Greenmarket Square – a sense of place in Cape Town

“The search for a sense of place in a city is also a search for that place where the city is most itself. For me this is Greenmarket Square.” – from Sea-Mountain, Fire City by Mike Nicol (Kwela Books, 2001)

For around three centuries the heart of Cape Town has beaten in Greenmarket Square.

It started in 1696 when the authorities at the tiny refreshment station, founded by the Dutch East India Company (or VOC, for Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) 44 years earlier, decided that a building should be erected for the Burgher (Citizen) Militia (or Burgher Wacht) which had been established in1659 as a force for both policing and defence.

The members of the militia were given wooden rattles which with they signalled the hours, as well as sounding a warning to loiterers and others up to no good.

Mothers in the Cape taught their children a little Dutch ditty:

Moederlief, ‘k geloof vast

Dat hy op de dieven past,

Goede klaper houdt de wacht;

Ik ga slapen – goede nacht.

(Dearest mother, I firmly believe

that he catches the thieves,

the watch has a good rattle

I’m to bed – good night)

The Burgherwacht Huys was built in 1696 on what was to become Greenmarket Square. It was a simple building and no doubt a fire-trap too! Fire was a constant hazard at the little settlement at the time and one of the duties of the Burgher Wacht was to act as a fire brigade.

In 1710 the Council of Policy, the highest authority at the Cape, decided to erect a more permanent building for the Wacht and in the same resolution set aside land for public use. The land so set aside was what is now Greenmarket Square.

The building for the Wachthuys was started in the same year. It served not only the Burgher Wacht but also served as a meeting place for the Burgher Council (Raad), until in 1755 it was demolished to make way for a new Wachthuys. The foundation stone of this new Wachthuys was laid by a member of the Court of Justice, Baerendt Artoijs, on 18 November 1755. The silver trowel used for the ceremony is still in the building.

The Old Town House across the Square. Photo taken in 1967

The Old Town House across the Square. Photo taken in 1967

The new building was completed in 1761, although it had been in use for some years before already. The façade, still largely unchanged to this day, was designed by Matthias Lotter whose father was a stucco-sculptor in Augsberg.

The balcony in the front of the building was used to make proclamations and citizens were summoned to the Square to hear these by a bell in a tower above the balcony, now replaced.

When in 1804 Cape Town was given a Coat of Arms, this was placed in the cartouche above the door to the balcony. From this time onwards the Wachthuys was used for civic functions, which is why it acquired the name the “Old Town House”. It served as Cape Town’s Town Hall until the present Town Hall was built in the early years of the 20th Century.

The square in front of the Old Town House was used as a market by the market gardeners on the outskirts of Cape Town, hence the name Greenmarket Square. The square was first mentioned officially in 1733 but by then had already been long in use.

Slaves on Greenmarket Square. Drawing by Johannes Rach, 1762.

The square was also a favourite gathering place for slaves during their infrequent free time, when they would gather there to gossip and relax. It was also popular with visitors from all over the world when their ships called at Cape Town, the square being a jolly meeting place offering travellers all the amenities of bed and board.

One of the travellers who spent time in the Square was Norwegian Johannes Rach who visited Cape Town in August 1762, staying for a fortnight. While in Cape Town Rach captured the early spirit of Greenmarket Square in a series of drawing like the one here.

During the 1960s and 1970s Greenmarket Square entered into a period of what Nicol described as “sterility”, weighed down by the dark mantel of apartheid and its denial of life. It became primarily a car park.

People relaxing under a tree next to the once-disputed toilets.

One of the stories about the Square in that era concerns the farmer from the Free State Province who was visiting the Cape and had to make use of the toilet facilities in the Square. He found himself standing next to a coloured (creole) man at the urinal and was outraged. He wrote to the City Council demanding that the toilets be declared for white use only. The Council did a survey to establish who used the toilets most and found that coloured people were the most frequent users. They therefore decided to proclaim it a “coloured” facility.

The cobblestones of the Square

The square and surrounding streets were paved with cobblestones in 1967 when the whole area was proclaimed a National Monument. This proclamation has ensured that the façades of the surrounding buildings will not be encroached on by high-rise buildings which would destroy the human scale of the Square.

