Six Flags Over Three Centuries

For 143 years, the Castle was the nerve centre of the Cape Colony - part logistics hub, part government, part military base, part prison and courthouse. It was the place where everything that mattered was decided. The colony that had started as a vegetable garden grew into something far more complex and far more troubled, fuelled by enslaved labour and the steady dispossession of the Khoekhoe people.

In 1682, Governor Simon van der Stel moved the main entrance from the seaward side to the landward side. Cape storms kept flooding the courtyard through the original gate. A practical fix. But it is also a neat metaphor for the whole VOC era: constantly adapting to a reality that never matched what the directors in Amsterdam had imagined.

The first British takeover of the Castle had nothing to do with the Cape and everything to do with France.

In 1795, French Revolutionary forces swept through the Netherlands and established the Batavian Republic - effectively a French puppet state.

Britain, already at war with France, immediately worried about French access to the Cape. A French-controlled Cape would threaten British shipping to India.

British forces landed at Muizenberg, a coastal village south-east of Cape Town, in July 1795. The Dutch defenders made a stand, but they were outgunned and poorly supplied. After a brief but decisive engagement, the Dutch retreated.

The Castle, some distance away, assessed the situation and surrendered without a shot being fired at its walls. For the second time in the Castle’s history - and it would not be the last - the fortress changed hands not because of any failure of its own defences, but because the battle that mattered had already been lost somewhere else.

A new flag went up. British uniforms replaced Dutch ones. English replaced Dutch as the language of official correspondence. But essentially the machinery of colonial government carried on as before.

At this point in time, the British had not come to transform the Cape - they had come to deny it to France. For eight years, that was enough.

The Treaty of Amiens paused the European wars in 1802. As part of the peace settlement Britain agreed to hand the Cape back to the Dutch - now reconstituted as the French-backed Batavian Republic.

New officials arrived. The flag changed.

Three years later, the peace collapsed and the whole process reversed again.

The people actually living at the Cape had no vote in any of this. Their home was traded back and forth between European powers like a commodity, decided by people who had never been to Africa.

The Napoleonic Wars killed the peace. Britain landed 6,700 troops at Bloubergstrand in January 1806. The Battle of Blaauwberg lasted only a few hours. The Castle changed hands again, for the fourth time, without a shot being fired at its walls.

In 1814, the London Convention made it official: Britain bought the Cape Colony from the Dutch for six million pounds, treating an entire continent’s worth of people as an accounting entry.

By 1811, the colonial government had expanded sufficiently that it needed purpose-built administrative buildings, they moved out of the Castle and the Castle was handed over entirely to the military. It became a garrison, a prison, and a storage facility. It was during this period that the Castle acquired its darkest reputation as a place of detention, not for ordinary criminals, but for significant political and military opponents of British Empire and its colonial expansion.

The pattern that emerged in the Castle’s dungeons during this century is worth pausing over.

Three African kings:

• Cetshwayo of the Zulu
• Langalibalele of the Hlubi
• Sekhukhune of the Pedi

were each imprisoned here after fighting to defend their people against colonial encroachment. They came from different nations, fought different wars, in different decades. But they ended up in the same building, behind the same walls.

The Castle, in this era, was where the British Empire put the men who had most effectively resisted it.

One on my ancestors was imprisoned in the Donker Gat too. Interestingly, he was on my Dad’s side of the family, and was imprisoned for murdering people on my Mom’s ancestral lineage!

In 1910, South Africa became a self-governing state within the British Empire. The four colonies of southern Africa - the Cape Colony, Natal, the Transvaal, and the Orange River Colony - were merged into the Union of South Africa.

The Castle, which had been a British military base for over a century, transferred to the authority of the new South African state. It became the headquarters of the South African Army’s Western Cape command, a function it would retain for the next eight decades.

In 1936, the Castle was declared a National Monument - a formal recognition of its historical importance that, in theory, protected it from demolition or insensitive alteration. The walls that had been built to defend a Dutch trading empire were now being preserved as a heritage asset by the country that had grown up inside and around them.

