Every time you drive through the gates of Vergelegen today, past the manicured gardens, the oak-lined avenue, the beautifully restored Cape Dutch homestead, you are looking at the work of people whose names were never recorded in any official document. People who were not free to leave. People who were not paid.
When Willem Adriaan van der Stel arrived at the Hottentots Holland foothills in 1700 and decided to build his empire, he did not build it alone and he did not build it with hired labour. He built it with VOC slaves — men and women who had been taken, bought and transported from places as far apart as Madagascar, Mozambique, the Malabar Coast of India and the Indonesian archipelago.
They dug the irrigation canals. They laid the foundations of the homestead. They planted those half million vine stocks, one by one, in the thin mountain soil. They built the cattle stations, the corn mill, the reservoirs, the outbuildings. They did it under the Helderberg sun, without wages, without choice and without any prospect of ever leaving.
Among them were people whose stories, fragmented as they are, have survived the centuries. Eva van Madagascar and her son Jan Bruyn. Catharina van Malabar, one of the earliest enslaved women to later gain her freedom and become part of the developing community of free burghers at the Cape. Damon van Malabar, who became famous for escaping slavery and surviving alone in the forests of the southern Cape for years — a man the wilderness claimed before any master could. And Angela van Bengale, who gained her freedom, acquired property and became the ancestor of thousands of South Africans. Her daughter Anna de Coningh later married Olof Bergh — yes, that Olof Bergh — and became one of the wealthiest women in the colony. Then there were the Masbiekers, men and women from Mozambique, whose labour shaped the land as much as any plough.
One striking feature of Cape history is what became of their descendants. Many modern South Africans can trace their ancestry back to several of these regions simultaneously — Madagascar, Malabar, Bengal, Mozambique, Indonesia — all converging in this small valley at the foot of the Hottentots Holland mountains, producing a people and a culture that belonged to nowhere else on earth and everywhere at once.
The Cape Colony was entirely dependent on slave labour from almost the moment it was founded. By the early 1700s, slaves outnumbered free settlers. They cooked in the kitchens of every homestead, worked the fields of every wine farm and built the roads and buildings that the colony depended on. The grand estates of the Helderberg — the ones on the tourist maps, the ones pouring award-winning wine today — were built on this foundation. It is worth sitting with that for a moment.
Many of those enslaved people came from a place in what is now Indonesia called Makassar. Their descendants and the community they built over generations, gave that name to the town you drive through on the N2 today. Macassar. A suburb of the Helderberg that has been there, in various forms, for more than three centuries. The name is not Dutch. It is not French. It is not British. It is the name of a faraway island, carried across an ocean by people who had no say in the journey.
One of the most remarkable figures connected to this community was Sheikh Yusuf Al-Makassari — a Sufi scholar and prince from Makassar who was exiled to the Cape in 1694 by the Dutch, who feared his influence over enslaved and indigenous people. He is widely regarded as the father of Islam in South Africa. His tomb, known as a kramat, stands in Macassar today. It is still visited, still honoured, more than 330 years later.
The people who built the Helderberg were never written into the heroic version of the story. But they are in the ground. They are in the place names. They are in the faces and the family trees and the faith of the people who live here still.
They are still here.
Between You and Me:
I often try and visualise how does one “build” a farm using the tools and equipment of the 1600s and not forgetting the people. The hands that built the Helderberg, the Evas, the Catherinas, the Damons, the Angelas, the nameless thousands who planted half a million vines in mountain soil without wages or choice, never made it into the official version of the story. Yet here is the thing about the Cape. It has a long memory and an even longer sense of irony. The descendants of the people written out of history gave their name to a suburb that outlasted every governor, every VOC decree and every grand colonial scheme. Macassar. Still there. Still standing. And not far from where Sheikh Yusuf rests in a grave that has been honoured for over three centuries, someone in 1991 decided to build a water park on a moving sand dune. Charged admission, reconsidered the admission after community protests, ran out of money, stopped paying the staff and watched the South-Easter bury the whole enterprise slide by slide until there was nothing left but faded blue paint and a sign pointing to a parking lot that the dunes had already reclaimed. The Sheikh, would have enjoyed the water park. The vines outlasted the governor. The kramat outlasted the colony. The dunes outlasted the water park. Some things, it turns out, cannot be built over.
Historian – Harmen Bockelenberg
Next week: the five trees that outlived an empire.
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