In Cape Town, activist and historian Lucy Campbell is using the city’s streets, monuments, and silences to challenge how South Africa remembers its past—and how that past still shapes present injustice. Through her walking tours, Campbell rejects sanitized colonial narratives, instead centering the violence of dispossession, slavery, and Indigenous erasure embodied by landmarks like the Castle of Good Hope and the Slave Lodge. Drawing on personal history and academic research, she connects colonial exploitation by the Dutch East India Company to enduring inequalities in land ownership, poverty, and gender-based violence. Figures such as Krotoa are reclaimed not as footnotes, but as complex agents of resistance. For Campbell, memory is not symbolic—it is political, urgent, and essential to dismantling systems that continue to privilege profit over people.
Aljazeera
