King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands faced a confrontational situation on their first visit to Cape Town on Friday, October 20, 2023. Protesters met them as they visited a museum that delves into their country's deep involvement in South African slavery spanning 150 years.
King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands faced a confrontational situation on their first visit to Cape Town on Friday, October 20, 2023. Protesters met them as they visited a museum that delves into their country's deep involvement in South African slavery spanning 150 years.
As the royal couple exited the historic Slave Lodge in the heart of Cape Town, a few assemblies of protesters representing South Africa's First Nations, the indigenous inhabitants of the Cape Town region, encircled them. The demonstrators voiced their grievances, accusing Dutch colonizers of seizing ancestral lands.
In response to the mounting tension, security personnel swiftly ushered the king and queen into a waiting vehicle while a subset of protesters, attired in traditional animal-skin attire, engaged in a brief scuffle with law enforcement.
The Dutch colonization of Southwestern South Africa began in 1652 through the Dutch East India Trading Company, and they retained control of the Dutch Cape Colony for over a century and a half before British colonization. The legacy of this complex Dutch history still echoes in modern-day South Africa, most notably in the Afrikaans language, derived from Dutch and used as an official language in the country, even among the descendants of the First Nations.
During their visit to the Slave Lodge, King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima made no formal addresses but spent their time exploring the rooms where enslaved people were confined under Dutch colonial rule. The Slave Lodge, constructed in 1679, stands as one of Cape Town's oldest edifices and served as a place of detention for men, women, and children until 1811.
The First Nations indigenous settlers in South Africa. Accompanied by Garth Erasmus, a representative of the First Nations, the royal couple's visit to the Slave Lodge was intended to help confront the historical injustices and shed light on a painful chapter in South Africa's past. First Nations groups have persistently called on the South African government to recognize their historical oppression, asserting that their narrative was overshadowed by the apartheid period between 1948 and 1994.
In Cape Town, the Dutch East India Company was a supply port for trading ships traveling to and from Asia. Enslaved people were imported to work in the colony from various Asian and African nations, while the indigenous First Nations people of South Africa were also subjected to enslavement and displacement from their lands.
