All that is buried is not dead”: Public histories and legacies of slavery in post-apartheid Cape Town

by Nick Shepherd

This paper is concerned with the materiality of memory and identity in the post-colony. More specifically, it is concerned with developing a set of comparative perspectives around the public histories and legacies of slavery in the postcolonial/ post-apartheid city, in this case as mediated by the corporeal remains of the colonial underclasses themselves. Prestwich Street is in a rapidly gentrifying part of Cape Town , close to the Waterfront, the city's glitzy international zone. The accidental discovery of an early colonial burial site in Prestwich Street in the course of construction activities in May 2003, and its subsequent exhumation, became the occasion of a fiercely contested public campaign. This pitted pro-exhumation heritage managers, archaeologists and property developers against an alliance of community activists, spiritual leaders and First Nations representatives. The materiality of the site and its remains became a key point of focus for the working out of a range of forces and interests in post-apartheid society, including the buried legacies of slavery and colonialism in the city, the memory of apartheid forced removals, and post-apartheid struggles over restitution and representation. In quite complex ways, the contestation around Prestwich Street served to map the shape and nature of an emergent post-apartheid public sphere. On the one hand, it mobilised a technicist, dispassionate discourse, wedded to notions of science as authoritative intervention, and framed in terms of notions of heritage management and development. On the other hand, one saw the emergence of what I would characterise as a “public heritage discourse”, framed around an empathetic identification with the Prestwich Street dead, and a particular understanding of the histories of slavery and forced removals. Even as the public histories and legacies of slavery in Cape Town remain largely unresolved, so the transformation of the physical fabric of the city has accelerated. The burial site on Prestwich Street is currently being redeveloped as a set of “New-York-style” loft apartments, with an invented history which references New York 's “Jazz Age”.