AMNESIA AND CAPE SLAVERY

The dilemmas of recalling and commemorating a slave past were evident long before the apartheid era. The freed slaves and their descendants celebrated Emancipation Day (1 December) in Cape Town throughout the nineteenth century, with special church services, street parades and picnic parties, dancing and the singing of ghoemaliedjies (drum songs) that satirized their former masters.Footnote ⁷ But by the early twentieth century such events had disappeared. The generation that had experienced slavery had died out, but perhaps more telling was the lament of the editor of the African People's Organization (APO) newspaper in December 1909 that:

By the early 1900s, slavery was no longer a desirable heritage in a society where increasingly pervasive social and political segregation had made whiteness the most desirable social attribute. As Mohamed Adhikari has argued, the descendants of slaves identified themselves as part of the ‘Coloured’ population, as distinct from ‘Black’ or ‘Native’. They sought to distance themselves from the indigenous African majority who had been socially segregated and excluded from political rights. Instead of unitary non-racialism, the APO fought for acceptance of Coloureds as part of a British-dominated white South Africa.Footnote ⁹

At the time of the centenary of slave emancipation in 1934 the APO leader Dr. Francis Gow organized a street procession and a ‘grand floodlit pageant’. However, these events bore little relation to the earlier spontaneous popular celebrations of 1 December. The pageant, viewed by a mainly white audience (including Prime Minister Jan Smuts), was a paean of praise to the achievements of the British Empire that had brought both Christianity and emancipation. It said nothing about the experience of slavery itself.Footnote ¹⁰

When apartheid was instituted in the 1950s, public awareness of slave heritage was well buried. At the Van Riebeeck Festival of 1952 (the tercentennial of the founding of the Dutch colony and a spectacle celebrating white South Africa), the slave past did not feature at all. Several days after the main pageant, a ‘parallel’ event marking ‘Coloured’ history took place. This event displayed the arrival of Sheikh Yusuf, the Islamic opponent of the Dutch, who had been exiled to the Cape in the 1670s, here portrayed as the founding father of the ‘coloured people’, the ‘coloured Van Riebeeck’. No mention was made of the slave trade, and the retinue of personal slaves that Sheikh Yusuf had brought with him was politely referred to as his ‘servants’. The event, like the rest of the Festival, was boycotted by most ‘non-white’ Capetonians and photographs show rows of empty seats.Footnote ¹¹

The Sheikh Yusuf pageant was part of the apartheid state's support for a distinctive ‘Malay’ identity for Cape Town's Muslims with Islamic and South-East Asian origins. This had been given a particular boost in the 1940s and 1950s by the state's Coloured Affairs Department under the Afrikaner academic and poet I. D. du Plessis, who promoted a specific ‘Malay’ culture with competition choir singing, a distinctive cuisine and the demarcation of a specific ‘Malay Quarter’ on the slopes of Signal Hill overlooking the town. Under the Population Registration Act (1950), ‘Cape Malay’ was declared a distinct racial category, while the Malay Quarter was proclaimed an area for Malay segregation under the Group Areas Act of the same year. In this ethnic and cultural construction, little or nothing was said about slavery. The roots of the community lay rather in the exile of Islamic leaders and ‘princes’ whose past was romanticized and glorified.Footnote ¹²

The ‘people's history’ that emerged during the apartheid years to counter the state's official version also had little place for chattel slavery, preferring to stress instead the common black South African experiences of land dispossession, migrant labour and township segregation.Footnote ¹³ Coloured dreams of inclusion in a white supremacist state had finally been shattered by disenfranchisement in 1956. Self-identity as ‘Coloured’ was becoming stigmatized as collaboration with the racial classificatory system of the Population Registration Act (1950). Instead, there was a need for unity between all of those defined as ‘non-white’ by the apartheid state, which was furthered by the rise of Black Consciousness in the 1970s. This meant that a distinct slave heritage was played down in the interests of a common struggle for liberation.Footnote ¹⁴ Anti-apartheid organizations such as the African National Congress (ANC), labour unions and the United Democratic Front (UDF) used the term ‘slavery’ in a more generic sense to refer to all forms of oppression under apartheid. In so doing they evoked not the history of a distinct Cape slave past but rather the tradition of the Lenin Club who had distributed leaflets at the gates of the 1934 centennial pageant in Cape Town declaring, ‘A hundred years of liberty! The very words are a mockery … Today you are wage-slaves, the slaves of capitalism’.Footnote ¹⁵

