It’s Heritage Day in South Africa. A day to reflect on our collective identity and how heritage resources have the capacity to promote reconciliation, understanding and respect, and contribute to the development of a unifying South African identity.

On this day, the City announced that it was able to implement an innovative project to protect the milkwoods of Gordon’s Bay as “an iconic part of the natural heritage of this popular recreation area on the coast.” At the same time, it released a call for people to nominate liberation struggle sites around the metropole to a list of sites that would comprise a heritage booklet to showcase various iconic liberation struggle sites around the metropole.

Strangely, the Two Rivers Urban Park (TRUP), including the River Club, which Heritage Western Cape described as a “site … identified as part of the National Liberation and Resistance Project of Government…” has not been listed as one of the provisional sites for inclusion by the City.  The River Club property and the TRUP, rich with the history of colonial colonisation and Khoi resistance, is simply not featured.

Take a look at the two images above. On the right is an image released by the City of the protection of the milkwoods of Gordon’s Bay for which the City has invested considerable resources because it rightly views the indigenous milkwoods of the Western Cape as an important heritage resource to protect. On the left is an image taken from the Supplementary report prepared by Melanie Attwell for Heritage Western Cape in 2017 of the original Liesbeek River area south of the former Vaarsehedrift crossing and opposite the private land of the River Club – so severely neglected that one of the River Club planners could describe it as a storm water gutter in the Municipal Planning Tribunal on Friday 18th September.  It seems that if you neglect heritage, you can get away with further degrading and destroying it, especially if it is intangible heritage that resides in the open space of the Riverine Valley and is not found in a building or a tree or a grave.  This is exactly the message the Municipal Planning Tribunal has sent out last Friday – an insult to Heritage Day.

Ironically, one of the main organisation trying to protect the Liesbeek, the NGO, Friends of the Liesbeek (FoL,) which does regular clean-ups of the River, is one of the 18 organisations appealing the DEADP Heritage Environmental Authorisation because it is a decision destructive of the environment and antithetical to heritage protection.  

We don’t believe the Environmental Management Department in the City would want to render invisible the history of the Khoi people in South Africa and their resistance to colonial oppression – an outcome now made possible the recent Municipal Planning Tribunal decision to approve the rezoning of the River Club. With the open call for additional suggestions, you can write to albert.webster@capetown.gov.za to nominate the Two Rivers Urban Park and the River Club for inclusion on the Liberation Route.

Please do so today. It’s Heritage Day. Don’t just remember the history of our people – do something to protect it now. If our City can deem the milkwoods of Gordon’s Bay worthy of protection, which they should, then surely the Khoi history of resistance in the Liesbeek corridor deserve a place in living history rather than a Century City-style sequestered commemoration overlooked by 46m tall high-rises? Condemning the Liesbeek River as a gutter best suited to be buried by infill and replaced by an artificially reconstructed river on the other boundary of the property is an insult to Heritage Day.  

To quote Jonty Cogger and Robyn Parkross from Ndifuna Ukwazi, writing in the Mail and Guardian today, “the approval of the River Club development is an affront to the constitutional project of healing and restoration and reinforces unjust spatial planning reminiscent of the bulldozing apartheid planners.”

But you can contribute to that project of healing and restoration. Make sure the River Club and the wider TRUP is not excluded from the City’s nominations for government’s National Liberation and Resistance Project. Send albert.webster@capetown.gov.za your nomination now. Tell him why you think the site is important to commemorate Khoi resistance to colonialism as part of our living history.