Kites of Good Fortune
Front Cover
“Rich in anecdote and reference, Kites of Good Fortune takes the reader into the heart and mind of Anna de Koning, the daughter of Angela of Bengal, a slave in the household of Jan van Riebeeck at the Cape of Good Hope. Mother and daughter both achieve material success, flying the kites of their ambitions, and Annie follows her fortunes in the highest echelons of Cape society.
The author is an eleventh-generation descendant of Anna de Koning. Her story is based on extensive archival research, and evokes a vivid sense of life at the Cape at the turn of the seventeenth century. It is, at the same time, a modern tale of the quest for fulfilment and a conflicting sense of belonging both to Europe and to Africa.”
Published in 2004 by David Philip, an imprint of New Africa Books, Cape Town, South Africa
ISBN: 0864866712
Therese posing at Blouberg in imitation of Annie
Natal Mercury, 4 Nov, 2004
Khadija Mohammed
Kites of Good Fortune is a historical fiction which takes the reader into the heart and mind of Anna de Koning, the daughter of Angela of Bengal, a slave in the household of Jan van Riebeeck at the Cape of Good Hope.
Mother and daughter both achieve material success, flying the kite of their ambitions. Annie follows her fortunes in the highest echelons of Cape society.
The main characters are Olof Bergh and Anna de Koning. The book talks about his relationship with several influential people in the Cape in the 17th century, some of whom were Shaikh Yusuf, the van der Stels and the van Riebeecks.
The book is rich in anecdote and reference. Benade, who is an 11th-generation descendant of Anna de Koning, has based her work on archival and museum research. Benade takes a very bold step by writing this novel of passion, lust and love - in the first person.
The book is written in an easy, fluid style which rivets the reader’s attention.
Drum, 23 Sept. 2004
Read this Book
Have you ever what life was like in the Cape of Good Hope in the 17th century? Get a glimpse of life back then through the heart and mind of Anna de Koning, daughter of Angela of Bengal, a slave in the household of Jan van Riebeeck. Mother and daughter manage to rise above their circumstances through successful marriage. The author is an 11th generation descendant of Anna, and tells a great tale of a quest for fulfilment and belonging - to Europe and Africa.
Natal Witness, 13 Dec 2004
Margaret von Klemperer
An Independent Woman in 17th Century Cape Town:
The heroine of this book is Anna de Koning, an ancestor of the author’s. Anna’s mother, Angela of Bengal, was a slave in the household of Jan van Riebeeck and caught the eye of a handsome sea captain who, unusually for the time, made provision for her unborn child before he succumbed to his dangerous profession.
Angela was manumitted and able to live at the Cape as a free woman, raising her illegitimate child by David de Koning with her other children by her Dutch husband. And so Annie grows up in the second half of the 17th century in the settlement of Cape Town, an intelligent, independent woman with a passion for drawing and painting and the flora of the Cape.
She eventually marries the Swede, Olof Bergh and the main story of the book covers their lives together, the good and bad times at the Cape. It was something of a snakes and ladders existence. Offend the Van der Stels and you were down the snake so fast it was bewildering, with plenty of jealous bystanders to enjoy your fall; back into favour for whatever arbitrary or un-savoury reason, and you were up the ladder.
Benade recreates the times with skill and the book makes an interesting counterpoint to Dan Sleigh’s Islands that covers much of the same time and territory and even some of the same characters.
Inevitably, Anna’s story is fictionalised.
Although Benade does include a timeline, it would have been interesting if she had said what is romanticised and what is factual.
There’s no harm in embellishing the early history of Dutch settlement, but it would have been fun to know where the embellishment begins and ends.
Author’s note: See Facts and Fiction below
The Citizen, 20 Nov, 2004
Ann Mapham
Lively Picture of Cape Society:
How intriguing to go back in time and step into the shoes of your grandmother 11 generations back.
Therese Benade does this and finds herself in the Cape in 1655. She traces her family back to Mai Angela, an Indian girl who was sold into slavery at the age of 13.
Angela was a highly gifted storyteller and that special talent has endured through the generations and culminated in Therese Benade, the present day writer of the delightful book, Kites of Good Fortune.
Angela’s charm and initiative lead to romance with a visiting Dutch relative and it enables her to break out of slavery - her kite flies momentarily.
Sadly, her lover drowns, but she has conceived his child, a half Indian and half Dutch daughter, Annie.
The backdrop to Annie’s story is a lively picture of Cape society from 1655 to 1734.
Ironically, when Annie goes to Europe in her old age she finds that, “every insipid cold day convinced me of how instinctively African I was.”