SLAVERY AND POST-APARTHEID HERITAGE

The most striking result of the advent of democracy was that the need for unity against apartheid dissolved. In particular the politics of the new dispensation resulted in awareness of a distinctly Coloured identity and heritage. In the 1994 elections, the Western Cape was one of the few provinces where the ANC did not win an outright majority. Coloureds formed 55 per cent of the voting population and, to the dismay of many activists in the anti-apartheid movement, many supported the apartheid National Party (NP) rather than the liberation ANC movement. Playing a role in this was the alarm created by the NP during the election campaign over ANC affirmative action for Africans in jobs and housing.Footnote ¹⁶ Subsequent tensions over access to housing and social resources by Coloureds and Africans have continued to create political friction, both within the Western Cape ANC itself and in broader provincial politics. As Adhikari argues:

This search for a new political and social identity was first apparent in the emergence of movements such as the South African San Institute, the Working Group for Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa and the already established Griqua National Conference, which associated themselves with the heritage of the Khoi and San hunter–gatherer and pastoralist population of precolonial South Africa. Several of these united in 2002 as the National San Council. Symbolized by the T-shirt which proclaimed ‘liewer Khoi-Khoi as toyi-toyi’, such an identity was a clear distancing from the cultural markers of the majority African population.Footnote ¹⁸ Activist leader Benny Alexander changed his name to Khoisan X, following the example of Malcolm X, in a reminder of the loss of his true name under colonial rule. Lobbying led to United Nations recognition of Indigenous or ‘First People’ claims by these groups in 1995. These claims included land compensation from the time of colonial conquest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – demands that South African legislation refused to recognize.Footnote ¹⁹ Appropriation of indigenous knowledge was also targeted by campaigns to secure compensation from pharmaceutical companies using indigenous plants and medicines.Footnote ²⁰ Some tangible benefits have accrued from these campaigns, as well as symbolic recognition from the state, notably the adoption of Khoi and San symbols and language in the new South African coat of arms. But Khoisan movements have been plagued both by internal disunity and by the reluctance of the state to give meaningful representation to them: for example, no self-identified Khoisan leaders sit in the National House of Traditional Leaders.

These campaigns were predicated on claims of precolonial indigenous rights. Such possibilities were not open to those who claimed slave ancestry. To be descended from a slave was to be an outsider and thus part of a colonial history, albeit on the receiving end.Footnote ²¹ Moreover, unlike West and Central African states, South Africa could not claim redress for the forced exportation of its inhabitants as slaves. Cape slaves had instead been seized from elsewhere. At the international conference on Race and Reparations for Slavery and Colonialism held in Durban in 2001 this awkward fact was glossed over.Footnote ²²

One movement which did consciously use slavery and slave emancipation as a unifying image was the ‘1 December Movement’, which named itself after Emancipation Day: ‘December 1 … is a remembrance of the worst that could be done by people to other people, and could serve to unlock the door of memory and knowledge of who we (coloured people) truly are, where we come from and where we belong’.Footnote ²³ On 1 December 1996, launch of the movement was accompanied by the laying of a wreath at the one place in Cape Town where slavery was memorialized – the site of the ‘Old Slave Tree’ in a central city square where it is popularly believed that slave auctions were held.

