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There are places I travel to which turn out to be lightbulb moments in my life. Places where you pick up enough pieces about the world that fill in your mental model of it, to such an extent that you have to shift your perspective, or suddenly see the things that had previously lain hidden in plain sight because you did not understand what you were looking at. The insight welled up again in me, as I went through the galleries in Cape Town’s Castle of Good Hope.
South Africa was not on my bucket list. Up until 2024, I never thought I would travel there. But then, in the wake of Tufan al Aqsa and the ethnic cleansing that followed1, South Africa stepped up to file an ICJ case2 in defense of Palestinians3. It did not relent despite heavy censure from US-aligned media.
Its dogged resilience and moral clarity4 inspired other countries – both from the Global South as well as some from the Global North – to join them in support. South Africa’s foreign minister at the time, Dr. Naledi Pandor, communicated eloquently that its apartheid history could not allow it to stand by.
And that was when South Africa came all the way up my travel list. For ever since my journeys in the Pacific, I no longer travelled to countries just to see landscapes and attractions, but also to meet nations. That year, I resigned from my corporate job. And the country I chose for my “retirement trip”, was South Africa5.
I felt then, I needed to know about these people.
First impressions of a new continent
In my mind, my trip to the Western Cape feels like visiting Africa for the first time.
Technically, it’s not. I’d been to Morocco before. But surely, on a continent so large, the two are vastly different, just as Japan is unlike Jordan. And of the two, Morocco is arguably Mediterranean – for who says cultures can only be grouped by land, and not also by sea?
But in hindsight, while I experienced it like a wholly new region, South Africa doesn’t feel totally ‘African’ either. Its novel cultural landscape was apparent from the moment I entered the immigration queue.
The airport TV screen displaying news headlines selected international news differently from CNN or the BBC. Iraq bill feared to erode women’s rights. Japan resolute in its decision to ban Israel from the Nagasaki memorial ceremony despite threats from the US and UK to boycott the event. And there was more news from Global South countries: Muhammad Yunus to return to Bangladesh, Venezuela’s opposition refuses a high court summons, Israel vows to kill Yahya Sinwar.
Something about the racial diversity ratio, and the body language of the people, felt like home – except the races were ‘wrong’a. A fleeting thought came into my mind. Cape Town feels like what Australia might have been, had the Aboriginal people not been outnumbered.
The airport forex board was much more global, displaying rates for Asian and South American currencies as well as those of western countries. I was surprised to see the Malaysian ringgit.
Driving towards Cape Town in a taxi, the radio sounded like I could be in the UK, except it was also clearly not. We passed by a hospital. My taxi driver told me it was where they carried out the first heart transplant in the world.
Getting a full history of Cape Town
On a visit to any new country, I like to first get a good orientation. Not just physically – although I do like to begin by actually walking my neighbourhood. Rather, I mean a basic context of its history and culture identity.
I wondered how much I was compromising by only going to the Western Cape. Of course, I still can’t say. However, perhaps the omission was not a big deal, because it turns out that Cape Town is sort of a capital as well, being the seat of the South African parliament and its oldest city.
Consequently, its roots as a 17th century European city is easy to see across the City Bowl down to the V&A Waterfront. Its VOC6 origin is obvious from the gardens along Government Avenue, prosaically named ‘Company’s Garden’ – for there was really only one company you could mean. Statues within introduce its luminaries in history. There was even a Corporation Street.
However, if these had been all, I would have come away with a disquieting sense of incompletion. Unlike the European cities it was modelled on, Cape Town would have been missing an important chunk to me. There would have been no cultural trace of the labour class, the peasantry – basically the part of society that did the manual work of building and maintaining a city. I would have noticed, because no culture is made up of only the ruling class.
Fortunately, I came three decades after the end of apartheid. Looking back, the two places I visited that gave this more complete summary, were the Castle of Good Hope, and the Slave Lodge. In this reflection, I focus on these, since this was the part with insights relevant to my own region.
The Slave Lodge
I went to the Slave Lodge museum before the Castle of Good Hope. The other way around is probably better. But from Bo-Kaap, where I was staying, the Slave Lodge was nearer and more walkable. Still, maybe it primed me better for the castle – there were multiple exhibits in there.
I don’t know.
It was a miserable rainy day, too. I figured, it was the right day for a depressing museum. And it really was depressing.
