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The mirror and the square —old ideological conflicts in motion: Church square slavery memorial
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Citation: The Mirror and the Square--Old Ideological Conflicts in Motion: Church Square Slavery Memorial. In, K. Miller & B. Schmahmann. Public Art in South Africa: Bronze Warriors and Plastic Presidents (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), pp. 53--70. ISBN 978-0-253-02992-8. isitors to Cape Town often remark on the concern that the general public would have difficulty Vvineyards stretching up to beautiful Cape in accepting an abstract approach. Contestants for Dutch manor houses from the seventeenth century. the commission were drawn from all parts of South Low white-painted walls surround these buildings Africa, and judging by some of the unsuccessful and each ensemble seems to follow the same pattern proposals,3 a highly figurative approach had been – an H-shaped manor house featuring gables, a favoured by most. Such works were in the tradition jonkmanshuis (Afrikaans and Dutch for ‘young of Karl Broodhagen’s Bussa Emancipation Statue man’s house’), a former slave lodge, and a slave (1985) in Barbados which features a large man on a bell. Elsewhere, and most often out of sight, will high pedestal, legs astride, and with broken chains be a row of workers’ cottages. In the case of Groot hanging from his manacles but also a more evocative Constantia, one of the most celebrated of these memorial in Zanzibar: in her Memory for the Slaves historic farmhouses, the former slave lodge is now (1998) Clara Sörnäs created a cement pit containing given over to wine tastings and the jonkmanshuis is five cast-concrete figures, three of which are chained now a restaurant.1 by the neck to the walls of their den. Often overlooked by visitors and omitted from Pain, suffering or personal loss, pose huge marketing and publicity narratives is the fact that problems for representation. Jill Bennett, an more than 60 000 women, children and men were Australian academic who has written extensively on brought to the Cape to be sold into chattel slavery transnational trauma, suggests that ‘the traumatic during the period 1652–1807. These were the people event is beyond comprehension’, that it is ‘inimical who built much of Cape Town: they built the Castle, to description within normal language.’4 Bennett they built jetties and they dug furrows to grow addressed aspects of the author’s artwork for the vegetables for the VOC and for the so-called vrye 1997 Memorias Intimas Marcas5 project, stating that burgers (literally ‘free citizens’, the Dutch name for she focused on my work because I was less concerned officials who had left the employ of the VOC and with recording verbal testimony than with processes started farming on their own account). Vrye burgers of inhabitation – of what one might call ‘remaking were also permitted to keep their own slaves.2 the world’.6 The work in question is calledForces In late 2007, Cape Town announced a competition Favourites and is a video installation comprising for the creation of a memorial that would symbolize ten, vellum-clad bicycles carrying ten video screens. the indomitable spirit of the enslaved and the Playing simultaneously on the screens is a video contributions that they made to the economic I shot on the killing fields of Cuito Cuanavale in and cultural development of the city. Wilma Southern Angola. In this sense, she noted that I had Cruise and I entered the competition and were entered what the anthropologist Veena Das calls a awarded the commission unanimously, although ‘scene of devastation’ – on one level a ‘real’ space that the adjudicating panel did express some concerns. permits of an outsider’s visit, but also a psychic space Central to these was the number of blocks of granite in which memory, guilt and pain is worked through. that we proposed including in our memorial – For Wilma and myself, we recognized the seventeen. While this was the number of slaves in complexity and elusiveness of our subject. We could Jan van Riebeeck’s household, the panel felt that it never grasp the fullness of suffering experienced could mistakenly be read as a tribute to the Heeren by captured people, either on the middle passage, XVII, the seventeen directors of the Dutch East or after being sold-on into slavery on the farms at India Company (VOC). There was also the unstated the Cape. We had to guard against attempting to contain, or fully represent, this suffering. Worse still, abstraction avoids showing bodies in states of could either of our ancestors been involved in the degradation - and thus in some sense avoids repeating a trauma.10 slave trade, or in slave-ownership? As it happens, our The attack