of non-white (and non-northern Dutch for that matter) faces…

Only a few welcomed them with open arms, while the majority started locking their bikes and back doors. “After all, you don’t know what kind of people you’ll get.” For the few years that the centre was near the village, the refugees were kept at arm’s length. Of course, the village’s actual waywards were indulged, and accommodated – as ‘missing stairs’ they may have been skipped over for generations, at least they were familiar missing stairs.

We had black people on television of course. The Cosby Show was unmissable, with the wholesome Huxtable family, minus daughter daughter Denise when actress Lisa Bonet became too scandalous. The A-Team came with Mr. T’s B.A. Baracus, who was the mercenary team’s strongman and occasional comic relief. Miami Vice had Rico Tubbs, conceived as “nobody’s Tonto”, though according to showrunner Michael Mann “that eroded a little bit.” I certainly don’t have any strong recollectons, other than pastel jackets with the sleeves bunched up.

Sitcom Zeg n’s Aaa, with GP John Wijntak (Kenneth Herdigein) of Surinam origin.

The comedy series about a GP practice Zeg n’s Aaa (Say Aah) became water cooler talk in 1988 when a black GP and the white surgeon’s (white) niece got involved. Actor Kenneth Herdigein was born in Suriname in 1959 and came to the Netherlands in the early ’70s. As a young actor he refused to play criminals or drug addicts, and wanted to be an example for the young men in De Bijlmer, the ‘projects’ of Amsterdam: “In Suriname I was an outsider because I was too light, but when I came to the Netherlands I was too dark.” Those boys in De Bijlmer were far away from me and my brothers in Ulrum, though.

Our library had a few boxes with records, but no rap or hiphop. What music there was for the youth was pretty much decided on by the vocal majority, which basically came down to Metal and Madonna. Her “Like a virgin, touched for the very first time,” got a pass, of course. I don’t know what we thought where she was touched – her heart? What we did know was that Prince was a little pervert. Michael Jackson was fine, as long as he still had some of his boyish charm.

Ah, and the library had books, of course, through which a young boy from the desolate coast got to know the world. Like the books he has at home, his own and the hand-me-downs from brothers and parents, it’s a collection of new books, old books, and new books with old stories. These would of course include such standbys as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Robinson Crusoe, a thankful ‘Man Friday’ rescued from savages, but also original Dutch fare. And there were black people in the Dutch books. Strangely enough, not from former colony Suriname but from Africa. Nor were there any people from our other ‘big’ colony Indonesia, come to think of. Perhaps another bit from our past we’d rather was kept buried.

A 1946 Suske en Wiske comic rife with stereotypes. Later reworked, but not improved.

One of the comics I borrowed time and time again from the library is a facsimile reprint of an early book from the Suske en Wiske series, De vliegende Aap (The Flying Ape). It’s set in Africa and formed my image of Africa for years to come. They’re crude caricatures who speak broken Dutch and come with a giant cooking pot to stew Europeans in. Our heroes don’t mince words: “That n* even starts to swing! He’s more civilised than I thought!” In the 1968 this comic was redrawn, but the crude stereotyping, with lips filling half the face, and the racist slurs remained. Only in the last decade or so was the text adjusted.

Retiring Sjors & Sjimmie artist Frans Piet literally handing over the pencil to incoming artist Jan Kruis. Two modern (for 1969) children say goodbye to their predecessors.

For decades a staple of Dutch comics Sjors & Sjimmie, about a white and a black boy. The white boy Sjors was ‘borrowed’ from an English comic in the 1930s; once adventuring in Africa he met the black boy Sjimmie. Sjimmie, drawn ‘as usual’ was not too clever, easily frightened and definitely the sidekick of bread-and-cheese grown Sjors. In 1969 the comic radically changed: “It was in the spirit of the times. I have taken the wildman Sjimmie and made him into a normal Surinam boy, like you’d meet on the street,” artist Jan Kruis said.

Bizarre: in the 1950s there had already been a restyling of the white boy, whose sailor’s uniform was seen as old-fashioned. In the middle of an adventure, the boy got a letter from his parents, calling him home. “Sjimmie very sad is. He now alone. What is Sjimmie without Sjors?” his friend frets. “Cheer up, Sjimmie, you’re not staying behind alone,” comes the reply, “you’ve got a new friend, the boy nextdoor. His name is Sjors too. Will you help me pack my suitcases?” It seems black friends are disposable, and transferrable. And a few panels later, Sjimmie seems happy enough alongside new-Sjors.

Disposable friends. Frans Piet’s Sjimmie had lost his curly hair (“too intricate to draw”) and also his ability to speak proper Dutch. With the loss of language, he’d also become less bright.

Another ‘fun fact’: Dutch filmmaker Henk van der Linden produced several films around the duo. Filming in the rural south, he often had difficulties finding a black boy, and several times a girl in blackface had to do, including his daughter: “Sjimmie was a fun type to play. I had to talk weirdly. That was in the script. My father had to stick to that. Nobody found it discriminatory at the time. Sjimmie was just a fun fellow, and whether he was black or white, we didn’t care about.”

Going through the children’s books and comics I read as a child is an onslaught of the same stereotype. People over a certain age, say 40, grew up with a huge amount of racism that was soaked into culture. This is true for The Netherlands, and I doubt it’s been much different for the UK or the US, and not everyone has had the opportunity, the impetus, or the will to address that.

Blackface in the late ’60s. The last Sjors & Sjimmie film was in colour in 1977, and blackface would no longer do: “because blue eyes would show up.”