The Slave Lodge was built in 1679 to hold VOC chattel slaves. After the abolition of slavery, the British turned it into government offices. Later, it housed the first Supreme Court of South Africa. In 1966, the South African Cultural History Museum established in the space, with exhibitions focusing on Cape and international heritage and culture. There was hardly any mention of its slave history at all.
Until 1998, when the building was renamed and repurposed as the Iziko Slave Lodge.
So yeah. It wasn’t my imagination that the city was missing something that cities usually had.
Making the invisible class visible
The museum made it clear that its mission was to acknowledge and restore visibility for the contributions of enslaved people of the Cape, and their descendants.
The Dutch colony in the Cape was a slave society. I don’t mean that it was ‘just’ a society which practiced slavery. Rather, the entire society was built on slavery from the beginning, and had always relied on it. I think, I didn’t quite understand this before.
The Cape was an important strategic colony for the VOC, to supply passing ships sailing between Europe and colonies in Asia. In order to supply the growing colonial extraction, the Cape colony itself needed to grow, by taking control of ever more land and water supplies of the indigenous Khoi and San peoples.
But taking and farming land required enormous amounts of labour. Understandably, the natives would not be co-operative. And supplying the labour with your own people, required natural population growth over many generations – that’s not going to fit into shareholders’ annual dividend expectations. So the VOC enslaved people elsewhere, and brought them to the Cape by the thousands.
The colony was so short on manpower that slaves didn’t just do the hard labour. Even auxiliary police, teachers, and healers were slaves. So, while slavery conditions in general were horrifying, especially for women, you also had stories that indicate more complex social relationships existed as well – a condition with analogues in other slavery contexts.
Today, the Slave Lodge collects and shows the stories of the enslaved, in rooms and spaces re-named after them.
Restoring dignity to the enslaved
It was these names and their stories that I really liked. They tell you a lot about what humanity is like under slavery. Perhaps, while they are specifically about slavery in the Western Cape, you could assume analogues for other slavery periods elsewhere, whose stories are lost, thus invisible forever.
The names of the slaves were unexpectedly enlightening. For the Dutch sometimes re-named their slaves with more Dutch-sounding names. So the names that I would assume as Dutch, could really have been any ethnic. Jan Smiesing, for example, was an enslaved healer who wrote in Tamil.
Yet other times, perhaps early on, they kept their names. Only, the Dutch gave them surnames that referred to where they came from.
The museum even included a section featuring cultural items from the lands that the enslaved came from, so that we could see them as more than slaves. That they came from lands that had and still have free people.
Traces from the Malay Archipelago
There were three links to my own region which were interesting to me.
Lingua franca of the Indian Ocean
The museum raised the question of how the enslaved communicated with one another, when they came from such different places. They weren’t even from cultures near each other, or near the enslaver’s culture. It was a new problem of the colonial era of global empires. So it was not a problem unique to the Cape; Bislama evolved as a common class language in the Pacific for this reason.
But the Indian Ocean was already bustling with trade for a thousand years. So it already had a lingua franca – Malay. Moreover, the Portuguese had preceded the Dutch, and by that time had already captured Malacca in its eponymous strait, producing a second lingua franca – Creole Portuguese. Court records indicate that slaves gave evidence in these two languages before Afrikaans evolved as a local creole language.
A free African in colonised Batavia
More surprising, was the story of Doman, an indigenous man of the Goring-Haiqua. It was still early times for the Dutch Cape colony. The native people, not yet foreseeing what was to come, sometimes served as interpreters for the colonists. Doman was one of them.
In 1657, he travelled to Batavia to train further as an interpreter. But almost immediately upon arrival, he saw what 40 years of colonisation had done to the native people. Almost no indigenous people were left, and the few who remained had been reduced to servitude. He was, as the kids say these days, radicalised.
When he returned, he mobilised a war against the Dutch. But he was ultimately unsuccessful, because he was not able to get all of the Khoi tribes to understand.
A Bugis being typical Bugis
I have a soft spot for the third story, since I have a predominantly Bugis ancestry. Slammat van Bougis’ story is told entirely from his master’s complaint to a magistrate, because by that time he was already gone.
