Our Board member Bart Lommerse recently contacted Josep (Joe) Kalemba. Joe is an expert metal detector hobbyist and when they started talking, he showed Bart his finding of a sword he had unearthed at Camp Columbia. He had already figured out that it was Dutch however, he had no idea why Dutch artefacts were showing up during his discoveries. So Bart explained the Dutch connection with Camp Columbia.
We sent pictures of the sword to our experts in the Netherlands and they confirmed that this was a 19th century ceremonial sword of a minister, mayor (or governor), but of a non-Dutch variant, i.e., from the Netherlands East (NEI now Indonesia) or West Indies (Dutch Antilles). As there is a direct relation between the Netherlands East Indies and Camp Columbia it makes sense to link that to the NEI. The Dutch experts mentioned that this was indeed a very unique find. There was even a suggestion of a possible owner of the sword.
Joe had found the sword on the edge of Camp Columbia, in what looked like a dump as a large number of other dumped material was found at this site, amongst it also more Netherlands and Netherlands East Indies material.
Joe is very happy to work together with us to make the relevant parts of his collection available to us for photographs and later on our planned exhibition at the Pooh Corner Bush Reserve Centre.
So, watch this space for further developments.
