Fetish. Perhaps few words are more redolent of the negative outlook of “enlightened” Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries towards the “superstitions” embraced by the supposedly benighted inhabitants of the Dark Continent of Africa. This intellectual snobbery on the part of such European intellectual luminaries as Hume, Voltaire, Kant, and Marx led to fundamental misunderstandings of the nature of African religious beliefs and practices. In particular, it obscured the ways in which European visitors to the African coast made use of the concept of the fetish for their commercial purposes. In the process, they introduced European ideas about physical objects of supernatural power into the complex of beliefs that Enlightenment thinkers later came to deride as uniquely emblematic of African backwardness. The conception of the fetish as both a European and an African invention re-emerges in reading the documentary evidence left behind by European travellers and traders of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These sources present the fetish—and in particular the practice of sealing agreements by swearing oaths on fetish objects—as an intermediary between European and African systems of economic and spiritual value, thus fostering the modicum of trust necessary for trade to proceed.

This paper deals with several themes central to recent debate about Dutch colonial society in Java, the key island of the erstwhile Netherlands Indies. Primarily, these themes relate to the colonial-metropolitan nexus, and my discussion seeks to illuminate these themes with particular reference to the documented experiences of three women who were either on their way to the Indies—or making their way back from there—early in the 1830s. The paper's fundamental argument concerns the importance of the concept of “Empire Families” to an understanding of Dutch colonial communities in the Indies. It is an understanding that serves to correct some misconceptions about the dynamics of those societies in the early to mid-nineteenth-century period. Among other things, building on the work of others and drawing on unpublished documentation, it seeks to locate some aspects of colonial “discourse,” particularly those relating to “colonial women,” in the broader framework of social history.

In early 1959, Luiz Rendall Silva, Cape Verdean administrator of the concelho (district) of Fogo, on the volcano island of that name in the Sotavento group (Leeward Islands), wrote a very energetic report to his Portuguese superiors. He complained to the Governor of Cape Verde about the lack of decisiveness in Portugal's colonial welfare policy, and about the absence of clear programmes for the future of the islands. In his words, he wished “for the improvement of the Cape Verdean land and for the benefit of its populations, and for a more visible advancement of the civilising mission.”

In August 1958, Meeuwis Drost (1923-86) was the first missionary for the Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland (Vrijgemaakt), or Reformed Churches in the Netherlands (Liberated) to start proselytising among the Papuans of the Upper-Digul area in Netherlands New Guinea. He later recalled how that day: “I simply started with Genesis one. And they listened!” Drost finished teaching the entire Old Testament within one year. To start at the beginning seems logical and is in fact the approach used by most missionaries of the Liberated churches. Transfer of religious and cultural knowledge was seen as an important aspect of their work, especially with an illiterate audience. The Protestant religious landscape in the Netherlands had fragmented heavily during the nineteenth century. Two secessions from the Dutch Reformed Church in 1834 and 1886 led to the formation of the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands in 1892. Its tendency to depose those who refused to adhere to its theological views resulted in the Vrijmaking (Liberation) in 1944. Although the Liberated churches were one of many Protestant branches, they were very secure in their own theological views. Consisting of exclusive political, religious, educational and even recreational organisations they formed a mini-pillar in Dutch society.

Beside the records of the Dutch East India Company (or VOC) stored at the Netherlands National Archives in The Hague, there are various VOC collections kept in Asia that pertain to India and Ceylon. Some of these are relatively well-known: the “Dutch Records” in the Tamil Nadu Archives (Chennai); the records of the VOC government of Ceylon in the Sri Lanka National Archives (Colombo); the records of the Dutch Reformed Church of Ceylon at the Wolvendaal Church (Colombo); and the records of the Asian VOC headquarters at Batavia in the National Archives of Indonesia (Jakarta).