Cape Town: At the Foot of the Mountain

The VOC never intended a colony. The directors in Amsterdam — the Heeren XVII, the Seventeen Gentlemen who governed the company — were merchants, not empire-builders. They wanted logistics, not territory. But the mathematics of running a refreshment station required farmers, and farmers required land, and land at the Cape was occupied by the Khoekhoe people, who had their own ideas about it. The slow, grinding dispossession that followed was not planned from Amsterdam. It happened because of proximity and power and the logic of supply chains.

The Castle you see today is a five-pointed star fortification — the classic design of seventeenth-century military architecture, with angled bastions named after the titles of the Prince of Orange: Leerdam, Oranje, Nassau, Catzenellenbogen, and Buuren. The thick walls were designed to deflect cannon fire by presenting no flat surface to direct impact. The design never really needed to be tested in battle; the Cape's main vulnerability was always disease and drought rather than military assault.

Inside the Castle, the William Fehr Collection documents Cape history through oil paintings, watercolours, and artefacts from the seventeenth century onward. You can see how the Dutch imagined this place — dramatic, exotic, a backdrop for European enterprise. The paintings are beautiful and disturbing in equal measure.

There is one moment in this building's history that ties the entire arc of South African history together: on February eleventh, nineteen ninety, Nelson Mandela gave his first public speech after twenty-seven years in prison from these battlements. He had been imprisoned in nineteen sixty-four, sentenced to life at the Rivonia Trial. He was released not from Robben Island but from Victor Verster Prison outside Paarl. He drove to Cape Town. He spoke from the Castle. In that single choice of venue — the oldest symbol of colonial power in South Africa — there was something deliberate, something about who now owned the meaning of this building. We'll return to Mandela later on this walk. His story is woven through almost every stop.

Think about what it means that this collection exists here. The Dutch settlers who came to the Cape brought their culture with them — their religion, their language, their legal traditions, their aesthetic sensibilities. The Golden Age Dutch paintings in this building are not transplants; they are the cultural DNA of the people who built what you're standing in. Jan Steen, Frans Hals, Anthony van Dyck — their work hung in Cape Town because the Cape was, in a meaningful sense, a Dutch city for its first century and a half.

Today the square is given over to the open-air craft market that has operated here for decades. The range of what's on offer is a compressed lesson in South African material culture: Zulu beadwork in the complex geometric patterns that encode meaning about social status and identity; Ndebele painted panels in the bold geometric designs that Ndebele women have traditionally applied to the walls of their homes; wire sculpture from the townships, intricate figures made from recycled electrical wire; carved wooden masks from across the continent; printed fabrics; leather goods; township art. It can feel touristy because it is touristy, but the craftsmanship is often extraordinary if you slow down and look.

The market operates every day except Sunday and public holidays. The vendors are predominantly Black African and Coloured — in South Africa, "Coloured" is not a pejorative but the accepted term for people of mixed heritage, a complex category that includes the descendants of Malay slaves, Khoekhoe people, white settlers, and various other communities who mixed across the Cape's long history of forced and voluntary proximity.

Greenmarket Square has also been a place of political assembly. During the anti-apartheid struggle, the square was a gathering point for protest. The city's public spaces have always been contested — who could use them, on what terms, for what purposes — and the square's current openness, its casual mixing of tourists and vendors and office workers eating lunch, is something that was not guaranteed and was not easy to achieve.

In nineteen sixty-six, the apartheid government declared District Six a "whites only" area under the Group Areas Act. This was not a decision made carelessly. It was the deliberate application of a systematic ideology — the idea that South Africa's different racial groups should live separately, in designated areas, and that the mixing of District Six was a problem to be solved. The solution was forced removal. Between nineteen sixty-eight and the early nineteen eighties, approximately sixty thousand people were taken from their homes and relocated to the Cape Flats: a flat, windswept expanse of sandy ground twenty-five kilometres from the city centre, where the government had built township housing with minimal services and maximum distance from white Cape Town.

