South African activist uses history to highlight ongoing injustice | History
Cape Town, South Africa – Lucy Campbell, with her long grey dreadlocks, stands animated in front of the thick stone walls of the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town’s city centre, her small frame accentuated by their towering height.
The 65-year-old activist-turned-historian has a message for the 10 American students who have come to hear her version of the city’s history. Dressed in a black hoodie and blue jeans, Campbell is well-spoken but shows her disdain for Cape Town’s colonial past, often erupting in harsh language for those she blames for its consequences.
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“This castle speaks to the first economic explosion in Cape Town,” she says at the beginning of her five-stop tour of the city. “It’s an architectural crime scene.”
Campbell refuses to enter the 17th-century castle, which she sees as a symbol of the violence and dispossession that the colonial era brought to South Africa’s second biggest city.
“That is where they used to hang people,” she says, pointing to one of the castle’s five bastions. It was built by the settlers of the Dutch East India Company, commonly known by its Dutch acronym, VOC. The VOC built the fortress as part of its efforts to establish a refreshment post between the Netherlands and other trade destinations in the East. The castle is now run by the South African military.
Campbell, an accredited tour guide, has been giving privately run tours like this for 17 years, starting at the castle and offering a scathing critique of the city’s monuments and museums for dozens of people each year.
She says most official tributes, such as the Slave Memorial erected in 2008 in Church Square, fail to do justice to the enslaved people who contributed to the construction of Cape Town and often neglect to acknowledge the Indigenous population that lived here for hundreds of years before the Dutch arrived in 1652, displacing them and introducing slavery to the Cape.
Campbell can still see clear echoes in the city of the “genocide” and dispossession of the Khoi people, the Indigenous herders who lived on this land for thousands of years. She remembers her mother’s stories about how this history personally affected her family, who are descendants of the famously wealthy Hessequa, a subset of the Khoi. The Hessequa lost their land and livestock to the Dutch.
Known as “the people of the trees”, the Hessequa lived for centuries in the farming area now known as Swellendam, about 220km (137 miles) east of Cape Town. The arrival of European settlers transformed them from land and cattle owners to peasant workers employed by white people, conditions that in many places persist to this day.
Land ownership in Cape Town and South Africa as a whole remains overwhelmingly in the hands of the white minority. Rights groups have also accused white farmers of sometimes abusing predominantly mixed-race agricultural workers and evicting them on a whim, a practice that has carried on since the colonial era.
“Many of them have worked there for generations, and they are just being evicted,” Campbell says. “There’s no pension. There’s nothing. So the ailments of the past [continue].”
The coloniality of the museum
With a resume that includes posts ranging from trade union administrator and mechanic’s assistant to historian, Campbell started her tours after working at the Groot Constantia estate of the VOC colonial Governor Simon van der Stel, now a museum. This is where she got her first taste for history.
When she started working on the estate as an information officer in 1998, she found that the history of enslaved and Indigenous people was largely erased on the property, including the “tot” system, the use of wine as payments to workers that dates back centuries and was still in use on some Cape Town farms years after the fall of apartheid in 1994.
Alarmed by this erasure of her ancestors at the estate, Campbell resigned and pursued a degree in history. Armed with a postgraduate degree specialising in the history of slavery in the Cape, Campbell established Transcending History Tours in 2008.
Her academic research uncovered the inherently colonial nature of museums globally. She discovered that human remains were held in museums, universities and in private ownership, especially in Europe. The South African Museum, founded in 1825, housed human remains that were used in studies that sought to reinforce racist ideologies, such as seeking to prove that non-Europeans were racially inferior. Even though these studies have been halted, the remains continued to be housed by these institutions.
Campbell would prefer that the museums she tours be decentralised and relocated to the Cape Flats, a mainly nonwhite working-class area where Campbell and most descendants of the Khoi and enslaved people live. She argues this would make the museums more accessible to these communities, bringing them closer to their personal histories and demonstrating that their current difficult living conditions and marginalisation are not natural or inevitable, but rather the result of a cruel past.
“At night, this place is filled with homeless people,” she says on a sunny morning in September as the tour leaves the castle.
A few steps away, past two lions perched on pillars at the castle’s entrance and a moat filled with fish and pondweed, a barefoot man is asleep on the sidewalk while a woman in a bra and camouflage pants scrounges for food in the shrubs. Like most of the unhoused on the wealthy city’s streets, they are people of colour.
The tour passes the Grand Parade, the city’s public square and oldest urban open space, where the mud and wood predecessor to the existing castle stood. For many years, it served as a training ground for the colonial garrison before becoming a marketplace, surrounded by striking buildings, such as the Edwardian City Hall.
The parade’s most famous moment in modern South African history was as the setting of Nelson Mandela’s first public speech after his release from prison in 1990. Today, traders still gather here to sell everything from brightly coloured dashikis (colourful, traditional garments) to kitchen electronics.
A ‘trailblazer’
A few blocks away, the group stops to look at a plaque in St George’s Mall dedicated to one of Campbell’s heroes, Krotoa, a Khoi woman known as the progenitor of Cape Town’s mixed-race population after her marriage to a Danish surgeon.
The plaque dedicated to her in this busy modern commercial area feels misplaced and superficial to Campbell, who says it fails to celebrate the woman’s historical significance. Campbell also dislikes the commonly used image of Krotoa on the plaque, which she says is fabricated.