I’ve been living in the UK for 15 years now, and working in an office where we regularly have young people starting who are fresh from The Netherlands. It’s almost a ritual that the first year they’re here, they get ‘the talk’: “Black Pete might be youth sentiment for you, it’s also a racist caricature.” A year later, they’ll likely give the talk themselves; it really is a lot worse when you look at it from the outside.

When I was 18, I moved away from the small village; first to the city of Zwolle, then to Amsterdam, where I lived for 8 years in De Bijlmer. Yes, ‘the projects’. During that time, I got ‘deprogrammed’ fairly well, but I’m thinking of all those people of my age who never left their villages, never left the white neighbourhoods, and genuinely can not see Black Pete as anything other than harmless fun for children. Cannot, or will not, as the price they’ll pay is too high, while they’ll get nothing back for it: why would they change their values for people they don’t know?

There does seem to be a disconnect between the ‘real’ black people we grew up with on television and those in our children’s books, but I think it reinforced something that I now see coming to the fore in the USA too. The black people in television shows and music, I think, were accepted as long as they conformed and didn’t rock the boat. This because from our books we had an idea of what black people really were underneath: impressionable, irresponsible and child-like at best, savages at worst.

Oki en Doki bij de <slurword>, still published in my childhood. The language was sanitised up a little bit by that time, but not the images.

And that’s what I think is what someone from the outlands, who doesn’t know black people, sees in the BLM protests. The question is not just how we give them a wider, more informed perspective: it’s how we make them want to see.

I’ve been thinking – were there no non-stereotype, neutral depictions of black people in the books I read a child? Yes, there was one book in the Pim, Frits en Ida series, which were read in school classes. I’ve looked it up; it’s part 8. I remember there’s a black boy temporarily in our heroes’ class, whose father is an ambassador. They set off on a school trip to the caves, and the four children get lost. They pretty much spend the rest of the book in pitch blackness…

(RvS)

There Has To Be Flour

More from M.D. Teenstra’s “The Fruits from my Labours”, about his 1825 stay in South Africa.

A certain rich lady told me: “Over the mountain I have a big farm, and you should visit it – I’m breeding a lot of cattle and slaves there.” The slaves are not allowed to marry, though they are multiplying in abundance; many mothers have 8, 10, 12 and more children, each from another father – in which the English play a main part.

The prison and customs house for Cape Town in Teenstra’s time, called de tronk.

Then I walked to the tronk, or prison, and punishment place for the slaves, at the lower or north side of the Strandstraat. We shall not stay here for long, as I’m positive that you, like me, would soon get bored there. Picture that you’ll first pass through some barracks, where you find these unfortunate creatures locked up, almost naked and sometimes chained. You’ll find many in one barrack, and the filthy slaves and the Hottentots who smear a mixture of fat, oil, etc in their hair create an unbearable stench, while they lay on the ground like senseless creatures. Worse, yes much worse, than animals are these inhabitants of the country treated.

Christians, is what you want to call yourself, you white Europeans, who want to see yourselves as enlightened. Africaners, descendants of Europeans, get a hold of yourself and look at your poor slaves with compassion! Are they not your fellow creations? Are they not our brothers? And are they not with us the children of the same God and Father? Remember that after our days they will be equal to their master and the mightiest king. Remember that while you bury them at a different place than your own graveyard. Remember, I tell you, that they will stand in front of one and the same Judge, and will be in everything the same as you!

Then, looking closer at this prison, and going further into these barracks, my heart shrank at the screaming of a maid, who they had tied to a post in the courtyard, and gave her there a pack at the request of her owner; a pack consisting of 39 hits with a bundle of 5 or 6 thin reeds or with an end of rope. See, this is after the Jewish punishment laws: According to the Mosaic laws, one cannot give more than 40 hits. Only 39 were given, out of fear to have miscounted. This then happened at the request of the owner, without any juridical trial. Whatever the request of sir or madam was based on, the maid or boy would get a pack. And if you really were fed up with slaves, you’d send them to the treadmill, or present them at a sale, as we’d bring a horse to a market or public sale.

Then we finally come to the so-called treadmill, where we are met with the unpleasant smell of sweat. Here 10 or 12 slaves, wearing nothing but trousers, are pedaling on the wheel as punishment. This wheel is a cylinder of 6 or 7 meters long, and 2 meters in diameter. 24 or 25 thin boards have been placed round, like the ribs on a treshing roll, on which 10 to 14 slaves can be seen climbing upwards, holding themselves steady with a stick placed above the wheel. A police servant, called Kaffer, usually slovenly clothed, big drinkers and unfeeling creatures, keeps an eye an eye on this. The treading lasts from 7 in the morning till sundown, or the evening’s canon shot from the old castle, with some short breaks and a break from noon till 1. I saw some come off it who couldn’t speak a word, while their naked breasts and bellies were heaving like bellows. Some slave owners send unwilling slaves there for 6 or 8 consecutive days.

The worst thing of this is that it is necessary to always have enough slaves to operate this flour mill. The aforementioned servants of justice are wont to, especially on Saturday and Sunday evening, round up some drunk, rowdy or fighting slaves or Hottentots from the streets. Because without criminals the miller would not mill flour, and he wouldn’t be able to pay the rent to the government. And, of course, there has to be flour.

At The Body Of A Child

M.D. Teenstra’s anger is palpable and his pen is dripping with sarcasm as he reports a trial of a group of South African slaves who killed their masters, and the attitudes that lay behind it. In 1825 a slave named Galant led a revolt that consisted of twelve slaves and Khoisan labourers in the Koue Bokkeveld. They killed his master and two other whites before fleeing into the surrounding mountains. A commando was dispatched from Cape Town and captured Galant and his supporters. The below is edited from Teenstra’s fifth letter, of 22 June 1825, as published in his book The Fruits of my Labour. 