In the late 1980s the Square was opened up for trading again and became a “noisy, friendly, raucous” place – it has become, as Nicol writes, “A meeting place again.”

Drawing of Greenmarket Square in 1833 by Sir Charles D'Oyly.

Nicol writes of the 1833 drawing of the Square and the Old Town House by Sir Charles D’Oyly shown here: “…the mountain rises behind Town House and the buildings that enclose the square in a warm embrace. I can stand where he stood, see the Town House he saw. I can imagine, then as now, disappearing into the market jostle, becoming part of the city.”

Square, while the Metropolitan Methodist Church (right) offers comfort to the lost and lonely, as it has done since 1879.

The Old Town House (centre) still keeps guard over the Square, while the Metropolitan Methodist Church (right) offers comfort to the lost and lonely, as it has done since 1879.

 

Voices of the past, voices of the present – re-imagining our history a pre-requisite for peace

“If you can’t see the country’s past, if you can’t hear the voices from the past then you can’t understand the present.” – Anglican priest Michael Weeder, quoted in Mike Nicol’s Sea-Mountain, Fire City (Kwela Books, 2001).

“On its own the passage of time neither heals injustices nor pacifies antagonists.” – Bernard F. Connor OP, The Difficult Traverse (Cluster Publications, 1998).

When ANC Youth League president Julius Malema made his now-infamous statement that “all whites are criminals”, in reference to what he termed the “theft” of land by whites from blacks, the response of most whites was defensive – taking the form of either an aggressive denial or a personal attack on Malema himself.

The Slave Lodge in Cape Town. Under a tree close by this building weekly slave auctions were held.

While understandable, these responses are not helpful, and also show a very basic misunderstanding of the history of this complex country. Perhaps such misunderstanding is not surprising, given the many years of racist propaganda to which many whites have been subject for so long.

Certainly Malema’s statement was calculated – and he is too clever a politician not to have calculated this – to excite his followers and to provoke his white opponents. He certainly succeeded in achieving both those outcomes, though his very success raises many other questions.

The most basic question is, what sort of South Africa do we want? And how do we want, in this envisaged country, to relate to our past? We need to ask these questions, and to begin to search for answers, before we can move on, because we will not be able to move on until our relation to our past is clarified. The experiences of Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, Chile, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Argentina and even the United States, attest to this, as indeed do the responses to Malema’s statement.

Lithuanian philosopher Emmanuel Levinas who lived through a time of unparalleled violence against his fellow-Jews wrote:

“Violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognise themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility of action.”

Police supoervise the destruction of Modderdam on the Cape Flats, August 1977. Image from "A Shanty Town in South Africa" by Andrew Silk, 1981.

South Africa has certainly experienced much of this type of violence in the more than 500 years of white intrusion onto the soil of this southern tip of the great continent.

The first violence in this intrusion took place in 1487 when Portuguese sea captain Bartolomeu Días, using his cross-bow, shot and killed a black African at the place he called São Bras, which we now call Mossel Bay.

In the light of the later propaganda about who was here first, it is perhaps relevant to note that the people who were seen on that fateful shore in 1487 were “blacks, with woolly hair like those of Guinea” – i.e. most likely Bantu-speaking people and not Khoisan, indicating that the apartheid discourse that whites moved into empty land when moving east from the Cape Colony and that the Bantu-speaking people arrived there at about the same time was a lie.

Emblem of the Dutch East India Company carved above the entrance to Cape Town Castle Circa 1680. Photo by Andrew Massyn via Wikipedia

When the Dutch arrived at the Cape and started to develop their replenishment station below Table Mountain in 1652 they found Khoikhoi people already in residence there and began systematically to displace them. The first “apartheid” barrier was the almond hedge planted by Jan van Riebeeck to keep the Khoikhoi out of the Dutch East India Company’s gardens growing on land that the Khoikhoi had for generations considered “theirs”. This was perhaps the first “land grab without compensation” in South Africa’s history. The first, but by no means the last.

The planting of the Dutch settlement at the Cape was also a grave interruption of the continuity of the indigenous people. It interrupted the continuity of the grazing of their cattle; it interrupted their freedom of movement across the land and interrupted the natural power relations between groups by introducing outside influences.