“The Krotoa that I know, she’s a trailblazer. She’s an interpreter. She’s a negotiator,” Campbell says.
The niece of the Khoi chief Autshumato, Krotoa joined the household of the first Dutch governor in the Cape, Jan van Riebeeck, at about the age of 12. As one of the first Indigenous interpreters, she became a mediator between the Dutch and the Khoi, playing a key role in the cattle trade, which was vital to the settlers’ survival at the Cape. She also negotiated in the conflict that arose between locals and the settlers.
Krotoa’s influence in van Riebeeck’s government eventually led to her becoming the first Indigenous person to be baptised as a Christian in 1662 and adopting the name Eva. She married a Danish soldier, who was later appointed as the VOC surgeon, Pieter van Meerhof, in 1664, and the couple became the Cape’s first recorded interracial marriage.
In the end, though, Krotoa was a controversial figure: Khoi leaders criticised her for adopting colonial ways, and both they and Dutch officials accused her of being a spy for the other side.
“She went right into the kitchens of the Dutch,” Campbell says. “She used to tell them, ‘I know you. I know who you are. You can’t do anything for yourself. Slaves have to do everything for you.’”
Campbell says Krotoa was instrumental as a mediator in the first Khoi-Dutch war, which lasted from 1659 to 1660 and was sparked by a campaign led by local Khoi leader Nommoa, or Doman, to reclaim the Cape Peninsula. The Dutch were victorious against the two Khoi groups, the Gorinhaiqua and the Gorachouqua, and expelled them from the peninsula to mountain outposts about 70km (44 miles) away.
Asked what she would consider a fitting memorial for Krotoa, Campbell says: “Monuments are Eurocentric and hierarchic. Where her memorial should be, I am not sure. What I know is that her story and her memory should be a popular memory and part of our learning in schools and in other tertiary learning. She and her Danish husband van Meerhof were sent to Robben Island. She also spent lots of time at the first castle, which is today’s Golden Acre [shopping mall], and her so-called plaque in Castle Street is a humiliation of the contributions she made in resisting the colony in favour of her people.”
Profits over people
Around the corner from Krotoa’s memorial in Castle Street, Campbell stops at another VOC landmark – the cobbled walkway featuring the VOC’s bronze emblem framed by an outline of the castle’s five ramparts.
“I want you to see how the VOC is embedded right in the fabric of the city,” she says, pointing to the insignia emblazoned in the street.
Then she directs her tour’s attention to nearby skyscrapers, which she views as symbols of wealth rooted in VOC exploitation.
As she speaks, workers on their lunch breaks walk by while others sell beaded jewellery, paintings, leather handbags and other wares in stalls dotted along the mall. Most of these workers live in overcrowded townships far outside the city, which is famed for its French Riviera-like lifestyle and has often been voted one of the world’s top tourist destinations.
“For me, it’s important to speak of that company, the first company that came here,” Campbell says, explaining the origin of capitalism in the region.
“It comes from there – profits before people. It comes from history. … The VOC is alive and kicking in the city.”
Restoring memory
The most haunting stop on the tour comes next: the Slave Lodge. It stands on the doorstep of the parliament precinct and the gardens that the VOC established to provide fresh produce to ships journeying between the East and the Netherlands.
Thousands of enslaved people from as far away as Angola, Benin, Indonesia, India and Madagascar were housed here from 1679 to 1811. Converted into a museum, it contains artefacts, including shackles and the reconstructed hull of a slave ship as well as a plinth recording the names of the enslaved people – names assigned to them by slave owners when they arrived at the Cape.
Campbell objects to the pristine exhibits, saying they are in stark contrast to the building’s dark history as a place of suffering and violence. One of the most horrific aspects of life there was the sexual violence inflicted by soldiers on women, including rape and coercion into sex work, often with payments made to the VOC.
This violent culture has had lasting effects, contributing to today’s high levels of sexual crimes and domestic violence on the Cape Flats, according to Campbell.
“The Slave Lodge does not get the reflection that it should get,” Campbell tells her tour. “It is very much veneered and made palatable to the visitors. It doesn’t bring the voices of the women in.”
The tour ends in the street behind the Slave Lodge, where Campbell shows the tourists a macabre landmark they might otherwise miss. On a traffic island in the middle of Spin Street is the spot where the city’s slave auctions were once held. A tree that marked the spot was chopped down in 1916. In its place, a slab of stone was installed in 1953, inscribed with a fading and barely legible message about its historical significance.
“It looks like a drain,” Campbell says, noting the sharp contrast between this neglected memorial and the bronze statue of Afrikaner leader Jan Smuts, oddly situated in front of the Slave Lodge, where the plaque bearing his name has been restored to a brilliant gleam.
In 2008, the city tried to rectify this oversight at the auction site, unveiling a commemorative art installation designed by prominent artists Gavin Younge and Wilma Cruise across the street. It consists of 11 granite blocks, roughly at knee height, inscribed with the assigned names of enslaved people and words that recall their tortured reality: “Suicide, infanticide, abscond, escape, flee.”
Activists have criticised the installation for being too cold and failing to convey the deep wounds left by nearly 200 years of slavery.
“Birds s*** on it, people sit on it, but they don’t know what it is,” Campbell says. “They have the names of the slaves that were held at the Slave Lodge, but there’s no story. … It’s a monument that only serves the master, at the end of the day, because it doesn’t bring out the pain of the people.
“I would have loved to see a high rise to bring out the memory of the people, … something more visible.”
