Rebranding, Erasure, and Violence: Krotoa’s Story and the Patterns of TFGBV

From colonial Cape Town to today’s digital age, Krotoa’s story shows how women’s voices are silenced, reshaped, and harmed — and why Technology Facilitated Gender-Based Violence must be confronted now.

Author’s Note: From Lauren Powell, Archaeologist, Paleoanthropologist & Digital Anthropologist

A mouthful of titles but: An archaeologist is someone who spends their time analysing objects left behind by humans who lived before us. A paleoanthropologist is a long word for someone who studies people from the past. I am both. I am also a coloured woman from Cape Town who has been passionate about the past since the age of nine. I was privileged enough to do an undergraduate degree in Archaeology, and then further specialised in topics such as human migration & admixture, as well as primate hybridisation, during my post-graduate degrees.

The aim of these pieces is to highlight the ways we use what we know about our own history to enhance and highlight the benefits of this digital revolution, as well as mitigate some of its harms. Our history, our humanness, and our heritage, are deeply woven into how we show up and innovate.

Our Images Used and Our Voices Silenced:

Throughout history, women have been the marginalised gender. We have been and continue to be underestimated, and silenced. Couple womanhood with colonization, and women of colour all but disappear from historical narratives.

In the month of August, South Africa celebrates Women’s Day. A day to remind us of the 20,000 South African women who marched to the Union Buildings to protest the Apartheid government “pass laws”. A law that discriminately hindered and controlled the movement of black people in South Africa. Women of all races marched with placards, petitions, and their children, for all people in South Africa.

For that month, however, we are presently inundated with spa-day specials, wine promotions, and hashtags. Little is done to ensure our safety or believe our voices, and the importance of that day is rarely highlighted or remembered. The irony was not lost on me, as I was writing this piece, wine sales were marketed to women as a part of the “celebration”, while the woman I was reading about was condemned by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) as an alcoholic.

Krotoa: A Woman Remembered, Rebranded, and Rendered Voiceless

I wanted to sit down and write about a woman whose name has surfaced many times throughout the history of Cape Town, South Africa. Krotoa. Her image and narrative have been constantly rebranded to serve shifting socio-political agendas, while her voice remained silenced. The parallels still exist for women today. We are still more readily looked at than listened to. If we post our voices and views on social media, our image is attacked. If we are deemed ‘visually pleasing’, we are advised to keep quiet and look ‘pretty’. Photoshop was used to paste faces onto naked bodies, and today we battle with deep fakes. Our images remain useful; our voices, expendable.

As technology advances so too do the risks of erasure, paralleled by the opportunities for positive change. Technology is but an extension of society, both its ills and its hopeful resilience. How do we make sure that we use these opportunities to create a more clear and equitable world? One that doesn’t erase or ignore the voices and perspectives of women.

The Recorded Story

In 1652, the Dutch East India Company landed at the Cape of Good Hope. With the intention of settingling up a refreshment station in Cape Town, for the ships enroute to Asia, the region became a melting pot of the enslaved, the indigenous, and the colonisers. Krotoa was a young khoe girl from the Goringhaicona group, famously renamed the Strandlopers.

Accurate historical accounts of Krotoa’s life are limited to her being mentioned in her colonisers’ diaries1,2 - such as Jan Van Riebeek, a colonial administrator for the VOC. Although Krotoa was known for learning foreign languages and working as a translator between the Dutch settlers and the Khoekhoe1, she did not write her own story2.

Krotoa was praised by Jan Van Riebeeck for her skills as a translator and her Christian conversion. Her baptism had her renamed as Eva, the first indigenous woman to convert to Christianity. But when leadership changed hands, her reputation shifted. Zacharias Wagenaer dismissed her, criticising her conversion and scorning her marriage to Pieter van Meerhof, a Dane. After her husband’s murder, Krotoa’s life unraveled under colonial scrutiny: she was imprisoned, labelled an alcoholic, a neglectful mother, promiscuous, branded immoral, and eventually died in confinement on Robben Island in 1674.