According to the slave Abel: “My master has always clothed me badly, and he punished me from the inside and outside.” (Meaning, alongside corporal punishment, hunger and thirst were used to punish). “My boss also had threatened my life, and that’s what brought me so far that I wanted to shoot my master. He has not once but three times threatened to kill me. I could try what I wanted, but it was never enough, even if I did all that was ordered; but I never complained, because I saw that whomever complained was beaten. There were six of us there, but now there are only three, the others having run away because of the bad treatment.” Abel added that it was during the harvest that his master had threatened to kill shoot them all. Abel was told however, that surely he knew that the threats of his master weren’t meant, because otherwise he’d have complained; and that, in general, a slave would be as safe in the care of his patron as a child in that of his father.  

Galant said: “I have to speak about my child, who is dead. His name was David, and his mother is the Hottentot Betje. My boss said she had to leave the child behind, who was 12 months old and began crawling through the house, as it was a bother, and the mother had to cook and watch the cattle. Once she found the child tied to a tree, and when she touched him, he began to scream; she looked over his body, and saw that he’d been horribly beaten, etc, and on further asking found out that my mistress had him tied up. My wife took the child in, and when the sores were almost healed and the child began to walk, it went to his mother, to the water. My boss then hit the child with a belt. The water was far from the house, the child was very quiet, and in the evening he died. When the child had died, nobody was called in to examine the body.” 

The Cape Town jurists said to me: “The fruit of our female slaves belongs to us from before the birth, and at a difficult delivery we have the choice which to keep.” See there, reader! How could the father and the mother, Galant and Betje, be angry about the death of their boy David? This child surely belonged to Van der Merwe, who could then, like the pups of a dog, drown it, beat it to death, or otherwise kill it as he pleased? 

All prisoners underwent their punishment and the heads of the three main prisoners were, according to the sentence, put on poles. There were but few people who came out to see this, and the interest was not as big as was expected. This, then was the ending of these unhappy slaves, by their masters mistreated, who committed their horrible crimes in retaliation for the crimes done to them, and were therefore sentenced to the punishment they deserved according to the law. But how far the owners of these slaves were themselves the cause of them committing these murders, I leave to the humble and objective reader. It is true that W.N. van der Merwe tortured to death an innocent child of only a year old; but remember then, that it was only a slave’s child. 

At the body of a child
The crawling caterpillar, tired of crawling
worn out in his narrow cell, 
Broke out of his prison, fluttering 
Beat its wings from the dried out shell.
See it float, see it sail, 
Fled from earthly soil and toil; 
Higher it flies, higher it lives, 
Tired of playing in the lower sky. 
Nurse, dry your wet cheeks, 
Don’t stare at the dead pupa, 
Don’t keep hanging from the web:
the butterfly can’t be caught again:
The angels in heaven take care of it now. 
                 – Hendrik Tollens Cz. 1808

With the Smash of the Hammer

Marten Douwes Teenstra’s time in South Africa was formative. Through what he witnessed there and as a colonial administrator in Suriname, he developed a conscience about his country’s impact on the world. On returning to the Netherlands, he campaigned for the abolition of slavery, which finally happened in 1863. While statues of slave traders are now pulled down in the USA and Europe, Teenstra’s native village of Ulrum has yet to honour him with as much as a memorial bench.

Cape Town, 25 June, 1825 

Something that hit me in particular was witnessing the sale of 19 slaves and children from an inherited estate. Imagine, friend, how in a public sale they were made to step on a table one by one, standing there to be auctioned off; these miserables, coming to the table, looking around the faces of the most interested, fearing that this one and hoping that that one would be the highest bidder, while they also look at the surrounding strangers and approve of them or reject them; and how important must this be for a slave on sale, as he and his will sometimes be subjugated to this family for a century, over many generations. 

Children below ten years old are no longer allowed to be sold without their mother. An old slave woman, brought here from Mozambique, who through her advanced years and her demanding slave work was already bending her head towards the grave, went to the table, bent over and supported by a stool; she wept heartbreakingly and cast her tearing eyes round the crowd, who all appeared strangers to her; some sparse hairs, white from age, hung wildly round her head, and how it struck me when she started talking to the people who bid on her (through long exposure to the Dutch she knew the language quite well): “I can not do any more, – I … old woman can nothing else than keep the fire in the kitchen and peel potatoes; – Och Seuer!” (she cried to one of the bidders) “Why then buy me?” and since she couldn’t fetch more than some rijksdaalders, she was allowed to stay with the inheritors, to her great happiness. But this joy didn’t last long: a healthy lad, a boy of 13, whose mother had died giving birth to her first child, was now presented for sale. 

The old woman was his grandmother, and as she had raised him since the death of her daughter, and he called her memme. For the blushing, but well-formed youngster were multiple buyers found, and he was sold for the paltry sum of 1300 rijksdaalders to a man who lived 40 days’ travel from the city, on the east borders of Kafferland. The boy, on hearing this, jumped up with the smash of the hammer (which must have sounded like the beat of thunder to him), off the table – his sadness went to anger and rage; but he was caught, bound and tossed onto the cart, and so was against his will transported by his new owner. 