This entertaining book gives us insight into a wonderful person in our history.
LitNet: 05 July 2005
Compelling reading: Kites of Good Fortune
Mary Watson
Theresa Benade has recreated Cape Town at the turn of the 17th century to tell the story of Anna de Koning, daughter of Anjali, or Angela of Bengal.
The book begins with two journeys. First the return of the sixty-four-year-old Anna to the Cape after her only trip to Europe. This is the narrative position of the novel as the older Anna recounts the story of her life. The second journey, told to us by Anna, is the journey from the Netherlands to the Cape made by her mother, the slave Angela. These two journeys - one in each direction - frame the novel. Central to the book is the gravitational pull that Europe exerts on Cape colonial society.
Angela comes to the Cape to work in the household of Van Riebeeck. The second chapter of the novel nods to Angela’s friendship with Krotoa Eva - the intermediary who went between the Dutch and the Hottentots. At the core of the Angela story is the three days of passion she experiences with the dashing captain David Koning during which Anna was conceived. The narrative then continues, somewhat jerkily, through Anna’s life in early Cape high society. It traces her rise and fall and rise again; her relationship with her husband Olof Bergh and her friendships with Heinrich and Marie Claudius and with Marie van der Stel, amongst others.
There are many characters who drift in and out of these pages, like Anna’s numerous children, but it is the “irrepressibly fertile” Anna who stands out. I was enraptured by this heroine - she is vividly brought to life through a wealth of historical detail.
The story is a temporal mapping, rather than any kind of thematic or dramatic narrative progression. We are given access to various snippets, or episodes, of Anna’s life, starting from her conception and continuing until just before her death. Necessarily, in any historical novel, particularly one that maps a whole life in only 239 pages, there has to be some kind of selection of events, but I wasn’t always sure of the logic of the selection, or why Benade chose to elaborate on any specific part of Anna’s life at any given time.
Even though the book is propelled forward by time, rather than by a more coherent or fluid sense of story, it is a very compelling read. There is a lovely, gentle sense of narrative that sees us moving from botanical expeditions in the untamed Cape to musical interludes in the castle, all the while bringing to the reader’s imagination this wonderfully strong woman who was ahead of her time.
The historical novel is a curious blend of fact and fictionalisation and Benade negotiates these two in way that keeps the reader engaged. Undoubtedly the strength of the book is the rich historical detail with which Benade has layered the experiences of her heroine. This book begins to plug some of the necessary gaps in popular understandings of South African history - I was thrilled to pick up a book about the offspring of a slave in the early Cape. It has left me with a hunger for more information about some of the other characters and the historical context. The maps, timeline and glossary are welcome appendages.
We are told that Anna doesn’t have Angela’s skill of evocative storytelling, and this is unfortunately sometimes true. The world of the book is made believable by the historical detail rather than by the weaving of an imaginative canvas through storytelling as a craft. And while this historical detail is carefully integrated, it could have been complemented by more evocative storytelling. The effect is somewhat distancing - we feel the mediation of the story through the telling of it and so we’re not always at one with Anna.
The book is framed by Anna’s consideration of her split loyalties to Africa and Europe. She says, “All my life I have felt divided, as though the ground on which my life was based, my melody and harmony, rhythm and tempo were African, but every ornamentation, every improvisation, every trill and grace note were European” (220). I was a bit puzzled by this, as the bulk of the book doesn’t indicate much of an African sensibility. I am not looking for any kind of reductive or essential sense of “African” but fail to see the African “rhythms and tempos” in Anna’s Cape society interludes. Without lapsing into the obvious, this could have been explored more adventurously.
Anna’s African identity is perhaps best revealed through her love of its landscape, but even that seems to be the love of the coloniser: identifying and naming (in Latin) that uncomfortable acquisition of knowledge of the colonised landscape. Related to this is her curious hankering after Europe, expressed also through her desire for her lost father. What I found markedly absent was any kind of speculation about her Bengali identity, that there was no desire to know more about this part of herself, despite Angela’s supportive presence throughout the novel. It just seems a bit odd that she never reflects on this part of her identity at all. The Bengali heritage seems to be a less considered area; even here the characterisation of Angela sometimes lapses into stereotype: long neck and proud shoulders when she is young and exotic and standing before David Koning. I wanted to know more, even if just a few lines, about the implications of being of slave descent while inhabiting early Cape high society. The slaves lurk on the margins of these pages, and because Anna could so easily have been one of them, I was intrigued by her relationship with the slaves, but needed more. There is a sense of the slave community and of the covert Islam through Angela’s later interest in the religion of her birth, and this begins to develop an interesting narrative strand.