But the 1 December Movement lacked the tangible benefits that Khoisan movements offered. Its co-founder Trevor Oosterwyk, who had been an anti-apartheid activist, stated that it was ‘not just another coloured grouping in search of a homeland. It sought full participation in the new democracy and had faith in the future of the country’.Footnote ²⁴ However, the 1 December Movement posed a potential political threat to both the ANC government and the NP provincial opposition. It swiftly attracted criticism, especially from African activists, for evoking a separatist ethnic identity which divided ‘our own blood brothers and comrades of the recent past’, and its supporters were stigmatized as ‘reactionaries, racists and gravy-train wannabees’.Footnote ²⁵ It attracted little corporate funding and soon sank without trace.

These circumstances help to explain the ambiguities of the government's response to an initiative from UNESCO to establish a ‘Slave Route’ project which would highlight awareness of the slave past and its impact on the present. A South African ‘chapter’ of this project was set up at a meeting held on Robben Island in 1997, with sub-committees to investigate ways of promoting awareness of the slave past in museums, archives and monuments, in education and research, in the tourism sector and in the process of ‘nation-building and African renaissance’. Local researchers and tour guides saw the ‘Slave Route’ as a means of empowering communities of slave descent, and projects were launched for a ‘Slave Route’ guided walk in Cape Town and for tourism initiatives at Elim, a mission station in the rural Cape. These plans came to little. In part this was because the South African experience of chattel slavery did not readily fit the images and patterns of Afro-American slave heritage emphasized by UNESCO, since the large majority of Cape slaves were Asians from the Indian Ocean world. Also, the problem was that formal chattel slavery, of the kind identified by UNESCO, did not include other forms of labour exploitation such as indenture, debt bondage and migrant labour which had been the experience of the majority of black South Africans. Government representatives at an initial workshop argued, to the concern of academic historians, that the definition of slavery be extended to all such forms of labour in order to incorporate the history of all regions of South Africa ‘with regard to the nation-building exercise’.Footnote ²⁶ A government concerned to build national unity was unlikely to show much interest in a project which focused only on a local slave past, particularly at a time when that past was being used to mobilize a distinctive ethnic identity and alternative political organizations.

However, the ANC government could not ignore a history that was clearly part of the story of oppression and racial subordination against which it had fought. It also needed to pre-empt accusations that it was neglecting that past, accusations which could give fuel to organizations such as the 1 December Movement. The state therefore began to make a point of singling out slavery as a topic requiring attention and recognition, although at the same time carefully avoiding the dangers of a separatist appeal. In his famous ‘I am an African’ address to the nation at the adoption of the new constitution in 1996, Deputy President Thabo Mbeki made a powerful rhetorical plea for unity by identifying a range of past South Africans of all races to whom ‘I owe my being’, stating that:

Slaves, and specifically slaves from outside Africa, were associated in this way with others whose suffering had contributed to the making of the new nation, such as nineteenth-century chiefs who resisted colonialism, indentured labourers in the mines and (remarkably, given South Africa's recent past, but a sign of Mbeki's desire for nation-building) Afrikaners who suffered in the Anglo-Boer war.

The National Heritage Resources Act of 1999 specifically included the ‘special value’ of ‘sites of significance relating to the history of slavery in South Africa’ alongside ‘places to which oral traditions are attached or which are associated with living heritage’ and the ‘graves of ancestors, traditional leaders and victims of conflict’.Footnote ²⁸ Slavery was thus incorporated into the heritage of all South Africans, alongside indigenous leaders and heroes of battle (including those on both sides of the liberation struggle).