It all began when Nolte spied his slave smoking instead of working. When confronted, Slammat talked back, complaining that he can’t always be working, and had to rest a bit – then dared his master to sell him if that was an issue. Nolte struck him with a spade. But Slammat fought back, and then burned down Nolte’s house, tan-yard, and stable, before fleeing. He was never captured.
I couldn’t help but grin when I read the story. Slammat was selamat7.
The foundations of apartheid
But the stories also foreshadowed eventual apartheid.
In the beginning, the racial lines between master and slave seemed more blurry. You had Krotoa (later called Eva), the niece of a native leader who assimilated into Dutch society, who learned Dutch and Portuguese and served as an interpreter and trading agent. She was in the service of none less than Jan van Riebeeck’s household, and even married a Danish surgeon.
But as slavery increased in scale and efficiency, the racial lines seemed to harden, effectively to caste lines. The trans-Atlantic slave trade picked up, somehow achieving an even more horrifying version of slavery than what was already in the dismal record of human history. Over time, there were more stories of slave suicides, disobedience, arsons, and rebellions.
And perhaps, it was always going to be so. For even Dutch-assimilated Eva ended up cast out of Dutch society in the end, banished to Robben Island after the death of her European husband. She died aged only 31 years.
The creep of slavery into an economic system
The honesty of the Slave Lodge exhibits stood out to me. It allowed me to step back and contemplate slavery as an economic institution.
We usually think of slavery as a system that requires cruelty, yet it really mostly needs apathy. What people accept as cruel changes throughout history. Human beings are astonishingly malleable in what we tolerate, especially if the consequences are borne by others. Especially, if our own prosperity – our economic systems – incentivise it.
For while the VOC was the largest single owner of slaves at the Cape, ‘company slaves’ weren’t the only onesb. VOC officials had their personal slaves, though it was technically against company rules. The free burghers also owned slaves, to help them farm the lands the company gave them upon retirement. And most revealing of all, the final though smallest category of slaves were owned by free blacks in urban Cape Town.
It illustrates that when a society is so dependent on slaves for its whole economy, it is very difficult to individually decide to just not have them. The entire economy structure you exist in impedes it. So it creeps and creeps, into household help, then into agriculture. And in such a system, even freed slaves find that they needed slaves themselves.
The institution may have begun because the VOC needed manpower to grab native land. But it created an economy that structurally could not run without it. So it seems you could only abolish it, by transitioning the entire economic systemc.
Castle of Good Hope
The week continued to be rainy, so I eventually decided to uber to the Castle of Good Hope rather than walk.
There was a homeless encampment at the corner to the railway station. The driver dropped me off not far away, at the start of the curving path to the castle entrance.
The Castle of Good Hope (Casteel de Goede Hoop) is shaped like a pentagon, each of its five corners tipped with a bastion named after one of the titles of William III of Orange-Nassau. It was not built to defend against native uprising. Rather, it was to defend the Cape colony against the British.
I entered into a spacious lawn, the long yellow line of the main castle quarters at the far end. This row of rooms bifurcates the pentagon-shaped castle in two. The castle barracks and foundry had once lain behind.
Exhibits in the Castle of Good Hope
In hindsight, I should have done some research before I went to Castle of Good Hope. Lulled by the many castles I had visited in my life, I made the mistake of assuming that the castle exhibits would be about the castle. And sure, you could wander around and explore the castle, as a castle.
But the exhibits inside the castle were not just about the castle history, nor even of the VOC settlement history. In fact, you could say that the castle actually houses several mini museums. I focused on the exhibits inside the main Kat building, and the Camissa Museum, because my main interest was to obtain a broad historical context of Cape Town.
I did try to skim through the other exhibits, but it took too long. Fortunately, I had already gone to the Slave Lodge and Bo-Kaap, so I think at least the Cape Heritage Museum would be redundant. If I only had a few days in Cape Town though, I suppose I could have just spent a whole day at the castle and skipped the Slave Lodge. Basically, the exhibits at Castle of Good Hope seem intended to serve as a one-stop rundown of the complexities of the contested Cape history.
There are regular guided tours at the castle. However, my guide was of the typical “too much, too fast” info-dumping school of tour guiding. I suppose it’s helpful if you wanted an introduction to the castle itself. But there’s no way all the exhibits would fit in an hour, nor did he give an orientation of how many exhibits there were, and where to look for them.