Kites of Good Fortune is absorbing and compelling. Through the careful and detailed rendering of its engaging heroine, the book takes its readers on a journey into the early days of the Cape, with its treacheries and intrigue and botanical interludes.
8th on the Johannesburg Sunday Times Fiction Long List for 2005
Back to top... Facts and FictionA background to the research that supports the story.
The life of Olof Bergh is well documented from his arrival at the Cape in 1676 as sergeant to his final inspection of the fortifications shortly before his death in 1724. One of the most important primary sources for his long public career is the Resolusies van die Politieke Raad - volumes 2 to 8. (These are minutes of the meetings of the governing body at the Cape) Another is the journals of his expeditions published by the Van Riebeeck Society. His signature can be found on the original manuscripts of the Resolusies in the Cape Archives. The deed for Constantia also exists. He also did own Saxenburg and De Kuylen.
Useful secondary sources on his life and some of his children is the Dictionary of South African Biography.
One fact, hitherto unknown and uncovered by Jim Armstrong in the Colombo Archives, is that O Bergh left Ceylon for ‘patria’ in the first part of 1694. This is at the same time when Shaykh Yussuf is smuggled to Galle and from there clandestinely brought to the Cape. O Bergh is only officially recorded as being back at the Cape a year later AND he came on a ship from Holland, not from Ceylon. It is this information that led to the intrigue with Shaykh Yussuf. I invented a reason why OB leaves the Cape in disgrace and returns victorious to become Captain of the garrison, the third best paid official at the Cape. It is plausible that he ‘unofficially’ brought Shaykh Yussuf to the Cape and then went on to Holland to claim his reward from the Lords Seventeen in person.
The discovery of this fact about his movements solved another puzzle: his daughter Dorothea is recorded as being born at the Cape in 1695. At the time of her conception, Bergh was, according to official documents at the Cape, still in Ceylon. The fact of his 1694 departure makes it entirely possible that Dorothea was conceived when Bergh called in at the Cape on his way to Holland.
Portraits of both Olof Bergh and Anna de Koning still hang side by side on the walls of one of the descendants.
An arthritic old lady’s signature can be seen on Anna de Koning’s will. Her part in the rescue of Marie van der Stel is recorded in the diary of Adam Tas.
She is mentioned in the Resolusies in connection with the petition to send Simon Petrus to the East.
Like many women, she is like a shadow that follows the chronology of her husband’s life, like a mirror that reflects the status of his grandeur or disgrace. But we know she was a real person. For more than three centuries she has waited for a writer to furnish her with an inner life. What she does and who she is, is based on extensive reading and research about Dutch and Cape society in the 17th Century: There are the accounts of visitors such as Valentijn and Pere Tachard(who also recounts Occum Chamnam’s account of the wreck of the Nossa Sehnora dos Milagros). There are biographical notes on the botanists and high officials who called at the Cape. There are the Claudius drawings of Cape flora and fauna. There are the many visits to museums to study 17th Century textiles. There is the story about the silk industry pieced together from entries in the Resolusies.
There are also the original inventories of Constantia and her town house at her death as well as the inventory that was taken of the house she had to leave when O Bergh was exiled. This inventory even states the colour of the bag in which the ‘stolen’ musk was buried: the contents of the loft includes the ‘blue bag! The bag in which the musk was buried!’ (exclamation mark of the inventory taker.)
What she feels is based on some of the writer’s emotions and reactions to similar situations such as loss, disgrace, temptation, fulfilment in work and motherhood.
Angela of Bengal is well documented. Her X can be seen on the document that grants her a piece of land on ‘the tail of the Lion’. Her marriage to Basson makes her one of the stammoeders of many Bassons today (see Heese’s Genealogy).
What is really special is a primary source character reference: Jan van Riebeeck’s granddaughter visits the Cape early in the 18th Century and writes to her father Abraham: ‘I met your nanny, Ansjla. She is now a very old lady but still has fond memories of your parents. The portraits she has of them are rather dirty with age.’ (Ansjla is exactly how Angela is pronounced in Brazilian Portuguese.)
There is a document recounting the auction after her death which gives an idea of what she owned.
David Koning appears early in Jan van Riebeeck’s diary. He is named as the Captain of the Reyger and goes fishing in False Bay.
He does really perish in the Indian Ocean ten years later. The account of that storm is based on two different versions from survivors.