The very beginning of what we now call South Africa was steeped in violence and the voices of those who suffered need to be heard, even at the distance across time of more than 500 years, as do those who suffered after.

Can you hear the voices whispering in the mists coming down Hoerikwaggo?

We all in South Africa at the beginning of the 21st Century need to open our ears to those voices which call to us down the centuries, those voices which, if we are still and listen, we might hear carried on the winds which blow down the crevasses and kloofs of Hoerikwaggo (or Sea-Mountain, as Table Mountain was called by the Khoikhoi), or in the hot winds of the Karoo or the gales across the Highveld, the songs and laments of Khoisan, of slaves, of Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, Tswana. We might, if we listen carefully, also hear the cries of children and women and old people trekking through the unknown, fearful and tired.

History, it has been said, is always written by the victorious. In Africa we also have a saying, that until the lion tells his story, the hunter is always the hero.

And so I think we have to re-imagine our history. We have to use our minds’ eyes to see how people have lived and died, and begin to re-interpret the meaning of that living and dying. We have to try to imagine what it must have been like for those people on the shore at São Bras to have seen these strangers arrive, and to have seen one of their own killed by this hither-to unknown weapon.

It is important too that we try to understand the feelings of Khoikhoi at the Cape when Van Riebeeck planted the Dutch flag (or was it the flag of the Dutch East India Company?) on their soil. And the fears of the Dutchmen who were given the task of making the Cape a viable investment for that company – what were their feelings about being stuck in this strange land, surrounded by people who were so different?

Ven. Michael Weeder, now Dean of St George's Cathedral, Cape Town. Image from http://cape-slavery-heritage.iblog.co.za/2011/01/12/people%E2%80%99s-dean-cadre-padre-father-michael-weeder-named-new-dean-of-st-georges-cathedral/

To quote Michael Weeder again (from Nicol’s book) talking about the Slave Tree monument in Cape Town: “Families were destroyed here. Children sold to one person, their mothers sold to another. A woman sold to a farmer in Stellenbosch, her man sold to a merchant in Cape Town. Can you Imagine that? Can you just imagine what it was like, all the misery that happened here on the ground beneath our feet?”

The great chief Maqoma

The great chief Maqoma. South African Library, Cape Town

Can you imagine how the great chief Maqoma felt, lying on the ground with the booted foot of that hyperactive Governor of the Cape Harry Smith on his neck?

Can you imagine the pain of a young mother dumped with her little children in the veld at Dimbaza in the middle of winter?

Image from the film "Last Grave at Dimbaza"

Can you imagine the anguish of a father watching the home he had painstakingly built for his family at Modderdam or Crossroads being demolished?

Can you imagine how a descendent of Sekwati (chief of the Pedi at the time of the Great Trek) must feel every time he or she sees the Voortrekker Monument?

South Africa is a complex country with a rich history which, like all histories, is an interpretation of what we have been taught, what we have read, what we have experienced. No one history or interpretation of history, can adequately do justice to where we are today in this country.

If we are to make something of this country, we need to listen and understand each other, and that takes patience and a willingness to learn. A willingness, a humility, to allow another person’s history, in a sense, to become my own.

Typical apartheid sign. Image via Wikipedia

Typical apartheid sign. Image via Wikipedia

Of course we cannot change the past – what has happened has happened. There can be no turning back of the clock – indeed to which time would we turn it? But we have to deal with the past some creative way without denying anything in it. As Beyers Naude said, “No healing is possible without reconciliation, and no reconciliation is possible without justice, and no justice is possible without some form of genuine restitution.”

In the Interim Constitution, which was the basis for the elections of 1994 and the subsequent Government of National Unity, a statement about reconciliation was included which might be a basis for our moving forward. The Interim Constitution spoke of the “need for understanding but not for vengeance; a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimisation.”

In the Preamble to the Freedom Charter is the statement “that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people.”

In his recent speech at Stellenbosch, which has aroused the fury of so many whites, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Mpilo Tutu said:

“Our white fellow citizens have to accept the obvious: You all benefited from apartheid. But that does not mean that all are responsible for apartheid.

“Your children could go to good schools. You lived in smart neighbourhoods. Yet so many of my fellow white citizens become upset when you mention this. Why? Some are crippled by shame and guilt and respond with self-justification or indifference. Both attitudes make that we are less than we can be.”

