The Past In My Place

My research topic is the Castle of Good Hope that has stood at the heart of Cape Town since 1679.

It is the oldest surviving colonial building in South Africa, built between 1666 and 1679 by the Dutch East India Company in Cape Town.

Six flags have flown over its walls. It has been a trading post, a prison, a military headquarters and a national heritage site. Interestingly, the Castle has never been taken by force. But it has changed hands over time.

That transformation is the real story.

Growing up in Cape Town, the Castle was always just there - something I drove past often without thinking about it. But once I started looking into it properly, I realised how much of my own history was connected to it and how historically significant this building is.

I’ve always been interested in military history and in castles specifically - how they developed over time from basic wooden forts to the sophisticated stone fortresses with all their defensive engineering. The Castle of Good Hope sits at a really interesting point in that story. Its five-pointed pentagonal shape, with a projecting bastion at each corner, was designed so that every wall could defend the one next to it. It is a design that changed the way fortresses were built across the world, and the Castle remains one of the oldest and best-preserved examples of it in the southern hemisphere.

I also wanted to understand the history of the place I grew up in and how it shaped my country. That felt important. And it got personal when I found out that some of my own ancestors were held in the Castle’s dungeons. Knowing that people from my own family were inside those walls, not as soldiers or officials, but as prisoners, made me want to understand the full story, not just the comfortable version of it.

Cape Town is also one of the most beautiful places in the world, and there is something striking about this massive, imposing building sitting right in the middle of it with Table Mountain behind it. It made me curious.

The more I looked, the more I found out about its rich history.

What started as a history project became something more personal than I expected. Between the military history, the family connection, and the remarkable stories I kept discovering along the way - a spider firing a cannon, a man escaping with an iron spoon, a king cursing his executioner from the gallows - I found a building that had far more to say than its walls first suggested.