The 5 R’s of the Castle

The Castle is South Africa’s oldest surviving colonial building. It was built using a cutting-edge military design of the time, which makes it architecturally notable.

What makes it even more remarkable is that it was built by a trading company rather than a government, and constructed using trafficked labour at one of the most remote corners of the world known to Europeans at the time.

The Castle has been recorded, depicted, and debated for more than 350 years. It appears in VOC governors’ letters, British officers’ diaries, Boer prisoners’ accounts, and apartheid military records. Hundreds of historical paintings show it - many now hanging inside the Castle itself in the William Fehr Collection.

But the more interesting question is not whether it has been remembered. It is how, and by whom. For Dutch settlers, it was the birthplace of their colony. For the Khoekhoe, it was the kui keip - the stone enclosure that began their dispossession. For the enslaved people who built it, it was both their workplace and their prison. For African kings held within its walls, it was where colonial power displayed its victories over resistance.

These are not competing versions of the same story. They are different stories, all true at once. What makes the democratic era’s approach significant is its refusal to choose between them.

The Castle of Good Hope has not merely witnessed history - it has been the mechanism through which history was made. Decisions made inside the Castle changed South Africa forever.

Tens of thousands of people were enslaved because of choices made there. The Khoekhoe people lost their land because of it. Some of its laws still affect South Africa today. During apartheid, the military used it to enforce racial segregation.

Now, in the democratic era, people around the world look to what South Africa has done with the Castle when they ask: what should we do with buildings that were part of terrible regimes?

Who gets to enter a building, and who is kept out - that question is not just history. Many people feel it today.

All over the world, societies are asking what to do with buildings that were part of dark chapters in their past. The Castle’s answer was to transform it without erasing what happened there.

This is one of the most thoughtful responses to that question anywhere in the world. Don’t erase history. Remember it, so we can learn from it and not repeat those chapters that highlighted the darker side of humanity.

The Castle shows how colonial power actually worked - how a trading company quietly became a government, how forced labour was built into the foundations of places that later called themselves civilised.

It also shows how the same building can mean completely different things depending on which side of its walls you stood on. It could be seen as a refuge or a prison. And now as a national heritage site showcasing the journey of South Africans through time.

It also shows something else: that history can be told honestly. Doing that is uncomfortable. But it is more powerful than pretending it never happened.