For nearly 150 years, Krotoa was given little attention. Then it began its many resurrections:

• In the 1920’s: Branded as “The first baptised indigenous woman”. To be valued, you had to be Christian.
• By the 1940’s: Her story was used as an example of a failed experiment in ‘civilization’. People of colour were perceived as ‘uncivilized’ and should be separated from white people. Reinforcing the Apartheid regime logic.
• In 1963: She was portrayed as the ‘Mother of the coloured nation’. Praising her marriage to a European (Van Meerhof).
• At present: the picture used to represent Krotoa is being questioned.

She was praised for who she married, and shamed for how she survived.

Whose Lens, Whose Story?

As I pooled the research around her, I noted that many of the note-takers were men. The first mentions of Krotoa were made by Jan Van Riebeek himself. It is not uncommon that our history is documented through the lens of people who do not understand our reality, and we rarely sit and question it. So I decided to go on a light quest: women who wrote about and researched Krotoa. And I watched the lens shift, the understanding of what possible pressures and systemic violence Krotoa lived through. Landman1, Davis2, Abrahams3, Zaayman4 , and Miller5 are but a few that begin to reframe her life, connecting her struggles to systemic violence, lost matriarchal lineages, and contemporary injustices facing women of colour. 

I remember sitting and reading a Dutchman’s journal entry, he was noting how the sailors lined up outside the women’s slave lodge after dinner. He remarked that the enslaved women were trying to entice and capture sailors with their bodies. There was no additional lens for understanding that enslaved people did not choose to be enslaved, that enslaved people had no autonomy. These enslaved women were sexually assaulted. With every reframe in historical stories, it’s important to assess the power dynamic at play.

Similarly, I think of a young girl (Krotoa) who was forced to live in Jan Van Riebeek’s house, and later attended meetings with Dutch advisors, commanders and generals. Powerful men accompanied by a young indigenous girl. I get the sense that she was on the receiving end of verbal, physical and sexual violence. This is speculated by Abrahams3 and many others. More parallels of pain, violence, and survival, with South Africa struggling in the grips of a femicide.

Then and Now

Miller5 reflects on the similarities between Krotoa’s assimilation into the colonial world and being a coloured woman in academia: “Being part of academia has always felt something like what I imagine Krotoa’s experience as a translator for the Dutch to have been: translating between two worlds, one being that of your disadvantaged and Indigenous Khoi-Coloured community and the other that of the well-spoken, well-written British-styled academy in South Africa.”. It makes us consider the many ways that we may echo Krotoa’s experiences in our everyday lives. Balancing two worlds, speaking many languages. Women in corporate, STEM, academia, and everywhere else.

This highlights that historically, many tools have been used to erase the voices of certain groups. Krotoa was a cultural mediator, and spoke many languages, and yet she was continually reinterpreted through a colonial lens. It requires us to investigate the ways in which society is replicating the story of Krotoa through new tools like predictive and generative AI. As mentioned in my previous piece: From Stone Tools to Chatbots, technology is an extension of society. If stone tools were the first extension of our hands, the pen and paper an extension and preservation of our memory, then AI could be deemed the extension of our voices. Although the pen and paper preserved and stored some of our memory, it also erased and excluded others. Women had to publish under pseudonyms and people of colour were written about from a colonial experimental lens. AI is already wrestling with the same biases. Gender biases found in Amazon’s AI hiring tool, that negatively impact women in the tech industry6,7 and UNESCO’s study that LLM’s (such as OpenAI’s GPT-2 and ChatGPT, as well as Meta’s Llama 2) are negatively biased against women and girls8 are examples of this.

Technology does not create inequality, it amplifies the values, exclusions and aspirations of the society that built it. This is why examining how we design and implement digital interventions is crucial. If we replicate existing patterns of erasure, we risk encoding Krotoa’s silencing into our algorithms and platforms and enabling new forms of TFGBV.

What we build will perpetuate and magnify the structures and systems we value. If it perpetuates the current South African landscape that women have to navigate, then we have to address how gender-based violence is amplified, adapted, and facilitated through technology.

