VERY FEW PEOPLE of colour can claim identities that colonialism has not ruptured or altered in some way. But for me it is even more fundamental than that: if not for colonialism, my entire ethnicity simply would not exist.

Beginning in the seventeenth century, the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), commonly known as the Dutch East India Company, commenced its trading activities. These were vast in scope and involved the mass transportation of peoples across oceans to its various trading outposts. A key outpost was the Cape of Good Hope, at the very southern tip of Africa, under the gaze of Table Mountain. From 1652 onwards, these trading activities marked the beginning of various forms of European colonial control over South Africa.