This is a very very interesting piece of work. It integrates a standard archaeological account of an excavation at one of the earliest points of interaction between the Dutch soldiers of the Dutch East India Company with indigenous Khoikhoi herders on the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. It also discusses the ways in which indigenous peoples have been objectified and disempowered by the settler societies that displaced them, and by the anthropologists, historians and anatomists who sought, in their own fumbling ways, to understand them.Part memoir, part historical reconstruction, part narrative re-imagining, Schrire raises important and unsettling issues regarding archaeology and its place in the contemporary world.
There are many reasons why Schrire's book appears on the reading lists of many of my colleagues who teach historical archaeology and/or about the politics of the past. For one thing, Schrire produces a relatively short and readable discussion of the nature of archaeological investigations and very nicely captures some of the flavor of the field and its minor victories and frustrations.
For another, Schrire's re-imaginings of the thoughts and motivations of the "silenced" of Dutch colonial history at the outpost: common Dutch soldier, Khoikhoi woman, Swedish deserter, frustrated native chief, officious Company functionary, all serve to highlight the laconic prose of the official accounts and together give a much harsher and more emotional rendering to the "facts" she gleans from the historical and archaeological record. We (archaeologists and non-archaoelogists alike) often choose to suppress the emotional when we deal with the past, but this, Schrire argues (and I agree) is something we do at our own peril.
Then too, Schrire also challenges us think very hard about the ways in which archaeologists may (or may not) choose to challenge the convenient founding mythologies of colonial countries. For my part, I'm tempted to interpret the "Darkness" of her title as the empty spaces or silences in colonial histories that enable or justify the casual racism and sense of entitlement that drives colonial regimes and the talented and intelligent people that choose (however unwittingly) to accept and defend that entitlement.
Schrire is also wise enough to place herself inside this matrix. By detailing her childhood and early career in the way she does, she exposes her own complicity in, or tacit agreement with, the same forces of privilege and power. Would that we were all so brave and unsparing of ourselves.
One reads Schrire's frustration and horror at her inheritance, and the land of her birth: the ending anecdote is both chilling and sad. At the same time, one also senses her own deep attachment to South Africa and to the people (Black, Jewish, Colored, English, Afrikaaner) who live there. This kind of emotional honesty and awareness of double-consciousness is what characterizes the best social analysis of our times. Despite (or perhaps even because of) its difficult emotional terrain, this book is a worthy addition to that body of work.
If there are ways beyond the mutual recriminations and hostilities which are the legacies of colonialism, Schrire has outlined one brave attempt to begin to map the path. In the words of my late friend and mentor Professor Rhys Jones (who was one of Schrire's friends and colleagues at Cambridge): Good on yer Carmel.