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Abstract

South Africa’s first nations, the Khoi and San, were dispossessed of land, subjugated, enslaved and decimated in the centuries following the first wave of European colonisation and settlement of the Cape by the Dutch in 1652. Under subsequent British rule and Apartheid, their identities and cultures were negated and supressed. South Africa’s 1994 democratic Constitution recognises all citizen’s cultural rights and commits to the protection of culture and language. However, reclaiming place and identity in the new South Africa remains a struggle for the KhoiSan. This paper considers the politics of place as it played out in the KhoiSan’s claim on a site in Cape Town currently under development. The massive mixed-use development on this historically sensitive River Club site in Observatory, was challenged by various stakeholders, including a range of KhoiSan groups. However, some KhoiSan groups (the KhoiSan Collective) aligned with the developer around an agreement that would give them a culture, heritage and media centre, as well as an indigenous garden and amphitheatre. In reference to the theme of politics, people and place, this paper considers the interplay of intangible heritages interpreted architecturally. The paper will focus on the KhoiSan Cultural Centre designed by Noero Architects. Using the theoretical lens of a places’ encrypted significances and politics of visibility (Denis Byrne), politics of recognition (Laura-Jane Smith) and urban landscapes as storehouses of social memory, holding place, social and body memory (Dolores Hayden), the paper explores how architecture can retrieve and emplace cultural heritage and intangible associations with/in place.