Barriers: Part 4

So here is what I learned on the tour:

Our first stop was the noon gun. Every day except Sundays the gun goes off precisely at noon. It has been doing so ever since a settlement was first established at Cape Town. The purpose of it was to alert the sailors as to the time of day so they would be able to reset their watches. It can still be used to set watches, though there aren’t sailors/explorers going by as often who don’t have digital watches. From the noon gun we had an amazing view of all of Cape Town.

As we wound our way down the mountain Bilqees told us the history of Bo Kaap. During apartheid Cape Town had been districted (it is truly the basis of the movie, District 9). The Bo Kaap neighborhood was designated a Cape Malay neighborhood. The Cape Malays are descendent from slaves that originated from the Indonesia/Malaysia region. When they first came as slaves they were able to communicate to each other in a language called Malau, even though this was not their first language. As such, the white Afikaaners proceeded to call these groups of people Malays. They were primarily Muslim in religion, and when they got their freedom in the mid-1800s congregated in the Bo Kaap neighborhood on the side of Signal Hill. They were among the few groups of people who were able to keep their neighborhood during apartheid.

So after Ramadan each family would paint their house. White was by far the least expensive paint, but the families wanted to distinguish their house from their neighbor’s house, so they started to tint the paint. The colors they used were quite vibrant: pinks, yellows, greens, blues, etc. It is an amazing array of colors. My house was a beautiful shade of green.

Back to the 1800’s before freedom, though. As the ships full of slaves arrived their names were registered. On certain days, however, the man tracking the names wouldn’t care what the actual name was and would often give a person a new name, such as “Sara October.” Later, when children were born to enslaved women, they would be baptized under the surname “van der Kaap” (“from the Cape”). As families now try to trace back to where they came from, they often face these roadblocks and so can only go back to the early 1800s. This means that many people of the region do not actually know where they are originally descendent from.