Culture / History
Cape Town looks to exploit slave history

Misanet.com / IPS, 26 June - The greatest monument to slavery in the city of Cape Town is the telephone directory, where the origins of many of its citizens can be seen in names given to their forebears by slave owners. "Many slaves were give biblical names or named after the months of the year," explains Ramzie Abrahams of the South African Cultural History Museum, "Today we can recognise those names in the telephone directory."

January and February, Abrahams and Jacobs are common surnames in the Cape Town telephone directory. 

South Africa is the one country on the African continent where slaves were imported from other parts of the world. Over 180 years, as many as 63,000 slaves were brought to Cape Town from East Africa, Madagascar, South India and Indonesia, among other places. They were used as labour on farms on the outskirts of the city, as workers in households and factories and as builders.

Slavery in the Cape only came to an end when the British banned it in what was then their colony, in 1834. Now, the city has created a slave route for tourists - which takes them to places where slaves where bought and sold, lived, worked and were punished.

One stop on the route is Greenmarket Square, venue of a popular city flea market, and once a place where slaves were publicly whipped. Another is the Slave Tree, just around the corner from the South African Parliament. Here, slaves were bought and sold weekly for hundreds of years.

There are also stops at churches where slaves were allowed to worship and mosques where they converted to and practised Islam. Signal Hill, which overlooks the city and where the emancipation of slaves was celebrated in 1834, is also on the route.

The tour also shows the tremendous impact the slaves had on the culture of the city - starting centuries ago, up to today. Cape Town's people, its language and its food today all bear the marks of the slaves who were brought to the city from around the world. 

However, there are no accurate figures for the number of descendants of slaves who now live in the city.

Abrahams is the manager of a project to turn the Cultural History Museum, formerly a slave lodge, into an exhibition about slavery. The project, scheduled to be completed in about two years, aims to highlight the evils of slavery and the contribution that slaves made to the political and economic development of South Africa. It hopes to unlock the history of slavery and make it accessible for the many South Africans who are descendants of slaves and those who chose to ignore the city's darker history.

Besides providing a means to educate young South Africans about slavery, the exhibition is looking at creating a database of slave names. The database will allow South Africans who are the descendants of slaves to research their background.

For Abrahams, the importance of this is that South Africans descended from slaves often tried to hide their history. Apartheid and institutionalised racism elevated Europeans above indigenous blacks and those descended from slaves in South Africa, until the end of apartheid. In the new South Africa, people are becoming more comfortable with their past.

The exhibition will also look at training slave route tour guides recruited from the communities that began among the slaves.

Abraham sees the exhibition as a way of highlighting the slave heritage of Cape Town, a South African tourist attraction better known for its mountains and beaches.

For the moment, slave route tourism has a limited appeal, say some of the guides who have run tours, but Abraham is confident interest will pick up once the exhibition and related projects are established.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has been working on an international slave route project since 1994. An international scientific committee - with experts from Africa, the Americas, Europe and the Caribbean - has been established to work on the project, which includes the restoration of sites associated with the slave trade and the development of museums in Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean. The chair of the South African Parliamentary committee on Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, Wally Serote, serves on the committee.

Meanwhile, preparations for the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR), to be hosted in South Africa from August 2001, have bogged down, with Africa and the West deadlocked over whether the continent should receive reparations for slavery. At this stage, it is reported that while former colonial powers are ready to apologise for slavery and colonialism, they are set against any claims for reparations.

Western countries also have been reluctant to put slavery and colonialism on the agenda, arguing that it is more important for the conference to deal with contemporary forms of racism than historical events.

The South African Non-governmental Coalition (Sangoco) has come out strongly in support of the call for reparations. "The economies of developed countries were essentially built on resources taken from the developing world. We need to look at reparations as a means of restructuring the world economy, so that developing countries can also benefit from globalisation and the inequalities and injustices of the past can be addressed," says Sangoco spokesman, Mark Weinberg.

At this stage, explains Weinberg, there is no clear idea about what form reparations should take. "While some have spoken of reparations for individual families, we are more in favour of debt cancellation to free productive resources in developing countries and adjustment policies that will aid the poor in the developing world." 

By Anthony Stoppard, IPS

© IPS.    You can contact us at mail@afrol.com