History shows that people will steal to feed themselves and their families. If pushed, they will even kill. In this world of hunger, there is no exploiter or exploited, only varying levels of very desperate individuals.
Dutch colonization of the Cape was a strategic business move by the Dutch East India Company designed to supply its ships with fresh produce on the journey between Europe and Asia. Like all big business the company wanted the most profit for the least amount of expenditure.
To this end, Europeans of different nationalities were lured with the promise of freehold land and a horizon of opportunity. To refugee Huguenots in the Netherlands it was a chance to kick start their lives in a place where they would not be murdered in their beds for their religious beliefs.
They arrived at the Cape laden with a casket of seeds and farm implements.
They thought, because there was no precedent for thinking otherwise, that they were moving to a secure, settled colony. In reality, they were dumped onto ox wagons and taken into the wilderness, to the base of a line of mountains which separated Dutch East India Company land from a group of very angry indigenous people who had been barred from roaming the Cape Peninsula at will.
The Huguenots were, in essence, the first line of defence for the Company, the expendable cannon fodder which would take the brunt of the anger and buy time for the Company's employees to build additional and layered levels of protection.
The Huguenots were not the first group of Europeans to find themselves in this position. Mercenary Germans and even Company employees, freed from their employment bonds, had preceded them. The difference was that the Huguenots were farmers and craftsmen with a smattering of military men - very few military men - in the mix.
Our family had one of the few military trained men in the mix. He had been an Army officer in Paris, so the story goes, and he was part of an underground movement which gave safe passage out of France to Huguenots.
Whether he was discovered, or whether he thought it was time to go, is lost in time, but he and his family migrated to Holland along the same escape system, and from there to their uncertain fate in the wilds of Africa.
The family arrived at the Cape and were taken to a patch of tenacious shrub and grass where they were unloaded and left to their own devices.
I have often tried to imagine how they felt as the truth of their situation dawned on them.
An alien world filled with the forlorn sound of night predators with only the flimsy walls of a makeshift shack between.
What little food they had was rationed as they scrambled to figure out how to reach the Dutch East India Company which lay at a distance across miles of sand and foliage - as they tore out scrub with bare hands and pitifully inadequate implements to expose a patch of land for seed.
And the desperation of knowing that that seed was their sole source of food and income.
Six months into the nightmare, my ancestors had a patch of green watermelon to show for their efforts. They guarded it with life and limb, and, so, when a Khoi made his way into the patch and asked for an unripe melon, the head of the household said no.
During the ensuing argument, the Khoi picked up a watermelon and threw it with some force at my ancestor's chest. The impact ruptured an artery.
A crazy way to die - in a food fight between two hungry people.