Nobody has attempted to explain Anna de Koning’s paternity. Choosing David as her father is an informed guess, a creative liberty.
Occum Chamnam is real. A portrait of him has recently surfaced from the Vatican Library. He is a very handsome man. His friendship with A Bergh is an invention.
2004
Introduction to the launch of Kites in August, 2004 at Groot Constantia, Cape
It was no less an author than Henry James who declared, to his correspondent Sarah Orne Jewett, that the “historic” novel was an impossibility, a form that limited author’s creative freedom by the fetters of actual events and personalities it imposed. “The real thing”, he warned, “is almost impossible to do and in its essence the whole thing is as nought”. One hesitates to disagree with The Master, but his observation is belied by our everyday reading experience. Since his day, historical novels have become a genre of fiction which enjoys much success even if they are not as popular as mysteries, spy thrillers and romances. One has only to recall Charles Frazier, Brian Moore and Barry Unsworth, to limit mention only to recent American, Canadian and British authors. Perhaps in answer to Henry James, one might admit that the historical novel has implicit rules, which impose a special discipline on its practitioners, just as do other genres of fiction, even if James was unwilling to accept them.
South Africa, with its incredibly rich history, has only begun to be explored, one is tempted to say exploited, by its novelists. The Dutch East India Company period, especially, with the notable exception of novels by Andre Brink and Dan Sleigh, is as yet fairly unfamiliar ground for the novelist and novel reader, despite the now ample historiography of the period.
But one might ask, by what right do novelists annex the past, which historians like to claim as their own? Well, the answer there is that historians give us facts and factoids taken from archives, libraries, museums, holes in the ground and from each other, together with their interpretations of these facts. They are thin on emotion and dialogue, the stuff of our everyday lives. It is here that the novelists find open ground, waiting to be populated with characters that are recognizable, yet different from our contemporaries, by virtue of their historical context.
The task of the historical novelist is to convince us that we have somehow stepped into the past and are eavesdropping on conversations we can understand and identify with. Parenthetically, a major hurdle for the novelist here is to avoid anachronisms and neologisms which will give away the contemporaniety of the writer and tear the historical tapestry. The best example I can recall of this is in Giuseppe de Lampedusa’s, The Leopard, a solid 19th c. Sicilian tale, where suddenly the narrator breaks off and looks up into the sky and sees a squadron of B-24 Liberators on their way to bomb the Germans! The suspension of disbelief comes crashing down, even as the bombers fly on. For neologisms, I can think of an Afrikaans novel, which climaxed with a Khoi woman up a baobab tree, having a stream -of-consciousness reverie full of Jungian terminology.
All that by way of introducing Kites of Good Fortune by Therese Benadé.
The book is solidly based on archival and museum research. The principal characters, Olof Bergh and Anna de Koning, are historical personages on whom documents exist in the Cape Archives and in published archival sources. The chief male character, Olof Bergh, was a Dutch East India Company employee whose career can be followed archivally in some detail. His story provides an armature on which the story of Anna de Koning can be created. Unsurprisingly, there is much less in the documents about her. It is a truth universally acknowledged that women’s lives are less fully recorded archivally than men’s. (Hence the novelist). But there are documentary flashes, as when she fishes Willem Adriaen van der Stel’s wife out of a dam: that comes from Adam Tas’s Diary.
Unlike many historical novelists, the author has chosen not to use the easy device of an invented peripheral character as narrator, who witnesses the action and serves up a running commentary on it. She has chosen Anna de Koning herself as her narrator. This was a bold decision, but it works and works well. Indeed she has no invented characters at all; they are all historical personages [except for one musician].
The inner life of Anna de Koning had to be invented, and the author has done that very effectively, in such a way that the reader is involved and interested. Whether the historical Anna de Koning had any of the qualities and skills with which the novelist has endowed her is something the historian will never be able to tell us. But for an hour or two she will live for the reader in a way that makes her time more accessible.
The critic John Lukacs wrote “Historical novels which have no resonance in the present are bound to prove only of antiquarian interest”. Kites of Good Fortune does resonate for the contemporary reader in that it does intimately reveal a woman involved in the timeless life crises of birth, becoming, love, lust, matrimony, old age and death. Along the way she encounters a cast of historical characters whom the author brings inimitably to life.
As for Henry James, well, he might just have agreed.
Jim Armstrong served as Field Director for the US Library of Congress in Kenya, Brazil, Pakistan and Indonesia
Back to top... Rogues Gallery
Anna de Koning
Olof Bergh
Occam Chamnam
Signing books at the launch of Kites at the launch at Groot Constantia
