Countering Colonial Memory Through Public and Popular Culture in Cape Town

Abstract

Historical legacies of enslavement and apartheid structural violence underpin the societal fabric of Cape Town. Walking through the city of Cape Town, colonial reminders and bastions of white supremacy remain evident in statues, street names and the continued spatial apartheid present in the public space. Sites of intergenerational trauma remain scattered through the city, retraced and reclaimed through the efforts of community members, activists, artists and museums. This paper focuses on how race and memory are represented, resisted and challenged within popular culture in Cape Town, South Africa. Through considering museums and music as sites of public memory, this paper highlights how collective memory is being constructed in post-apartheid South Africa in ways that challenge white supremacist and colonial memory. Focusing on two case studies, the Iziko Slave Lodge and Youngsta CPT’s song YVR, this paper shows how colonial and apartheid conceptualisations of race are constantly being contested in post-apartheid popular culture to resist colonial memory and recreate new public memories.

“We don’t have to visit museums to visit memory”

- Lauren Powell, Paleo-archaeologist, 2024

1. Introduction

In December 2024, I visited the District Six Museum in Cape Town with Lauren Powell, a paleo-archaeologist. As ‘coloured’ women from Cape Town, our histories are intertwined, and so are the memories of District Six. We both work on rehumanizing our ancestors by telling their stories, from different disciplines, yet with the same goal of decolonizing and contributing to challenging colonial memory. As we sat in the District Six Museum, we spoke of the complexity of being in the museum space, especially one that now houses the memories of the home that your family lost. For me, only being able to see photos of the Bloemhof Flats, where my family lived before District Six was declared a white-only area, left me with a complicated feeling of belonging. In our silence, I asked Lauren, “why do I feel a sense of belonging amongst so much trauma?”; her reply is the epigraph to this paper.

The post-apartheid public space is that of contesting legacies, and deconstructing and reconstructing public memory. Cape Town, a city located on the southern tip of Africa, boasts beautiful beaches, penguins and the famous Table Mountain. However, Cape Town is also known for its visible and widespread inequalities and lack of racial transformation of the geography and economy of the city. The legacies of spatial apartheid are visible immediately upon arriving in the city. It is commonly said that in Cape Town, the further you are from the mountain, the less white and less wealthy areas become, this is due to years of settler colonial and apartheid land stealing policies and structural design. Today, some physical sites, such as buildings, parks and neighbourhoods, of colonial and apartheid traumas have been reclaimed by communities, activists and the ‘new’ government. For example, the Castle of Good Hope, the military fort of the VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie/Dutch East India Company), is now a museum that houses the Camissa Museum. The museum is dedicated to indigenous knowledges, storytelling of silenced histories and challenging colonial processes of racialization and genealogy. The reclamation also signifies an important challenge of and resistance to colonial memory being contested in public spaces. For this paper, colonial memory includes apartheid memory as they exist on a continuum, rather than as separate events.

It should be noted that I write this paper from the setting of a Dutch university where I am currently employed but through the lens of using this position to bring counter-narratives to the colonial myths of Dutch colonialism and disrupting colonial histories. Situated within this special issue, this paper is focused on how colonial memory is represented, resisted and challenged within popular culture, specifically through two case studies in Cape Town, the Iziko Slave Lodge Museum and through the music of rapper YoungstaCPT. Cape Town itself is a contested site of memory, with a complex and layered history. The case studies chosen here are not placed in comparison with one another, but as examples of where popular culture is being used to challenge colonial memory.

2. Post-Apartheid Cape Town

The first name for the area that is currently known as Cape Town, given by the Khoe and Nama people, is ǁHui ǃGaeb, meaning “where the clouds meet”. The city sits at the foot of the iconic Table Mountain, or Huri ǂoaxa, “where the sea rises”. When there is thick cloud cover over Table Mountain, this cloud is called the Table Cloth. Much of the land between the ocean and mountain was covered by Table Bay; with increased expansion, land was claimed from the sea to create the Foreshore and ports of the colonial era and the land that we see today. Shange (2025) tells of the significance of the names given by the Nama and Khoe people to this area as symbolic with its geographic features:

“The word invokes memory of a mountain that was once engulfed in water under the sea, over time, the mountain slowly starts to rise from the sea as the water levels start to drop. This word not only tells a story about the mountain, but it also tells a general story about the land, that there was a time when most of Cape Town was covered in water.31The water click “ǂ” makes a sound that almost allows ones to visualize and hear the sound the water makes as the waves hit the rocks of Table Mountain. The land that was also seen as a gift from the Gods, rich in flora and fauna, and the word Huri ǂoaxa is also associated with blessings, mainly from the Gods or ancestors”.

(p. 10)

The politics of naming and renaming are inextricably linked to the legacies of colonial and apartheid violence and their active attempts to erase indigenous culture and language. Uncovering the stories behind these names remains essential to processes of decolonisation. Today, Cape Town’s nickname is the Mother City, which gained popularity in the 1930s and stems from the Greek word ‘metros’ meaning ‘mother’ (Grootes 2025). However, Grootes has argued that the seemingly innocent nickname is a whitewashing of the colonial and apartheid history that promoted Cape Town as the birth place of South Africa (as colonialism constructed it and the borders that exist today), thereby promoting the myth of an empty land without history before the Dutch arrival in 1652 (Grootes 2025). Mellet’s The Lie of 1652: A decolonised history of land (Mellet 2020) addresses this exact myth, providing a detailed historical and chronological outline of the movement and lives of people before 1652 across the southern African region.