on the World Trade Centre in New York investigations suggested this is not the case. in September 2001 killed 2996 people including the Pierre de Vos, a constitutional law expert and nineteen suicide bombers. It is a ‘red letter day’ in frequent blogger commented on the parole of modern history and has led a number of artists to apartheid assassin Eugene de Kock on 30 January wrest meaning from a politically inspired atrocity 2015. De Vos writes that if De Kock and his Vlakplaas that targeted civilians. The artist Stephen Deo is death squad had not existed, white South Africans represented on the Legacy Project and he used would have had to invent him to absolve us of our photographs of his hands as ‘the healing part of the complicity in the system of apartheid. In thinking art, intended to shield the viewer from the event and through his own possible complicity, De Vos suspects rebuild the towers - to push them back into the sky’.11 ‘that it is exactly when you contemplate the possibility The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s infamous that you too – given different circumstances – might statement to a group of journalists that the bombings have been capable of doing something unthinkably were ‘das größte Kunstwerk, das es je gegeben hat’ (the horrible, that you may be best placed to ward off the greatest work of art there has ever been)12 provoked inhumanity that stalks the world’.7 an outcry and a boycott of some of his performances. It is tempting to think that wider atrocities, In a so-called clarifying press release, Stockhausen the concentration camps, ethnic cleansing, slavery claimed that his original statement revolved around – lie beyond ‘normal’ language. Clifford Chanin, Lucifer as ‘the cosmic spirit of rebellion, of anarchy. the initiator of the Legacy Project in New York,8 He uses a high degree of intelligence to destroy remembers Theodor Adorno’s statement that ‘to creation. He does not know love.’13 Robert Hilferty, write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ He argues who writes on classical music and who penned that artistic representation of the death camps was an article entitled ‘The Greatest Work of Art in not simply misguided, it was a barbaric reversal in the Entire Cosmos’ (without a question mark), which the aesthetic takes precedence over the moral. defended Stockhausen by saying that he was not in He writes “in this reversal there would be faint fact legitimating the bombings, and wondered what echoes of the crime itself”.9 the fuss was about given that others (the playwright Brenda Schmahmann follows this line of thought: Dario Fo) are on record as saying ‘regardless of When I was teaching public art memorials on the Holocaust, a question I would always focus on – who carried out the massacre, this violence is the and which I think is pertinent – is how do you legitimate daughter of the culture of violence, hunger represent something so enormously terrible that and inhumane exploitation’.14 In conclusion, Hilferty it is almost beyond representation? Some writers goes on to say that ‘the magnitude of the catastrophe, argue that you can only understand the horror of the Holocaust by showing it mimetically. an artful work of non-art, has rendered much so- Hitler did not kill in the abstract’ is the type of called “art” irrelevant, worthless, silly or tasteless’.15 argument forwarded by people coming from this But has it? At a lecture presented at the University position. The opposite argument is that when one of California in Los Angeles16 Karina Eileraas asked is dealing with something so huge, it belittles the scope and scale of the horror to show one dead what it meant to think about lesbian participation or suffering individual or even ten, one hundred in AIDS activism in New York alongside the ‘bigger’ or a thousand such individuals. Following such issues of slavery, the Holocaust, political violence an argument, only abstraction is appropriate. in Chile, and the event I have just been discussing, Only abstraction can potentially heal. And only 9/11. She answered by saying that personal or private Blaauberg in 1805-6.) By 1653, Van Riebeeck he kept feelings do matter in global contexts, and that they 17 slaves for this purpose, most of whom were from do so without ‘presuming to equate them[selves] Angola and Guinea. In 1657 there was a dramatic with other instances of geopolitical trauma’.17 She increase in the number of slaves imported to work argued that she had had to grapple with, ‘the ways for vrye burgers. The VOC established a ‘slave lodge’ sexual trauma and queer trauma can be relegated to keep their slaves from running away. to invisibility by distinctions between private and For the next 175 years, about 63,000 slaves were public trauma … and by structures of