Enslaved people in Strand Street, Cape Town, during the 19th century. Image: Western Cape Archives and Records Service.

Everything about South African history, culture, languages and social futures can be dated back to our free and enslaved ancestors, and our First Nation brothers and sisters. Take, for example, the historical record of a relatively free person banished to the Cape during Dutch Slavery.

When Jacob van Amboina (Ambon), a free Black (vrij swart) from the island of Ambon in present-day Indonesia, died on 5 November 1734, he left behind his wife, Dorothea van de Caab, and their two children, Jacob, aged 14, and Wijnand, aged 11. He was also survived by four other children who were in their care: Jacob Jacobsz, aged four; Adriana Jacobsz, aged nine; Sophia Jacobsz, aged seven; and, Caatje Jacobsz, who was about one or one and a half years old.

These were the people who loved him, his most precious gifts. But he also owned several worldly possessions that would be carried over to his wife and children – tangible material objects that bring us intimately into his domestic life and the type of home the family had. The belongings included twelve cups and saucers, six shelves, a tea kettle, tea leaves, two mirrors, bedding, a water-fathom, a coat rack, five chairs, two chimney sweeps and an ash shovel, thirty porcelain plates and a slave girl, Eva van Rio de la Goa. I can just imagine it: Jacob, Dorothea and their children entertaining more than 20 guests at a time in their home.

But this colonial record and its details also weave a story of a Jacob van Amboina in debt. While he left behind several worldly possessions for his wife, they were also to be taxed, since he was in debt to a slave named Pieter van Bengalen in the amount of 300 guilders, then known as gelt (roughly R2500 today).

On this fateful day, Dorothea lost not only her husband, but also the household possessions that formed the material centre of their family and social life. In the end, she was left with a paltry 10 guilders, while the enslaved girl Eva was taken from her. Dorothea could only accept the settlement, marking the document with a solitary, heartbreaking X.

The lives of Jacob and his family, not recorded in written texts, offer us deeper insight. Firstly, we observe the connection and subsequent interaction between them, people coming from different spaces, which impacted, but was not limited to, their shared culture, worldviews, discourse patterns and conventions.

Our perspective is formed by tracking their life histories – Jacob hailing from the island of Ambon, and likely banished to the Cape, and his wife and children born in the Cape. Their different surnames attest to their origins and elaborate on the impact of their union.

Secondly, the worldly possessions he left behind provide us with insight into his worldview, shaped through various interactions with members of other cultural groups. They elaborate on social practices, the possible mixing of linguistic conventions and shared cultural experiences such as cuisine and clothing, and whether these interactions could have helped shape their social, religious and cultural practices; belief systems; and, language usage.

Thirdly, their names stand as witness to an abstract phenomenon: language. While Jacob was a relatively free individual at the Cape, his fellow Ambonese, about 23 who were forced into slavery in the Cape between 1658 and early 1800, were not. Like most of them, he would have known Ambonese Malay (it's in his surname) and Arabic (or the written form Kitaab-Malay). Both languages were read and learned in Jawi script for religious reasons, and were actively used on his home island. He would also have learnt a romanised version of that script when the Dutch Christian missionaries translated the Statenbijbel into Ambonese Malay and used it as a vehicle of literacy across many schools on the island. His wife Dorothea and the children likely spoke a creolised version of Dutch at the Cape (mixed in with many Indian Ocean Malay dialects, such as the trade Malay dialect Hokkien Chinese, Javanese, and others) – the language that developed at the Cape, named Caaps by 1775, which we know today as Kaaps.

Dorothea likely knew Ambonese Malay and the Statenbijbel-esch Dutch used by Jacob, since she married him, and words like gelt, since she was there when his estate was taxed (gelt is a word still spelt and pronounced like that by Kaaps speakers, centuries later).

Jacob would have known Creole Portuguese as well, since the family slave Eva, likely a Masbieker from Mozambique, spoke Creole Portuguese (or Portuguese) based on her surname. When you think about it, when Eva was removed from the house, a language of value, common ground, and social life was also removed.

Jacob’s story provides us insight into a Dutch slavery past, of a human being taken from his ancestral homeland and forced to the Cape. But this record also raises many unanswered questions about the history of disconnecting people from their ancestral home, heritage, committing acts of genocide, and rerouting and unmooring languages through translation practices.

At the Cape, the Dutch enslaved many but also committed horrific acts of genocide against the Khoe and San, wiping out almost all our First Nation people from their stolen lands. The free and enslaved ancestors of Kaaps, Masbieker Portuguese and Cape Muslim speakers, also suffered a form of erasure we are still dealing with today.

We have so far learnt that linguists and philologists working with Afrikaner nationalists in the 1800s provided the intellectual blueprint for advancing linguistic knowledge to erase the linguistic lifeworlds of Kaaps, and Cape Muslim speakers, in particular. This is a blueprint still taught in Afrikaans and Dutch (or Neerlandistiek) departments and units today, in settled curricula that reproduce colonialism.

There is no sugarcoating it. How do we deal with this Dutch slave history and its afterlife today? How do we address the misinterpretation and manipulation of diachronic evidence that illuminates languages used by the formerly enslaved? For example, how do we teach South Africans that the pronoun djy, used every day by Kaaps and Muslim speakers, mostly romanised from Ambonese Malay into Dutch by Dutch Christian missionaries, was once an honorific term reserved for addressing someone of higher station and importance, like a Prince or God?

How did it lose its semiotic value through translation practices and the dehumanisation of those enslaved by the Dutch in Indonesia and the Cape? Should we establish an African-Indian Ocean history, language, culture research and teaching programme? Can we do so to re-interpret and re-evaluate the social practices of our enslaved ancestors who were written out of history?

And, importantly, what can we learn from the Dutch past of slavery that will help us re-intellectualise our languages, cultures and knowledge at various levels of society?

• Prof Quentin Williams is Director of the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR) at the University of the Western Cape and Professor of Linguistics in the Linguistics Department at the University. He is also the author of the first-ever Kaaps dictionary. 

The University of the Western Cape will host a symposium on Dutch Slavery Pasts and their Afterlives in Suriname, Indonesia and South Africa on 1 September 2026. Dutch colonial slavery has affected communities across Suriname, Indonesia and South Africa in various ways. These histories and their afterlives, both distinct and intertwined, have shaped differing perspectives on colonial-era slavery in these countries. The symposium brings together scholars from these countries to explore local research questions alongside transoceanic perspectives and conversations.