The commanders of the Cape
Of course, the first people who mapped a reliable route around the Cape of Good Hope were the Portuguese. But they didn’t settle in the Cape. Perhaps, being first to sail a sea route along west Africad, they had dibs on island clusters as far as south as São Tomé and Príncipe, and between those and Mozambique, they didn’t need a settlement in the Cape.
However the Dutch, coming second, did. So they – or rather the VOC – established a settlement at the anchorage of Cape Town, to grow a vegetable supply so that sailors didn’t get scurvy. The Company Garden is still the central part of Cape Town.
Later, the Cape became a retirement colony for VOC employees. The company awarded them land to farm, provided they also raised livestock. This not only deprived the native Khoisan herders from their grazing land and water resources, but the Dutch also no longer even bought cattle from them.
It brought me back to the highlands of Kashmir, where the grand old buildings of Srinagar viewed benignly the flocks of the mountain nomads that seasonally passed through its city streets on their way to the pastures amidst local farmland.
How unnecessary the conflict seemed. After all, the herders were nomadic. They weren’t there year-round. I thought, they could have just done as the Kashmiris, and shared.
The VOC’s expat lodgings in the Castle of Good Hope
Anyway, unlike the Portuguese, who established their global trading empire as a more traditional royal empire (albeit historically unconventional in that their territories were separated by seas which they did not control), the Dutch trading empire was a “publicly listed multi-national corporate” one. Still, the VOC was given authority to do all kinds of things normally reserved for sovereign states, such as occupy land, wage war, and take slaves.
But for the first time, there wasn’t a king you could point to as the responsible person. There were only the shareholders, who were many, and the VOC managers, who never stayed in their roles for long.
And I thought about that, when I saw the apartments of the secunde, the deputy Governor. The exhibits showed its typical furnishings in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. And while the furnishings got nicer, they were never lavish. If I were a VOC shareholder, I would not be mad.
I wonder if the short life expectancy was due to something in the colonists’ lifestyle, or because people who became colonists were typically already deprived in the Netherlands to begin with.
The William Fehr collection – contextualised
There was a large collection of paintings in the Castle, which turned out to be surprisingly interesting. No, the William Fehr collection wasn’t just paintings. It included other South African objects as well. But it was the paintings that sucked me in.
This was the collection of a Cape Town businessman, first exhibited in the Castle of Good Hope in 1952 as part of an apartheid government celebration of colonial history. But the reason they were more interesting than they would otherwise be, was the added context captions.
Before this exhibit, it never occurred to me to wonder about the broader context of a painted scene. I knew that painters usually got commissions to paint things. Yet somehow, I didn’t think about the reasons why. Apparently, artists were specifically on board the exploration voyages. It was literally a job, to paint the discovered lands, to serve as a visual report for the kings and companies who funded the expeditions. Basically, they were documentary photographers.
Inevitably, the need for reporting to powerful people to get more funding created demand for propaganda as well. Sure, it may not have been an actual job. But just as we come under management pressure to edit reports a certain way, so were painters incentivised to paint certain subjects or in certain ways – what was shown, what was omitted, what was romanticised.
Interesting paintings
The subject matter in the collection varied, but was usually historical. There were paintings of Cape Town, of settlers, ships and shipwrecks, and wars.
The context cards meant you could compare between what the paintings show and what was happening concurrently at the time. Sometimes, they also gave notes that helped you understand details in what you were looking at, particularly to highlight non-European contributions you would not notice otherwise. Below are a couple of examples to show what I mean.
This painting showed artisans working on the roof wearing conical straw hats called a toedang. The caption explained it was a hat from Indonesia, the name coming from the Malay name for ‘sun hat’, tudung panas.
This tactic of the creeping, ever-changing borders that only ever favours the settler, is a pattern we see today from a very notorious country3. It’s no surprise that South Africa recognised it straight away.
The Camissa Museum
Perhaps the most enlightening museum in Castle of Good Hope was the Camissa Museum. This museum delves into all the people who were lumped together as “coloured” under apartheid South Africa. The name ‘Camissa’ draws from an indigenous word meaning ‘sweet water for all’, chosen here to depict in positive terms, the people of South Africa as ever-flowing tributaries of people that combine between them.
The Camissa tributaries are many. Fortunately, you can get a review on its website8, which helps to manage the length of this essay!