According to the law of nature he had to give way to the servants of justice – the weak have to bow for the strong, and so he too had to obey. But what spectacle did now the visage of the senseless grandmother, this grey biddy, not offer! How she wrung her almost fleshless hands, when the boy said that he didn’t want that man as his Seuer – that he wanted to stay with his old Memme! – and under the screaming of memme! memme! memme! they carried him away like a piece of bought property, while he stretched out his hands to the old mother and maybe, for sure, saw her for the last time. That last look, that he cast on the frozen woman while uttering those heart rending words, also made the signs of humanity jump from my eyes, and I cursed loudly because his sad expression, now and then interrupted by the realisation of his disastrous fate, bored down through the bottom of my heart. 

This is how Christians act! – Christians? 

Marten Douwes Teenstra (1795-1864) – The Fruits of my Labours (1830) 

The Stone Itself Must Break

The Netherlands have a problem with racism, and it goes largely unexplored. In primary school I was taught that the country got rich from its trade in herbs and spices. The trans-Atlantic slave trade was not mentioned. After World War 2, the history books told us, the country set to rebuilding and that brought us into the ’50s. There was no mention of our colony Indonesia’s bloody independence struggle. If our colonies and former colonies were mentioned at all during geography and history lessons, they were no more than names and spots on the world map. They, and its people, never truly became part of The Kingdom of The Netherlands, and Dutch people from overseas are still seen as outsiders. Any dissenting word from them is often greeted with a curt “if you don’t like it, go back to your own country.”

The history of the colonies’ black people have historically been ignored, except by a few contemporary writers like Marten Douwes Teenstra, a colonial administrator in the earlier 1800s who became an anti-slavery lobbyist. It is through writings like his that some of the slaves in the Dutch colonies come to life, even if it’s on the eve of their death.

On the 3rd of September 1832 a group of men appeared from the Picorno Woods, just outside of the Suriname city of Paramaribo, and started a fire that would soon engulf the city.

They were enslaved men, who had fled into the woods after minor offences that would have awaited heavy corporal punishments. Kodjo had been sent out to sell buns, and had found himself 2.5 cents short at the end of the day. He knew that his mistress would have the whip ready, so he fled into the woods, as others would too. From their hiding place in the woods they would slip into the city to keep themselves alive with small thefts.

That day, they started a small fire at a shop, and planned to steal pickled meat and salted codfish in the confusion. However, there was a strong wind, and the fire got out of hand and leapt over to the neighbouring buildings. The next day, a large part of the largely wood-built city had burnt down.

The three young men who were seen as the leaders of the escaped slaves were Kodjo, Present and Mentor. They were tried and convicted to torture and death by burning.

The Dutch administrator and writer Marten Douwes Teenstra wrote at length about the trial and the young men. He visited them in prison, two days before their execution. He described Kodjo as about 30 years old, small of stature, with fiery eyes and some brands on his left arm. Present was thin, with many scars, a friendly face and a soft voice. Mentor was about 20 years old; he was the largest of the men, with a blue tattoo above his nose and on his forehead, and scars on his buttocks from previous punishments.

They sat patiently while they were sketched, and Teenstra remarks that they were very calm while even their clothes had been taken away. They seem to be resistant to any attempt to bring them to Jesus in their final days, and Present answers Teenstra’s question about how he feels with: “O, alla bakkra moesoe dédé toe!” – “O, even all white men must die,” after which Kodjo beat the stone window sill with his shackled hands and added: “Da ston srefi moesoe broko” – “The stone itself must break.”

Present, Kodjo and Mentor

Five black men were executed on the 26th of January 1833, on the square now called “Kodjo Mentor en Present-pren”.

Mermaids, more or less.

For a coastal region, the north of the Netherlands is peculiarly devoid of mermaid tales. Sure, K. ter Laan has an obligatory mention in his 1930s book, and digs up an old chronicle, and a century earlier M.D. Teenstra emptied out his box with index cards, but the legends are not as rich as those of white wives, devils, witches and devil dogs. Perhaps it’s because the local fishermen were too familiar with seals to mistake them for comely mermaids; when we visited the isle of Schiermonnikoog, we saw them fairly close-by, basking on the sandbanks.

Earlier we’ve written about the Wadden Devil, and Rem made an illustration of a mermaid with a story we’ve finished recently. Here are some other snippets on sea folk I’ve found.

Mermaid in the 15th century ceiling painting of the St Bartholomeus Church in Stedum. Click for the whole painting.

A Sea Woman

In the year 1558 Onno Leeuwe, with Jan Backer and others, saw a mermaid near Ameland, on dry land in shot’s distance, we shot at it with a gun, so that she screamed, then got back in the deep, and when Leeuwe sailed further, so came the mermaid up to the ship, lay both hands up the ship’s deck, and in the light of day cast a terrible eye on all, as was told by him and his son Lubbert Leeuwe. Source: Chronicle of Johan Rengers ten Post (1542-1626)

Mermen up the Lauwers

In the year 130 sea- or mermen appeared in the year 130 on the Frisian coast, and swam around. Two of them came to shore and went around Friesland for a while, without harming anyone. At Westerbierum (a now disappeared village) they jumped back in the sea. Source: Waling Dykstra (1821-1914)

Ascon, first duke of Friesland, for Hamconius’ chronicle, by Pieter Feddes van Harlingen

We already find these two mermen illustrated in the chronicle by Hamconius (1620), now as Tritons, blowing on their horns, as they come up the Lauwers, the inland sea that separates Friesland and Groningen. On the background the Cliffus Ruber, the Red Cliff of Gaasterland, on the other side of Friesland, from which comes fire and smoke, and a winged dragon, all harbringers of doom. On the foreground Ascon, the first Frisian duke.

The Frisian history books were long a mismatch of myth and garbled classics, and often the battlegrounds of nationalist politics. In the 19th century this lead to a spoof on this aggrandising of Frisian history in the shape of the Oera Linda book, which held that the whole of Greek myth is actually Frisian.

