SA Activist Links History to Present Injustice 🇿🇦

Cape Town, South Africa – Activist-turned-historian Lucy Campbell leads tours in Cape Town, offering a critical perspective on the city’s colonial past and its lasting effects on present-day South Africa.

The Coloniality of the Museum

Campbell, 65, has been giving privately run tours for 17 years, beginning at the Castle of Good Hope and offering a scathing critique of the city’s monuments and museums. She refuses to enter the 17th-century castle, viewing it as a symbol of violence and dispossession brought by the colonial era.

“This castle speaks to the first economic explosion in Cape Town,” she says. “It’s an architectural crime scene.”

Built by the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the fortress was established as a refreshment post for trade routes between the Netherlands and the East. It is now run by the South African military. Campbell points out that the castle was once a site of public hangings.

Campbell’s work began at the Groot Constantia estate, now a museum, where she found the history of enslaved and Indigenous people largely erased, including the practice of paying workers with wine long after the end of apartheid.

She established Transcending History Tours in 2008 after earning a postgraduate degree specializing in the history of slavery in the Cape. Her research revealed the inherently colonial nature of museums, noting that many institutions hold human remains used in studies promoting racist ideologies.

A ‘trailblazer’

Campbell highlighted the story of Krotoa, a Khoi woman considered the progenitor of Cape Town’s mixed-race population after marrying a Danish surgeon. Campbell feels the current plaque dedicated to Krotoa feels superficial and fails to celebrate her historical significance, and that the image used is fabricated.

Krotoa served as an interpreter and negotiator between the Dutch and the Khoi people, playing a key role in the cattle trade and mediating conflict. She was the first Indigenous person to be baptised as a Christian and married Pieter van Meerhof, the VOC surgeon, in 1664.

Despite her influence, Krotoa faced criticism from both Khoi leaders and Dutch officials, accused of being a spy for the opposing side.

Profits over people

Campbell directs attention to the VOC’s emblem embedded in the city’s walkways and links nearby skyscrapers to the exploitation that originated with the company. She argues the VOC represents a system prioritizing profits over people, a legacy that continues today.

Restoring memory

The tour’s most haunting stop is the Slave Lodge, which housed thousands of enslaved people from 1679 to 1811. Campbell criticizes the museum’s exhibits, arguing they sanitize the building’s dark history of suffering and violence, particularly the sexual violence inflicted upon women.

The tour concludes at a site marking the location of former slave auctions, where a commemorative art installation with the names of enslaved people was unveiled in 2008. Campbell believes the installation fails to adequately convey the deep wounds left by nearly 200 years of slavery.

“Birds s*** on it, people sit on it, but they don’t know what it is,” Campbell says. “They have the names of the slaves that were held at the Slave Lodge, but there’s no story. … It’s a monument that only serves the master, at the end of the day, because it doesn’t bring out the pain of the people.”