Jan Van Riebeeck 300 year commemoration medallion 1952

Jan van Riebeeck, a pragmatic Dutch East India Company servant who set out to establish an outpost of a trading empire in workmanlike fashion, he evidently had little sense of historical destiny and little taste for heroism. Although gaps in the biographical record are not necessarily a bar to romantic myth-making, the combination of Van Riebeeck's opaque personal background, doubts about the authorship of his diaries, and a certain dourness of character, have combined to make him an unlikely figure for adulation.

Until the nineteenth century, when attempts were made to reconstruct his moldering diaries and company reports in order to dignify white settlement with historical provenance and providential purpose, Van Riebeeck was a neglected if not a forgotten figure. Thereafter, prodigious efforts were made to cast Van Riebeeck in the role of national father figure, culminating in the rather muted, not to say bathetic, reenactment of colonial settlement on the occasion of the 1952 Tercentenary.

Ok so that's sort of the guy in a nutshell. Regardless of how popular he is it still is jan Van Riebeeck who said let's build here! ... This medal commemorates that day in 1652 by 300 years.