Cindy's Africa adventure: Thursday, Aug. 30

This is how our day started after we left the apartment to meet Lucy at Castle Good Hope for a tour: as we stepped out of the cab, she said, “How did I know it was going to be two dykes?” Ha! We corrected her: one dyke, one femme. Ha!

This is how someone described Lucy’s tour in their blog: “Lucy Campbell’s myth-busting, grassroots, warts-and-all account of the little recognized pre-1652 founding of Cape Town, and the trauma of slavery, is a meaningful educational experience that few visitors can afford to overlook.”

And indeed, it was educational, and we were given a glimpse that many on the tour probably don’t get – about being lesbian and how homosexuality was viewed.

This blog offers information about the tour: http://blog.sa-venues.com/provinces/western-cape/cape-towns-true-history/

I want to talk more about Lucy’s “heritage” activism, as she is attempting to do what Native people also are attempting to do in the United States: decolonizing colonial institutions and helping reclaim the history and the voices of indigenous people and others who have been oppressed by the colonizers. To re-imagine their history is what Lucy wants to achieve.

Lucy was featured and was involved in the production of “Secrets of the Dead: Slave Ship Mutiny” that premiered on PBS in November 2010. I have not watched it nor can I while I’m not in the United States, as it is not available in South Africa due to rights restrictions. I intend to watch it when we return. If you want to watch it, here’s the address: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/slave-ship-mutiny-behind-the-scenes/758/

The stories Lucy told resonated with us, as it is the all-too familiar story of colonialism.

We met her at Castle of Good Hope but we never stepped inside the Castle. Built between 1666 and 1679, the Castle is known as the oldest surviving building in South Africa and has been the center of civilian, political and military life at the Cape from approximately 1679. The website for the Castle indicates that there is not enough space “To delve into the rich, difficult history of this world-famous building. Save to say that the story of the Castle is a story of our young country.”

Well, that’s not the way Lucy describes the Castle. She described it as a crime scene because it was built on land stolen from the Khoi and for the injustice perpetrated by the Dutch against indigenous people. The Castle was built by Khoikhoi, slaves, burghers (ex-slaves) and company workers.

She told us the story of Krotoa (Eva), who was the niece of Autshumao, a Khoi leader and interpreter to the Dutch. When she was 11 years old, she was “taken in” by Jan van Riebeeck during the first few days of Dutch Settlement. She worked as a domestic servant for Van Riebeeck ‘s wife and became a translator for the Dutch authorities. She negotiated a co-operative relationship between the fort and the followers of her rich relative Oedasoa, and she was later instrumental in working out terms for ending the First Dutch-Khoi-khoi War. Her marriage was the first recorded union between a “native” and a “settler.” She was eventually banished to Robben Island in 1669 for “immoral behavior.” It was her drunken behavior at the dinner table of Commander Wagenaar and her increasing bitterness against the settlers that prompted a warning, then her banishment.

She was a cultural broker but she was torn between her loyalty to the Dutch and her own people whose land was being taken over by the Dutch in the late 1650s.

These are the kinds of stories Lucy told us – stories that are not part of the colonizer’s narrative.

We stopped at a memorial that memorializes the hundreds of orphans from Angola that were brought to Cape Town by the Portuguese. The children were forced to work in a spinning factory. The spinning factory marked the eastern boundary of Church Square, which is one of the three early areas of land about which the early town developed. The first public building was a slave lodge – more about that later – that was erected on the southern side of the area. The Dutch Reformed Church, known as the Groote Kerk, was erected in 1701 on the northern edge. Originally, the square served as the site of the slave market, and it was declared a national monument in 1961.

While we were at the children’s memorial, a woman was sitting and listening to Lucy. When Lucy finished, she shared her story. She was born in 1956 to a Scottish woman and an Egyptian man so she is classified as “coloured.” She lived in Canada before returning to Cape Town 20 years ago. She came to Cape Town to be with her step-sister who, upon seeing her get off the airplane, told her that she was not allowed to tell anyone they were sisters because her step-sister could pass for white and the woman telling us her story could not pass for white. It’s the story that was told in “Blood Knot,” a play by South African playwright Athol Fugard that we saw at the American Players Theatre in Spring Green before we left.

Oh, and the woman asked a question to which Beth and I responded simultaneously using the same word (I can’t remember what it was) but she remarked that she knew we had been together for a long time. Ha!