We are all here now and belong here simply because we are here. There is absolutely no profit for any of us in self-justification or indifference.

To make our future together we have to let go of guilt and let go of the need to justify any of the evils of the past. We have to understand where we come from by hearing those voices from the past and make active efforts to change ourselves, to, in Gandhi’s famous words, “be the change we want to see.”

We defeat ourselves if we wallow in guilt or recrimination, or, with indifference, wait for the passage of time to heal the many injustices and antagonisms that have arisen in the course of our complex, rich and fascinating history.

We can be so much more.

© Text and photos, unless otherwise indicated, copyright by Tony McGregor 2011

A book for all South Africans now

“We were on a coast of centuries of sea tragedies, and of millennia of prehistoric habitation. A great deal of the strange and incomprehensible surrounded one there, and one was credulous of many things that one would not believe elsewhere. Such belief is a form of affirmation of that sense of wholeness that is so distinctively African, and upon which I have several times remarked, a purity of bond with the unfathomable, the unknowable and the long reach back that reduces the human immediate to a great littleness. It was what I chose to remember throughout the writing of this book.”

These final sentences of Noël Mostert’s great, wonderful book Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People (Pimlico, 1992) are really a summing up of the experience of reading this long and absorbing book. There is so much in this book of the unknowable, of the “long reach back”, and the final littleness of our human existence.

On one level the book is a chronicle of the incredible arrogance of white encroachment on black existence, the piecemeal and yet dogged conquest and appropriation of the land which the Xhosa-speaking peoples of the Eastern Cape regarded as their ancestral birthright.

At another level the book is an exploration of humanity, of what makes us human, what leads us to forget our common humanity, and so the book rises above mere history to become a philosophical meditation on the human condition, and especially on that condition in the South Africa in which we find ourselves in the early years of the 21st Century.

On this level the Frontiers of the title are not only the moving borders on the colonial map but also the interface between two civilisations – the white European and the black African. On this “frontier” the missionaries who came to “civilise” the black people in South Africa were key, and highly controversial, players.

The missionaries mostly brought a high Victorian sensibility to their work among the Xhosa-speaking peoples, which caused misunderstanding and conflict. The attempts at “civilising” the blacks meant that the missionaries became associated with the colonising forces in the eyes of the Xhosa-speaking people, and their message of salvation was treated respectfully but critically. This “frontier” remained largely intact even as the lines on the map shifted and changed.

In a sense, if we want to understand South Africa now, this book is essential reading. If we want to understand our fellow-citizens in this strange land, black and white, this book will deliver deep insights.

Mostert, Cape Town born and of a long line of ancestors stretching back to the early white settlement of the Cape in the mid-17th Century, is a masterful writer who manages to hold attention while delivering masses of information; drawing on a wide variety of sources his narrative has a weighty authority.

Chief Maqoma

From the background of the broad sweep of the historical events colourful characters abound who stand out and command attention. There is the frontier giant at almost seven feet tall Coenraad de Buys who married many women (none of them white) and fathered a people, the Buysvolk of the northern parts of South Africa; there is the very human and yet very interesting James Read (Snr) who came to South Africa fired with enthusiasm to uplift the “Hottentot” (Khoikhoi) people and lived as one of them, marrying a Khoikhoi woman and championing their cause against the white settlers; there is the brave and ultimately tragic chief Maqoma who in the end wanted nothing but to live like a white farmer; the little braggadocio governor Sir Harry Smith who, understanding almost nothing of Xhosa culture, claimed himself to be their “Paramount Chief”; there is the sad chief Sarili who had a deformed leg and was regarded by many as a weakling, but who was the “last great independent chief of the Xhosas” and whose final tragedy was to be the chief over the great cattle killing of 1856 which brought about the end of the Xhosa-speaking people’s independence.

Sir Harry Smith

As Mostert notes, in spite of the way the British had treated his father and his people, “…there had never been anything in Sarili’s demeanour that suggested a hatred or a longing for vengeance. He appeared in every respect to be a larger man than that.”