Their homes were bulldozed. The streets were erased. The land sat largely empty for twenty years. The government couldn't find white buyers willing to build on what felt — even to people who supported apartheid — like a moral crime scene. The few structures that were built in the cleared area stand out precisely because of the emptiness around them.

The museum opened in nineteen ninety-four, the year of South Africa's first democratic election, in a former Methodist church that had survived the demolition. It is one of the most carefully conceived museums in Africa, possibly in the world. The approach is not monumental — it doesn't try to overwhelm you with scale. It works through accumulation of the personal: photographs of faces, street maps on which former residents have written the names of the streets they lived on, personal objects — keys, identity documents, school reports — donated by people who were removed and who wanted some piece of their former life to survive in the place they came from.

The floor of the museum has the original floorboards on which residents have written the names of the streets that were bulldozed. You are standing on what was once a neighbourhood. The street names written on the floor are the ghost of the city that was here.

The museum also documents the ongoing process of land restitution — former residents and their descendants applying to have their land returned under post-apartheid legislation. Some families have returned. Most of the land remains in dispute. The erasure was so total, and the delay so long, that returning to District Six is not simply a matter of unlocking a door and walking in. The neighbourhood, as it existed, cannot be restored. What can be done is partial, imperfect, and still contested.

Come here. Walk slowly. Read the names on the floor.

The garden became a public park in the nineteenth century, after the VOC had collapsed and the British had taken over. The British were not always better than the Dutch — the history of the Cape under British rule includes its own catalogue of dispossession and violence — but they did have a tradition of public parks as civic infrastructure, and the Company's Garden became something available to residents rather than reserved for company use.

The buildings that surround the garden represent the institutional core of Cape Town's intellectual and political life. The South African National Gallery sits on the western edge — a national collection that has been actively grappling with how to tell a decolonised story of South African art. The South African Museum, one of the oldest museums in the country, covers natural history and has some extraordinary San rock art reproductions. The South African Library, founded in eighteen eighteen, was one of the first free public libraries in the world — founded on the principle that access to knowledge should not require wealth, a radical idea for its time and not a universally achieved one even now.

At the upper end of the garden, where Government Avenue broadens, is the Parliament of South Africa — the original building dating from eighteen eighty-four, where apartheid legislation was passed and where, in nineteen ninety, F.W. de Klerk announced the unbanning of the ANC and the release of Nelson Mandela. The building carries the weight of both crimes and their undoing.

There is, at most times, at least one squirrel in the Company's Garden. The squirrels were introduced by Cecil John Rhodes, the mining magnate and arch-imperialist who served as Cape Prime Minister in the eighteen eighties and nineties and who lived in a house at the upper end of the garden. Rhodes is a complicated figure even by the standards of the Cape's complicated figures — brilliant, ruthless, genuinely visionary about some things and catastrophically wrong about others. The squirrels are one of his less consequential legacies.

Slavery was abolished at the Cape in eighteen thirty-four, two years after Britain passed the Slavery Abolition Act. Freedom did not mean equality — freed slaves faced systematic discrimination in employment, land ownership, and political participation. But it did mean that the community could begin to build something permanent, and Bo-Kaap became that permanence.

The food is extraordinary. Cape Malay cooking is one of the great fusion cuisines of the world, developed from the meeting of Indonesian, Indian, African, and European ingredients and techniques over three centuries. Denningvleis is a sweet-sour braised lamb with tamarind. Bredie is a slow-cooked stew — waterblommetjie bredie uses the flowers of an aquatic plant found in Cape vleis, something found nowhere else on earth. Koesisters — not to be confused with the Afrikaner koeksister — are spiced, syrup-soaked doughnuts flavoured with cardamom and coconut that you should eat immediately if you encounter them.

During apartheid, the houses of Bo-Kaap were uniformly white. Landlords — many of them absentee — required it. The neighbourhood had been threatened with forced removal under the Group Areas Act; unlike District Six, Bo-Kaap was ultimately spared wholesale demolition, though many residents were removed from the fringes. The bright colours came after democracy, a community-wide act of visibility and self-assertion. Some residents repaint every few years, deepening the saturation, making the statement louder.