homophobia’.18 captured on the high seas. Obtained from Indonesia, In this chapter I indicate how Cruise and I India, Ceylon, Zanzibar, Madagascar, Angola and endeavoured to engage with a loaded and complex Mozambique, and brought by sailing vessel to Cape topic in our memorial. We indicate how changes Town, they were brought into Cape Town where they were effected from the initial proposal to address were sold on public auction. The growing Cape farming concerns that were raised with our design, on the community, especially, sought out young, able-bodied one hand, but also how our solutions were arrived men and women to perform myriad manual tasks, at through sustained engagement and research on from construction, farming and furniture making to the topic of slavery. Prior to engaging with these drawing water, cooking and tailoring. details, I provide further background about slavery In addition to Church Square, there are a number in Cape Town, thus suggesting how our memorial of sites and spaces throughout the city of Cape Town has additional importance in the sense that it that are part of the city’s slave-owning history. For takes cognisance of a history that, even in the new example, almost all of the Bo-Kaap, the Parade, the millennium, is often underplayed or overlooked. Slave Lodge, the Slave Tree Plaque, Spin Street, the Company’s Garden, Leeuwenhof, Platteklip stream on Cape Town as a slave site Table Mountain, the Old Slave Church, St Andrews The largest, most prominent memorial bearing Presbyterian Church, St Stephen’s Church, the Auwal testimony to the indomitable spirit of slaves, is the Mosque and the Palm Tree Mosque contain vestiges city of Cape Town itself. This is borne out by the of Cape Town’s slave-owning past. The Auwal Mosque scholarly writings of many respected historians (for in Dorp Street – the oldest mosque in South Africa instance, Robert Ross, Vivian Bickford-Smith and – was built in 1794 and was originally owned by a Robert Shell). Shell (2007: 17) notes that for at least freed slave, Salie Coridon of Ceylon. All of these sites 180 years, enslaved people outnumbered free people are important in that they form part of a historical in Cape Town. imprint that reaches into almost every facet of life, The first Dutchman to set up a ‘station’ at the architecture and culture at the Cape. Today one can Cape, Jan van Riebeeck, needed people to grow take a ‘slave walk’ and see the Slave Lodge, the Castle vegetables for the passing ships of the Dutch East and the first slave churches. India Company for which he was employed for A ‘whipping post’ once stood at the corner of 10 years because the local people (called Khoi or Darling and Buitenkant Streets near the Castle Quena) refused to work for him. (There were many of Good Hope – an area known as Justitie Plaats Quena ‘tribes’ – whom the Dutch called Hottentots (Justice Square). This was once a place of torture because they did not appear to be typically ‘African’ and execution. The Dutch authorities had hoped – who fought among themselves, and some fought that bringing these floggings into public view would on the side of the Dutch against the British when exert a restraining influence on their captives who, Britain decided to invade the Cape at the Battle of quite naturally, hoped to escape bondage. Politics surrounding understandings of slavery alarm if a slave had absconded. But instead of these in South Africa, and levels of culpability, are edifices being destroyed by slave descendants, they sometimes complicated by tensions between English are lovingly given a fresh coat of lime wash every and Afrikaner inheritances. Martinus van Bart, year. Not only do many of the old wine farms still author of Kaap van Slawe (2012), is incensed by the display their slave bells (for example, Vergelegen, ‘slave walk’ pamphlets because, he claims, undue a wine estate founded in 1700, proudly displays its emphasis has been placed on the Dutch period bell and slave lodge as if its slave past was somehow (prior to 1806) and little on the period under British admirable) but some newly built security estates rule. He argues that the audio-visual presentation even provide a replica slave bell to authenticate the dealing with the Meermin mutiny,19 which features Cape vernacular architecture – white walls, small prominently at the Iziko Slave Museum, together shuttered windows and a thatched roof. with the posters and models on display, depicts the ‘Symbol blindness’ is most evident in the Slave Dutch as slavers and the British as liberators (Van Lodge, built to accommodate VOC slaves. It was Bart 2012: 17). Van Bart chronicles the adventures small, overcrowded and badly ventilated. Apart of British royalty in capturing slaves for profit. He from a useful place for keeping company-owned