We moved down Spin Street (where the spinning factory once was located) to a rather understated memorial designating the location of the Slave Auction Tree. As you can see from the photo, it’s nothing more than a plaque on a traffic island in the center of Spin Street. As the inscription says, a tree grew on the spot, and it became known as the slave tree because in its shade, people were auctioned once a week. People from East Africa, Madagascar, India, Indonesia, people who had been caught by slave traders and brought to be sold. But also people who had been born in bondage in Cape Town.

Cape Town was founded on slavery, Lucy will tell you, although it’s difficult to know because the shame of those who were slaves and of those who enslaved has been deeply buried, and Lucy’s mission is to bring those facts, stories and narratives to the surface.

Our next and last stop was the Slave Lodge, another of the oldest buildings in Cape Town. Built in 1679, the Slave Lodge was built to house Dutch East Indian Company’s slaves. Between 1653 and 1856, 71,000 slaves were captured in South East Asia and brought to Cape Town by the company. Many were sold to colonial homes and farmers, while the rest were trained by the company and housed in the slave lodge on the periphery of the Company’s Gardens (where we were yesterday).

When the slaves landed at the Cape of Good Hope, they were stripped of everything including their identities and were either renamed after the calendar month in which they arrived or the country from which they came. There was an exhibit in the lodge that featured faces of people named after the months along with their stories.

The slaves lived in appalling conditions. At night, they were kept under lock and key in the Slave Lodge to prevent them from absconding. The lodge had no windows, only barred slats in the walls and so the interior was always dark and one needed a light to move through the slaves anytime of the day. Leaks in the roof caused perpetual dampness and poor air circulation led to a permanent stench in the building.

In the evenings, the lodge operated as a brothel welcoming free men inside. Lucy explained that this was also a method for breeding more slaves.

The lodge housed between 700 and 800 souls, and it is estimated that between 7,000 and 9,000 slaves including men, women and children, lived in the Slave Lodge over a period of 132 years. Aside from slaves, the lodge also housed petty convicts, the mentally ill and political exiles. The Slave Lodge operated until 1811 when it was transformed into government offices by the British colonial authorities. Later, the lodge served as a Supreme Court and the South Africa Cultural History Museum before it was renamed the Iziko Slave Lodge Museum in 1998.

After we left Lucy, we got a cab and went to the Lower Cable Station on Table Mountain to spend the afternoon.

Table Mountain gained national park status in 1998. In 2004, the Cape Floristic Region was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it was inaugurated as one of the New 7 Wonders of Nature in December of 2012. And it is, by all accounts, the most iconic landmark of South Africa.

It’s breathtaking, to say the least.

We ate lunch then wandered around for a couple of hours.

The Khoi name for Cape Town is Canissa (Place of Sweet Waters), and they call Table Mountain Hoerikwaggo or Mountain in the Sea because the rocky promontory seems, almost magically, to rise from the ocean.

The history of the mountain dates back to over 30,000 years and there is some evidence that the mountain was inhabited in the Stone Age as well as hand axes that were found in the Kirstenbosch Garden, which is at the foot of the mountain and which we hope to visit on Sunday.

The first European to climb it, Antonio de Saldanha, called it Taboa de Caba (Table of the Cape). It is the only South African and only natural site on the planet to have a constellation of stars named after it. The constellation is called “Mensa,” which means “table” in Latin. It has withstood 6 million years of erosion, and it hosts the richest floral kingdom on earth with more than 1,470 floral species. The mountain often is covered in cloud (as it was the first three days of our visit), and the cloud that forms around the mountain is called “the table cloth.” The rocks on the mountain are over 600,000,000 years old making Table Mountain one of the oldest mounts in in the world, and more than 70% of all the plants found on the mountain are endemic, meaning they are not found anywhere else.

We saw several black girdled lizards and a beautiful orange-breasted sunbird. Some of the flowers we saw were the Yellow Margaret (!), Conebush and Cluster Disa.

Enjoy the photos of Table Mountain!

This is the woman at the children's memorial that shared her story about being colored. She said she frequents the memorial and has read every card on it.

This is a model of the Slave Lodge.

This is Lucy Campbell, our inimitable and intrepid tour guide.

The aerial cable car on Table Mountain. See that square black portal on the peak on the farthest left? That's where we ended up when we took the cable car to Table Mountain.