The placing of slave heritage into this wider context was evident in 2005 when the Western Cape Premier made Provincial Honours Awards in the Order of the Disa, Officer Class, to ‘14 individuals who represent slaves, abolitionists, sympathizers and those who gave sanctuary to slaves’. Held at Genadendal, the oldest mission station in South Africa, which has become a heritage centre highly valued for its role in Cape Coloured history, the choice of those honoured reflected a policy of broad inclusiveness in which all races, both genders and varied class experiences were incorporated. The citations included: Tuan Guru, ‘honoured because of the important role he played in the public expression of Islam’; Catharina van Palicatte (‘Groote Cathrijn’), ‘the founding mother of a prominent branch of the Afrikaner nation’; Emilie Lehn, ‘daughter of a slave woman and a white father, has been chosen because she and her husband Hans were able to transcend the evils of slavery and live prudent, godly lives after they were freed in late middle age’; Ngxukumeshe, ‘alias Hermanus Matroos … an example of an escaped slave who found sanctuary among the Xhosa’; Frederik Opperman, who ‘was born a slave and apprenticed, possibly to another slave, to learn his trade as a blacksmith. [After emancipation] he acquired huge tracts of land and emerges in history as a successful farmer in what is now the Free State’; Rachel Mooirivier ‘and other slaves [who] accompanied [her owner's family] on trek in the 1830s. She is remembered for saving the life of the 3-year-old son of Field Cornet Schoeman during the battle near Mooirivier in 1838 by hiding him in a donga until help arrived’; Ngqika, ‘representative of many Xhosa chiefs … who provided places of safety for escaped slaves’; and William Wright, ‘missionary, provides an example of someone from a relatively privileged background who, guided by conscience and a sense of justice, contributed to the upliftment of the oppressed and outcasts of colonial society’.Footnote ²⁹

The medals and certificates of those honoured at Genadendal are now on permanent display in the Slave Lodge Museum in Cape Town. The representation of slavery in Cape Town museums is a further indication of the changing politics of slave history and heritage. During the apartheid era, slavery did not feature in any museum.Footnote ³⁰ The most notorious example of this neglect was the fact that the South African Cultural History Museum, which focused entirely on the history of white South Africans and their ‘Graeco-Roman/European’ heritage, was housed in the very building which had been a barracks for government-owned slaves.Footnote ³¹ However, on Heritage Day 1998, the Cultural History Museum was officially renamed as the Slave Lodge, ‘in honour of the millions [sic] of slaves who lived in bondage over a period of 179 years’.Footnote ³² At the renaming ceremony, dramatic evocations of the building's slave past were presented and commemorative candles lit for each of the 179 years during which slavery existed in the Cape. Commemorations of 1 December have been held in the Lodge each year since, and in 2002 they included the planting of a commemorative tree at the ‘Old Slave Tree’ site where the 1 December Movement had been launched six years previously. Workshops, public lectures and cultural performances about slavery and its legacy are now regularly held at the Slave Lodge, such as those related to the bicentennials of the ending of the slave trade in 2007 and of a major Cape slave revolt in 2008.

Meanwhile public awareness of the neglect of slavery in other museums was growing. Particular targets were the numerous wine estates around Cape Town, many of which were key tourist venues. As was the case with US Southern plantation houses before the 1980s, many of these erased their histories of slavery in favour of a romanticized view of a bucolic past in which the vines seemed to grow and be harvested of their own accord.Footnote ³³ Groot Constantia, a renowned historical farmstead museum, only displayed story boards about its slave past some time after its management came under the control of the Slave Lodge in Cape Town in the late 1990s. In 2002, Vergelegen, an eighteenth-century manor house owned by Anglo-American and open to the public, was castigated in the press for its failure to highlight the role that slaves had played on the farm, despite an extensive archaeological excavation of the slave quarters some ten years previously.Footnote ³⁴ Its public display on the history of the estate was subsequently re-vamped to highlight its slave past. In the following year the Western Cape Provincial Museums Department sent out a memorandum to all of its local museums requesting that they actively search for local material on slavery for incorporation into their displays. The response from many curators, however, was that they had no such material and did not know where to start looking for it.