writes that in 1585, Elizabeth I of England fronted slaves locked up at night, under the watchful eyes of for the Barbary Company, which supplied weapons mandoors (a Dutch name for a slave entrusted with to Moorish factions on the Barbary coast (now keeping watch over other slaves), it was used as a Morocco) (2012: 46). James I and Charles I were brothel and asylum. Thus the late Anthony Holiday associated with the Guinea Company of Adventurers was moved to write that ‘it fused the conceptual of London Trading to Africa and the Association of themes of servitude, sex and insanity and let them English Slave Traders, respectively. The industrially trickle like a polluted stream into almost every facet minded British called their slaving ports in West of [South African] life’ (Holiday 2007: 45). He also Africa ‘factories’ (Van Bart, 2012: 54). observed that after the displacement of the VOC South Africa, like the United States, is a nation slaves in 1811, the building was transformed into the founded on slavery. However, while a country in seat of law-making and law-giving at the Cape – that Africa, South Africa never exported slaves – as is, it housed the Cape Supreme Court between 1815 was the case in Guinea, Angola, Mozambique and and 1914 and the Legislative Council between 1827 many other African countries, where local rulers on and 1844. He wrote that, ‘if legislators and learned occasion ‘sold’ Africans to Caboceers (slave traders). judges were content to situate the ancient edifices The conditions under which these people were of Roman Dutch law in such a setting, it must hunted and herded into barracoons (slave pens) to surely have been because they had so thoroughly await the arrival of a slave ship were unspeakable, absorbed the concepts associated with slavery and but, while South Africa did not have these, its its degradations into their own lives and modes of importation of slaves renders the country culpable judgment that the significance of what they were in perpetuating such brutality. doing … altogether escaped them’ (Holiday 2007: A difficulty surrounding the history of slavery in 45). South Africa, and which Cruise and I felt made our It is difficult to cast one’s mind back to those project especially necessary, is a pervasive symbol times. Slavery was legal. Slaves and their master blindness. For example, visitors to the Cape will be lived in close proximity in the same werf (yard). struck by the omnipresent ‘slave bells’ which were Slave owners had a duty to care for their human used formerly to call slaves to work, or to sound the possessions: if a slave fell ill or was pregnant, for example, the master was compelled to provide the Amsterdam Battery on the Cape Town Castle assistance. Infanticide was strictly forbidden, as the and, in so doing, establish a free state. The leaders of young child represented future free labour. When this uprising were found guilty of treason and two slaves were manumitted through marriage, they too were executed. bought slaves. When the Church needed restoration Overall, our proposal was marked by five work or new buildings, they took on slaves to do the precepts: work. Slaves were auctioned every week at the ‘slave Silence. Silence in the face of the abomination that tree’. was slavery evoked by the deeply reflective surface of There was a smallpox epidemic in 1713 and the stone’s weighty presences that elicit the memory many people died. Of course this affected the slave of the slaves that were sold, tortured, and suffered at population as well, and the VOC and the free Church Square. burghers took revenge on their surviving slaves. Soebat. The plea of the Slave is echoed in this Owners were allowed to flog their slaves for ‘laziness’; monument with its silent imploration to respect the minor disobedience could be met by, among other rights of all humankind. punishments, flaying, crucifixion, and breaking on Sacred. A sacred site. The arrangement of the 17 the wheel. These punishments were meted out in blocks of granite enhances the sense of contemplation public. and calm. The British banned the import of new slaves in A map. A map as well as a presence. The 1807, and slavery was abolished worldwide in 1834. interconnecting lines linking Church Square to other But slave owners in the Cape were allowed to keep slave sites are spiritual, historical and geographical. their slaves for another four years to compensate Words. Slave histories are recovered by evoking them for the money they had spent on buying and the lexicon bequeathed to us by slave society. feeding them. Because the Iziko Slave Museum is adjacent to the memorial site, and it has an almost permanent A Proposed Church Square Memorial to exhibition of objects, documents and displays that Slavery index South Africa’s slave-owning