Joline Young’s new book, “An uncomfortable paradise” takes us on a journey, part personal, part historical, and a South African history that few know of – early colonial life in Simons Town. Modern day Simon’s Town is a tourist hub in which South Africa’s naval base provides a quaint, if slightly militaristic, backdrop to charming coffee shops, pleasant bed and breakfast establishments, design emporia, emblematic vistas of sea and mountains, a penguin colony and multiple iconic colonial memorials, not least the fetishised statue of a naval dog.
But the true history of the area, like almost all of South Africa, long precedes British or Dutch appropriation. It is a history of which the last 4 centuries has been built on the dispossession of indigenous peoples and the expansion of colonial domination, which was dependent on the import of enslaved people to the colonies and the brutal exploitation of their labour. The book also exposes the incredible injustice and arbitrary brutality of colonial law, which is described through the human stories that have emerged from Young’s archival research…