Sarili, as he comes through in this great book, epitomises the tragedy of the Xhosa-speaking peoples. The various groups of Xhosa-speaking people seem to have gone out of their ways to accommodate and appease the colonists in hopes of being left in peace to continue their lives in the way they most wished to, and at every turn, they were frustrated by the demands of Britain and the colonists. They saw their land and cattle taken from them and even when they were innocent were accused of cattle rustling.

The cruelties visited on the Xhosa-speaking people were unbelievable. And yet they tried to maintain their dignity, to maintain as much of their customs and beliefs as they could in the face of the colonial and missionary onslaught. Their land they lost. As they said, “ilizwe lifile (the land is dead)” – “You kill our country by taking away our customs.”

Paramount Chief of all the Xhosa-speaking peoples, Sarili

So, as Mostert says, South Africa was born in a great tragedy, symbolised by the death of Sarili, who died in hiding at the age of 83, in 1893.

With the defeat of the amaZulu in neighbouring Natal the British had “achieved the military conquest of the two great black groups which had offered the main resistance to the white domination of South Africa.

In a final ironic twist of history, though, as Mostert noted, “It was through the Xhosa-speaking peoples, however, that African political leadership in South Africa mainly continued to express itself.” The list of 20th Century leaders who came from among the Xhosa-speaking peoples and have shaped the new democratic South Africa is impressive, among them Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter and Albertina Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Raymond Mhlaba, Wilton Mkwayi, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Mpilo Tutu, Steven Bantu Biko, Chris Hani, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, to name but a few.

Frontiers is an essential and absorbing read for anyone wishing to understand South Africa today, and an enjoyable trip through history, thanks to the skill of the author.

© Text copyright by Tony McGregor. All illustrations from the book Frontiers: the Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People by Noël Mostert (London, Pimlico, 1992).

From the Algarve to the Cape of Storms

“There is nothing – absolutely NOTHING – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”
From Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows

One of my favourite books as a young child was The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. My father had a passion for ships and all things to do with sailing and the sea. He particularly loved the quote at the beginning of this article, using it often in both formal talks and informal conversations.

We had a bed-time routine of him reading to me some story, preferably an uplifting one, before I went to sleep.

The Manse at Blythswood where I lived with my parents from 1955 to 1960

The Manse at Blythswood where I lived with my parents from 1955 to 1960

At the time we lived on a Church of Scotland mission institution in the Transkei region of the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa called Blythswood. It was relatively far from most amenities and there was no electricity supply there so when the sun went down candles and paraffin lamps provided light for meals and reading.

So some of my earliest memories are of going to bed with a hissing Coleman or Hurricane paraffin lamp beside my bed and my father reading stories to me from Arthur Ransome, A.A. Milne, Fennimore Cooper and sundry others of the “Boys’ Own Paper” sort.

From these came my fascination with small boats. Where my father was really keen on the big ships, especially of the naval variety, I was fascinated by small craft, rowing boats and dinghies and the like. I was always interested in boats that could navigate small bodies of water, rather than the wide open sea.

Boats in Sagres harbour

On a visit to the Algarve in southern Portugal some years ago I found the small boat culture there very interesting, especially the colourful “paint jobs” many of the boats had, which contrasted strongly with the rather drab paint of the boats with which I was familiar from holidays in Cape Town and other South African sea-side resorts. The boats I knew were mostly painted green or black or a combination of those two colours.

Of course the maritime culture of Portugal, and in particular of the Algarve, is of interest to anyone who studies South African history, as the first white travellers to our shores came from this area, in all likelihood. While in the Algarve the party I was with spent a good deal of time at Sagres, the small fishing village on the south-western-most point of Europe (the Promontorium Sacrum, or Sacred Promontory, from which the village derives its name), where the man well-known as “The Navigator” lived and died more than 600 years ago.

The Navigator (o Navegador in Portuguese) was one of the “Illustrious Generation” (Ínclita Geração in Portuguese) of Princes of the Royal House of Avis, whose mother was the English Princess Philippa, who was in turn the daughter of the famous John o’ Gaunt. So a link was forged between England and Portugal which has remained strong until now.

