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Iziko Museums recently embarked on a major project to transform the
Slave
Lodge at the top of Adderley Street in Cape Town into a
museum commemorating slavery, drawing on its symbolic significance as
a site of memory. Increasing awareness of current issues of civil and
human rights, equality and justice will form an integral part of the
project. We plan to transform the Lodge ‘from a site of human wrongs
to one of human rights’, to pay tribute to those who have been
forgotten, denied and stigmatised.
New
exhibitions will contextualise slavery in the history of
the Cape, and uncover the links among the groups of colonial oppressed
and their relationships to the slave owners and colonial governments.
Visitors will learn of how slavery entrenched racial discrimination
and its impact on the lives of South Africans today will be explored.
With the very recent disbanding of the apartheid state in 1994,
challenges remain to uncover the buried and marginalised aspects of
our past. Many South Africans are grappling with questions of
identity. A grasp of what slavery was and what freedom could mean
still eludes many South Africans. Our history deeply affects the
present and shapes the future.
Located in the historic heart of the city, the
Slave
Lodge was constructed in 1679 to house the slaves of the
Dutch East India Company or VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie).
In its origins, the Slave Lodge is one of Cape Town’s earliest
buildings. However, it was altered substantially over the centuries
and this makes its original appearance difficult to imagine.
The Slave Lodge, which was almost certainly mainly built by the VOC
slaves themselves, accommodated the largest single concentration of
slaves at the Cape. It permanently housed the Company slaves who
laboured on the public buildings, fortifications, outposts and roads
in and around Cape Town. The building held between 500 and 800 men,
women and children, including at times indigenous Khoe-San people,
prisoners and the mentally disturbed. Living conditions were cramped,
airless, and vermin-infested. The Slave Lodge continued to be used in
this way during the early years of British rule which began in 1795.
After the abolition of the Slave Trade in the British Empire in 1807,
the function of the building changed and it was converted for use as
Government Offices, the first Cape Supreme Court and many years later,
in 1966, the South African Cultural History Museum. Significantly this
Museum overlooked entirely the history of the site itself and its
primary use as a lodge for VOC slaves for the major part of its
existence. This historical amnesia started to be addressed with the
renaming of the building as the Slave Lodge Museum in 1998.
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