Evidently, and contrary to colonial narratives, Cape Town has a long-standing history, and its beauty is built into the oral traditions and storytelling, preserved in the memory of the people indigenous to this area. With the arrival of the VOC in the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, a colonial narrative was created, sustained through apartheid education policies, entrenching the idea that no history was present in the Cape until 1652 (Mellet 2020). At this time, Cape Town became known as the Gemeente van Kaapstad/De Kaap, a city within the Dutch colonial empire.

The Dutch colonial empire heavily relied on the slave trade within the Cape, beginning from 1658, relatively soon after their arrival. The Dutch brought slaves from East Africa, South and Southeast Asia and across the Indian Ocean (namely Madagascar and the Indonesian archipelago), while also bonding indigenous Khoe people into servitude (Jouwe and Zaayman 2025). When the British took over in 1806, the slave trade continued until the abolition of slavery in 1834, when indentured and bonded labour replaced the slave trade. The existence of the slave trade, the subsequent years of bonded labour and the continuous use of the indigenous and enslaved populations as cheap labour set up the conditions for the entrenchment of legacies of white heteropatriarchy, further engrained by the apartheid regime from 1948 to 1994.

During apartheid, Cape Town was scarred by further forced removal of people from District Six, which was declared a designated white area under the Group Areas Act of 1950 (Layne 2008). A lively multiracial area that threatened the apartheid regime’s policies of racial segregation, further entrenched through the Group Areas Act of 1950, District Six is rooted in the memories of those forcibly displaced to the Cape Flats. In post-apartheid South Africa, there have been some successful claims for compensation or land redistribution for those displaced through this Act; however, this is slow going, and not specific to the District Six area but also across the suburbs of Cape Town. The District Six Museum now sits on that same land, as a living memorial to the lives and histories of those displaced.

Like District Six in its importance to Cape Town life, but in contrast in terms of their historical outcome, is Bo-Kaap. Located on the slopes of Signal Hill, part of the Table Mountain Range. Bo-Kaap began as small rented housing during the Dutch colonial era, for political exiles and freed slaves after the abolition of slavery, then increasingly becoming a place for migrants coming from other parts of the country throughout the years of British colonial rule. The “Old Malay Quarter” was one of the five areas of Bo-Kaap and housed the majority of the Muslim population of free enslaved people. Major efforts were made by white Afrikaaner poet I.D. Du Plessis to preserve the Quarter as a heritage site, to which he was successful. Unlike District Six, due to the preservation of the quarter being confined to Cape Malay’s or Cape Muslims who were classified as ‘coloured’, the area was not under threat from the Group Areas Act of 1950 (Ghirardo 2001). However, Baderoon (2014) cautions that the work of Du Plessis romanticised the creation of a Malay race, arguing that these efforts led to an “ethnicising and racialising of Islam that had started in the immediate post-emancipation period thus foundered in the face of the racial instability of the term “Malay”, but it has had lastingly damaging effects” (p. 15). Still, and as a result, Bo-Kaap became and remains one of the hearts of Cape Malay/Muslim life in Cape Town (Bruinders and Layne 2023). This is not to say that Bo-Kaap was spared from the wrath of the apartheid regime, where there was active suppression of the population as well as active resistance against the regime by the community.

During the struggle for liberation, Capetonians actively engaged in both violent and non-violent resistance against the apartheid regime. Post-apartheid Cape Town remains a city of resistance, despite the deep entrenchment of spatial apartheid and lack of racial transformation. Activists work to bring public services to communities, to challenge gentrification of the city, leading to further displacements of people of colour (Nhlabathi and Maharj 2021). Activists have actively challenged the local city council for their program of removing unhoused people from the city, rather than providing adequate public services, social services and housing for all. During the hosting of the 2010 World Cup, instead of renovating existing stadiums used in impoverished areas, a new stadium was built in a historically white area, costing the city millions that could have been redirected into affordable housing and better service delivery (Musikavanhu et al. 2022). NGOs like NdifunaUkwaziCT and Reclaim The City provide research, advocacy and litigation to work towards land justice and systematic change through affordable land and homes. NGOs work consistently to reshape post-apartheid Cape Town in a direct challenge not only to the legacies of settler colonialism and apartheid but also against the anti-poor and anti-Black policies of the city and provincial government.

The socio-economic and historico-political context of the city remains deeply intwined with the violence of the apartheid regime, in particular sexual violence that was committed with impunity against black and brown bodies and women in particular by agents of the colonial and apartheid regimes (Metcalfe 2025; Brodie et al. 2023; Mpako and Ndoma 2023; Gqola 2022). The context of the city cannot be imagined without the dark historical violences that continue to plague society, and not without the resistance of Capetonians to build a better society where they engage in freedom-making activism.

The city of Cape Town, in line with national policy, has embarked on a campaign of renaming streets, cities and public spaces that carry colonial and apartheid names. These street name changes have drawn criticism from all ends, where either it is seen as an erasure of a group of people histories (white Afrikaaners) or people that believe the government should invest in housing, proper sanitation and other service delivery mechanisms that are underfunded and much needed. For example, in Cape Town, De Waal Drive (M3 highway) was changed to Phillip Kgosane Drive (a prominent anti-apartheid activist and leader of the Pan African Congress (PAC)). The Athlone Civic Centre in Cape Town was renamed after Dulcie September (an anti-apartheid activist assassinated in Paris in 1988). These name changes are politically fraught, yet they form part of the necessary discussion of transforming the cityscape.