The Navigator, whose full title was The Infante Henrique, Duke of Viseu, was the third child of King John I of Portugal and the Queen Consort Philippa, and in spite of his honorary title of “Navigator” did not himself do much in the way of exploration. Rather he set up a school of navigation and other seafaring skills on Sagres Point, which inspired the explorers Bartolomeo Dias and Vasco da Gama to sail around the southern-most tip of Africa, Da Gama eventually continuing to India, thus cementing Portuguese dominance early in the colonial race, a dominance which was, however, very soon challenged.

 

This bold exploration of seas uncharted and unknown to the Europeans was celebrated by the great Portuguese poet Luis Vaz de Camoens in the epic poem Os Lusiadas:

The entrance to Hout Bay on the Cape Peninsular

The entrance to Hout Bay on the Cape Peninsular

 

“I am that mighty Cape, occult and grand,

Stormy by nature, and ‘Of Storms’ by name:

Geographers have never mapped this land,

Into these seas no old explorers came.

Pointing south, last sentinel I stand

Of Africa’s long coast. Who comes to tame

This seagirt spine of crags till now unknown?

Your challenge puts a tongue in silent stone.

After setting sail from Lisbon in August 1847 Bartolomeo Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in late January 1488. He and his ships anchored in the bay they called Sao Bras, now known as Mossel Bay, and there occurred the first violent clash between Europeans and African indigenes in South Africa. This was a fateful day which foreshadowed many, many more to come in the centuries which followed. The clash resulted in the death of one of the indigenes who thus was the first African in South Africa to be killed by a white person. It was 3 February 1488.

When Dias and his men left Portugal they took with them four African women taken from West Africa, who “were to be put ashore at various places on the African coast with instructions to fo into the interior, there to sing the praises of the Portuguese king and the ‘grandeur of his kingdom’” (This from the book Frontiers by Noel Mostert (1992)). One of these women was put ashore at Algoa Bay, near the present city of Port Elizabeth. Mostert notes of her: “Few figures in the African story strike me as being more dramatically sad than this pitiful wretch, taken from her world in West Africa to Lisbon, possibly as a slave, taught the Portuguese language and the mercy of Christ, embarked upon that incredibly vile and arduous voyage into the unknown, and then summarily abandoned within sight of natives of unknown disposition towards strangers. They would be back, the Portuguese assured her, to hear her news. In this bizarre fashion the story of European contact with southern Africa began.”

Dias and his men and ships sailed on for a further three days or so before the men forced Dias to turn back to make the return voyage to Portugal. Along the way they went ashore west of the Bushman’s River mouth, at a place now called Kwaaihoek. Here Dias erected, on 12 March 1488, a padrão, a limestone cross, of which three had been brought with them from Portugal. He dedicated this padrão to St Gregory.

Great South African poet and author Guy Butler wrote a narrative poem called Pilgrimage to Dias Cross (Cape Town, David Philip: 1987). He describes the scene thus:

“And there beside his pillar of stone

The swarthy discoverer stands

“His truculent men who sweated to raise it,

Tightening, easing ropes through palms,

Are snoring long since.

Is his sleepless mind

Still on the East, his Prince’s hunger

For spices and converts? Or does he foresee

His cold homecoming, demotion

To third in command? About him cling

Silent conspiracies. Records are lost.

The name of his ship? No soul knows.

Mere scraps of gossip, disguised facts.”

And later in the poem Butler writes:

Dias drew away from that pillar

With pain and passion, as much as if

He’d left a son in exile there for ever:

Remembering the peril to his person,

To all his men and ships; embittered that

Their voyage should yield no other fruit

Than a branchless little tree of marble planted,

Its name soon lost on the charts.

So ambiguous was the first recorded encounter between Europe and southern Africa, so fraught with meaning in the light of the subsequent history of the sub-continent.

The brightly coloured boats of the Algarve are symbolic of the cultural riches that are the birthright of everyone, European and African, who have been touched by the maritime exploits of the people of the Algarve. Picturesque they might be, but they carry a weight of history and memory for me.

Where I am now, the person I am, is made up of all these strands of history and memory, culture and genes, threads that weave a pattern, a rich tapestry, full of colour and life, that make up my consciousness, my awareness.

To quote Butler again:

“No culture is large enough to contain

The fullness of being of those who comprise it.

History’s noise seems endless like the sea’s.

“We are the traffic on its surface,

The life that sweats and labours,

The singing voices on the shore.”

 

(All photos above by the author)