VAN RIEBEECK SOCIETY

50 volumes in tan cloth. 

"Historical Publications Southern Africa (previously the Van Riebeeck Society) was established in 1918 to publish meticulously edited original sources on Southern African history, which were inaccessible to the average South African. Since then it has produced one volume in every year bar two...

The Society was very much the product of the new Union of South Africa established in 1910 and sought to provide the fledgling state with a sense of its roots in the colonial past. Even so, in a multi-racial and interdependent country like South Africa, the subject-matter of its volumes went well beyond white society and also contained rich information on the indigenous San, Khoekhoen and African populations and slaves, though usually seen through colonial eyes... 

The origins of the Society lie in the discovery by Lloyd in 1911 of a large fragment of Adam Tas’s diary for 1704. As the leader of the free burgher opponents of the corrupt Dutch East India Company Governor of the Cape, Willem Adriaan van der Stel, Tas symbolised the long pedigree of the colonists’ struggle for freedom from autocratic foreign rule, which seemed so relevant to the building of national identity at the time of Union. The Trustees of the Library, led by Merriman, raised the funds to publish the diary which appeared in 1914, edited by Professor Leo Fouché.

With the money remaining from the publication fund, the Library’s Trustees decided to publish as the second volume Baron van Pallandt’s General Remarks on the Cape of Good Hope, a rare work which had been suppressed when first published in 1803. Pallandt’s General Remarks duly appeared in 1917 but met with sharp criticism in Parliament from the Opposition National Party for its inclusion of passages referring to the harsh treatment by the Dutch settlers of the Khoekhoen (‘Hottentots’). They denounced the work in rousing terms, with the result that sales soared, providing the Trustees with a healthy profit."

Abbreviated from https://hipsa.org.za/about/