In 1948, the National Party came to power and introduced apartheid - a system of legislated racial segregation that classified every person in South Africa by race, determined where they could live, work, and go to school, and enforced those determinations through state violence.

The Castle, as the headquarters of the army that gave apartheid its military backbone, was deeply implicated in this system. The same yellow walls that had once held African kings now housed the command structure of an army used to suppress the people those kings had once led.

This is the most uncomfortable section of the Castle’s history to sit with. The building itself did not change. The flag did. The building continued doing what it had always done: serving whoever held power.

In 1994, South Africa held its first fully democratic elections. Nelson Mandela became president. The country began, with enormous difficulty, the process of transforming itself. One of the questions this transformation raised was: what do you do with the buildings of the old order? Tear them down? Seal them away? Pretend they had a different history than the one they actually had?

The Castle of Good Hope became a test case for a different answer: transformation without erasure. The building remains a working military headquarters - the SA Army’s Western Cape command still operates from within its walls. But it is now simultaneously a museum complex, a heritage site, and something more deliberately ambitious: a place that has chosen to confront its own past.

The William Fehr Collection, housed within the Castle, contains one of the most important collections of historical art relating to the Cape - paintings, drawings, and decorative arts that document the colony’s visual culture across three centuries.

The Castle Military Museum tells the building’s martial history.

The Centre for Memory, Healing and Learning uses modern archival technology and educational programmes to engage directly with the traumatic dimensions of that history - the enslaved people, the imprisoned kings, the dispossessed communities.

But the most powerful transformation is the one that happened in the courtyard.

The De Kat Balcony, the elevated platform from which colonial governors once proclaimed laws and read out death sentences, now looks down on four bronze statues. The installation is called the Kings of the Castle.

The four figures are:

• Doman, the Khoekhoe leader who led the first armed resistance against the Dutch in the 1650s
• King Cetshwayo of the Zulu
• King Langalibalele of the Hlubi
• King Sekhukhune of the Pedi.

Three of the four were imprisoned in the Castle. All four resisted. All four lost their immediate battles. The balcony from which they were once condemned now faces their permanent, unbowed bronze gaze.

The colonial-era portraits of governors that once lined the Castle’s interior walls have been taken down. In their place are images of resistance and resilience. The building has not been demolished, its difficult history has not been papered over - but its meaning has been deliberately and purposefully repositioned to one of learning and educating as opposed to glorifying the past.

We need to learn from history. Embrace our past. Not erase or whitewash it! How else will we be taught the lessons we need to learn and not repeat the same mistakes. We need to see the darker chapters in our history, shine a light on it. Shining a light on past mistakes is not about blame. It is about understanding.

The Dutch East India Company collapsed in 1799.
The British Empire is gone.
The apartheid government fell in 1994.

Three of the six powers that flew their flag over this building have vanished from history entirely. A fourth, the British Empire, exists now only in memory and legacy. The only ones left are the two versions of the South African state.

They are the ones who will decide what the Castle becomes next.

Here is what the Castle proves: what gets built outlasts the people who built it.

The workers who laid the first stone on 2 January 1666 could not have imagined that their fortress would still be standing three and a half centuries later, flying the flag of a democratic republic they could never have dreamed of.

They built it to protect a spice trade. It ended up as something far more complicated and far more interesting - a monument to the full messiness of human history, including the parts that are uncomfortable to look at.

When you walk through the Castle today, you are walking through every version of it that has ever existed. The walls do not pick a favourite era. They hold all of them at once. What changes is who is doing the looking - and what they are willing to see. It’s purely a matter of perspective, what this Castle means to you.

For me… I like the idea of it holding the entirety of its history between the Castle walls and on display for all to see. I love the fact that all 6 flags fly outside the Castle as if to say look at me, I am still here, through good times and bad. I survived and I will continue to thrive.