What The Walls Remember

The research took me to places I didn’t expect. The first unexpected find was personal. While reading about the bastions, I came across the word itself - bastion - and realised I already knew it, because it is where my name comes from. A bastion is a fortified point that projects outward from a castle wall, designed to protect everything behind it. Then I found out that the Castle’s five bastions were named after the titles of a Dutch prince called William of Orange - Willem in Dutch. My full name is Bastian Willem. My mom always told me she chose my name because she liked the idea of it meaning strong protector - someone who stands firm and shields what matters. Finding that connection inside the exact building I was researching was one of those moments that makes history feel less like something that happened to other people. It was an interesting coincidence.

Also that is what I wanted this project to be - a bastion - something that protects the real history of this building. Not the comfortable version. The honest one.

Secondly, what I didn’t expect was how there would be a personal connection to the history of the Castle itself. Discovering that some of my own ancestors had been held in the Castle’s dungeons changed the way I read everything. It stopped being abstract. The Donker Gat wasn’t just an interesting historical detail anymore. It was a place where people connected to me had actually been imprisoned, sometimes in floodwater, sometimes in the dark. That’s not easy to think about, but I think it’s important to be aware of anyway.

What makes it even more complicated is that the history is not cleanly divided into victims and bystanders in my own family. My Dad’s ancestors were imprisoned in the Castle. They were imprisoned for killing people from the same community that my Mom’s family descended from. My own family contains both sides of a history that the Castle was right in the middle of. I didn’t choose that. But I think understanding it is part of why this project matters to me - and part of why I believe so strongly that the full story of this building needs to be told, not just the comfortable parts.

One of the most important things I learned during this project was how to properly evaluate sources. I used a wide range of them - the Castle’s official site, Iziko Museums, South African History Online, SAHRA and Wikipedia as a starting point rather than a final source.

Early on I made the mistake of trusting a detail from a single source, only to find it contradicted somewhere else. That taught me to always check facts across more than one source before including them.

I also started thinking about who wrote each source and why - a colonial government record and a Khoekhoe account of the same event are both useful, but they are telling the story from completely different angles. Learning to recognise that difference felt like a real skill.

The most challenging part was knowing what to trust when stories conflicted. Some of the more dramatic details - Van Noodt’s curse, Duquesne’s iron spoon - are in the historical record, but have clearly grown in the telling over hundreds of years. I tried to be clear in the document about what is confirmed fact and what has become legend. I didn’t want to just include the most exciting version of a story if it wasn’t accurate. That was sometimes a hard call to make.

Organising everything was also more difficult than I expected. The Castle’s history covers 350 years and six different governing powers. I had far more material than I could use, and deciding what to leave out was difficult. Structuring it all into something that actually flowed and made sense was probably the skill I improved most during this project.

One thing I would do differently is spend more time on the story of the enslaved people who built the Castle. Their story is the most important one and also the hardest to research, because detailed records were rarely kept about them at the time. That gap in the record is not an accident - it tells you something about whose lives were considered worth documenting. I noticed that, but I didn’t explore it as fully as I could have.

What this project taught me most is that history isn’t just a list of facts. It is about asking questions: who recorded this, why, and what did they leave out? The Castle looks different depending on who is standing in front of it. A historian’s job is to try to hold all of those different views at once, rather than just picking the most comfortable one. I found that more difficult than I expected. I also found it more interesting than I expected. To try to not be biased. And to try to research based on facts and not opinions.

What I’ve learned is that old buildings are not neutral. The Castle didn’t just witness South African history. It was the place where that history was made, announced, enforced, and eventually challenged.

The most thought-provoking thing I came across in this entire project was the decision to place bronze statues of the Kings in the Castle’s own courtyard. These were statues of the very men who had been imprisoned within its walls, sentenced from its balcony, defeated by the power it represented. They are not hidden away in a corner. They stand at the centre, looking directly back at the balcony where their fates were once announced.

The building that held them now honours them. That reversal - done without demolishing anything, without pretending the difficult history never happened - felt like the most honest thing a building can do with its past.

It didn’t erase anything. It just made sure the full story was finally being told. And that, to me, feels like exactly the right way to deal with history that is painful. You don’t hide it. You face it. And then you make sure it is never forgotten.

I grew up in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, with one of the most complicated buildings at its centre. When I return, I’ll walk past it differently now. Appreciating it more. Realising that it’s presence shaped my country of birth.

We are a nation built from many different peoples, cultures, and histories. And as our slogan for our Springbok Rugby Team says - we are ‘Stronger Together’. Just like the Castle, a fortress holding memories and sharing perspectives from the many different groups of people that make up South Africa’s Rainbow Nation.