period, we were Our winning proposal envisaged 17 granite blocks able to adopt a more evocative and less descriptive laid out in a grid across Church Square. Each block approach to our project. This gives meaning to the 20 would carry textual and pictorial information title of this chapter, the Mirror and the Square. The relating to the history of slavery at the Cape. We ‘mirror’ stands for a descriptive approach, and the thought of telling this history through stories. For ‘square’ stands for that arc of modernity initiated by instance, one of the granite blocks would convey Kazimir Malevich, and more commonly known as the strong spirit of resistance through the story of geometric abstraction. Josef Albers also comes to a runaway slave called Lena. Another block would mind as an artist who has used geometric elements in tell the story of rebellion by recounting the story of his paintings. More pertinently to this discussion is the the 1808 Slave Revolt. In this well-planned, but over- work of the American architect Peter Eisenman who ambitious plot, Louis of Mauritius and Abraham won the commission to design the Berlin Holocaust van de Kaab led a band of over 300 barefoot and Memorial which was completed in December 2004. unarmed runaway slaves on a ‘long walk to freedom’ His winning entry comprises row upon row of from Malmesbury (several days away from Cape unadorned, concrete pillars of different heights. Town by ox-wagon) to the Amsterdam Battery in Cruise and I ascertained from one of the public Mouille Point. They planned to turn the cannons of participation presentations called for by Heritage Western Cape (to which we had to present a Heritage colour prints of three of our proposed blocks to Impact Statement) that our concept fell short of present to the audience. One block dealt with the some people’s expectations that we take a more 1808 Slave Uprising, a second with resistance and documentary approach to the project. For example, the mutiny on board the Meermin, and the third some individuals wanted to see a powerful image dealt with slavery and the burgeoning wine industry. of a slave throwing off his chains. Indeed, a public In each case, a single word was associated with the intellectual and blogger, Patric Mellet, suggested as theme of the block. Thus, the block detailing the much when we visited him. He spent a good two Meermin incident was associated with the Dutch hours telling us about the ‘red letter dates’ such as the word Armazoen (Dutch term describing a ship smallpox epidemic in 1713 and the mutiny on board with a slave cargo).21 Other themes (not presented the Meermin between Madagascar and the Cape in at the public presentation meeting) included the 1766. He suggested that we concentrate on the loss Galant Uprising of 1825, Droster (Dutch name for a of the slave ship San Jose on the rocks south of Cape community formed by runaway slaves) communities, Town in 1794. The crew made it to shore but the a map showing the major slave routes, the Slave entire human cargo drowned. Later, after the ship’s Lodge, slave labour, and Stamouers (Afrikaans for timbers had rotted away, and the shackles loosened, ‘ancestors’). 250 bodies washed up onto the beaches. A member of the public who attended this public The terms of the competition were, as is usual, participation meeting commented negatively on the fairly specific. The overall budget was set at R presence of the Hofmeyr statue ‘lording it over’ the 350,000 (about $ 35 000 in United States currency). proposed slave memorial, clearly not recognizing Also, we were required to leave the statue of Jan that the retention of the older work was non- Hendrik Hofmeyr in place on the square. This statue negotiable in the competition brief. Another person commemorating parliamentarian Hofmeyr’s efforts commented on the accessibility of the images and to place Afrikaans and Dutch on an equal footing their educational potential. My lasting memory of with English was unveiled in 1920. It is set on a the meeting is that I did all the talking to a group of four-metre high stone pedestal similar to that which about thirty townspeople. The young reporter who supports the Van Wouw’s figure of President Steyn at covered the meeting for the daily newspaper, the the University of the Free State, unveiled nine years Argus, described our proposal simply as ‘messages later and which Brenda Schmahmann discusses in and inscriptions about slavery’ (Davids 2008). her chapter in this volume. We also had to appoint In July 2008 we received a ‘bullet in a letter’ a heritage consultant (at our expense) to draw up from Basil Tommy, our liaison person with the City a Heritage Impact Statement for presentation to, of Cape Town. His specialist committee was of the and approval by, the Cape Institute