Krotoa and the Dutch EAST India Company (VOC) – ‘Chaos and Governance’ in the Relations of Indigenous Women and Colonial Corporations, and Chaosmosis (“How Can We Breathe?”)

In the successive phases of global governance, corporations have played a pivotal role, agglomerating resources while also producing chaos. This was the case during phases of colonial territorial expansion in which the needs of the corporation shaped the footprint of colonial expansion, dictating the kinds of accumulation that were required from local environments. These forms of accumulation also fashioned particular kinds of relationships with local indigenous communities. Epistemic Injustice has highlighted the ways in which indigenous and women’s place in these historical developments have been invisibilised. This paper contributes to the growing literature on the role of women in historical processes of accumulation and dispossession, and the potential for social change that indigenous women represent. The capacity of indigenous matriarchs to play a healing and transformative role in post-colonial contexts may once more require an engagement with corporations and large monopolies in order to reshape these social relations. Beginning with the place of Krotoa, a young Khoi interlocutor for the Dutch viceroy, and through archival research that ranges from the 1650s and Dutch corporations such as the Dutch East India Company, to British firms such as Unilever and with a specific focus on food corporations in SA since the 1960s, this paper traces the social interactions of global corporations and the women in Indigenous communities who were sometimes included in this patriarchal world of corporate institutions in various and troubling ways. These social interactions shed light on the character of South African corporates today and their relationship with descendants of these indigenous communities, particularly in the city of Cape Town where so many of these descendants reside. Does potential for chaosmosis and new assemblages exist in these post-colonial environments, and how can we breathe?