Life Under the Palms: The Sublime World of the Anti-Colonialist Jacob Haafner
Paul van der Velde (translated Liesbesth Bennink
Yale University Press: 2020
.
This book introduces us to the world of Jacob Haafner, a seasoned traveller and prolific travel writer who, over a thirty-year period, lived successively in South Africa, Java, India, Sri Lanka and Mauritius. Haafner’s many experiences, and his close observations of the societies in which he resided, converted him into a trenchant critic of colonialism and missionaries and instilled a lifelong Anglophobia. Possessed of a prodigious memory, Haafner acquired fluency in seven languages—Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, Hindi, Tamil and English. Van der Velde’s detailed overview of Haafner’s life and times is supplemented by germane excerpts from his writings.
Jacob Haafner was born on 13 May 1754 in Halle, Prussia. After his father’s recruitment as a ship’s doctor to the Vereenidge Oostindische Compagnie (VOC, the Dutch United East India Company), the family moved to Emden and, later, in 1765, to Amsterdam. Signed on as a cabin boy, the twelve-year-old Jacob joined his father on the ship Luxemberg, which departed for Cape Town on 25 June 1766.
More from Mekong Review
-
An ode to a Bangalore bookstore
-
Poetry from Rory Harris
-
Snacking in Calcutta