Reading the City as an Archive

Nancy Jouwe

As a cultural historian engaging with public spaces in the Netherlands and abroad, I listen collectively to what the city and cityscapes can tell us. This often means scratching the surface to unearth the layers of the city and discovering that it’s a palimpsest: something that has been reused or altered, but still bears visible traces of its earlier form.

I am especially interested in the colonial traces of the Dutch Empire, including its migratory processes, using an intersectional1 lens. I weave in transnational connections with multiple locations and link colonialism, including slavery and its afterlives (Hartman, 2008-1), being mindful of the fact that I have been affected by Dutch colonialism in multiple ways. The African American scholar Saidiya Hartman has been incredibly influential for scholars, curators, and artists on both sides of the Atlantic in thinking through the history of slavery. Through the notion of the ‘afterlife’, she has created space to think about the impact of slavery in contemporary societies and how it resonates materially in the everyday lives of formally enslaved people. In the Tropenmuseum Amsterdam (now the Wereldmuseum), the semi-permanent exhibition Afterlives of Slavery, which ran from 2017–2021, used Hartman’s coinage to think through ways in which slavery has also affected us culturally and scientifically.Since 2009, I initiated or helped to establish several walking tours in my hometown of Utrecht and my birthplace of Delft, both cities founded in the Dutch Middle Ages. Internationally, I have done similar work with my colleagues in Jakarta and New York, cities that were once occupied by Dutch ‘trading companies’, the East India Company (VOC) and West India Company (WIC), vessels of violent colonial practices. In all cases, the walking tour functioned both as a non-formal education practice and as an act of remembering and a participatory practice (Jouwe, 2022). This meant that walking together involved not just walking, but also remembering, learning, sharing, teaching, and listening together.

While in Cape Town it made sense, having been generously invited by The City and the Nieuwe Instituut to participate in the See Studio, to walk through the city of Cape Town to witness the many traces and layers of this city, from Indigenous land to colonial territory and from an apartheid system to a hyper-modern city with many issues to resolve and a fragile yet strong culture of memory of those past times that somehow are not the past.

I was not, of course, the first to do this. Many Capetonians involved in memory work, the history of slavery and (memory) activism have engaged with their city in this way. I am therefore indebted to the work of Bonita Bennett (heritage consultant, former Director of the District Six Museum), Lucy Campbell (founder of Transcending History Tours), Carine Zaayman (curator, researcher, scholar), Yvette Abrahams (activist, feminist scholar), Amie Soudien (curator, researcher), Mandy Sanger (Head of Education at the District Six Museum), and Tony Stuart (poet, performer, and educator). I am grateful to the scholar Ciraj Rassool (Professor of History at University of the Western Cape), who gave me a tour of Cape Town in 2018, and to Michael Weeder (Dean of St Georges Cathedral) and Paul Tichmann (Director of Collections, Iziko Museums), who generously shared their time with me during my stay in the Cape in 2018, where I was invited to speak at the “Recognition, Reparation, Reconciliation: The Light and Shadow of Historical Trauma” conference in Stellenbosch.

As I was navigating Cape Town, I could not help but stumble upon familiarities, starting with the faces of people I passed, who often reminded me of people I had seen in Java or the Moluccas. While consciously looking at the city through a historical lens, I used several ingredients or methodological tools, and I will mention four of them.

First, the title of this walking tour in Cape Town was ‘Reading the City as an Archive’. Reading a city means understanding that while the official archive can remain silent, the city can speak. It involves learning how to look, to use a different lens, and to learn and see what remains unseen by the public eye. It also involves learning to understand what it is that we do see. Who lies beneath the gravestones in the churches, who lived in the grand houses along the streets and canals, who is remembered in the street names, and what do the gable stones and ornaments tell us? (Jouwe, 2021, 323)

A second ingredient is mapping the things that we encounter on physical or digital maps so as to counter and/or layer the mainstream maps. Seeing and mapping the unknown was the business of European mapmakers in the 17th century as an important tool for conquering parts of the world. Mapmakers were in demand. Dutchmen like Joan Blaeu and Jodocus Hondius were mapmakers who lived in Amsterdam, making the city the epicentre of mapmaking in Europe for a large part of the 17th century (ibid).

Third, I make use of critical fabulation, a term coined by the scholar Saidiya Hartman (2008-2), which involves a writing methodology that combines historical and archival research with critical theory and fictional narrative. As such, Hartman uses storytelling to imagine not only what was, but also what could be. And finally, when we do this work, we are implicated and therefore we need to position ourselves. As human beings, we all have intersectional positions and when that position has a multitude of dominant aspects (white, male, able-bodied, affluent, cis), one is often unaware of one’s privileges or simply takes them for granted, as opposed to a person who predominantly occupies marginalised positions. Our intersectional positioning impacts our lives in different ways, which can also mean that we have to do different work. This is why it is so important to position oneself consciously. For instance: understanding that you have an ethnic position as a white person and that this positionality always brings with it privilege and often fragility is something you really have to sit with, and this definitely applies to Dutch white people who are not used to this practice of positioning themselves ethnically (Jouwe, 2021, 327).

