Uncovering Hoerikwaggo’s archive of the enslaved women of Cape Town
Much of Cape Town’s slave women’s history remains largely invisible in the landscape, yet the Cape was a slave colony for almost two centuries. Very little is available in the institutional archive about the identity and personal journeys of the city’s enslaved women from the mid-17th to early 19th centuries. The direct connection between the Castle of Good Hope and Hoerikwaggo (the Khoi name for Table Mountain, meaning ‘Mountain in the Sea’) in terms of its slave women’s history is not immediately obvious.
In recent years, there have been civic campaigns amongst descendants of the Khoi and enslaved people to reclaim spaces and the story of Cape Town, such as through the work of Archival Platform’s activist scholar Lucelle Campbell which provides citizens and visitors the alternative narrative of the historic making of Cape Town; making visible the invisibilities of the city’s rich slave heritage in the landscape. Through alternative stories of fresh water and canals, these archival activists bring the history of the enslaved people alive by piecing together dispersed, little- known facts, and aspects of Khoi oral tradition of meaning and memory in the landscape.
We also know a little bit of the slave washerwomen’s history through Elizabeth Jordan’s doctoral thesis in Anthropology which was completed in 2006, “From Time Immemorial: Washerwomen, culture and community in Cape Town”. Her thesis provides a lens through which we have come to know of the landscape archive found in the small and fragmented material remains such as of buttons, shards of glass bottle, coins, pocket knives and curtain rings (which indicate heavy washing) excavated by archaeologists on the washing site on Platteklip ridge. Jordan’s work highlights the fact that the numerous shards of ceramic containers and glass imply that people often ate and drank at the site.
Other sources of interesting histories regarding this archive are from the NGO ‘Reclaim Camissa’ (Camissa means ‘place of sweet waters’ in Khoi) which aims to build a museum for washerwomen at the old wash houses found at the start of the ‘Hoerikwaggo Trail’. The story of fresh water and enslavement is central to understanding the inclusive history of present day Cape Town: the significance of sustaining the Company Gardens and the replenishment of European visiting ships. Buitenkant Street, which leads from the Castle up to Platteklip Ridge, was historically known as ‘Slave’s Walk’. The washerwomen (many who have been buried at Prestwich Street and whose remains are now held at the highly contested ossuary) carried heavy washing all the way from the Castle up to Platteklip Ridge.
The APC’s June Bam-Hutchison and colleagues from Archaeology, Fine Art and Environment Humanities were invited by Anthropology’s Lesley Green to hike up Platteklip ridge with Capetonian hiking enthusiast, Eben van Tonder. The purpose of the hike was to make sense of an intriguing inscription found on the large rock on the Ridge. The group met at Deer Park on the morning of Sunday 15 May and walked up to the Platteklip stream and up to the large rocks where the enslaved women did the city's laundry since Van Riebeeck’s time.
On an earlier hike, undertaken by Eben with his daughter as part of a school history project on slavery at the Cape, he stumbled on an inscription on the rock. It seemed to read ‘Permanently Freed’ (some letters eroded) with the number ‘4’ engraved above it which could denote what remained of an originally inscribed date of ‘1834’. When the group invited by Green got there, they could at first not find the inscription. Some of the group suddenly realised that the angle of the sun obscured it from view and that they were standing right on top of it. One of the children who accompanied the group, Jordan Green, came up with the plan to splash water on the hardly visible inscription to make it more legible, and the letters and numbers were slowly revealed in the shadow as the group huddled together curiously over the spot on the rock to read it.
APC’s June Bam-Hutchison organised a follow up ‘crack of dawn washerwomen walk’ on Sunday 5 June from the Castle, up ‘Slave’s Walk’ (Buitenkant Street) to the Platteklip site with Eben for her Stanford University ‘Site of Memory’ students. On this occasion, as the sun rose majestically in bright orange over the low-lying sprawled Cape Flats visible from this spot on Hoerikwaggo, one of the students, Laila Al-Shamma, spotted further eroded numbers (what remains of an 1800s date) and an accompanying symbol of what looks like an eroded ‘stick’ figure of a woman engraved on the same rock.
This may well be the spot where freed and enslaved people of Cape Town once partied. We are not certain. Follow-up research on the inscription and its dating (whether contemporary such as possibly done with a recent commemorative event or whether done in the distant past) is currently underway. At present, knowledge of this hardly visible inscription seems not to exist - at least not amongst archaeologists, historians and scholars in the field nor those who are working on South Africa’s ‘Liberation Route’ project.