It was immediately taken for authentic.

The Mermaid of the Dollart

Where now the Dollart lies, between Groningen and Germany, was fertile land before; peat ground with woods, to which place names like Finsterwolde, Midwolde and Bellingwolde still refer. There also was a Reiderwolde, but you won’t find it on the map. It was in the Reiderland, which was drowned by the sea between December 1287 and February 1288.

In Onze Beste Volksverhalen Tjaard de Haan tells a Groninger seaman tells his stories of the sea. He also tells about the miraculous “sea wives” in which he says he does believe. Reiderwolde, he says, was drowned because it was a godless place, and its demise was announced by such a sea wife. She was caught in the nets and before she died on shore, she said:

Reiderwolde will disappear, no stone will be left upright!

Soon, her prophecy came true: Water soaked through the dyke, sea wish was found in the city moats, and yet nobody took heed. They were too busy. The pastor tried to make them repent in vain, until one night, when everyone was celebrating and getting drunk, a storm appeared and the weakened dykes washed away. Three people survived: The pastor and his housekeeper could just stay ahead of the waves and get to the higher sand grounds. Number three was a newly born child in a cot, kept upright in the waves by a little dog.

Contested Will

In our story Road to Starohrad swordswoman Kaila goes undercover in a theater troupe, and crashes the stage as it would have appeared in Shakespeare’s time. I’ve long been fascinated by the history of the theatre, from its ritualistic origins in ancient Greece onward, and were it not for bus tickets back home, I’d have seized the opportunity to see Macbeth performed on an authentic Elizabethan stage, in Prague’s castle in 1998.

This article first appeared in Northern Ireland’s Verbal Magazine in 2010. As if there’s merit in debate, the Shakespeare Question goes on unabated, as do a whole raft of other crackpot theories, for which we don’t have to look further than our word leaders. As Ben Shapiro already had it, a decade ago: “we live in an age when authority and knowledge are suspect and devalued.”

What’s in a name: Would Shakespeare by any other name smell as sweet?

Everyone knows Shakespeare. We saw Leonardo DiCaprio as star-crossed lover Romeo, wonder with Hamlet whether to be or not to be, we toil and trouble with Macbeth’s three witches. Shakespeare’s influence on our language beggars belief: without him no brave new world, foregone conclusion or household words.

After almost 400 years, Shakespeare is alive and well. Some, however, maintain that someone else wrote the plays, and that the Stratford actor was merely a front. The list of suggested bards is a Who’s Who of Elizabethan England, and amongst many others we find Walter Raleigh (between importing the potato and wooing the queen), Christopher Marlowe (in the small hours after writing his own – inferior – plays), Francis Bacon (and Drake), the Jesuits, and last but not least: Good Queen Bess herself.

Top contender for Shakespeare’s quill is undoubtedly Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, his authorship championed by such luminaries as Jeremy Irons, Keanu Reeves and sir Derek Jacobi. James Shapiro, author of Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? is not surprised. “We live in an age of conspiracy,” he told us, “everything is contested and wild theories advanced. Weren’t the moon landings filmed in Morocco? Was the Mossad or the CIA behind 9/11? When so many love The Da Vinci Code, it’s no surprise that they would buy into a theory that Oxford wrote the plays and inserted secret codes confirming his authorship.”

We know very little about Shakespeare’s life, and what personal documents have survived are largely financial: he persistently chased a neighbour’s small debt, and only bequeathed his wife his “second-best bed”. The image arises of an uncharitable and mean man, not at all the Gentleman of Stratford we like to think of. But we don’t know that neighbour – perhaps lending him that small sum was already overly generous. The best bed probably was automatically Mrs. Shakespeare’s due. Suddenly, we get a different story. And unfortunately, stories, conjecture and hearsay are all we have regarding Shakespeare. In this vacuum, there’s space for wild theories to flourish.

In contrast, the Earl of Oxford is a well-documented figure, and he comes with a heady background of scandal and intrigue: rumour has it that he was Elizabeth’s bastard son, her lover, or both. Candidate bards are often wheeled out to support one theory or the other, and Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets combed for supporting evidence. According to Shapiro: “J. T. Looney, who in 1920 came up with the notion that Oxford wrote the plays, did so because he was looking for a politically reactionary figure who embodied what he saw as the right-wing, some might say fascist, values of the plays. Delia Bacon, who proposed Sir Francis Bacon as the true author in the 1850s, read the plays as revolutionary and left-wing.”

A video we found on the website of The Declaration of Reasonable Doubt, the document at the centre of the Oxford theory, resembles a religious conversion testimony in its language, tone and air of persecuted faith. Shapiro agrees: “For those who doubt that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, the cause takes on religious dimensions.” Oxfordians and Baconites are as entrenched as the religious camps we’re so familiar with here, and accord themselves equal authority to bona-fide Shakespearean academics. But: “I for one would like to hear them explain how Oxford, who died a year before Don Quixote was written, was able to write a collaborative play that draws on Cervantes’s plot, called Cardenio.” It’s hard to disagree with Shapiro.

Oxford theorists claim “Shakespeare” writes too convincingly of court intrigue not to have been in the thick of it himself. But Shakespeare performed at court, and in the streets and taverns of London he encountered all the sailors, Moors, Jews, fools, peasants, idle young noblemen and old philosophers his plays required. Shakespeare’s face was well known there, and it’s inconceivable he could be someone else’s sock puppet. Besides, most plays then were published anonymously: a perceived slur to a person in power could land you in prison, or worse. So, what courtier would bother with a pseudonym, and why would Shakespeare the actor risk attaching his name to scribblings he’d have no control over?

