Chapter Three
When we look at the Castle today, we see stone. We should also see people, because the story of who built this fortress is inseparable from some of the darkest chapters in South African history.
Trafficked across the Indian Ocean
The enslaved workers were forcibly trafficked from Madagascar, Mozambique, the western coast of India, and the Dutch East Indies.
Over the following decades, the VOC would bring approximately 60,000 enslaved people to the Cape. This reshaped the entire demographic character of the colony, and its legacy can be felt in Cape Town’s culture, its cuisine, and the Afrikaans language itself.
Signal Hill stone, Robben Island slate
The building materials were sourced locally wherever possible.
Stone for the outer walls and foundations was quarried from Signal Hill - the same hill that looms above the city today.
Blue slate and lime were transported from Robben Island, a few kilometres offshore in Table Bay.
It is ironic that the island which supplied building materials for the seat of colonial power would, three centuries later, be used as the prison where Nelson Mandela served eighteen of his twenty-seven years of imprisonment.
Indispensable and invisible at the same time
Krotoa was a young Khoekhoe woman taken into Van Riebeeck’s household as a child. She became the colony’s most important interpreter. She was fluent in Dutch, Portuguese, and Khoe - bridging two worlds that had no other common language.
She was indispensable and invisible at the same time: tolerated in Dutch society, valued when useful, rejected when not. Krotoa married a Danish sailor. After her husband’s death she was exiled to Robben Island, where she died in 1674, five years before the Castle whose colonial world she had helped build was even completed.
In 2016, more than 340 years later, a ceremony at the Castle symbolically brought her home. A memorial to her now stands in the grounds.
