Exploring Cape Town’s ‘Castle of Good Hope’, oldest surviving building in SA

CNBC Africa published this fifty-minute documentary in October 2017, as the Castle of Good Hope was being refurbished and pitched as a candidate for World Heritage status. Rather than a tour of the battlements, it is a conversation about what the oldest surviving building in South Africa means today, carried by historians, castle staff, Khoi and San voices, and officials from the defence ministry that still owns the site.

The film begins long before 1652, stressing that people lived at the Cape for tens of thousands of years before the Dutch East India Company arrived. It describes the first fort, the displacement of Khoikhoi communities to make way for the stone pentagon, and the enslaved workers brought from Angola and the East who helped build it. One of the most affecting passages is set in the castle’s torture chamber, where a staff member recalls a visitor whose ancestor was branded there. Later sections cover the De Kat balcony from which laws and sentences were proclaimed, Krotoa, the Khoi interpreter once buried under the castle, and the prisoners of the wars of resistance.

The castle’s ghosts — an angry governor said to stride the ramparts, a grey lady at functions, cries from the windowless cell called the Donker Gat — are never mentioned here, which is exactly why the film is worth watching alongside them. The best-known story, about Governor Pieter Gysbert Noodt being cursed by a soldier he had sent to the gallows and dying the same day in April 1729, grew out of the punishments this documentary describes. The torture chamber and the cells are where those legends are set.

Some dates in the programme are garbled in passing; the record gives January 2, 1666 for the laying of the first stones and 1679 for the completion of the five bastions. The film is also openly an argument for re-telling the castle’s story from the point of view of the dispossessed and enslaved, so expect advocacy as well as history.