MOBILIZING SLAVE HERITAGE

Meanwhile plans for a new permanent exhibition inside the Slave Lodge were delayed by financial and personnel constraints, to the frustration of those for whom the renaming had raised expectations of more immediate changes. Anxiety to make progress in displaying slave history at the Slave Lodge was expressed by the newly appointed Director of Iziko, Jatti Bredekamp, an academic who closely identified with his Khoisan heritage.Footnote ³⁵ Much publicity was given in 2000 to excavations by the museum's archaeologist, Gabeba Abrahams-Willis, partly funded by UNESCO, which revealed what were described as ‘slave cellars’, although their precise purpose and dating were not established.Footnote ³⁶ Academic scepticism at such work broke into open controversy when Abrahams-Willis declared that a fragment of hand-painted glass discovered on the site showed a slave woman with a yoke on her shoulder and was ‘the only representation of a slave by a slave’ in South Africa. Academic archaeological experts swiftly retorted that the fragment was instead typical of north European decorated glass in which milkmaids carrying pails on yokes were often depicted, and that there was no evidence that it either depicted a slave or was made by one. They argued that these suppositions resulted from over-eagerness to locate specific slave artefacts and to justify an expensive project.Footnote ³⁷ When more permanent displays were finally opened at the Slave Lodge in 2006, they focused on the findings of academic research to the neglect of material artefacts. The controversial glass fragment was not mentioned.Footnote ³⁸

This exchange revealed the tensions between the methods of academic historical and archaeological enquiry and public demands for tangible evidence of a slave past. In press reports on the excavations, Abrahams-Willis stressed the broader contemporary implications of slavery:

These words make clear that, by the late 1990s, the topic of slavery could also be used to mobilize and support new identities in contemporary South Africa and suggest the extent to which public awareness of slave heritage had grown. Several theatrical shows using slave music and oral traditions were mounted, which were enthusiastically received by large audiences.Footnote ⁴⁰ A number of books about slavery aimed at a popular rather than an academic market also appeared in the course of the early 2000s, and a highly popular regular column in the Cape Argus newspaper, by former National Library researcher Jackie Loos, publicized stories about slaves, using local library and archive collections.Footnote ⁴¹ The respected Coloured educational leader and later South African Ambassador to Spain, Richard van der Ross, published a book entitled Up from Slavery: Slaves at the Cape, their Origins, Treatment and Contribution. Ross declared in its introduction that:

As Patric Tariq Mellet, political activist and author of a new blog on Cape Slave Heritage, has more recently put it:

Certainly there was growing interest among slave descendants in tracing their ancestry. Some of this was closely associated with academic and traditional genealogical research methods although the paucity of written sources made such work difficult. For example, the Cape Family Research Forum was founded in 2002, an active group of genealogists who focus on the heritage of Muslim slaves (from whom many of them are descended), linked by email distribution lists and engaged in recovering archival records of their family histories, which are combined with oral traditions.Footnote ⁴⁴ Another project funded by the government National Research Foundation (NRF) in 2000 provided training by slave historians in the use of archival records in Cape Town for seven rurally based community workers who wished to find out about their slave past.Footnote ⁴⁵ The participants all brought their own information, obtained through oral traditions, and were thus enabled to locate material in the archives in a clear demonstration of the value of local knowledge, not only in its own right but also as a lever for opening up the ‘official records’. One of them, Ebrahim Rhoda, described how:

One outcome of the project was a practical guide for ‘beginner researchers’ seeking to trace slave ancestors, which sold out quickly and is now in a second edition.Footnote ⁴⁷

However, initiatives by academics and museum curators to stimulate interest in a slave past were destined to be of limited overall impact in a society where the ‘official voice’ had long been mistrusted by the majority of the population. As Michael Weeder, a founder member of the 1 December Movement, warned at a public discussion of plans for the new Slave Lodge in 2003: ‘until the descendants of slaves themselves start relating to the matter on a mass level, then, however well-intentioned, proposals from academics and the “ancien regime” will come and go’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Weeder's words came just at the time when ‘mass’ appeals to a slave heritage were indeed beginning to emerge, appeals which differed markedly in nature from the approaches of academic researchers and official state organizations.

