REGULARS Once Upon A Time... Revisiting The Past: Ancestral Voices And The Karmic Novel BY NICOLAAS VERGUNST
Biog Born in Cape Town of emigrant Dutch parents, Nicolaas Vergunst (1958) has worked as an artist, teacher, designer, curator and journalist. After a longstanding career with the national museums of South Africa, he resigned to write this novel and has since lived with his wife Ellen, a diplomat and historian, in Kiev, Kinshasa and Strasbourg.
Five hundred years after Francisco d’Almeida and his sixty compatriots were murdered at the southern tip of Africa, a new story emerges as independent individuals ‘hear’ and ‘see’ the event. Their story challenges the historical record and is told here for the first time.
‘The massacre of Viceroy Francisco d’Almeida, 1 March 1510’ by Angus McBride, 1984. Courtesy of the Castle Military Museum, Cape Town.
“Having been displaced from his position as the Portuguese Viceroy of India, Francisco d’Almeida sailed for Lisbon in peril of his life,” began the clairaudient, speaking slowly, as he described what had happened five centuries before. I stood beside him on a desolate beach below Table Mountain, Cape Town, as near to the murder scene as was still possible today. Most of the old beach was now covered by tons of landfill. I knew the passage from India to Portugal had been a long and dangerous one, even for this veteran Viceroy of the Seas, but not that he feared being killed by his own men. Nor that the conspirators had even planned to assassinate him. And yet there seemed to be more to this story? After all, the poet laureate of Portugal, Luís de Camões, recorded how the witches of Cochin had predicted Almeida’s inglorious
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death at the Cape — then the southernmost portal to his empire (The Lusíads 1572). “It was thus at the Cape of Good Hope that the conspirators struck,” continued my companion, looking toward the mountain, “carrying out an order of execution, disguised as a prophecy of doom, in which Almeida would not pass beyond the Cape. The ambush was carefully orchestrated as an altercation between the sailors and the irate natives. Yes, that much is still true. But the Viceroy was already dead, and his supporters wiped out, when the conspirators returned to seal their atrocity—ritually piercing Almeida through the throat with a lance of steel. And so they silenced him forever.” This was the first of several messages I would receive from the clairaudient, Dr Laurence Oliver, a practising psychiatrist in