Beyond the ethical choice. Decolonizing the Zuid-Afrikahuis through an 18th century text

Abstract

Published roughly a century after the founding of the Cape of Good Hope settlement for the VOC by Jan van Riebeeck, it breaks with the dominant, pejorative European discourse about the Cape of that time. For De Marre, the Cape is proof of God’s omnipresence. More than that, De Marre instills in its reader an awareness of conceptual biases of European worldviews. Today, more particularly, De Marre invites a pensive reflection on the continued colonial power imbalance in Western knowledge systems. In this paper, I draw on De Marre to suggest ways of decolonizing the ZAH collections. In his fundamental awareness of Western knowledge systems in relation to the Cape, De Marre constitutes an absent presence of consequence for the ZAH library.