When looking at Andrew Putter’s striking video work Secretly I Will Love You More (2007), the viewer is confronted with what looks like a framed oval painting of a pale, seventeenth-century Dutch woman clad in severe black-and-white clothing, similar to the style of subjects in portraits by Dutch masters such as Rembrandt. The viewer does not expect the portrait to come to life as a video, nor does the viewer expect the subject to open her mouth and sing in one of the gentle, immensely complicated, and almost extinct click languages of the Khoi, the indigenous African inhabitants of the Cape of Good Hope.
When the Dutch settlers first landed in Cape Town in 1652 and tried to co-opt the local Khoi as servants and laborers, the Khoi, who were hunter-gatherers, were not particularly interested and simply moved away, out of reach. The importation of slaves from countries like Java in Southeast Asia soon followed. Subsequently the Dutch accused the Khoi of cattle thievery, and Dutch authorities inhumanely gave Dutch farmers permission to shoot the Khoi as if they were vermin. Not a pretty history.
This is the history that Andrew Putter’s Secretly I Will Love You More (2007) revisits. The woman in the white lace collar is Maria Della Quellerie, wife of Jan van Riebeeck, first Dutch commander of the Cape of Good Hope. In this work Maria is singing to Krotoa, niece of one of the Khoi chiefs at the Cape. Little is known about Krotoa, except that she was taken into the van Riebeeck home, and because she learned to speak Dutch, she became important as a translator.
Putter imagines a relationship in which Maria, who was far from regarding Krotoa as “the other,” takes pleasure in the Khoi girl’s sweet nature and celebrates her brown skin and woolly hair—and respects her sufficiently to learn her language. Putter’s video presents a possible new reading of a period generally understood as racially divisive and as setting the tone for the onset of apartheid three centuries later.
Wrote critic Miles Keylock in the respected Johannesburg weekly Mail & Guardian of Secretly I Will Love You More, “Disdaining agitprop, stereotypes, and nostalgia, the work uses quiet logic and technical precision to cut through the divisions between intimacy and distance, movement and stasis, sound and silence, past and present, between fictional voices and institutional authority to present a vision of history that’s surprisingly tender, deeply open-ended, and refreshingly utopian.”
Born in 1965 in Cape Town, where he still lives, Putter is continuing working on new interpretations of other little-known aspects of early colonial history.
Secretly I Will Love You More 2007
Video installation
Singer: Claire Watling
120 x 90 cm
Image courtesy of the artist
© Andrew Putter