CONTESTING SLAVE HERITAGE

Such mobilization has inevitably led to contestation over the interpretation and ownership of the slave past. This was first apparent through the activities of another member of the NRF community slave research project, Ebrahim Manuel. A seaman from Simonstown, he traced his ancestry back to exiles transported to the Cape from Sumbawa in the 1760s. He discovered a handwritten kitaab (special book) in his family which revealed the names of ancestors written in the Sumbawan script. Drawing on a strong Sufi mysticism which included revelations through dreams from his father and from other ancestors, he visited Sumbawa in 1999. There he participated in a ‘Roots’-style reunion with inhabitants of his ancestral home in Pemangong village, where he discovered that his ancestor was Lalu Ismail Dea Malela who in turn was related to the sultan of Sumbawa. Believing that he was led there not by chance but by revelation, he sought to establish links between his home and Sumbawa, supported by the local authorities in Indonesia and the Indonesian Consulate in South Africa.Footnote ⁴⁹ As a consequence, an exhibition of the journey and of his experiences was held at the Arsip Nasional in Jakarta the following year, to which South Africans claiming Indonesian descent were invited.Footnote ⁵⁰ Ebrahim Manuel and his family were subsequently chosen as one of nine South African families whose story was told at a major exhibition held in Amsterdam and Johannesburg.Footnote ⁵¹

However, no archival or documentary evidence of such claims was found. Another branch of the family claimed that the kitaab book belonged to them. Moreover, the names in the book only went back to the mid nineteenth century. Ebrahim Manuel substantiated his claims of descent from Sambuwa by other means, such as the similiarities between personal names in Simonstown and Pemangong, and the fact that ‘family members … are deeply into spiritualism, tassuwf and Sufism in both countries. Family members experience similar spiritual feelings, dreams, receiving messages, happenings etc. in both countries’.Footnote ⁵² Archival records failed him; ‘rather some divine light was guiding him’.Footnote ⁵³

Ebrahim Manuel's claims included the escape of his exiled ancestor from the ‘slave cells’ of the former magistrate's house, now containing the Simonstown Museum. When he demanded that the Museum show this history, the conflict between differing concepts of acceptable evidence came to the fore. Although the Museum was anxious to display a history that included slaves and exiles, they were sceptical of the claims made by Ebrahim Manuel, particularly when these were embroiled in complex family politics.Footnote ⁵⁴ A public meeting held in July 2004 heard counter-evidence from Simonstown Muslims claiming that the majority of their community arrived in the town from Cape Town during the British period in the nineteenth century, and that it had little or nothing to do with slavery or exile in the Dutch Company period. Claims were also made that the common ancestor of the Manuel family came from Java and not from Sumbawa, and that Ebrahim Manuel himself had been adopted. A ceremony was conducted by Muslim clerics to lay to rest the ghosts of those who suffered in the cells, and the Indonesian Consul General promised assistance with further studies which the Museum warmly welcomed, but the matter remains unresolved.

A further feature of Ebrahim Manuel's claims is his argument that he is descended not from slaves but from a high-ranking imam who was related to a princely ruler. The desire to associate with a heritage of princes and sultans reflects an elitist view of the Asian roots of Cape history which neglects the realities of slavery. This is reminiscent of I. D. du Plessis's promotion of the exoticism of the ‘Cape Malay’ in the 1940s. At a conference held under the sponsorship of the Indonesian Consulate in 2005, it was claimed that slavery had not existed in precolonial Indonesia and so was of little account in the heritage of high-ranking Muslim leaders at the Cape.

Ebrahim Manuel's focus on the heritage of the forced migration and exile of a Muslim spiritual leader by the colonial Dutch authorities has in part attracted notice because it resonates with the land politics of present-day South Africa. He comes from a community which was forcibly removed in the 1960s, under the Group Areas Act, from Simonstown to Ocean View, a bleak settlement in sandy soil several miles over the hills and away from the coast where many of its members made a livelihood. He has been at the forefront of recent land reclamation claims.Footnote ⁵⁵ Further complications arose in 2004 when Ebrahim Manuel asserted that his ancestor, after escaping from Simonstown, had sought refuge from the Dutch authorities in Antohnie's Gat, a cave now located within the Cape Peninsula National Park. He demanded that its heritage status be recognized. The Parks Board has refused to comply unless the claim can be substantiated by more conventional research methods.