of Architects opinion that, ‘apart from one or two instances our and Heritage Western Cape (HWC). Failing their words would have little or no meaning for the general approval (via a highly venerated certificate called public’. Most crushingly, the committee felt that our a Record of Decision), the commission would fall choice of stories and events did not all ‘symbolize away and we would be reimbursed only for any the indomitable spirit of slaves and the contributions direct expenses incurred. HWC stipulated that we that slaves made to the economic and cultural had to enter a public participation process in the development of the City’.22 Central to the problem form of a public meeting at which our ideas would was the granite block which Wilma and I called the be presented for comment. ‘Lena block’. This section of the memorial was meant For this public meeting, we prepared full size to portray slave resistance by telling the story of Lena, a slave who escaped to a droster community · PLAKAAT · SOEBAT · RIXDOLLARS · at Hangklip. The block was also to narrate Lena’s STATUTES OF INDIA 1642 · BAAREN · CURFEW expulsion following a lover’s spat and her journeys · CAFFRES · SLAVE CODE 1754 · SLAVE BELL . wandering the outlying farms and pilfering goods These words are opaque, and most likely do not off of the wagon trains making their way over the mean much to the general public. This is intentional. mountains to the east. The committee did not see this We wanted to provoke further research on the part honouring ‘the contributions that slaves made to the of those who were interested. Perhaps passers-by economic and cultural development of the City’ nor would be surprised to discover that the Afrikaans a particularly apt example of slave resistance – Lena word for a man’s jacket, baadjie is of slave origin. The was recaptured, flogged, branded with a hot iron and Dutch word for a jacket is jas. forced to live the rest of her short life in shackles. Another theme is ‘Slave Contributions’ and here Because of these critiques, we then decided to we engraved the following words on the top and abandon any form of narrative and rely solely on the sides of one of the blocks: recovery of memory through the lexicon. Stephen GOEMALIEDJIES · RAMKIE · OLD TOWN Wright has drawn up a lexicon of usership in which HOUSE · POPULATION · STAMMOEDER · concepts are either due for retirement, useful as GABLE · LANGUAGE · CUISINE · COMPANY’S modes of usership, or emergent. Imperformativity GARDEN · KITAAB · AFRIKAANS · STAMOUERS ranks as ‘emergent, and underpinning usership’. · PIERING · ARCHITECTURE · WORDS · The one I like best is Lexicon—a user-repurposed BAADJIE · BLATJANG · PIESANG · ROTANG · wordscape.23 BAIE · TARENTAAL · SOSATIE · KOEKSUSTER · BAADJIE · TAMALETJIE The Slave Monument in its Final Form Of the 11 granite blocks comprising the final Our final proposal, after seven months of memorial, two are placed on a raised plinth on collaboration, negotiation and fruitful input from the south-west corner of Church Square close to two highly respected slave historians, Nigel Worden the Iziko Slave Lodge. A further nine are grouped and Robert Shell, comprised 11 blocks (Fig 1. Cover in a tight grid close to the Slave Tree plaque. Each image). Two of these carried the names of slaves the block is 80 centimetres (31 ½ inches) square. Three other nine carried thematic inscriptions (Fig. 2). are 30 centimetres (about a foot) high, four are 60 These themes are meant to act as touchstones, or centimetres (about two feet) high, and four are 40 pointers to a larger reality: that is, that slavery at the centimetres (15 ¾ inches) high. Their common Cape suffused all of Cape Town and, by extension, ‘foot print’ represents our common humanity all of South Africa. It is a harsh reality; a reality their different heights represent growth, and the unsuccessfully concealed in picturesque slave bells importance we attach to the youth of South Africa – on privileged wine estates; in laws in our Statute they, too, need to be able to read the texts engraved on Books; and in our flat-roofed architecture which the surface of the blocks. Plain, jet-black Zimbabwe developed around the concept of master and slave granite is used throughout. living in close proximity to each other. The two blocks on the raised plinth are both The theme for Block 5 isEnslavement . Here we 80 centimetres (2 feet) high. These are the two chose the following words as indexical markers: that are engraved on their sides with the names of CAPTURE · BONDAGE · SLAVE TREE · the enslaved. In this task we were guided by the CHATTEL · SHACKLE · GOREES · LIBAMBO comprehensive research of many historians and · BRAND · MARK · COFFEL · BARRACOON activists. Their research has revealed these forgotten Fig. 2 Church Square