3. Rememorying Post-Apartheid Public Memory

This paper uses Toni Morrison’s concept of rememory which focuses on the events and knowledges that are being ‘remembered’ and ‘re-memoried’, which provides a commentary on disjunctures between memory and history (Gqola 2010, p. 8). Gqola argues that “Morrison’s word range implies a much wider field than simply collection, recollection and recalling, and is itself a commentary on the (dis)junctures between memory and history” (p. 8). Morrison’s rememory recognises that “history is fictional” and focuses on the importance to “re-humanise the ‘disremembered and unaccounted for’” (Gqola 2010, p. 9). Rememory thus speaks directly to the complexities of how the lives of those who have been “disremembered can be imaginatively rendered” (Gqola 2010, p. 19). Within this frame, Gqola further argues that rememorying is a counter to forgetting and what she calls ‘un-remembering’—where “both forgetting and unremembering are inscribed by power hierarchies, unremembering is a calculated act of exclusion and erasure” (p. 8). Gqola argues that understanding memory though the lens of rememory “ongoing entanglements: remembering and forgetting, always side by side” (Gqola 2010, p. 19). Furthermore, rememory is in a state of “perpetual incompleteness” due to this constant entanglement in the relationship with the past, present and future (Gqola 2010, p. 19).

Therefore, rememory is a way to rehumanise those who have been purposefully excluded from history through showing the entanglements of the past, present and future. This is the departure point for rememory in this paper, applying the concept to two case studies that have shaped public and popular culture in Cape Town. While the memories created, rememoried and retold within both the Iziko Slave Lodge and the music of YoungstaCPT offer different sites to hold memory, they reflect the resistance to colonial memory and silence crafted over years of single-story narratives of the colonised. Both case studies offer the space for these resistances to show themselves through exhibition of lyrics, art or archive, but also lead the public to question and co-create collective memory of the past, present and future.

Within both case studies, the importance of remembering the histories of enslaved people is central to their intended purpose. Hesse (2002) argues that slave memory studies “invite a questioning of the relations between what is forgotten and what is remembered” (p. 164). In this way, postcolonial memory studies become essential in not only acknowledging the unremembered histories of the past but as a tool to understanding the continuous historical legacies that remain present in our society (Gqola 2010, p. 10). More specifically, Gqola argues that a gendered postcolonial memory should work to rehumanise the way that black and brown women have been portrayed by colonial histories. This applies to indigenous women, such as Sarah Baartman, who was not only brutalised and dehumanised in life, but had her memory tarnished by colonial rhetoric and her bones desecrated in European museums (Abrahams 2003). Connecting back to rememorying, the framing of postcolonial gendered memory and slave memory within the theoretical framework of rememorying is evident in the impact of the historical legacy of Sarah Baartman, written in the past in ways that have shaped how we remember her in the present and shape how she is remembered in the future.

Diana Ferrus’ poem I’ve Come to Take You Home (first written in 1998) is a critical intervention in the practice of rememorying history. Sarah Baartman was a Khoe woman who was taken from South Africa to be put on display at ‘freak shows’ in London and Paris, the latter is where she died. Sarah was referred to by many derogatory names while imprisoned, none which I shall repeat here. At the time of Sarah’s display in England, there were debates surrounding Sarah’s status as an enslaved woman, where counter-narratives have argued that she was a willing subject in her transportation to Europe, being displayed in the shows and in her own prostitution and subsequent alcoholism (Gqola 2010, p. 62). It is evident, in the work of Yvette Abrahams (2003), that Sarah was treated as a slave throughout her time in London, even by those who opposed her display, and subject to the vile obsession of the European public with Black bodies (Gqola 2010). Her remains were put on display in the Musee de l’Homme in Paris from 1816 (Ferrus 2022).

While Ferrus was on a fellowship at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, she states that Sarah came to her in a dream, telling her that she wants to come home, Ferrus’ response was the poem, I’ve come to take you home, turned into a subsequent book of poetry in 2011. Ferrus notes the overwhelming reactions that she received to the poem upon performing it in South Africa for the first time, where through the tears of others, she realised the power in those words (Ferrus 2022). There had been several attempts over the years to have Baartman’s remains returned to South Africa. While Ferrus’ poem is considered a crucial turning point in the French government’s decision to return Sarah’s remains, and was included in the French Law that ensured that return, the actual process of returning Sarah’s remains involved “legal wrangling” between the governments (Gqola 2010, p. 75). Six days before the Sarah’s burial in her hometown of Hankey, a traditional Khoe enrobing ceremony was held in preparation for her body and as an act of rememorying.

Gqola (2010, p. 64) argues that “while pre-funeral rights are customarily referred to as activities performed in memory of the departed, the use of memory evoked, in this instance, an additional set of associations and was linked to other memory activities in the democratic era”. Here Gqola locates the poem within the practice of rememorying to recentre the humanity of those who were dehumanised by colonial narratives and practice. Ferrus’ poem speaks of bringing Sarah home, where home is in the smells, senses and tastes of memory, where Sarah will not be exposed or exhibited, where she can rest peacefully (Gqola 2010). Sarah was laid to rest 192 years after being taken from her home. The significance of this poem does not only lie within its call to bring Sarah home but in how we remember the many enslaved women who were dehumanised, exhibited and violated throughout the colonial and apartheid regimes. As well as in post-apartheid South Africa, where their bodies remain unsafe and unprotected, even in their home. Here is the poem in its entirety:

I have come to take you home, home!

$$

Remember the veld,

the lush green grass beneath the big oak trees?

The air is cool there and the sun does not burn.

I have made your bed at the foot of the hill,

your blankets are covered in buchu and mint,

the proteas stand in yellow and white

and the water in the stream chuckles sing-songs

as it hobbles along over little stones.

$$

I have come to wrench you away,

away from the poking eyes of the man-made monster

who lives in the dark with his clutches of imperialism

who dissects your body bit by bit,

who likens your soul to that of Satan

and declares himself the ultimate God!

$$

I have come to soothe your heavy heart,

I offer my bosom to your weary soul.