As in other ex-slave societies, notably in New York, contested claims to the heritage of slavery and exile in the Cape have also been evident in a number of disputes over burial sites.Footnote ⁵⁶ In 1996, as part of a widespread campaign against the building of housing and a hotel on the Atlantic seaboard slopes of Table Mountain at Oudekraal, Muslims protested against the potential desecration of ‘hundreds of unmarked graves’, especially those of religious leaders from the Dutch period, whose tombs or kramats encircled the city, and of their followers.Footnote ⁵⁷ As a result, development was stopped and the area has now been incorporated into the protected Table Mountain National Park.

In 1999 a similar protest took place against plans by a private Christian (and predominantly white) school to build on part of their property adjoining another kramat. One newspaper correspondent combined racial and religious sensitivities with the evocation of slave heritage: ‘Has slavery, colonialism and apartheid taught [the school] nothing about the history and suffering of others? Does the Muslim community not have equal access to heritage, or is slave history not worthy of recognition?’Footnote ⁵⁸ In this case negotiations led to compromise. Archaeological excavation of the site was undertaken. No graves were discovered, but the artefacts found were placed in a permanent exhibition, opened to all schools for educational purposes, which put the kramat into its historical context.Footnote ⁵⁹

Sensitivity to burial sites and their association with slavery was not confined to the Muslim community. In 2003, Cape Town was rocked by the discovery of between 2,000 and 3,000 skeletons at Prestwich Place, a site on the outskirts of the early colonial town and now in the heart of its commercial district. Documentary evidence of the identity of the remains was lacking, but the site was known to have been near to graveyards used in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for burial of the poor. Early press reports emphasized that the graves included ‘slave’ remains, an indication of the appeal that slave heritage now held for the general public.Footnote ⁶⁰ Such speculation was partly encouraged by the early reports of university archaeologists, called in to examine the remains, who reported that some skulls contained ritually decorated teeth in the style of slaves from Mozambique.

Initially it seemed that the site would provide a rich resource for archaeologists eager to exhume and examine the remains. However, a ‘Hands off Prestwich Place’ organization was formed to prevent archaeological excavation. One of the leaders of this grouping was Michael Weeder, an Anglican priest who had been a leading member of the 1 December Movement. He had a particular interest in slave history, especially in promoting the memory of a slave named Lydia who had led a community of ex-slaves at St. Philip's Church where he ministered. St. Philip's Church is in District Six, the working-class community near the harbour from which inhabitants were forcibly removed under apartheid in the 1960s, and so it was a fitting place for a commemoration of Lydia's spirit of resistance.Footnote ⁶¹ On Emancipation Day 2002, Weeder preached at a commemorative service in the church in which he stated that slavery ‘has strengthened us, not weakened us’ and that ‘we are awakening to the dream of our heritage’.Footnote ⁶²

The Prestwich Place controversy focused on two interconnected issues. One was an assertion on the part of ordinary Capetonians – and particularly those who had previously been excluded from the city's history – that the skeletal remains belonged to them. The campaign stressed the need to protect the memory of the poor and oppressed, and the use of slavery as part of that heritage was linked to the growing awareness of the mobilizing potential which had been evident in the 1 December Movement. The campaigners opposed the site developers whom they accused of placing profit above human compassion: ‘these are our ancestors disturbed by the banging of jack hammers’.Footnote ⁶³

