Cape Town - A group of around 50 people gathered at Church Square in the Cape Town CBD, a site where hundreds of enslaved people were sold, for a symbolic renaming and reclamation of the site to “Freedom Square”, on Sunday.
The gathering was organised and facilitated by the Prestwich Place Project Committee, District Six Museum, Institute for the Healing of Memories, and volunteers, and saw flowers placed at the Square by attendees as well as a large banner bearing its new name.
Midnight on December 1, 1834, saw the legal emancipation of enslaved people of the Cape. Annually, Emancipation Day is commemorated on December 1.
During this year’s commemorative event, the intention was to draw connections between the St George’s Cathedral “Freedom Steps” and the Square.
The Freedom Steps, located at the church, has been historically and presently, a site of political protest, solidarity events and programmes, as well as vigils, more recently, a year-long uninterrupted weekly vigil for Palestine.
Lindsay Hendricks, an independent educator, shared that the Slave Tree on Church Square was a site where hundreds of enslaved people were sold with the first recorded public sale of enslaved people on Church Square in 1826, outside the office of the VOC's Sequestrator, which stood on the corner of Spin Street and Church Square.
“The office would later be a drapery shop. Its owner would spearhead the campaign to commemorate the tree by installing a plaque. Over time, the tree was in a bad state, and the City of Cape Town cut it down to a stump in 1916.
“In 1951, the City demolished the fabric shop and removed the plaque and the stump in order to widen Spin Street.
“The location of the original stump was rediscovered in 1953, which was now an island in the middle of Spin Street, and the City built a new memorial on the site.”
District Six Museum director, Chrischene Julius, said a commemorative walk takes place every year on the evening of November 30 into December 1, commemorating the moment enslaved people heard of their legal freedom.
“And we know that on the evening before the first of December, they lit bonfires in celebration, there was celebration in the streets.
“There's this almost layer of missing memory around slavery in the city… We don't really pass anything that reminds us that slavery was so much part of Cape Town’s story and so the idea of renaming Church Square, Freedom Square, is about historical sort of acknowledging this was actually a space of trauma, a space where people’s freedom was taken away.”
Many slaves had come from Indonesia, Malaysia, Madagascar, Mozambique and parts of East Africa.
The Cape was also a place where political prisoners were banished.
In linking with the St George’s Cathedral’s Freedom Steps, was to connect the past to the present, and to think about other struggles for freedom throughout Cape Town, nationally and internationally such as in the ongoing struggle for freedom in Palestine.
She added that a place like Freedom Square had the potential to be an active space, similar to the cathedral’s Freedom Steps.