I will cover your face with the palms of my hands,

I will run my lips over the lines in your neck,

I will feast my eyes on the beauty of you

and I will sing for you,

for I have come to bring you peace.

$$

I have come to take you home

where the ancient mountains shout your name.

I have made your bed at the foot of the hill.

Your blankets are covered in buchu and mint.

The proteas stand in yellow and white—

$$

I have come to take you home

where I will sing for you,

for you have brought me peace,

for you have brought us peace.

$$

Diana Ferrus, 1998 (Ferrus 2011)

One of the most popular examples of memory practice in post-apartheid South Africa is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which aimed to address the atrocities and crimes against humanity conducted by the apartheid regime. The TRC centred on forgiveness and reconciliation, where testimony was heard by survivors, victims and families of victims. The TRC created a much-needed shift in public memory by exposing the, in some cases, silent horrors of the apartheid regime. While the TRC received much public and scholarly criticism at the time and in subsequent years, the testimony of the survivors challenged the once silent and denied horrors of the apartheid regime. Gobodo-Madikizela (2023), through her analysis of transgenerational trauma, shows how the traumas of the colonial and apartheid regime are experienced by subsequent generations. She argues that “the question of transgenerational consequences of collective trauma in societies with a history of colonial violence, slavery and oppression is of profound significance considering the recent explosion of social protests on a global scale by especially young people who were born or grew up in the shadow of these violent histories” (Gobodo-Madikizela 2023, p. 69). Here, she specifically refers to the #RhodesMustFall movement, where she questions what can be learned about “transgenerational traumatic memory in these collective movements where the descendants of the oppressed are putting their bodies on the line, demanding to be seen and to be heard” (Gobodo-Madikizela 2023, p. 69).

The #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) and #FeesMustFall (#FMF) movements in 2015/2016 were an example of a public and collective rememorying by the post-apartheid generation through widespread protests across South African universities. Starting with the toppling of the statue of British colonizer Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town (UCT), the movement focused on free tertiary educations, a decolonization of the curriculum, fair treatment for non-academic staff and addressing inadequate racial transformation of senior academic staff and student admissions. In addition, the movement focused on class struggles, especially at a historically white university like UCT, where large wealth disparities remain across the student population; these debates led to the subsequent movement of #FeesMustFall. #FMF focused on the inclusion of non-academic staff onto the university payroll and the rising costs of tertiary education, particularly to not have free university education for all. The #RMF movement aimed to challenge the slow pace of decolonization in South African universities of which many are bastions of colonial and apartheid white supremacist institutions. Rooted in intersectionality, Black radical feminism and African feminism, the #RMF movement also ensured that the Jameson Memorial Hall at UCT was renamed the Sarah Baartman Hall.

The role of the arts and literature within memory culture, specifically as sites for holding memory cannot be undervalued. These are spaces of resistance, where artists and writers not only challenge societal issues but invite readers, listeners and viewers to do the same. Therefore, the concept of site in this article is both the physical space of Cape Town, where memorialisation and historical legacies shape its construction, but also the site of memory that exists within the stories that are told, the lived experiences and within the archives, that contribute to the creation and production of public culture.

4. Challenging Colonial Memory

4.1. Iziko Slave Lodge

Iziko Museums of South Africa are a collection of museums aimed to create new national museums that reflected all the history of South Africa. It signals a shifting away from the colonial and apartheid museums that glorified violent legacies and figures. Ndhlovu and Rassool (2021) argue that the undertaking of creating new museums for the new ‘nonracial’ South Africa from the colonial collections that were currently shown was an immense challenge. They argue these challenges include “addressing colonial division between cultural history and Iziko Museums of South Africa ethnography, the near absence of the history of slavery, the failures of the canon of “western” art history, the presence of stolen human remains collected for racial research and the need to adopt approaches to heritage making and management that were attuned to the work of challenging colonial legacies” (Ndhlovu and Rassool 2021, pp. 224–25). The name of the museums, Iziko, in IsiXhosa, meaning ‘hearth of the nation’, was selected to give the museum national grounding (Ndhlovu and Rassool 2021).

Museums in themselves are contested spaces, with overtly colonial histories. Present day critiques of museums, especially those in Europe, are based on the returning of stolen artifacts taken and extracted during colonial regimes. The creation of national museums within new democracies, like that of South Africa, can be critiqued for creating particular narratives in line with new regimes. As a child, school trips included museums, where we would learn about colonial and apartheid history, and as a teenager included a trip to Robben Island. Museums are sites of education, and the curating of these spaces is intentional and aligned with telling the stories of South African history. Iziko Museums across South Africa hold educational programs as well as events on specific national remembrance holidays. The museums also have outreach programs to include marginalised communities and to encourage South Africans to visit the museums (Iziko Museums Annual Report 2021–2022 n.d.). These educational programs extend beyond primary and secondary education and include training for tertiary education students pursuing degrees related to art, history, transitional justice and curatorship.

In 1998, the former South African Cultural History Museum (name since 1964) was renamed the Slave Lodge, due to its history as a site where people enslaved by the VOC were held. As a result, the Slave Lodge holds and “depicts the history of slavery and the forced migration of people, a history which the colonial classificatory division deliberately obscured” (Ndhlovu and Rassool 2021, p. 234). The Slave Lodge, as part of the Iziko Museum ethos, holds various public programs, as well as outreach programs in partnership with schools and community partners, including artistic performances from youth in local communities and memorial or commemorative ceremonies (Iziko Museums Annual Report 2023–2024 n.d.). While the annual report for 2023–2024 states that there were 24,815 visitors to the Slave Lodge, it is unknown how many were by locals or as part of outreach and education programmes offered by the museum. The museum website itself does list a specific curator, but there are notable curatorship efforts by Shanaz Gallant and Paul Tichmann.