Now the neighbourhood faces a different threat. Bo-Kaap is photogenic — extremely, viralistically photogenic — and property values have risen dramatically as developers and wealthy buyers have recognised what they're looking at. Long-term residents are being priced out. The community has organised, applied for heritage protection, lobbied the city. The outcome is not settled. The bright paint is doing a lot of work.

Long Street has always had a slightly ambiguous character. It was commercial and residential, respectable and not quite respectable at the same time — the kind of street that has bookshops and brothels on the same block, which is true of all interesting streets everywhere. Today it is the backpacker hostel and bar district, which means it is cheap, loud after ten p.m., and genuinely mixed in the way that Cape Town's more expensive neighbourhoods are not. The hostels have names that lean into the mythology — Africa on a shoestring, the romance of the road — and they are full of travellers from everywhere.

During the day, Long Street is bookshops and vintage clothing stores and Lebanese restaurants and the kind of small businesses that occupy the ground floors of old Victorian buildings in cities that haven't been fully gentrified yet. At night it becomes something else: the music spills out, the braai smoke drifts across the pavement, the bars are open until whatever time feels right.

At the mountain end of Long Street — the upper end, where the street begins to climb — the Long Street Baths have been operating since eighteen eighty-two. It is a Turkish bath and swimming pool, a relic of Victorian Cape Town's belief in the restorative properties of hot water and steam. The building is beautiful in the way that Victorian civic infrastructure often is: functional and grand at the same time. The baths are still operating. You can still go in.

Stand anywhere on Long Street and look up toward the mountain. Table Mountain fills the end of the street like a stage flat — the flat top so perfectly horizontal, the drop on either side so dramatic, that it looks designed rather than geological. The mountain is three kilometres away and six hundred metres above sea level, but from here it feels close enough to touch. The city has been building up toward it and against it for three and a half centuries, and the mountain has been looking down the entire time, unchanged. That contrast — the human noise of Long Street and the absolute geological indifference of the mountain — is Cape Town in a single image.

Twenty-four million visitors a year pass through the Waterfront. That makes it the most visited attraction in Africa — more than the Pyramids at Giza, more than the Kruger National Park, more than Victoria Falls. The number is both impressive and slightly misleading, since many of those visits are Cape Town residents going to a supermarket or a cinema, but the scale is real.

The architecture does not pretend to be consistent. Victorian warehouses converted into restaurants sit next to contemporary glass-and-steel hotel towers. The clock tower — a small Victorian Gothic structure originally used as the port captain's office — stands at the water's edge looking like something that has wandered in from another century, which it has. It works because the harbour is real. The water is real. The fishing boats and tugboats and charter yachts tied up along the quays are real.

From the Waterfront, the view of Table Mountain is arguably the best in the city. The mountain rises behind the city bowl in perfect proportion — close enough to fill the sky, far enough to show its full profile. The flat top, the steep faces, the buttresses of Lion's Head and Devil's Peak framing it on either side. In late afternoon, when the sun is dropping toward the Atlantic to the west, the mountain turns warm gold and the city goes purple in its shadow. You could stand here for an hour and not run out of mountain.

Nelson Mandela arrived on Robben Island in nineteen sixty-four, sentenced to life imprisonment at the conclusion of the Rivonia Trial, in which he and seven colleagues were convicted of sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the state. He was forty-six years old. He would spend eighteen of his twenty-seven years in prison on the island. His cell measured about two metres by two and a half metres. He slept on a mat on the floor for the first years of his imprisonment, before the prison administration provided a bed. He was allowed one visitor every six months.

The limestone quarry on the island is where political prisoners were forced to do hard labour — breaking rocks in conditions designed to be degrading and exhausting. The reflected glare from the white limestone damaged Mandela's eyes permanently. In the quarry, hidden from guards, prisoners conducted what amounted to a walking university — debating politics, philosophy, history, and economics, teaching each other, keeping the movement's intellectual life alive in the worst conditions. This is why the island is sometimes called "Robben Island University."

