Judith Westerveld, a multimedia artist with roots in both South Africa and in the Netherlands, reflects with her work on the omnipresent impact of the Dutch colonization of South Africans. Through diverse audio-visual installations, film, photocollages, and performance, Westerveld questions and unveils who is remembered and acknowledged, and whose stories and perspectives are consequently lost. Through this easy film’s poetic montage of sound and image, light is shed on forgotten folklore of the South African San language speaking |xam and !xun people. “The Sending of the Crows” initial tale was told by tribe member Dia!kwain in Cape Town, 1874, where the Dutch settlers had taken over. Three crows are sent out by |xam woman to find their husbands, but return with the news that the colonizer had taken their lives.

In the film, cultural activist Janine Overmeyer (aka Blaq Pearl) reflects on a variation of the story in a spoken word piece, fused with fragments of long-lost |xam language. The connection between the natural and spiritual world is evoked with visuals, while the words of a silenced past linger in disquiet. This essay film emphasizes the significance of keeping record of language, in order to preserve memories of an otherwise forgotten culture. In the essay film tradition, the spectator is invited to engage in a critical reflection on the presumed authority in colonial narratives from a postcolonial perspective.

The Sending of the Crows is featured in a block dedicated to Judith Westerveld’s work on the colonial legacies of South Africa.