Since its opening, the Iziko Slave Lodge has held several exhibitions dedicated to rememorying the histories of both the enslaved and those in forced migration. One of the first prominent exhibitions was the 1794 shipwreck of the Portuguese ship Sao Jose Paquete Africa, the first known shipwreck to have carried African slaves, while on its way to Brazil (Ndhlovu and Rassool 2021). The exhibition was rooted in international collaboration with countries in Africa and beyond, challenging colonial memory and focusing importance on exhibitions that honour slave memory.

Another important exhibition was Under Cover of Darkness, which was dedicated to the lives of three women: Susanna of Bengal, who was accused of killing her baby and sentenced to death; Krotoa, who was taken into Jan van Riebeek’s household as a child and ultimately occupied a complex socio-political standing; and yet unidentified women who were held at the slave lodge showcase the invisibility of enslaved women (Iziko Slave Lodge n.d.c). A memorial to Krotoa was also created in her honour in the Cape Town city bowl. This exhibition was curated by Carine Zaayman, an artist and scholar focused on KhoeKhoe histories.

In December 2024, I revisited the Iziko Slave Lodge Museum. The building itself has remained within its original colonial form, giving a chilling feeling upon entry. As a descendant of enslaved people, the connections to my own family history and the histories housed in the museum were healing and confronting. The museum holds space for archives of narratives of enslaved people, etched on the walls of the museum. The museum consists of two main levels, each room and space housing different exhibitions. The Column of Memory, a prominent feature in the museum, has the names of enslaved people written across it, which reflect the range of places from where enslaved people were taken. Given surnames in the Dutch style, such as “van Bengalen”, “van Java”, “van Mozambique” “van Zanzibar”, “van Batavia” and “van Bali” as examples, enslaved people were stripped of their names, a vital part of their identities. The surnames reflect the wide range of the Dutch colonial empire, connections relatively unknown due to the destruction of histories of enslaved people, who were viewed as material objects.

Since October 2016, the Iziko Slave Lodge has housed an exhibition specifically focused on surnames, titled “My naam is Februarie”/my name is February. The exhibit follows the stories of descendants of enslaved people who have surnames that reflect each month of the year. Across the Cape it is common to find people with these surnames, either written in Afrikaans or English. Enslaved people were given the surname based on the month of the year that the slave ship arrived at the Cape. Participants in the exhibition all have surnames reflecting the months of the year, they reflect on the history of the surname, connecting it to its slave heritage, but also sharing their own experiences in relation to their history and the intergenerational trauma of the apartheid regimes (Iziko Slave Lodge n.d.a). These videos can be found on the Iziko Museums YouTube page as well as in the exhibition room at the Slave Lodge.

From my own visit, this exhibition is a profound example of rememorying. While surnames may seem innocuous, they are inextricably linked to slave heritage. The politics of naming in itself was a deeply colonial exercise, evident in building and place names as well, therefore it is important to give context to the colonial histories of naming. The plaque on the entrance to the exhibition reads, “this exhibition is based on interviews with people whose surnames derive from calendar names, open up dialogue about the way in which the often forgotten and neglected slave past has shaped out heritage, not only at the Cape but in South Africa as a whole. In taking up this narrative we wish to pay tribute to the thousands of people forcibly uprooted from their homes in various parts of Africa and Asia, who were brought to the Cape and whose labour contributed to the building of South Africa’s cities, towns and farms”. This plaque further echoes the attempts of the new museums to amplify the histories of enslaved people and directly locate the exhibitions to the contexts in which they exist.

Another exhibition currently showing at the Iziko Slave Lodge is the “The Names of Freedom: 1664–1848 From Slave to Citizen” exhibition, which is visible immediately upon entering the museum. This museum is part of an exhibition exchange with Reunion Departmental Council (France), and the Villèle Historical Museum in La Reunion and the Iziko Slave Lodge (Iziko Slave Lodge n.d.b). My first viewing of this exhibition came at a time while writing a chapter with Reunionese scholar Meyeti Payet on colonial silences in the Indian Ocean, and our attempts to connect our histories (Metcalfe and Payet, forthcoming). The exhibition showcases how enslaved people were given names before and after the emancipation process. Evident here again is the importance on highlighting the violences of the colonial naming process but also what these mean for the descendants of enslaved people.

Understanding the colonial legacies of surnames is an act of rememory, in the same way as renaming a street. Both acts challenge colonial memories while shifting public memory that has been conditioned by years of unremembering practices. The inclusion of the histories of the local community, in particular holding space for the memories of those who have survived the horrors of apartheid and the legacies of the colonial regime, shows the museum’s shifting role as a space of rememorialisation rather than constructing a narrative of unremembering. Of course, the museum as an institution is not without its critiques; however, this museum and the historical, geographic and physical location is rooted within a deeply violent memory that it does not shy away from. Rather, it refocuses the narrative onto the histories of enslavement at the Cape through archives and memory. The reclamation of the Iziko Slave Lodge as a site for remembering the histories of the enslaved goes hand in hand with the challenges of how to reutilize colonial spaces in the postcolonial context. How do we remember without also unremembering? And who do we remember and in which ways?

