Most visitors to Cape Town treat the Castle of Good Hope the way you treat an elderly relative at a wedding. A respectful nod, a photo of the gate, and off to the V&A Waterfront before anyone starts telling stories.
This is a mistake, because the Castle has the best stories in the country, and most of them are terrible.
This low, five-pointed star of stone is the oldest surviving colonial building in South Africa, and for a very long time it was where this country’s decisions were made. Land, trade, war, slavery, punishment: if it happened at the Cape, the paperwork probably went through here.
You can walk around it in an hour. Understanding what happened inside it takes rather longer.
A Vegetable Garden That Got Out of Hand
It all began with a shipwreck. In 1647 the Dutch ship Nieuwe Haerlem ran aground in Table Bay, and the stranded crew spent a year discovering that the Cape had fresh water, good soil and a sheltered bay. Their report reached the Dutch East India Company, the VOC, which in 1652 sent Jan van Riebeeck to set up a supply station.
His brief was modest to the point of comedy: grow vegetables, keep cattle, feed passing ships. Do not, under any circumstances, start a colony. Within five years the Company had released some of its employees as “free burghers” to farm on their own account, the Khoikhoi had gone from trading partners to competitors for the same grazing land, and the vegetable garden was turning into something nobody had ordered.
Van Riebeeck’s first fort was made of clay and timber, and it behaved accordingly in the Cape winter. In 1666 work began on a proper stone replacement. Soldiers, sailors and enslaved people built it over thirteen years, finishing in 1679. Its five bastions were named after the titles of the Prince of Orange: Leerdam, Buren, Katzenellenbogen, Nassau and Oranje. Inside the walls sat everything a small empire needs: a governor’s residence, a council chamber, a church, warehouses, a forge and, naturally, cells.
Van Riebeeck was sent to grow lettuce. His successors ended up running a colony. Nobody has ever had a more successful allotment.
Head Office
From the 1670s until the VOC lost the Cape in 1795, the colony was run from inside these walls. Land grants, trade terms with the Khoikhoi, the import of enslaved people and the punishment of anyone who objected to any of it were all decided here. The Kat, the long building that divides the inner courtyard, held the governor’s apartments and the council chamber, and its balcony was where proclamations and sentences were read out to the town. It is a lovely balcony. It has heard some appalling things.
Simon van der Stel took over in 1679, the year the Castle was finished. He was an energetic administrator, and he left his name all over the map: Stellenbosch, which he founded that same year, and Simon’s Town. He also pushed farming settlement steadily inland, onto land the Khoikhoi and San had lived on for thousands of years. Energetic administrators usually do.
Resistance had started early. In 1659, before the stone Castle even existed, the Khoikhoi leader Doman, who had worked as an interpreter for the Dutch and had seen their methods up close, led the first war against the settlement. It did not succeed. The Company’s records remember him chiefly as a nuisance, which tells you rather more about the records than about Doman.
The Room Beneath the Room
Here the jokes stop.
The Cape was built on enslaved labour. Between 1652 and the end of the slave trade in 1807, around 63,000 enslaved people were brought to the Cape from Madagascar, Mozambique, India, Sri Lanka and the Indonesian islands. For much of the eighteenth century they outnumbered the free settlers. The Castle was the administrative heart of that system.
Off the courtyard is the Donker Gat, the Dark Hole, a windowless cell used to hold and torture prisoners. Sentences of flogging, branding and death were passed in the council chamber and carried out below it or in public outside. You can still stand in both rooms. Most visitors find the second one rather quieter than the first.
Among the people whose lives passed through the Castle was Krotoa, a young Khoikhoi woman who became van Riebeeck’s interpreter, moved between two worlds, and was eventually banished to Robben Island. She died in 1674 and was buried within the Castle. In 2016, the Castle’s 350th anniversary, a ceremony was held to honour her memory: a small gesture towards everything the official story had left out.
The council chamber passed the sentences. The Donker Gat carried them out. Both rooms are still there.
Not Quite a Guest Room
The Castle has also held people that empires found inconvenient. The most famous was Cetshwayo kaMpande, the Zulu king whose army destroyed a British column at Isandlwana in January 1879, one of the worst defeats the British Army suffered in the colonial wars of the century. Captured later that year, he was brought to Cape Town and held at the Castle, before eventually travelling to London to argue his own case. He was not a criminal. He was the king of a sovereign nation, being processed into somebody else’s empire, in the building that had been doing that kind of processing for two hundred years.
Under New Management
In 1795 the British arrived, won a brief battle at Muizenberg and took over the Cape, Castle included. They wanted the sea route to India, and the Castle became their military headquarters. British rule brought the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and emancipation in 1834, although “emancipation” came with a four-year “apprenticeship” that kept most formerly enslaved people working for their former owners on very similar terms. Freedom, it turned out, also had a probation period.
The army stayed on through Union in 1910 and the apartheid years, when the Castle housed a regional headquarters of the South African Defence Force. It was declared a national monument in 1936, under a government that was keen to celebrate the walls and much less keen to talk about who had been locked behind them. That narrow version of its story lasted for decades. Since 1994 it has slowly been widened to include the enslaved, the Khoikhoi, a captive king and women like Krotoa. It is still a work in progress, which seems about right.
Why I Take Guests There
On my Cape Town tours the Castle is never just a photo stop. It is the one place where you can walk through South African history in the right order: the balcony where sentences were read, the Donker Gat below it, the courtyard where enslaved people were registered, the council chamber where the colony was run, the gate a captured Zulu king was marched through.
Nowhere else in the country can you stand in one building and follow a straight line from 1652 through slavery, frontier wars, conquest, Union and the apartheid military, to the unfinished business of the present. That is what makes it a microcosm. Not a simplified version of South Africa’s story, but a concentrated one.
So go inside. Take the tour. Ask about the Donker Gat. Ask about Krotoa. And ask who built the walls.