Lisa Adams, Technology for Impact Expert:

Just as Krotoa’s body and image were reinterpreted to fit colonial agendas long after her death, today women’s lives are mediated through digital tools that can both preserve and distort. Technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) expands on the age-old patterns of silencing, shaming, and erasing women. From online harassment, image-based abuse, and doxxing, to deepfakes and algorithmic bias, the digital age has created new platforms for old violences. What is striking is the continuity: history shows us that society has always found ways to re-inscribe harm onto women, even through tools meant for memory and progress. Where Krotoa’s story was sliced, edited, and retold without her consent, today’s women face similar violations through digital remembrance and representation.

For product designers and technologists, especially those working in Africa and other regions shaped by colonial histories, reflecting on our histories is not optional, it is essential. The ways women have been silenced, rebranded, and harmed over centuries show us how behaviors become embedded into systems. Today we see this in technology-facilitated gender-based violence, where historical violence is amplified through new tools. If we do not interrogate these continuities, we risk building digital platforms that extend rather than break the cycle. By grounding design in our histories and cultures, we can create digital spaces that reflect our lived experiences and actively resist harm.

If we ground our design practices in decolonial thinking, informed by history and culture, we have the chance to disrupt the cycle. Until women are not only seen but listened to, remembered, and believed on their own terms, technology will continue to be another tool of violence rather than a platform for change.

Curious about how history, culture, and technology can come together to build safer platforms — or want to explore how Citizen Code can support your work on TFGBV, AI, or digital heritage?

📩 Reach out to us at info@citizencode.co.za or connect directly with Lauren at lauren@citizencode.co.za.

We love meaningful conversations and co-creating tech that remembers, protects, and empowers.

References:

1. Landman, C., 1996. The religious Krotoa (cl642-1674). Kronos: Journal of Cape History, 23(1), pp.22-35. https://journals.co.za/doi/pdf/10.10520/AJA02590190_312
2. Davis, S.V., 2020. Viewing ‘Krotoa’through a Rahab Prism: a postcolonial feminist encounter (Doctoral dissertation, Stellenbosch: Stellenbosch University). https://www.academia.edu/download/86260369/387243624.pdf
3. Abrahams, Y., 1996. Was Eva raped? An exercise in speculative history. Kronos: Journal of Cape History, 23(1), pp.3-21. https://journals.co.za/doi/pdf/10.10520/AJA02590190_311
4. Zaayman, C., 2019. Seeing what is not there: figuring the anarchive. https://open.uct.ac.za/items/6b9d4f23-75a3-4c51-b68e-de210733c68e
5. Miller, D., 2024. Epistemic Injustice against Khoi-Coloured Women from the Cape: Connected Encounters with the Matriarchal Lineages of Krotoa. Journal of International Women's Studies, 26(3), p.7. https://vc.bridgew.edu/context/jiws/article/3286/viewcontent/6._Epistemic_Injustice_against_Khoi_coloured_women_from_the_Cape___Connected_Encounters_with_the_matriarchal_lineages_of_Krotoa.pdf
6. Dastin, J., 2022. Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women. In Ethics of data and analytics (pp. 296-299). Auerbach Publications. https://ecampus.paris-saclay.fr/pluginfile.php/3524211/mod_folder/content/0/Algos-%20Amazon%20scraps%20secret%20AI%20recruiting%20tool%20that%20showed%20bias%20against%20women%20-%20Reuters.pdf
7. Kodiyan, A.A., 2019. An overview of ethical issues in using AI systems in hiring with a case study of Amazon’s AI based hiring tool. Researchgate Preprint, 12(1), pp.1-9. https://www.academia.edu/download/63223386/Essay_On_Ethics___AI_Hiring20200506-102618-117wpj5.pdf
8. UNESCO, IRCAI (2024). “Challenging systematic prejudices: an Investigation into Gender Bias in Large Language Models”. https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/generative-ai-unesco-study-reveals-alarming-evidence-regressive-gender-stereotypes