4.2. Youngsta CPT’s YVR

Cape Town born and Cape Flats raised rapper Riyadh Roberts aka YoungstaCPT has been well known on the South African HipHop scene for a while. The rapper is known for repping his neighbourhood and uplifting the voices of working class people (Swai 2019). First, let me share a contextual note on terminology and location. The Cape Flats is an area in Cape Town where people, more specifically those racially classified as coloured and black by the apartheid regime, were forcibly removed to live as a result of the Group Areas Act. The racial category of Coloured is a broad term, used to further entrench racial categories of white and coloured. Cape Malays, used to identify Cape Muslims under colonial and apartheid racial categories, included people enslaved by the VOC and the British and brought to the Cape from South and Southeast Asia, East Africa and across the Indian Ocean. This is not to say that all Muslims in Cape Town come from “Malay” roots; rather, this shows the problematic and generalising notion of apartheid and colonial racial classifications (Baderoon 2014). “Derived from the use of Bahasa Melayu and eventually coming to mean “Muslim”, the term “Malay” is also shadowed by the history of enforced migration and enslavement. The use of the word “Malay” for Muslim during the colonial period is distinct from its use under apartheid as the racial category “Cape Malay” or “Malay”” (Baderoon 2014, p. 13). Baderoon argues that only towards the end of the VOC regime did the term Malay lose its geographical meaning to become synonymous with being Muslim.

Cape Malay was a sub-category of the broader constructed racial category of Coloured. The term and the continued use of the term is contested within post-apartheid South Africa, with many, like my mother, opting to use Black—as a unifying term and in response to the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) headed by Steve Biko, referring to those who by law have been politically, economically and socially discriminated against, where essentialist constructions of race are rejected (Biko 1970; Williams et al. 2019)—while others advocate for the continued use of the term as a cultural and linguistic identity. The contestations of this term is covered in seminal works such as Mohamed Adhikari’s Burdened by Race (Adhikari 2009) and Zimitri Erasmus’ Race Otherwise (Erasmus 2017), amongst many prominent works. While the terminology of coloured was used across the British colonial empire, it was refined by the apartheid regime, to consist of “dividing the term “Coloured” into “Cape Coloured, Cape Malay, Griqua, Indian, Chinese, ‘other Asiatic’, and ‘Other Coloured’”” (Reddy 2001, p. 75). The conflating of indigenous groups like indigenous Khoe, Nama, Griqwa and San people, has led to further contestation of this generalising and historically erasing category. The aim of the apartheid regime, through forced assimilation into this category of Coloured, was to create hierarchies of oppression, leading many people to be ashamed of their indigenous roots. YoungstaCPT represents this history, as a practicing Muslim; his music challenges stereotypes related to Cape Malay people, narratives of shame from being enslaved and Islamophobia, but it is also a challenge to racial categorisation and colonial histories (Swai 2019).

YoungstaCPT, along with many other Cape Town artists like Jitsvinger, Temple Boys, Blaq Pearl, Boskasie, Brasse vannie Kaap and Prophets of Da City, amongst many others, rap or sing in Afrikaaps within their music. Afrikaaps has often been considered a “lower version” of Afrikaans, particularly constructed as such by the apartheid regime as not being a “respectable” language (Oppelt 2023). However, Afrikaaps or Kaaps has become considered as its own language and is predominantly spoken on the Cape Flats in Cape Town (Oppelt 2023; Alim et al. 2021). The reclamation of Kaaps is in itself a challenge of colonial and apartheid memory that sought to unremember the origins of Afrikaans, which were constructed as “pure” and stemming only from Dutch. Kaaps, a mix of Khoekhoe, Bahasa Maleyu, Dutch and Portuguese and many South and Southeast Asian words, was a creolised language created at the Cape (Oppelt 2023; Alim et al. 2021). “Afrikaaps depicts this colonial Afrikaner project as “cultural appropriation” because ‘the construction of Afrikaans as a ‘pure’ language with Dutch origins served the Afrikaner Nationalist project when the National Party came into power in 1948 and began to justify its plans to implement legislated apartheid,” which “relied on biologically essentialist understandings of race as bounded and fixed and[…]those classified as coloured [were] seen as racially mixed and, therefore, defiled—marked with the shame of miscegenation’” (Alim et al. 2021, p. 198; Haupt 2001, pp. 176–78). Afrikaaps, and the movement of artists behind using the language in their music, is a site of refusal, a challenge to colonial histories that erase the intermixing of indigenous languages and have constructed Afrikaans as pure (Alim et al. 2021). Afrikaaps and its use is not only a reflection of the mother tongue of those on the Cape Flats but its solidification as a language within popular culture is a critical intervention into understanding the histories and complexities of colonial and apartheid suppression on a linguistic and cultural level.

Youngsta CPT is an award winning South African artist who first entered the scene in 2012. Since then, he has amassed a huge following across the country, solidifying his place in the Hip Hop scene, traditionally dominated by artists in Johannesburg (Swai 2019). In 2018, Youngsta won the South African Music Award for Best Lyricist and in celebration took the trophy on a tour of the Cape Flats to many schools, amplifying his message of cultural and linguistic pride (Swai 2019). In 2024, Youngsta was interviewed for GQ South Africa where he made his magazine cover debut. In the article titled “YoungstaCPT is one of SA’s most successful and influential voices in Hip Hop” he spoke of his childhood and the inspiration for his music (Manual 2024). Youngsta discussed his troubles of being signed to a label because of his political opinions and stigma attached to his racial identity, sparking his building of himself as an independent artist (Manual 2024). Youngsta addressed the continued stigma faced by coloured people as a result of apartheid constructed stereotypes. He also critiques the schooling environment for not sharing enough about coloured history and notes the importance of oral tradition in understanding the specific histories and cultural tropes in his music. He said, “speaking to my grandfather was a type of awakening for me. Him giving me his history and background and me sitting and realising how the current situation is not very different from how it was in the 50s, 60s and 70s. It was also a tribute album to him.” (Manual 2024).

