The Iziko Slave Lodge Museum is housed on the premises where thousands of slaves were effectively held prisoner from 1679 onwards. Revealing the oppression and severe conditions imposed upon swathes of individuals, the museum is nowadays a construction of austere and eerie quiet – an appropriate embodiment of a way of living that is thankfully in the past.
History of the Slave Lodge
It was the Dutch East India Company (VOC) who built the lodge in the 1600s. Having established a base in the Cape in 1652, the colonial multinational corporation started importing slaves just a few years later, and more or less kept slavery as a part of life in the Cape until it was abolished in 1834. It is estimated that approximately 9,000 slaves would have lived at the Slave Lodge during that time and evidence also suggests that convicts and the mentally ill were sent to live there.
Exhibitions at the Slave Lodge
Visitors take a route in a square around the edge of the Slave Lodge, leaving a large hallway and central courtyard intact. The museum focuses on how slavery impacted on the cultural diversity and roots of South Africans today, and there are large exhibitions in a series of rooms conveying this.
One of the most powerful is an exhibition of rows of dank-looking, wooden slatted bunks, sitting in a shadow behind a world map highlighting slave routes to Cape Town. While those involved in the European slave trade transported African slaves to Central and South America and the Caribbean, the majority of slaves brought to the Cape were from Indonesia, India-Ceylon, Madagascar and Mozambique.
An audio tour is also available, told through the words of a visitor to the museum who dropped off supplies every week. While the man explains his shock and horror at the conditions and the poor people he supposedly saw there, it’s not quite the same as hearing it from the slaves themselves.
Stories From the Slaves
Some of the most intriguing anthropological remnants displayed in the museum are the stories and accounts that have emerged from the slaves themselves. The majority are from the slaves who ended up having closer relationships with their colonial ‘captors’ – women who bore distinctive coloured or white children, or even those who ended up marrying the colonial employees of the VOC after slavery was abolished.
The emergence of different coloured skins in the Cape, in part due to the arrival of the foreign slaves and their relationships with the Dutch colonists, would go on to cause further segregation later on after the slaves were freed, as apartheid tightened its grip. The Slave Lodge Museum goes on to address this with exhibitions relating to human rights and influential activists during the apartheid. The museum has coined a carefully constructed vision,based on this, about why it exists in the form it does today: “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 stigmatized.” (Iziko Slave Lodge Museum).
Appropriate Tribute to a Repressed People in South Africa
The memory of the old South Africa takes the form of a sinuous stream that meanders from one form of oppression to another, where colonialism and slavery turned into apartheid. To learn about and recognize this history is but a small mark of respect and acknowledgement that the foreign traveler can leave behind by visiting the Slave Lodge.
The nearby South African Jewish Museum is equally worthwhile. Both are located by the Company’s Gardens and near the High Court, where people attended hearings to decide which race they would be classified as during apartheid, and where benches for ‘Whites only’ and ‘Non Whites only’ still stand outside. Visiting the Iziko Slave Lodge is part of an important journey for the international tourist to understand the context of their locality and the people surrounding them little better.
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