However, it was here that I got my epiphany about what apartheid “race” classification is actually about. I noticed to my surprise, that there was a coloured type for Non-Conformist Europeans.
To explain why, the museum also explained apartheid, and its batshit classification system.
You can be white, but also not
Now, of course there absolutely are such things as nations and tribes. But they’re about a shared culture and language worldview. Worldview, because a cultural worldview is but the accumulated history for how a tribe provided the basic human needs for itself. To access this ‘software’ in a new geography, you assimilate.
People leave and join other tribes all the time, by assimilating in and out of these. Most native cultures don’t require blood descent, as long as you’re basically indistinguishable culturally from everyone else. Or, you could partially assimilate, like Malaysia’s Baba Nyonya hybrid ethnic.
Apartheid society was something else. “White” could be Dutch or English, or French or Danish or Portuguese. Even today, these worldviews are objectively different. Nations on the margins of the European continent could have more in common with non-European nations next door, than to European ones in a totally different climate.
But the thing is, in settler communities, they did have a converging worldview and identity: a colonial one, which they needed to enforce on natives and migrant labour.
It was then that I realised, “white” is a caste, and not a race at all. Otherwise, you wouldn’t fall out of it for marrying non-Europeans. Or even, just for opposing colonisation.
It just happens to keep a lot of European cultural character, because humans need some kind of real culture to live, even if it doesn’t really adapt to the current land. But practicing the culture of any one of the European nations does not guarantee the caste status, nor was it required to qualify.9
You can be indigenous, but not native
I didn’t pick up on the second insight until I saw it spelled out for me. Then I noticed that the first Camissa group were black African tribes. But shouldn’t they be in the native classification, rather than coloured?
Turns out, the history of who counted as native and who did not10, was convoluted. It varied over time, basically as the European colonists encountered the incoming flow of nomadic African people, who became stopped in pools of territory because the colonial era imposed fixed land systems that changed how people interacted with land.
I struggled to get it, until I saw an excerpt which sounded very familiar.
However, prior to fixed borders, the tribes of a sailing race may have different homelands, but flow between each other all the time, mutually assimilating to whoever’s culture is the homeland host. So I reasoned, a region with nomadic people must have had a similar context. Coming from a sailing region, I can understand the logic of the migration description11 the museum presented.
You can be Aboriginal Australian, but suddenly coloured African
The latter period of colonisation brought even more tributaries into South Africa. As colonial imperialism encountered resistance throughout Asia, the Dutch exiled political prisoners and rebels from Indonesia to the Cape. These included religious leaders, but also Batavian Creole Chinese following the Geger Pencinan massacre, and even Filipino exiles from Spanish Philippines.
The British period saw an even greater variety of ethnics arrive, ironically after the abolition of slavery.
Decolonising the Castle
Today, the Castle of Good Hope intends to ‘decolonise the Castle’. I could tell, even without going to the website. There is a slight defensive tone in some of the exhibits, which was familiar to me. It is the tone of assertion, from the true majority who had long not been allowed to speak for itself. It should mellow, in about a couple of generations.
I can imagine that the task is not easy. It was easier for us; nearly all the Europeans had fled the Japanese invasion. But for South Africa, it means finding a way to mutually own the colonial history, when it was a source of pride for one people but of calamity for others.
Then again, I wonder whether some “white” South Africans were not also somewhat assimilated. At least, to the land itself. For even in my short three-week trip, I could detect a difference between “white” people I met in urban Cape Town, and others. The young man with the professional job talked at length about 9/11 in the US, as though he was personally affected as a toddler. Whereas the Böer farmer told me about miliepap, African wildlife, and the chieftain practices of the people neighbouring her farm.
One could have blended in with North America, or Australia. The other, I thought, could no longer be separated from Africa.
Perhaps, it would be enough for there to no longer be any “white” South Africans, only “non-conformist Europeans”.
Most of the shipwrecked people remained in the Eastern Cape and married into local Mpondo communities.
The abeLungu (‘the whites’) traces its ancestry to an adopted English child named Bessie who washed up on the shores of Pondoland in the 1730s, and later married a Mpondo prince.
Carbon offset information to Cape Town, South Africa
A return flight between Kuala Lumpur and Cape Town via Dubai produces carbon emissions of approximately 5,987 lbs CO2e. It costs about $48 to offset this.