A copy of Shakespeare's collected works circulated among the prisoners. Each man underlined a passage that spoke to him, then signed his name beside it. Mandela underlined a passage from Julius Caesar: "Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once."

Mandela was transferred from Robben Island to Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town in nineteen eighty-two, and later to Victor Verster Prison outside Paarl. He was released from Victor Verster on February eleventh, nineteen ninety. He drove to Cape Town, walked out onto the balcony of the Grand Parade adjacent to the Castle — where we began this walk — and gave his first public speech in twenty-seven years. He was seventy-one years old.

The tours of Robben Island are conducted by former political prisoners. The man who shows you Nelson Mandela's cell may have been imprisoned in the cell next to it. That is not a simulation. That is history speaking directly, while it still can.

Heatherwick's solution was to cut. The team took the profile of a single grain of corn — the thing the building was built to store — scaled it up, and used that form as the template for cutting through the concrete tubes to create a central atrium. The void that resulted is extraordinary: a cathedral-like space of curved concrete surfaces, organic and industrial at the same time, lit from a glass roof at the top. Around this central void, eighty gallery spaces were carved into the cylindrical tubes, each one a slightly different shape depending on the geometry of the cut. No two galleries are identical. Moving through the building feels like moving through a three-dimensional puzzle that resolves differently at every turn.

The museum opened on September twenty-second, twenty seventeen, and holds nine thousand five hundred works, making it the largest museum of contemporary African art in the world. The collection was seeded by Jochen Zeitz, the German former CEO of Puma who has spent decades collecting African contemporary art, and the Norval Foundation. The mission — to collect, preserve, and exhibit art from Africa and its diaspora — addresses a genuine gap: the great museums of Europe and North America hold the colonial collections, the ethnographic objects, the historical artefacts. Contemporary African artists, working now, in conversation with African modernity and the global art world simultaneously, had no dedicated institution of this scale on the continent.

The building is worth the visit for the architecture alone. The art, when it's good, doubles it.

The problem was solved by other means long ago. The noon gun has no practical function. It fires anyway, every day, because Cape Town has decided that a city which has been announcing noon for a hundred and sixty years should probably keep doing it. You can hear it from most of the city bowl. It is the city's heartbeat, regular and slightly startling, connecting the moment to every other noon that has sounded across this harbour since the age of sail.

The sunset from Signal Hill is the reason people come up here in the evenings. The sun drops into the Atlantic directly in front of you — dramatically, in a way that feels staged, because the ocean is flat and the horizon is clean and there is nothing to interrupt the geometry of it. The mountain catches the last light. The city below goes into shadow. On Sundays — and Sundays specifically have this quality in Cape Town — people drive up here with coolers and blankets and set up on the hillside for the event of the week. Braai smoke drifts across the grass. Someone has a bluetooth speaker. The wine is opened while there's still enough light to read the label.

This is the thing about Cape Town that is hardest to convey without being here: the city lives outdoors, and it does so with a consciousness of the beauty it inhabits that is relatively rare. Capetonians are not unaware of what they have. The mountain is not background; it is foreground, always. The ocean is not scenery; it is a destination, reached in twenty minutes from almost anywhere. The combination of these two elements — mountain and sea, the vertical and the horizontal — produces an environment that asks something of the people in it, a kind of daily aesthetic demand, and most of them rise to meet it.

You started this walk at the Castle, the oldest stone structure in South Africa, the first footprint of the empire that would shape the next three and a half centuries. You've walked through the square where that empire traded, through the museum that remembers what that empire destroyed, through the garden it planted and the neighbourhood it enslaved and the street where it built its Victorian confidence. You've stood at the ferry terminal for the island where it imprisoned the man who ended it. And you've climbed the hill where the cannon still marks noon, because some traditions earn their permanence. Cape Town contains all of this simultaneously — not resolved, not reconciled, just held together by the mountain and the sea and three and a half centuries of people making something from what they were given.