Western Cape Heritage

The Western Cape is the oldest European colonial settlement in sub-Saharan Africa, and the place where South Africa's multilayered cultural history is most visibly concentrated. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) established a refreshment station at Table Bay in 1652 — not a colony initially, just a stop on the route between Amsterdam and Batavia — and what grew from that modest fort and garden is one of the most historically complex places in the southern hemisphere.

Three and a half centuries of European settlement, indigenous Khoikhoi and San presence going back tens of thousands of years, a community descended from enslaved workers brought from across the Indian Ocean world, Xhosa-speaking communities in the east and north of the province, the wine farms and wheat farms of the Boland, the sardine run on the Garden Route coast — the Western Cape contains more history per square kilometre than almost any region in Africa.

The Cape of Good Hope

The Cape of Good Hope is not, as is commonly stated, the southernmost point of Africa — that is Cape Agulhas, 150 kilometres to the south-east — but it is the most symbolically significant. The Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias rounded it in 1488, the first European to do so, and named it Cabo das Tormentas: the Cape of Storms. King John II of Portugal renamed it Cape of Good Hope — boa esperança — because its rounding opened the sea route to the riches of the east.

The hope that the name expressed was about trade. The Cape was the hinge on which the global economy turned for two centuries: every ship carrying spices, silk, porcelain, and later tea between Europe and Asia passed around it or stopped in Table Bay. The refreshment station that the VOC established in 1652 was a strategic necessity, and the city that grew from it is a direct consequence of where the winds and currents of the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet.

The Khoikhoi and San

The Khoikhoi — the "men of men," as they called themselves, whom the Dutch called Hottentots — had been herding cattle on the Cape Peninsula for at least 2,000 years when the VOC arrived. The San — the "Bushmen," the hunter-gatherers — had been in southern Africa for at least 100,000 years, leaving their record in thousands of rock art sites across the Western Cape.

The encounter between the VOC settlement and the Khoikhoi communities was initially commercial — the VOC needed cattle and the Khoikhoi traded them — but it deteriorated into dispossession and then near-annihilation through disease, warfare, and the absorption of surviving Khoikhoi individuals into the enslaved and labouring population of the colony. Within a century of the VOC's arrival, the independent Khoikhoi communities of the Cape Peninsula had ceased to exist as political entities.

The San rock art of the Western Cape — in the Cederberg mountains, at Boomplaas, in the Swartberg passes — is among the most extensive and best-preserved in the world. The images of eland, human figures, and the therianthropic creatures that represent the shamanic experience of the spirit world are 10,000 years of visual culture carved and painted into the stone of a landscape that was already ancient when the first Khoikhoi herders arrived.

The Winelands

The Cape Winelands — Stellenbosch, Franschhoek, Paarl, and the surrounding valleys — were established in the last decades of the 17th century. The VOC planted the first vines at the Cape in 1655; Simon van der Stel established the farm at Groot Constantia in 1685; the Huguenot refugees who arrived in 1688, fleeing the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, brought with them a knowledge of viticulture that shaped the early development of South African wine.

Franschhoek — Afrikaans for "French Corner" — is the Huguenot settlement. The families who came from France brought their surnames — du Plessis, du Toit, de Villiers, Malherbe, Rousseau, Joubert — and their winemaking knowledge, and the combination produced, within two generations, a wine industry that would eventually become the ninth-largest in the world.

Constantia wine, made from the Muscat de Frontignan grape at the estate Simon van der Stel established, was the most famous wine in the world in the late 18th century. Napoleon requested it on his deathbed at St. Helena. Jane Austen referenced it in Sense and Sensibility. Frederick the Great of Prussia ordered it by the barrel. The wine that came from a farm in the Cape Peninsula had reached every court in Europe.

The Garden Route

The Garden Route — the coastal strip between Mossel Bay and Storms River — is one of the most celebrated landscapes in South Africa: the fynbos-covered hills descending to the Indian Ocean, the lagoons at Knysna and Wilderness, the indigenous forests of Tsitsikamma that are the largest remaining coastal temperate forest in southern Africa, the Outeniqua mountains behind.

The Knysna lagoon was a centre of the indigenous forest timber industry in the 19th century; the yellowwood and stinkwood of the Outeniqua forests were cut for furniture that still appears in Cape Dutch homesteads across the province. The forests were already depleted by the 1880s; what remains is protected, and the walk through the Knysna Forest — the trees reaching 35 metres above narrow paths, the Knysna loerie calling from the canopy — is one of the most atmospheric experiences in the Western Cape.

Cape Dutch Architecture

The Cape Dutch farmhouses of the Western Cape are among the most visually distinctive vernacular architecture in Africa: the whitewashed gables, the thatched roofs, the oak trees planted along the farm lane, the cellar that runs beneath the house and the stoep that runs along its front. The style developed in the 18th century from a combination of Dutch building traditions, local materials (mountain slate, clay brick, Robben Island slate), and the specific climate of the Cape — the hot, dry Winelands summer and the cold, wet winter that comes off the Atlantic.

Vergelegen, Boschendal, Groot Constantia, Lanzerac — the great Cape Dutch estates are still standing, most of them as wine farms, some as museums, and the landscape they create along the valley roads of Stellenbosch and Franschhoek is unlike anything else in South Africa.

Robben Island

Robben Island sits in Table Bay seven kilometres from the Cape Town waterfront. It was used as a political prison for most of its colonial history — Khoikhoi leaders were exiled there in the 17th century, lepers were quarantined there in the 19th century, and Nelson Mandela served 18 of his 27 years of imprisonment there in the apartheid era.

The island is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of South Africa's most visited destinations. The tours are conducted by former political prisoners — men who were incarcerated there and who walk visitors through the cells and the quarry where Mandela and his colleagues worked for years, damaging their eyes in the glare from the lime rock. The island connects the history of the Cape — its long use as a place of confinement and exile — to the 20th-century story of apartheid resistance in a way that no museum could replicate.