Where History Intertwines

I was in fourth grade the year that Nelson Mandela was inaugurated president of South Africa. Everywhere I went, the moment was celebrated as the culmination of years of righteous struggle against Apartheid. At Albemarle Music Camp in Princeton, our summer concert culminated in a joyous rendition of the Zulu hymn “Siyahama.” 

One year later, I read Anne Frank’s diary for the first time. Each night in the Secret Annex, the bells of the Westerkirk helped to mitigate some of the anxiety that plagued the hiders as they attempted to find rest and sought to focus on the gratitude they felt for another day still alive in the heart of Amsterdam. 

It wasn’t until I read Annie Coombes’ “History After Apartheid” that I began to see the tangle of threads connecting the histories of the Netherlands, the English, South Africa, and the Jews (in Israel and in the Diaspora). Amsterdam and London, Cape Town, Wannsee, and Tel Aviv, all are loci of a strange energy, a push and pull between freedom and domination, lawfulness and resistance. 

Interior of District Six Museum in Cape Town, and original member of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, dedicated to commemorating an interracial neighborhood destroyed under Apartheid. Courtesy Jim Henderson

In the delightful 2020 dramedy “Ted Lasso,” Amsterdam serves as a neutral site for the characters to find themselves again after a season of setbacks and confusion. The city is so clean, and free, and archaically beautiful that the characters who visit it for the first time respond with disbelief or even distrust. Nevertheless, each find what they are looking for there. Ted, the homesick Texan, reinvents a classic football strategy in an American-themed restaurant staffed by Australians. Rebecca finds the possibility of love on a house boat after falling in the Prinsengracht canal. Nearby, Jamie teaches Roy to ride a bicycle in search of a real windmill, remarking on the haunting sound of the Westerkirk as they ride past the place where Anne and her family hid from the Nazis and their Dutch collaborators.

During the German occupation, the law-abiding citizens of the Netherlands initially chafed at the most egregious displays of Nazi brutality, but ultimately, they enabled the most efficient deportation (and murder) of their Jewish community through compliance. A century before, the Boer descendants of the original Dutch East India Company settlers of South Africa touched off a bloody civil war with their rival colonizers, the British, when gold and diamonds were found in the territory’s heartland. The white nationalist compromise that characterized rule of the region by the British during the first half of the 20th century and then the Afrikaans minority for another forty years after independence would gain notoriety around the world. Based on an ironclad legal code built on the kind of pseudoscientific racism beloved by the Nazis and the crafters of Jim Crow in the United States, Apartheid would become synonymous with injustice. Thus, its dismantlement in the mid-1990s became a  symbol of the triumph of interracial struggle against oppression. 

In a moment of renewed interest in nationalist essentialism by the most powerful inheritor of the British colonial legacy, the fraught histories of the Netherlands and its colonies, the British and their colonies, and the purity-minded Germans and their periodic embrace of enlightened pluralism feels newly relevant and resonant. There is something special shared by all of these places touched by the hubris and magical thinking (both in the cause of and against the possibility of pluralistic freedom) of these European “parents.” South Africa, the United States, Israel, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand— we all struggle to define and honor indigeneity while promoting freedom and “self-determination” for majorities and minorities alike. Likewise, we struggle to commemorate past injustices while celebrating “the triumph of the human spirit” even as the struggles that define us (animated by those perennial constructions of race, class, and religion) continue and evolve. 

If nothing else, I hope that our common memorial touchstones can help us stop and breathe. This is the world we inherited, and this is the world we create. So far, we have nowhere else to go.