Whose Voice? Between Slavery, Identity And Gentrification In Cape Town – An Interview With Sam North

"As a city, Cape Town sits on top of an uncomfortable history of colonialism, slavery, and formal racial segregation. This history has an uneasy relationship with depictions of the city in tourist publications as an inclusive world of adventuring, beaches, dining, and warm weather. Cape Town’s problematic relationship with its slave past runs deeper than this. Slavery is a history which until the fall of apartheid in 1994 remained largely forgotten in public memory. Efforts to confront this history remain fitful and highly contested. But slavery at the Cape differed in style from most other systems of enslavement involving Europeans and Africans. Rather than serving as a source of human labour, the Cape was the recipient of enslaved people from Dutch Batavia – modern day South East Asia – as well as from elsewhere in Africa, predominantly Madagascar and Mozambique. However, memory and recognition of slave roots in South Africa has been marginalised by decades of subsequent subjugation and selective promotion of settler histories. The majority of slave descendants were classified as ‘coloured’ by the state."