Secondly, as in the case of Ebrahim Manuel's claims, the campaign also revealed differing concepts of what validated and constituted knowledge about slavery. It virulently opposed analysis of the skeletons by academic researchers. Precedents for the return and reburial of remains of First People communities existed in Australia and Canada. In South Africa, Khoisan groups had successfully lobbied for the return of the body of Sarah Baartman, a Khoi woman who died in Paris in the early nineteenth century and whose remains were preserved by museum researchers. This finally took place in 2002, amid much publicity. Reference to Sarah Baartman as a symbol of the colonized body exploited by outsiders were made at Lydia commemorative services and in the Prestwich Place campaign. The campaigners similarly demanded that the remains be returned from academic researchers and restored to their original position. The issue became more vexed as further remains were discovered in surrounding areas near the harbour.Footnote ⁶⁴

The outcome was something of a compromise which only satisfied the site developers. The skeletons were not taken back to the site but were formally carried through the city by a guard of honour, draped in South African flags, and placed in a temporary resting place.Footnote ⁶⁵ In 2008 they were transferred to a permanent ossuary close to, but not at, Prestwich Place. However, public access to the ossuary has been denied after the Prestwich Place campaigners complained that the display boards privileged one side of the story, speaking ‘with the voice of a rigid archive’ and failing to acknowledge any alternative approaches.Footnote ⁶⁶

For academic researchers at the Cape, where archaeological evidence about slavery is in extremely short supply (in contrast to slave societies in the Americas and Caribbean), Prestwich Place offered an exceptional opportunity. However, the campaigners argued that ‘popular memory’ was as valid as scientific research and that empirical knowledge for its own sake was unimportant. Being able to claim identity through ownership of the remains as a means of redressing the injustices of the past and of recognizing ‘human rights’ was the key issue. Bonita Bennett, one of the campaigners (and Weeder's wife), wrote in a letter to the press, ‘If more information is lost … this would be a great pity; but if it has as an outcome the recognition of the city's marginalised – both living and dead – then it is a small price to pay’.Footnote ⁶⁷ The value of this more populist approach to slave heritage was recognized in the Genadendal Provincial Awards: the Prestwich Place Campaign Committee was honoured alongside academic researchers, ‘for the particular way it has brought the story of slavery to the attention of the public’.Footnote ⁶⁸

Controversy over ownership of the slave past has not only been confined to burial remains. In 2008 the Cape Town municipality, under Mayor Helen Zille (who was also leader of the Democratic Alliance, the official opposition to the ANC in the national parliament), decided to memorialize slavery. The new public monument, designed by renowned South African sculptor Gavin Younge, was erected in Church Square, site of the ‘Old Slave Tree’. It consists of a number of polished black marble slabs, each one commemorating an aspect of the slave experience. At the official opening on Heritage Day (28 September), Zille spoke of the need to ‘preserve the memory of the enslaved, to prevent their contribution from being lost’, and in a direct reference to present-day circumstances referred to ‘the spirit of solidarity and activism passed on from slaves … our culture is infused by a democratic spirit – a deep understanding of our rights is part of our genes as Capetonians’.Footnote ⁶⁹

The municipal slave monument does not, however, find universal approval. Many are bemused by the isolated words carved on the stones, and the lack of contextual information. Others suspect Zille of using slave heritage as a cynical means of mobilizing political support amongst Cape Town's Coloured voters, while at the same time ignoring protests against its sombre design. A number of groups who identified with a slave ancestry boycotted the opening ceremony. In the words of one, ‘it looks that the White Slavemaster and his lackeys still crack the whip … are we descendants of slavery being silenced again by the burying of our suffering with black coffins?’Footnote ⁷⁰

Objections to the design of the monument, consciously modelled on the sombre symbolism of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, may reflect a desire for a more triumphalist memorialization of slavery. But it is also indicative of increasing opposition to ‘official’ state control over slave heritage in a city of deep racial and political division. In contrast to its earlier neglect and suppression, Cape slave heritage is one which both the local and national state and the tourist industry are anxious to promote. But it is also now an important component of popular assertions of identity and an increasingly powerful political weapon in local campaigns against academic and official control over the past. The politics of this heritage, as with all heritage representations, is inevitably complex and often fraught. It is deeply enmeshed in the distinctive circumstances of a region and nation where slavery has played a very different role from that in other parts of Africa.