While the apartheid education system taught a very specific heroes’ version of Afrikaner nationalist history and colonialism, paying homage to Dutch settlers and Afrikaner resistance to the British, the histories of the people oppressed by the colonial system were not present, and if they were, coloured people were portrayed as lazy or docile. In post-apartheid South Africa, national education on these histories did shift to include the horrors, atrocities and lived experience of those who fought for liberation, but the focus was more on major events on a national scale, rather than location specific histories. Therefore, Youngsta’s 2019 album 3T (Things Take Time) is a specific political and resistant intervention to highlighting the histories of coloured people, bolstered through clips of conversations with his grandfather throughout the album, acknowledging the importance of these histories being passed down but also affirming the importance of lived experiences in the process of rememorying these histories. The album features a picture of his now late grandfather, Boeta Shaakie, who features prominently on the album through conversations and oral retelling between the two, where they reflect on colonial and apartheid histories and well as unpacking what freedom means in post-apartheid South Africa. Like the Iziko Slave Lodge, Youngsta recentres the excluded histories of enslavement at the Cape and critiques what he perceives to be the exclusion of coloured identity from the national memory. Youngsta has since also included collaborations with artists from outside of the Johannesburg scene, such as the successful Early B, a coloured rapper from Gqeberha (formerly Port Elizabeth), to ensure through his music, forgotten or sidelined memories are represented.

In his song Voice of the Cape (VOC) (YoungstaCPT 2019a), Youngsta plays on the VOC (Dutch East India Company) by instilling himself as the Voice of the Cape, which is also a popular Muslim radio station (Moses 2020). In his song he states, “I’m the voice of the Cape, I gave a new voice to this place. And now they can rejoice in the Cape, I’m the voice of the voiceless”. This further indicates how he stakes his claim in the public space but also as a challenge to bringing Cape Town and Afrikaaps into the mainstream national popular culture. VOC features on his 2019 Album 3T.

YVR—or Young van Riebeek—from the same album (YoungstaCPT 2019b) is a more focused look at the specific histories of colonialism and how these extend in the current democratic era. The nuance of using the name Young van Riebeek is a play on the name of the Dutch settler and head of VOC in Cape Town, Jan van Riebeek, who is one of the most notorious colonial figures in colonial history and apartheid memory (Swai 2019, p. 364). YVR provides a challenge to these narratives by presenting a decolonised rememory of the experiences of enslavement from the perspective of those enslaved. From the album cover to the lyrics and with the incredible imagery of the music video, Youngsta challenges white supremacist constructions of the VOC and British history of enslavement in the Cape, while rehumanising our ancestors and telling their side of the story, through us as their descendants.

The cover for the YVR track reflects the old Dutch colonial emblem for the municipality of Cape Town/Gemeente van Kaapstad. While common Dutch history versions state that Cape Town was merely a “rest stop” for the VOC rather than a brutal and violent settler colonial regime, this emblem signifies that Cape Town was indeed part of the Dutch colonial empire. The YVR track cover with YVR spray painted over the front of the emblem is not only a literal writing over of history but also staking the claim that he is now Young van Riebeek, colonising the HipHop game (Swai 2019), evident in the lyrics, “a lot of mense [people] is hating but that’s not surprising, The hip hop game is like a country I am colonizing”.

Throughout YVR, Youngsta makes repeated references to the arrival of the British and the Dutch and the legacies of their colonial regimes:

• “When I stiek uit [arrive] it’s like the British and the Dutch arriving
• When they landed at the sea shore
• And they thought the Cape was just a detour
• Educate yourself, read more
• Before they signing your deceased forms”

Evident in the lyrics here, Youngsta refers to the colonial versions of history, that the Cape was only a brief detour along the spice trade route, rather than a violent slave route. The perceived “innocence” of this version of history is challenged by the statement “before they signing your deceased forms”, reflecting the violence of colonial regimes and the legality of signing documents sending people into slavery and ultimately to their death. This line further highlights how many slaves or even indentured labourers, after the abolition of slavery, where unaware of the content of any legal documents given to them by the colonial officials, due to language and literacy reasons. Youngsta then stresses the importance of education to avoid misinformation that leads to harm or the loss of dignity. Another challenge of this colonial memory can be found in:

• “You was worried about the waves,
• I was worried about the slaves
• Now you standing there amazed
• Go tell the mense [people] what’s my name”

Here, Youngsta specifically addresses the concerns of colonial powers, who viewed enslaved people as property, concerned only about making it across the ocean with their “cargo”, rather than the well-being and humanization of the people these boats carried. Swai argues that Youngsta offers “an intriguing and essential way of rewriting history; ultimately he elevates his concern about the slaves to the same founding-the-nation narrative as the well-known stories about storms and shipwrecks around the Cape” (Swai 2019, p. 365). As a descendant of these enslaved people, Youngsta reclaims and rehumanizes our ancestors through active remembering in showing worry for their safety. He shifts the perspective on who is important to remember, rather than what. Furthermore, his line “now you standing their amazed” brings it back to the dehumanizing visions that colonisers had of enslaved people, where Youngsta is not only a living decent of people they had tried to wipe out but is successful, according to his lyrics, in being the best in the HipHop game. In relation to this, he says “go tell the mense [people] what’s my name”, which immediately leads to the start of the chorus “It’s the Cape crusader, Young Van Riebeek, I put it down like Young Van Riebeek, What the name is? Young Van Riebeek (Kaapstad did it)”. Through renaming himself as the Cape crusader, he refocuses the narrative, decentring Jan van Riebeek by appropriating his name.

