Cape Town: Mountain and Memory

A city between table rock, prison island, colonial fort, and open sea

Six places where Cape Town carries its history in the open: the flat-topped mountain the Khoikhoi called Mountain in the Sea, the half-billion-year-old sandstone above the city, the pentagonal fort built by enslaved hands that no longer faces the water, the church-floor map of 60,000 people bulldozed out of District Six, the island cell where Mandela spent eighteen years, and the storm-guarded headland where Africa bends east.

Itinerary

1. Cape Town — The Dutch East India Company landed here in 1652 to plant a vegetable garden -- a supply station for ships on the six-month run to the spice islands. The garden became a colony, and the colony the seed of a nation defined by collision: Khoikhoi herders displaced by Dutch farmers, enslaved people shipped from Madagascar and Indonesia, British imperialists, trekking Afrikaners, and an African majority whose dispossession would not be reversed until 1994.
2. Table Mountain — The Khoikhoi called it Hoerikwaggo, Mountain in the Sea. Its summit sandstone was laid down over 500 million years ago, sitting on granite older still, and its slopes hold more plant species than the entire United Kingdom. When the southeaster blows, moist air condenses into the 'tablecloth' -- a dense white cloud that pours over the cliffs and evaporates as it falls, making the stone look as if it were breathing.
3. Castle of Good Hope — South Africa's oldest colonial building is a five-bastioned pentagon whose first stone was laid in 1666 -- raised in part by up to 60,000 people enslaved from Madagascar, Mozambique, the Dutch East Indies, and India. Its walls once rose straight from the shoreline of Table Bay, cannons trained on European rivals. Two centuries of land reclamation have stranded it inland; the maritime fortress now faces a traffic circle.
4. District Six Museum — Inside a former Methodist church on Buitenkant Street -- spared from the bulldozers only because it was a place of worship -- the floor is a hand-drawn map of the neighborhood, annotated by the displaced. 'My house was here.' 'This is where I grew up.' The Group Areas Act declared this multiracial community whites-only and razed it; 60,000 people were scattered to the Cape Flats.
5. Robben Island Prison — Cell 466/64 measured two meters by two and a half: a mat, a bucket, a barred window. Nelson Mandela lived there for eighteen years of his twenty-seven in prison. But the island had held the people colonial powers feared most since 1658 -- among them Tuan Guru, who wrote the entire Quran from memory across thirteen years of confinement. The inmates called it 'the University.' Three of them became President of South Africa.
6. Cape of Good Hope — Bartolomeu Dias called it the Cape of Storms after rounding it in 1488; King John II of Portugal renamed it for the sea route to India it finally opened. It is not Africa's southernmost point but its corner -- where a ship following the western coast begins to travel more east than south. The cold Benguela current meets the warm Agulhas here, raising the colliding seas that have wrecked over 2,000 vessels.