Natuur en Geschiedkundig beschreven door Lodewyk Alberti
Ridder der Koninklijke Orde van de Unie en Major bij den Generalen Staf der Koninglijke Hollandsche Armee; voormals Landdrost van het Distrikt Uitenhage en Militair Commandant van het Fort Frederik, aan de Kaap de goede Hoop
Met Platen en Kaarten
First Edition: viii, (iv), 260, (i errata) pages, hand coloured folding plan of Algoa Bay as frontispiece, 2 hand coloured plates, half black leather with matching cloth sides, edges uncut, the original paper covered boards bound in, contents crisp, a very good copy.
8vo (230 x 140 mm)
With the Album of four plates:
ZUID-AFRIKAANSCHE GEZICHTEN
Oblong folio (450 x 600 mm), Letterpress text leaf describing the plates and 4 large aquatint plates coloured by a contemporary hand, engraved by Ludwig Gottlieb Portman after drawings by Jacob Smies and Christopher Howen. Bound in the original marbled paper and housed in a later green cloth folder.
Mendelssohn (Sidney) South African Bibliography volume 1, pages 17/18, The Kaffirs of the South Coast of Africa : Their Physical Description and History, by Lodewyk (Louis) Alberti, Knight of the Royal Order of the Union, Major of the General Staff of the Royal Dutch Army, formerly
Landrost of the District of Uitenhage, and Military Commander of Fort Frederick at the Cape of Good Hope. With plates and maps.
With the Album : South African Views. Drawn from Nature by Chevalier Howen and J. Smies.
The work was originally written in German, then translated into Dutch, and subsequently into French. The four large coloured plates in the album are referred to in the Prefaces of the Dutch and French editions, and consist of:
- View of a Kaffir village or hamlet, the inhabitants amusing themselves by dancing.
- A horde of Kaffirs on a journey.
- Interview of His Excellency Governor Janssens with the Kaffir chief, Gaika, at the Kat River in Kafffrland in May 1803.
- View of Fort Frederick and of the military establishment at Algoa Bay on the South Coast of Africa.
The author accompanied General J. W. Janssens when he proceeded to the Cape as Governor of the Colony under the Batavian Republic, in 1802. He was a captain in the Fifth Battalion of the "Corps de Waldeck," and in the following spring was sent to Fort Frederick in Algoa Bay, where he took the direction of affairs relating to the Kaffirs and Hottentots, and acted as landrost. He gives a full account of the natives, including chapters on the situation and climate of Kaffraria, and on the education, language, occupations, and ailments of the various tribes, together with remarks on their form of government, manner of conducting their warfare, relations with the Cape Colony, and many other interesting matters. There is also a description of the peculiar traits of character of the chief, Gaika. The work is illustrated with coloured engravings and a plan of Algoa Bay.
Note. The British Museum possesses copies of both French and Dutch editions, but neither appears to be accompanied by the album of plates referred to in the Preface.
Huigen (Siegfried) Knowledge and Colonialism:Eighteenth-century Travellers in South Africa, Brill, Leiden.Boston, 2009, pages 192/3, 'Ludwig Alberti was born in the German county of Waldeck in 1768. He came to the Netherlands in 1784 as lieutenant of a regiment of Waldecker mercenaries and left for the Cape in 1802 as commander of a company of Waldeckers. In 1803 he and a small number of troops were posted far from Cape Town, at Fort Frederick, on the site of the present-day Port Elizabeth. In October of that year Alberti became commander of the fort and in February 1804 ‘landdrost’ (district administrator) of the newly proclaimed district of Uitenhage as well. Here he stayed until the Cape Colony was reoccupied by the English in 1806.
'Alberti’s book is unique in more than one respect. It is the oldest ethnographic description of the ‘Kaffers’, as the Xhosas were generally known at the time, the first Dutch ethnographic monograph and also the only practical application of the ethnographic questionnaire of Joseph-Marie Degérando (or De Gérando; 1772–1842), the Considérations sur les diverses méthodes a suivre dans l’observation des peuples sauvages (A consideration of the different methods to be followed in the observation of savage peoples) (1800). This questionnaire occupies an important position in the history of French anthropology as the earliest attempt to lay a theoretical basis for ethnographic descriptions. Lastly, De Kaffers aan de Zuidkust van Afrika is a very early example of applied anthropology in the sense of ethnography intended to serve administrative purposes within a colonial context.'