Shakespeare’s authorship is also supported by the original manuscripts. The texts are not completed works in themselves, but merely the blueprint for a performance by an actors’ company. “Take a familiar play, Romeo and Juliet,” Shapiro explains,” The earliest surviving printed quartos make clear that whoever wrote the parts for the actors knew those performers and their strengths intimately. When writing the part of the hilarious sidekick to Juliet’s Nurse the author wrote Kemp rather than Peter in the speech headings, because he was writing for and thinking about the star comedian of the company, Will Kemp.”

In the King Lear production that recently wowed Belfast, we saw first-hand the difference between writing for the page and for the stage: when someone dies on the boards, there’s a body to dispose of. Therefore, until the final scene, Shakespeare’s characters die offstage, are carried off, or survive to limp to the “infirmary” in the wings. In Shakespeare’s words, the play’s the thing. To Shapiro, those who argue that the plays could have been written by anyone who was not actively involved in stage craft are ignoring the world out of which these plays emerged. “But we live in an age when authority and knowledge are suspect and devalued. I live in a fact-based reality; if others choose not to, I can’t help them.”

The Internet has also democratised the authorship question, amplifying and equalizing Shakespearean and Oxfordian, lay reader and literature professor alike. Shaky theories get equal prominence to careful scholarship, and to other popular pseudo-revelations on subjects like Leonardo’s paintings. Dissenting positions have become mainstream via frequent uncritical repetition. Shapiro knows to pick his battles: “I didn’t write Contested Will to change the minds of those who don’t believe in historical evidence; their minds can’t be changed. I did it to show how the Shakespeare authorship controversy reveals some disturbing things about how we read and understand evidence today.”

It’s strange that we need so much convincing about Shakespeare when we know so little of modern dramatists. Do you know who wrote The King’s Speech? We know the actors, sometimes a big-name director. But even the writers of Oscar-winning screenplays remain obscure. Indeed, often there’s more than one unknown name. Collaboration is also documented in Elizabethan times, yet apparent collaborations by Shakespeare are dismissed by scholars as either “Shakespeare as script doctor” or “with additions by a lesser hand”. It may be unglamorous, but when all’s said and done, writing was a means to an end for Shakespeare, a way to earn a living.

Derek Jacobi meanwhile is lending his voice to the conspiracy thriller Anonymous out of zeal. In pure Dan Brownish fashion, the film makes the case for Oxford, and no doubt it will spark many a conversation starting with: “Did you know that Shakespeare is not Shakespeare?” But why shouldn’t he be? Surely creativity is not restricted to a social elite? To deny that the plays were written by Shakespeare himself is to deny that a man from an ordinary background, given the chance, can rise above his rank to delight, inspire and move millions of people for four centuries now.

But there’s the rub: sometimes, the truth is just too boring.

James Shapiro’s Contested Will: Who wrote Shakespeare? is published by Faber and Faber, and is now available in paperback.

A list of words and phrases coined by Shakespeare can be found here, while all 70+ candidate Shakespeares are listed on this page.

Once More, With Nibelung

I wasn’t going to do any further Nibelungen posts, but when looking for designs for Dr Caligari I stumbled upon a cache of production art for Die Nibelungen, and couldn’t leave it alone. I’ve also added some photos of the scenes as the designs end up as, and some (possible) inspirations. Meanwhile, I’m still enjoying Stephan Grundy’s Rhinegold; after 300 pages about his lineage, Siegfried eventually gets born!

“Behind the scenes”, with Paul Richter as Siegfried, and Fritz Lang on the far right.

Otto Hunte’s design for the castle of Worms, and the castle as it appeared in the film. This castle has been a model for the one in our story The Return of the Uncomplaining Child, but set on a rock like Brunhilde’s. What I love is that while the model is hidden in a lot of fog and lighting, you can see a lot of detail in the drawing, including the little dwellings outside.

Design for the dragon and shooting of the scene. Paul Richter once more in giant fur diaper.

Arnold Böcklin’s 1896 painting Silence of the Forest, Siegfried in the forest with giant trees. This analogue was pointed out by Lotte Eisner in her seminal book The Haunted Screen.

Caspar David Friedrich- Two Men Contemplating the Moon (1825-30), Erich Kettelhut’s set design drawing for Alberich’s marsh (1923) and the corresponding scene from the film.

Erich Kettelhut’s design for Brunhilde’s castle, and the castle as portrayed in the film.

Siegfried’s death, first as set drawing by Otto Hunte, then the resulting set (plus speared Siegfried). As Böcklin may have been an inspiration for Siegfried in the forest, it’s tempting to go back to his 1877 Elysian Fields for the birch trees at the lake setting.

(RvS)

Columns of Fire: Mepske van ‘t Faan

Rudolf de Mepsche and the northern Dutch sodomy persecutions of 1731 

Illustration from 1956 by Dutch illustrator Hans Kresse

“This inhuman tyrant found the wages of his cruelty in the following horrible death. The vermin devoured him alive – his appearance became so horrible, his lodgings so disgusting, that his next of kin could neither with money nor good words find anyone to help him in his last days.”

In his history of the province of Groningen, Dr. A. Smith positively gloats when he relates the fate of that scourge of the Groninger West Quarter, Rudolf de Mepsche, called the Devil of Faan. De Mepsche’s legend is not unlike that of Matthew Hopkins, though witch hunts were long a thing of the past for the God-fearing Dutch in the unquiet years of 1730 and 1731. It was the biblical sin of Sodomy that stirred them, sparked by a climate of religious strife and political instability. In the west of the newly formed republic the sodomite fever burnt itself out within months, but it came to a renewed crescendo in the obscure village of Faan, in the Dutch province of Groningen. 