Towards the end of the song, Youngsta again brings the conversation back to the writing of history from the viewpoint of the coloniser. He evokes a shared understanding that we all suffer from the effects of colonialism, where our scars remain visible. However, Youngsta also uses the continuum of colonial memory into apartheid memory and now the realities of living in the post-apartheid era, stating “take a look at how far behind we are”—referring to the amount of work that still needs to be done to overcome the colonial wounds and trauma.

• “Our history was rewritten by the Europeans and Britain
• We all share the same symptoms
• But you can never ever hide the scars
• Take a look at how far behind we are
• Now come meet the man behind the bars, his initials are YVR”

YVR, and the challenging of colonial memory through appropriating Jan van Riebeek’s name is a powerful lyrical resistance to accepting colonial versions of our histories. Youngsta calls out how colonial and apartheid histories have engaged in acts of unremembering, and through YVR and the 3T album more broadly, he practices rememory, shifting the public memory through pop culture as a tool to rehumanising our ancestors and memories of enslaved people.

From a visual perspective, the YVR music video is a rich and intense work of art. Directed by Imraan Christiansen, a Cape Flats and Cape Muslim artist and photographer, the YVR music video is a visual journey of rememory. The video begins with YoungstaCPT in a royal cape with a crown on his head alone in a colonial architecture-designed room, symbolising both an intervention into the colonial space in which he is physically present, but also as symbolism for his dominance in HipHop (Swai 2019). He is then shown wearing a red “fez”, a prayer hat worn by Cape Malay Muslims in Cape Town and a redesigned version of a colonial officer’s uniform. He is surrounded by other Muslim men and women, dressed in clothing for prayer.

The video follows the story of a revolt by enslaved people. Four men in chains sit in a boat while a Dutch coloniser, perceived to be Jan van Riebeeck, in VOC clothing/uniform stands over them, while berating and laughing at them. The slaves then revolt against the man holding them captive. This narrative shows another version of the history of enslavement that does not form part of colonial memory of the coloniser—resistance. Colonial perceptions of enslaved people were that they were docile and would therefore be “good slaves”—these narratives were present in Dutch colonial rhetoric from Cape Town to Suriname (Baderoon 2014). The revolt pictured in this video, although only four men, reflects a version of history where enslaved people become active agents in their lives and brings alive the many slave revolts that occurred during this time.

Throughout the revolt, Youngsta chants “Young van Riebeek, Young van Riebeek” multiple times, until the end of the video, evoking this rememorialisation of history, his challenge to colonial memory and reminder of his presence and the presence of enslaved people as those who resist rather than remain docile, as we were written and perceived to be. The video ends with a powerful image of Jan van Riebeek still dressed in his VOC clothing, lying face down, dead, and floating in the ocean. This image is powerful in that it challenges the images of oppression and violence inflicted on to black and brown bodies that are consistently shown in relation to slavery but also signifies an act of defiance, a triumph against the colonial regime. It signals a message and act of rememorying that while the legacies of colonialism and apartheid remain deeply entrenched in South African society, descendants of enslaved people remember through keeping their historical consciousness alive in ways that rehumanise them and reclaim their power.

The 3T album in itself pays homage to the rememorying of the colonial version of histories of enslaved people. As I have shown here, YVR, in its own right, both visually and lyrically seeks to engage in rememory practice. In the extended version of YVR that can be heard on the 3T album, at the end of the song, Youngsta returns to being in conversation with his grandfather, a memorialising of his memories and experiences, where he shares his own thoughts on colonial histories in South Africa:

“You know, if you rewrite history and delve deep into the history, you will find that the Afrikaner, the white man don’t have a history here because he don’t belong here. They came in here as an immigrant, what they call colonialism. They came into the country and they stole from those who they called ignorant. You see.”.

(YoungstaCPT 2019b)

5. Concluding Thoughts

Both the Iziko Slave Lodge and Youngst CPT’s YVR engage in rememorying practice. While the legacies of colonialism and apartheid remain deeply entrenched in post-apartheid society, Capetonians are hard at work to bring marginalized histories from the periphery to the core. Rememorying is used not only to understand the historical legacies that underpin societal conditions, identity construction and sense of belonging that inform public memory, but also it is used by artists themselves, to deliver messages of historical truth and challenges to colonial silence to create new narratives in popular culture.

YoungstaCPT, as an artist but also through his song YVR, provides a compelling case study for how born free South Africans are engaging with the retelling and rememorying of South African history. Youngsta’s approach is focused specifically on coloured history as an interruption of what he, and many in his fan base, view as the exclusion of coloured history from national historical narratives. The stigma attached to the history of slavery as well as the solidification of coloured identity as a homogenous racial category, are significant challenges to shifting decolonial conversations about coloured identity. These are also focal points of the Iziko Slave Lodge. Tasked with telling the history of enslaved people at the Cape, but also the broader impacts of the legacies of enslavement, colonialism and apartheid. The Slave Lodge actively addresses years of unremembering that national museums have been guilty of in the pre-democratic era. The practice of rememorying is not only in the exhibitions that are housed at the museums but in the physical space of the Slave Lodge building in itself. With a deeply traumatic and haunting colonial memory and history, which one can still feel within the building today, the museum changes the energy, addresses this history head on while engaging the broader public through programmes and education to counter colonially constructed public memory, while honouring and caring for not only those who died at the hands of this violence, and creating space for the intergenerational trauma of their descendants who inhabit Cape Town today.

Sites of memory differ; they can become memorialised in lyrics, music or in pieces of art or in the museum. While all these sites are contested, they lead towards a broader conversation about what is remembered and by who? How have stories been told and retold? How do we come to know the things that we know? As we look beyond the tangible documents that hold history, where colonial silence haunts the in-between spaces on the pages, rememorying plays out in different sites across public memory and popular culture.