03/06/2026
Beautiful story by Tafi. Just a Pity he left out half of it:
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=2894918187527692&set=a.336173960068807
Here's the facts and reply to above link 👇
Bessie was a young English girl, around seven years old, who washed ashore after a shipwreck on South Africa's Wild Coast around 1737 and was adopted by the Mpondo people, who named her Gquma, the Roar of the Sea, and who eventually became the matriarch of a royal clan.
He left out that the clan who adopted Bessie, the abeLungu (an isiXhosa word meaning "foam from the sea," describing people washed ashore after shipwrecks), were themselves already descended from earlier European castaways. By the 1730s they were a mixed-descent clan, taking in new castaways as routine. He skipped that, because if the family who raised Bessie was itself European-descended, the story stops being a simple tale of African generosity toward helpless whites. It becomes a three-hundred-year pattern of mixing that ran in every direction. Which is exactly what it was.
He named Bessie's founders but not who they were. The men known by the isiXhosa names Jekwa, Badi and Hatu were, according to the historian Hazel Crampton, most likely Englishmen: Bill Elliot, Henry Clark, Thomas Miller. English. Not Dutch. The amaCaine clan was founded by the Englishman John Cane. The amaOgle by Henry Ogle. Both names appear on a document signed at Port Natal (modern Durban) in 1837, recorded independently by a French naturalist named Delegorgue and published in Paris in 1847. Two clans on the Wild Coast carry the surnames of two English traders, confirmed in a French book and in oral tradition that has never read it.
So when he wrote "while Dutch colonists at the Cape seized Khoikhoi land, enslaved indigenous people and sexually exploited Khoikhoi women," he dropped a line about the Dutch into a story about English castaways on a coast 600km from Cape Town. That line has nothing to do with Gquma, nothing to do with the Wild Coast. It is there to frame a narrative, not tell a history. His audience will not check whether the founders were English or Dutch, because the point was never accuracy. The point was the like button.
He wants the Dutch in this story? Here is where they actually belong. Coenraad de Buys, great-grandson of a French Huguenot settler, crossed into Xhosa country in the 1780s. He took Xhosa and Khoi wives. He became the Xhosa chief Ngqika's right-hand man. He fought alongside the Xhosa. His thousands of mixed-descent descendants, the Buysvolk, were granted 11,000 hectares of land by President Paul Kruger in 1888. A Boer who married in, fought alongside, and whose family was formally recognised by the Xhosa. He left that out because it breaks the version he is selling.
In 2016 the University of the Witwatersrand tested the DNA of 146 abeLungu clan members. The result: close to 70 per cent carried European genetic markers on the male line (the DNA passed from father to son). The female line was African. European fathers, African mothers, Xhosa culture, three centuries deep.
Gquma does not need a propaganda line about the Dutch inserted into her story to farm engagement. She has a dynasty, a praise name, and a genetic record confirmed in a laboratory. The full history is bigger than the version Tafi told, and it does not sort into the simple story he needs it to.
References:
Hazel Crampton, The Sunburnt Queen (Jacana, 2004).
Stephen Taylor, Caliban's Shore (Faber & Faber, 2004).
David de Veredicis, MSc Med dissertation, Wits University (2016), WIReDSpace repository.
Jacob van Reenen, Journal (London, 1792).
John Henderson Soga, The South-Eastern Bantu (Wits University Press, 1930).
Adulphe Delegorgue, Voyage dans l'Afrique australe (Paris, 1847).
Historia Tragico-Maritima (Lisbon, 1735).
George McCall Theal, Records of South-Eastern Africa, 9 vols (1898-1903).
Tafi Mhaka Ebenezer Akhideno
