Ferial Haffajee
CAPE TOWN: THE MAKING OF A CITY by Nigel Worden, Elizabeth van Heyningen and Vivian Bickford-Smith (David Philip)
This is the history book I wish we had had at high school instead of the stiff set work that was so historically incorrect that it was laughable even to us teenagers.
Cape Town, according to that awful read, was ”discovered” by Jan van Riebeeck when he landed at its shores on April 6 1652. He and his compatriots immediately planted gardens that bloomed lusciously and they brought order to an alien and savage land.
We were made to draw two-dimensional replicas of the fort they constructed. It was painted for us as a work of architectural genius. But in Cape Town: The Making of a City we learn that the first fort fell down. The historian authors – Nigel Worden, Elizabeth van Heyningen and Vivian Bickford-Smith – have combed their material to come up with delightful nuggets like the falling fort. It was for me a subversive book, subversive of my education at least.
The book paints in broad sweeps: it starts midway through the 17th century with an account of the first colonists, who arrived at the Cape on their way along the spice route to east Asia. Many preceded Van Riebeeck , the governor who arrived in 1652 to set up a formal refreshment station. It was difficult for them to grow anything and often the bounty of Robben Island saved the foreigners from starvation.
Initially they were received hospitably by the Cape’s inhabitants, who were pastoralists travelling about the land. During 1655, the Goringhaiqua people told the Dutch firmly that ”we [the Dutch] were living upon their land and they perceived that we were rapidly building more and more as if we intended never to leave, and for that reason they would not trade with us for any more cattle”.
As this book moves methodically through history, the reader’s path is made more interesting by the layout, design and detail contained in the maps, paintings, documents, seals, statutes, photographs and other elements on every page. This is a beautiful book that distracts and draws you in all at the same time. It is particularly illuminating on the slave trade and the origins of Cape inhabitants who did not arrive from Europe. Their histories are contained in great detail in everything from dress to religion.
By the early 19th century, Islam was the fastest-growing religion at the Cape and the authors’ meticulous attention to detail takes readers into the heart of the ”ratiep” ceremony where men prayed until they reached a trance-like state in which they would pierce their tongues, arms and legs with tiny swords. It is a practice that lives on among both Tamil and Muslim sections of the population.
This is also very much a ”her-story” book. Throughout it one finds vignettes of fascinating women like Krotoa, the daughter of a Khoi chief who also worked in Van Riebeeck’s home as a servant. She became a vital link between the world of the colonists and the Cape’s original inhabitants.
Later the book tells of the women who disguised themselves as men to get on to the boats heading for the Cape, and of the female shareholders of the Women’s Mining Company. It also tells of an extensive black market run by company wives.
Cape Town as we know it today comes alive as the book proceeds. Its spatial organisation begins to take shape and the origins of landmark buildings are recorded. In 1790 the first street signs were erected and in 1861 the first bank in South Africa began to operate.
A follow-up to Cape Town: The Making of a City will be available early in May. Called Cape Town in the 20th Century, it is a sequel with the same look and design. It will go right up to 1996; the authors have even managed to capture the initial stirrings of Pagad (People against Gangsterism and Drugs), as well as taxi violence and the struggle years when the flames of resistance kept the Cape Flats burning. Like Cape Town: The Making of a City, this new volume should make an excellent and entertaining read.
As a regular holiday-maker there, I was happy to notice that we were not the first generation to get fleeced by its entrepreneurs. The authors write that, already in the 17th century, ”Prices were certainly inflated during the season when the ships were in and sailors complained that they were ‘milked’ ashore, but ‘the ships being gone off, the town was left quiet and empty, and everything was cheap again’.”