Footnotes:
- United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner. (2025, September 16). Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission finds. United Nations. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds ↩︎
- Regional Information Centre for Western Europe. (2024, October 30). South Africa vs Israel: 14 other countries intend to join the ICJ case. United Nations. https://unric.org/en/south-africa-vs-israel-14-other-countries-intend-to-join-the-icj-case/ ↩︎
- Of course, since then, Israel has refused to comply with the ICJ order for provisional measuresi to prevent genocide, as well as the ICC arrest warrantsii for a parallel case. Instead, the ICC prosecutor and judges have received threatsiii. Nevertheless, South Africa’s by-the-book leadership in pursuing the lawful solutions meant to respond to severe cases like genocide, and the subsequent revelation that the system breaks down when it comes to certain countries, was a valuable contribution towards a 21st century understanding of the real nature of these international systems.
i Human Rights Watch. (2024, January 26). Gaza: World Court Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide.https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/01/26/gaza-world-court-orders-israel-prevent-genocide.
ii UN News. (2024, November 23). ICC issues arrest warrants for Israel, Hamas leadership: what happens next? United Nations. https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/11/1157406.
iii Aljazeera. (2025, August 3). Threats and intimidation stalling top ICC prosecutor’s Israel case: Report. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/3/threats-and-intimidation-stalling-top-icc-prosecutors-israel-case-report.
↩︎ - SABC News. Pandor highlights similarities between Palestinian plight and apartheid. YouTube, 3 August 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AMrVWzKl2w. ↩︎
- I contemplated going to both Johannesburg and Cape Town. However, the practical realities of South Africa’s size persuaded me to be contented with only one of South Africa’s regions on my very first visit. (Actually two, counting the Northern Cape.) I chose Cape Town over Johannesburg for several reasons that I allude to in my guide for the Western Cape. ↩︎
- VOC = Dutch East India Company ↩︎
- Among the peoples of the Malay Archipelago, the Bugis were notorious for two things: sailing, and being fierce, hot-tempered warriors. The name Slammat is an Arabic-derived name meaning ‘safe’. Selamat, the modern standard spelling, is also a normal word in the Malay language. ↩︎
- Camissa Museum. 7 Tributaries. https://camissamuseum.co.za/index.php/7-tributaries. ↩︎
- This was also when I understood why Irish, Greeks, and Italians weren’t initially considered “white” in Australia, or the USA. ↩︎
- Camissa Museum. Race Classification. https://camissamuseum.co.za/index.php/orientation/race-classification. ↩︎
- Camissa Museum. The Cornerstones of the Peopling of South Africa. https://camissamuseum.co.za/index.php/orientation/peopling-of-south-africa/the-cornerstones-of-the-peopling-of-south-africa. ↩︎
a What is the “Rainbow Nation”?
These recollections bring to mind that South Africa is known as the “Rainbow Nation”. It is a term attributed to Nobel Peace laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and reiterated by Nelson Mandela.
As a Malaysian, likewise a post-colonial state with demographic issues that result from colonial-era mass migration and labour trafficking, I kind of get it. Of course, it’s not exactly the same, for our native kingdoms came near to fully losing, but never completely lost, sovereignty. Nor were the issues ever anywhere to the same degree. But muhibbah is sort of our equivalent version of ‘rainbow nation’, a post-independence framing to find a way forward from a demographic situation we did not choose.
And even then, it’s still hard. We’ve been at it for longer, and still not fully figured it out.
So I know that these things take longer than a generation. It’s more like three, and that’s speedrunning it. It needs a generation who grew up with these new shared values, raised by a parent generation who also did.
Desmond Tutu. The Rainbow People of God: The Making of a Peaceful Revolution. 1996.
“And you remember the rainbow in the Bible is the sign of peace. The rainbow is the sign of prosperity. We want peace, prosperity and justice and we can have it when all the people of God, the rainbow people of God, work together.” – Desmond Tutu, The Rainbow People of God: The Making of a Peaceful Revolution
The ‘Rainbow Nations quote’ is among the speeches of Archbishop Desmond Tutu compiled in this book.
Disclaimer: I haven’t read this book myself. However, since I had to do some digging to find the exact quote, I thought I’d save others the trouble and link the book here.
b The original “human resources”?