The display of ‘white innocence’, as coined by anthropologist Gloria Wekker (2016), makes exchange and conversation difficult. White innocence in the Dutch context refers to the idea that the dominant Dutch sense of self is characterised by the centrality of a (mostly) silent but self-flattering conception of whiteness, and that race has, by the dominant consensus, been declared missing in action in the Netherlands: “We don’t do race”. (Wekker, 2016). This must sound ironic to South Africans, since the Dutch were so involved in bringing apartheid to South Africa.

Our walking tour took place on 27 November 2022 and kicked off the final day of the See Festival.² I began our walk by welcoming everyone, positioning myself and by paying tribute to those Capetonians who have done similar work before me. In doing this in Cape Town, it was important for me to unearth the silences and centre the voices of the (formerly) enslaved as much as possible. And although our walk lasted a little over an hour, we travelled several centuries together during it, connecting colonial history with contemporary expressions of racialised and racist state policies.³

We started our walk in Bo Kaap, the neighbourhood known for its cobblestones and colourful houses, once home to many formerly enslaved people. At one of its highest points is Tana Baru, a Malay name meaning new ground or new land. The site is a burial ground and was purchased in 1805 by the Imams of the Cape Muslim community to bury their members. The master builders, tailors, masons, dressmakers, and labourers of Cape Town are buried here. One of the more famous people buried there is Tuan Guru, who was taken by the Dutch from the island of Tidore in the Moluccas and imprisoned on Robben Island. When I visited the island of Tidore in the Moluccas (Indonesia) in 2017, I met a descendant of Tuan Guru, whose real name was Qadi Abdussalam and who became the first Imam of the first mosque in South Africa, the Auwal Mosque at 43 Dorp Street, which opened in 1794. Dorp, by the way, is the Dutch word for village. Saartjie van de Kaap owned the land on which the mosque stands. The land was inherited from her mother, Coridon van Ceylon, a free Black woman. Saartjie offered the land for the use of the mosque.

We then left Bo Kaap and entered the lower part of the city, walking along Wale Street. There, we stopped at St George’s Cathedral to look at the Slave Lodge, now a museum but also—after the Castle of Good Hope—the second oldest building in the city. The Dutch commander Wagenaar ordered it built in 1663 and it was built by enslaved people. It housed the Dutch company and their enslaved workers, who lived in this building in dire conditions. Looking to the right and focusing on St George’s Cathedral, we are catapulted into a different time. The church is known as the starting point for anti-apartheid rallies and a meeting place for those who fought against the apartheid system. Its current Dean, Michael Weeder, is well known for his connection to this struggle, as well as for researching the Prestwich Burial Ground in Cape Town’s District One, a place where the remains of thousands of enslaved people are buried (Weeder, 2005).

We then entered Queen Victoria Street where we can still see the building that housed the Race Classification Board, which operated from 1959 to 1991. In the 1960s, a room in what is now the High Court Annex was the scene of formal hearings where ordinary people came before an appeal panel to argue about what ‘race’ they should be called. Between 1950 and 1991, apartheid’s Population Registration Act classified every South African as belonging to one of at least seven ‘races’ and accordingly granted or denied them citizenship rights on a sliding scale from ‘white’ (full rights) to ‘Bantu’ (the fewest). This classification was of course subjective. There are two benches in front of the building, one labelled ‘whites only’ and one labelled ‘non-whites only’. These were installed by the artist Roderick Sauls, born in District Six, Cape Town, as a physical and visceral reminder.

We ended our walk in the Company’s Garden, where the Dutch East India Company laid out their vegetable garden to provide fresh produce for both the Dutch inhabitants and the ships sailing to and from the Indian Ocean. Not only was this fertile land stolen from its Indigenous inhabitants, but the Dutch also stole from the land, including seeds and produce, which they took to the botanical gardens in the Dutch metropole. And vice versa: they brought plants from other continents to the Cape. Meanwhile, and thanks to these colonial interventions, the Camissa River— which springs from Table Mountain—runs under the Company’s Garden and is now lost as a source of fresh water for the city today.

End Notes:

1. Intersectionality is a concept and/or tool that analyses power differences based on categories of difference that we inhabit simultaneously, such as race, class, ability, sexuality, and gender. These specific positionings of us both as individuals and as groups mean that we encounter interdependent systems of discrimination and/or privilege.
2. A big thank you to all the South African participants in the See Festival programme of November 2022
3. The See Festival walking tour took an hour but if time had permitted, the second part of my walking tour would have taken us to the Slavery Monument, past the District Six Museum towards the Castle of Good Hope, the oldest building in Cape Town, built by the VOC

Nancy Jouwe participated in the See Studio 2022. It was led by Zahira Asmal and produced by The City in partnership with Het Nieuwe Instituut and the Research Centre for Material Culture, with support from the Creative Industries Fund and DutchCulture.