The landscape of the north seems desolate at first glance, but it has its own quiet beauty. Fields are marked by small roads and paths and clumps of trees. The land is flat, and when turning in a circle you can see the farms, villages and church towers to the far horizon. And there are many towers, because Dutch history is marked by religious schisms. Of De Mepsche’s borg, a stronghold turned mansion, nothing remains: it was demolished in the 19th century, its grounds cleared in the 1950s. All that remains is the driveway, now leading to the farm “Bijma”. It is as if the local powers wanted to erase all memory of the monster, and even recently plans to erect a monument for his victims were torpedoed. A plaque, the authorities decided, would suffice.

The grounds where the borg and church of Faan stood. Only part of the original entrance lane remains, as visible. In 1957, the borg long demolished, the terrain was cleared to make it ready for agriculture. Rumour went that between the foundations of the cellar the workmen found the chains with which the victims had been shackled. In reality, nothing remarkable was found. A couple of years ago, archaeological research was done on the terrain, which again yielded nothing worth mentioning. 

Almost unlimited power in an isolated community allowed De Mepsche to develop into a regional equivalent to England’s Witchfinder General. The supernatural shadow of his reign of terror extends well into modern times, and offers a prime example of how traumatic events keep local tongues wagging, and how the resulting folktales become accepted history. Credible books have been written about the terrible events of Faan, but ordinary people of the region will at best steer by a 1925 booklet by H.F. Poort, republished in 1986, exposing a whole new generation to its many errors and half-truths. The story roughly goes like this: 

De Mepsche, or Mepske van Faan, was a corrupt and cruel nobleman who wanted to eliminate his enemies and seize their wealth. According to Poort, he finds “an article that speaks of Sodomia, an evil that especially in medieval times was punished with horrible torture and even death. With a grin he says, no, shouts out: That shall be it! That shall be it!” He tortures and hangs two dozen innocents, but  for this terrible deed he is banished and finally dies horribly himself. The story doesn’t quite end there, though, and the farm on De Mepsche’s former lands is reputedly the focus of much supernatural activity. His ghost haunts there, they say, and each year on the anniversary of his death he tears at the blinds and howls from amongst the old beech trees. 

A widely known story was told to Martha van Straten, mother of one of your authors, when she grew up in the village of Niekerk, not far from Faan. On the morning of the annual fair and cattle market of nearby Roden, farmers would find their cows loose in the stables. The following evening, she told us, the sky above Faan is blood red, with columns of fire and rising clouds of smoke: a reminder to the good farmers of the area of the horrors that happened in their midst. She is quick to point out that she never believed the stories, and when another local asked the residents of the farm about the wood panel from which the bloodstains supposedly could not be washed, he was told: “Och son, don’t let yourself be taken in.”

Map of the northern Dutch province of Groningen, with in the west the Westerkwartier district. Het Faan is marked in red, close to the village of Zuidhorn.

It has proven difficult to make sense of what really happened in Faan in 1731. Many documents became lost or were destroyed, ironically, for their immorality. It appears that Rudolf de Mepsche was a fairly unremarkable but diligent man. Born into an influential family in 1695, he was soon granted responsibilities in local administration, and while only in his mid-twenties he became Grietman of the district, a position he held until his bankruptcy in 1747. The whole province of Groningen consisted of the City and the Lands. The Lands were further divided in sub-quarters, each headed by a Grietman. De Mepsche had virtually absolute powers as Grietman of Oosterdeel Langewold, serving as its prosecutor, clerk and judge. 

Rooted in Germanic, pre-Christian custom, this was originally a democratic system, with a new Grietman chosen annually from amongst eligible farmers. By De Mepsche’s time however, most farmers had sold their vote to either De Mepsche or his rival, Maurits Clant van Hanckema. The only brake on De Mepsche’s legal might was that all expenses for a prosecution came out of his pocket if the accused was cleared or unable to bear the costs of their trial and imprisonment. The law also tried to prevent corruption by not allowing a Grietman to preside over any case in which he himself had a stake or grudge. But these clauses offered little protection to a population that prescribed forgers to be burnt in a kettle, a churchbreaker to have his limbs broken and his head chopped off, and a traitor to have his heart removed – and then shown to him. 

The penalty for the 22 men and boys De Mepsche convicted of sodomy was strangulation, after which the bodies were burnt. This in itself was not particularly aberrant for the times, but the speed and number of De Mepsche’s convictions was, especially for a small community consisting of a handful of villages. On Sunday 20 April a blind boy was the first to be questioned, on the basis of an anonymous note. On 24 September of that same year 19 men were executed and two young boys imprisoned for life. All but a few of them were poor, and the cost of trying them fell entirely to De Mepsche. He didn’t shrink from sentencing a personal friend to the harshest punishment of all: this man was burnt in the face with a torch before being strangled. So it can be safely ruled out that De Mepsche acted out of greed, or sought to eliminate his enemies – at least in the beginning. 

One panel from a contemporary print warning youth of the wages of sin: strangulation.

It was only from the 18th prosecution that things got out of hand. He brought in the city of Groningen’s torturer, with well-off supporters of his rival Clant in the stocks. Clant complained about spurious indictments and the length of the “examinations”, but the city’s council consistently found De Mepsche to be acting within the law, and besides were loathe to meddle in what they regarded as a local affair. It is doubtful whether De Mepsche or his victims were quite sure what sodomy actually was. As all records prudishly speak in euphemisms – “sins against nature” and pecatum mutum de sodomiticum abound – we’re still none the wiser as to the state of their knowledge. Whatever it was, interrogations evoked tearful confessions and embarrassed questions about whether they could escape God’s wrath. 