Memorial commemorating the 1808 Swartland Slave Revolt, block B11 (Religion) in foreground. Photography: G Younge, 2008. names. By engraving them on the sides of these memory of the slaves that were sold, tortured and two blocks, we hope to remember them for what suffered at Church Square – a site that is itself an they suffered, and for what they contributed to the important marker of slave history, being bounded on building of the South African nation. three sides by other important buildings: the Iziko The other nine blocks are engraved with words Slave Lodge, the Groote Kerk where VOC slaves from the slave period in South Africa, 1652 to 1834, were baptized, and Spin Street, site of the slave tree the words embrace elements of resistance, rebellion, and a former silk factory in which slave children suffering on the slave ships and on the middle kept at the lodge were required to work. passage, the provenance of slaves, religion, slave life, The memorial was unveiled on 24 September manumission, punishment and the slave lodge, the 2008. At the event, Cape Town Mayor Helen Zille words are engraved in concentric circles, with the praised it, noting that the memorial was ‘not about Slave Tree Plaque as the centre. The words run up the perpetrators. Instead, it is intended to preserve the sides of the Blocks, across the tops in shallow the memory of those who were enslaved, to prevent arcs, and down the other sides. On occasion, the their history from being lost. It is intended to draw words are truncated — almost as if they run under attention to the under-acknowledged contribution the surface of the paving. that enslaved individuals made to the physical, cultural Thus the memorial is characterized by silence and economic development of Cape Town. This is one — silence in the face of the abomination that was of the reasons we chose to unveil it on Heritage Day.’24 slavery. This is evoked by the solemn arrangement Since then, the memorial has been accepted into on Church Square. Their weighty presence elicits the urban nature. It has become a mecca for parkour practitioners, office workers sit on the lower blocks Elphick, Richard and Giliomee, Hermann. (eds.), in order to eat their lunch, and they have become The Shaping of South African Society, 1652-1820. handy tables for camera gear when the square is Cape Town: Longmans, 1979. leased out to film companies for film shoots. On the Ferrari, Teresa and Bloch, Simon. 2014. ‘Landmark 5 February 2015, the square was taken over by Open sentence in human trafficking case.’News 24. City 6, a free event about taking ownership of public 2014-11-22. urban space. It is in the nature of cities that they Holliday, Anthony. 2007. Preface. From diaspora to entertain a robust experiential quality and as artists diorama: The old Slave Lodge in Cape Town. Cape and authors of the memorial we are happy that the Town: Ancestry24. site and this instance of public art is being used, as Ross, Robert. 1979. ‘The Occupations of Slaves in opposed to being boycotted, or vandalized. Eighteenth Century Cape Town.’ Studies in the History of Cape Town, 11, 2–4. Conclusion Ross, Robert. 1983. Cape of Torments: Slavery and While slavery was apparently finally abolished in Resistance in South Africa. London: Routledge, 1909, the Global Slavery Index for 2014 indicates London. that four per cent of Mauritania’s population is Shell, Robert. 1994. Children of Bondage: A Social held in modern-day slavery, closely followed by History of Slavery at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652- Uzbekistan at a shade under four per cent. The DRC 1838. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University holds seventh place at 1.13 per cent, and Namibia Press. ranks 17th, and Botswana 18th on this scale of Shell, Robert. (ed.). 2007. From diaspora to diorama: human ignominy. South Africa, by contrast, ranks The old Slave Lodge in Cape Town. Cape Town: 126th (narrowly easing out Japan)25 – a figure that Ancestry24. may seem insignificant but in fact translates into Van Bart, Martinus. 2012. Kaap van Slawe: Die 106,000 people and 0.2 per cent of the population.26 Britse slawebedryf van 1562 tot 1910. Cape Town: In such a context, it seems, our memorial is Historical Media. relevant not simply in terms of its insistence on Worden, Nigel, Van Heyningen, Elizabeth, and recognizing a history that tends to be overlooked by Bickford-Smith, Vivian. 1998. Cape Town: The visitors to Cape Town but also – more worryingly - Making of a City. Cape Town: David Philip. because slavery remains in fact an international and Worden, Nigel. 1985. Slavery in Dutch South Africa. local concern in the twenty-first century. Our hope Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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