This new category feels somehow more dystopian to me, though. At least, as an ‘old school’ slave, you belonged to someone or some family, perhaps a clan. There was the possibility of a lifelong relationship, or rewarded loyalty. Though slaves were frequently abused, they were legally human, just not free. A company slave sounds like you were just an asset in a ledger. No one wants to be owned at all, but in this case you were not even owned by another human. Even the manager only lasts until he moves to another company position. Was this a precursor concept to eugenics justifying total dehumanisation of slaves in North America?
c The abolition of slavery
I’m pretty sure that the British were motivated to ensure that the other empires ceased as well, precisely because economically they couldn’t just do so individually. Hence, the British Navy raids on the slaver ships of others, after they decided to divest from slavery.
The people’s abolition movement in Britain led the empire to abolish the slave trade in 1807. However, slaves in the Cape were only emancipated in 1834.
What happens after abolition depends a lot on how the society was transitioned towards it. On the one hand the vestigial social structures could remain, sustaining the old class separation for generations to come; for example, in South Africa. In others, no vestigial structures survive, such that you could even forget that you ever had slavery.
d Why did Portugal make such perilous voyages?
Every Malaysian knows about how Portugal rounded the Cape of Good Hope, because it led to the fall of Melaka. But I never thought very much about why. I always assumed it was a greed for gold and glory, or a fanatical Christian missionary fervour, which was weirdly normal in Europe at the time. After all, that was what the history books say.
And, having later gone to the museums in Lisbon, the books weren’t wrong. But these sea journeys were also extremely perilous. They didn’t really know where they were going. The southern cape wasn’t exactly easy to sail past either. There was a reason Diaz initially called it the Cape of Storms. That you could sail around it was not unknown to Indian Ocean sailorsi, but why would you?
The history syllabus didn’t explain, why then. Why were they dead set on finding an alternate route to India in the middle of the 15th century?
An exhibit in the Castle of Good Hope casually mentioned something, that made me realise it all came down to economics, and to see the Ottoman empire differently. While Portugal was already exploring in the early 15th century, it seemed contented with discovering new trade in gold, ivory, slaves, and pepper with kingdoms on the African west coast. But in 1453, the Ottomans captured Constantinople, the capital of the Roman empire. More importantly, this led to changes in beneficiaries of trade to Europe from the Silk Road.
That would do it. That would be enough to escalate existing motivations to a desperation. Enough to do something crazy, like sail to the ends of the earth to find one’s own way to the riches of India.
- i Olshin, B.B. (1996). “A sixteenth century Portuguese report concerning an early Javanese world map“. História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos. 2 (3): 97–104. doi:10.1590/s0104-59701996000400005. ISSN 0104-5970. https://www.scielo.br/j/hcsm/a/HtNK8HhmxkbycBDLzbp4SWH/?format=pdf&lang=en
South Africa is certainly more than its apartheid history. But this history also illuminates shadowed corners of the colonial histories of others. Save this article if you find it thought-provoking.
I love Cape Town. Been there twice and learned more about slaver there than I ever did in school. Those museums were harrowing but I’m glad I learned and Cape Town is an amazing city.
Me too. I felt that it must have been difficult for them to collect the material, especially for the Slave Lodge museum; after all, no one keeps much record of the things and tales of slaves. I’m astonished at what they managed to achieve. And grateful as well, because part of that record is my region’s history too, which we are missing. There are so many echoes to similar issues elsewhere, and while the context won’t be identical, I feel we could understand our issues better (and have it feel less triggering) by studying the more distant parallels in South Africa.
Such a powerful and thought-provoking piece—it goes beyond just describing the Castle of Good Hope and really reflects on its layered, often uncomfortable history.
Thank you. And I was surprised at how much I learned about my own region’s colonial history in theirs. It was strange. It felt somewhat validating, a little bit vindicated, somewhat surprising, and a bit of epiphany.
I understood that South Africa is diverse, but I simply didn’t understand how differently their diversity context is from my experience in a likewise diverse country and region. It really is different, very unique – and yes, the history is deeply uncomfortable, but apartheid sort of forced the cards all on the table, and it’s also unique in how frank they are about it as well. I’m sure South Africans may disagree, but I think everywhere else is even less frank, or even more unevenly so, actually.