De Mepsche was on a moral crusade, albeit one horrifying by modern standards. But the instigator of the persecutions in the West Quarter is never mentioned in the legends and in Poort’s book he’s a mere accomplice, reluctant at that. Reverend H.C. van Bijler was an old student friend of De Mepsche, who appointed him minister of the churches of Faan and nearby Niekerk. He was a scholar and something of a writer, and to the isolated locals he represented a window on the rest of the world. Following the 80-year war with Spain (1568-1648), the newly formed Dutch republic was in a state of crisis, with merchant regents and the emerging Orangists vying for supremacy. Closer to home, recent decades had brought cattle plague and the devastating Christmas flood of 1717. 

Van Bijler was sure that his country was about to go under, like Sodom and Gohmorrah, and when a pamphlet brought him news of the sodomy trials in the West of Holland, he knew what he had to do. Soon, he’d completed a book: Helsche boosheit of grouwelyke zonde van sodomie. It starts with a prayer but soon the reverend’s finger jabs: “…to the people who turn around the whole order of Nature, and have unfortunately imported the sins of terrible Sodom into our country, or still practice it. To guard against it and to punish it – the law of the Great God demands.” As a devout Christian, Rudolf De Mepsche could not have received a clearer call to arms to rout out the evil that undermined his own community. 

After the first round of executions a few men still awaited trial. More arrests were made, now on increasingly shaky grounds, the last handful incriminated by youths who had been easily coerced. De Mepsche’s crusading spirits began to slacken as complaints piled up, with relatives and accused going over his head to petition the High Justice in Groningen. As a duly appointed oversight committee took its time looking into the matter, the costs of trial, the execution (including a platform, 3 ships with peat and 70 tons of tar) and now lengthening imprisonments began to exhaust De Mepsche’s coffers. In December 1739 the committee concluded that, as judge of the area, De Mepsche himself was the best person to decide if his own prosecutions were legal. Only in 1747, more than 15 years after their imprisonment, were the last men released who had been prosecuted. 

De Mepsche could afford to be magnanimous: William IV of Orange had bested regents and been appointed to Stadtholder. As loyal supporter, De Mepsche got his debts paid off and he was also rewarded with a new position far from Oosterdeel Langewold. Ironically, for the rest of his life he laboured to dismantle the near-feudal system that had been the making and breaking of him: in Faan he’d been out of his depth, and now knew it. He died, following a slow decline in health, at the age of 59. He was buried in the Martini Church in the centre of Groningen with the highest honors accorded to a nobleman: preceded by drummers and torch bearers, dignitaries carried his coffin, with family, friends and city council members following – a far cry from the man who died, according to one narrator, like some inverted Midas: “Everything he wanted to eat changed into lice, spiders, earwigs, worms. If others ate from it, it was fine. But as soon as he wanted to take something himself, it was all vermin again.” 

The legends may offer a more morally satisfying ending, but the truth provides no such comfort. A handful of accused languished for 15 years in prison without even being put on trial, while public opinion largely remained with De Mepsche. Yes, he had feared enough for riots at the executions to order 300 peacekeeping troops, but most people must have had some trust that God’s justice was being done. Besides, going to see a public execution was considered a grand day out in those days. De Mepsche surely also benefited from the contrast between him and Lewe, tyrannical lord of neighbouring Aduard, who provoked serious riots when he demanded crippling taxes for dyke repairs following the 1717 flood. The real question, then, is how acceptance of De Mepsche as local ruler could take a 180 degree turn into the image of Mepske, duvel van ‘t Foan. 

Drawing of the borg Bijma from a map from 1782

The key to this is another shift in Dutch politics. De Mepsche was a loyal supporter of the Orange party when they were the political underdog, trying to break the power of the ruling merchant elite, but at the end of the 18th century the Orange family had acquired near-royal status and the general population had become thoroughly disenchanted with them. Mob mentality ruled, and pages were rewritten or torn out of the history books wholesale. Everything tainted with Orange was suspect, and generations now unfamiliar with the context of the trials had no truck with one who woud hunt and kill innocent villagers. That man, people said, must have been Satan incarnate. And so he became a local Bluebeard, an avatar of superstition and hatred.

Folk memory is persistent, as is the desire that justice is done: if not by men, then by higher powers. About a decade before historian W.T. Vleer wrote his critical study of the sodomy trials, he gave a lecture to a local club. When he started debunking some of the myths and misconceptions around the case, one old man jumped up and protested: “Mister chairman, this man is lying. It’s horrible. We were always taught that De Mepsche got his comeuppance, and now this man is claiming that God didn’t punish him? All lies, which as a decent man I won’t believe!” 

Who are we to argue? 

Literature:
H. Hofman, “Jeugdherinneringen van een Oud-Niekerker”, Oudheidskamer ‘Aeldakerka’, 1987
H.F. Poort, “Rudolf de Mepsche, of: De Faansche Gruwelen 1731”, Drukkerij Hekkema Zuidhorn 1925, reprinted 1986
K. ter Veer, “Protestants Fundamentalisme in het Groningse Faan”, Uitgeverij Aspect, 2002
W.T. Vleer, “Sterf Sodomieten. Rudolf de Mepsche, de homofielenvervolging, het Faanse zedenproces en de massamoord te Zuidhorn”, self-published, 1972