Slave Lodge

The current entrance hall leads into the complex that the Dutch East India Company built in sixteen seventy-nine to hold people it owned. From here, they were sent to work in the Company's Garden, the hospital, warehouses, fortification construction sites, and ship unloading. In the middle of the eighteenth century, around one thousand people sometimes lived under one roof: convicts and people with mental illness were kept alongside enslaved people.

The white facade with its pediment appeared only after the people had been removed from here and British officials converted the building into offices. During the time of the Iziko Slave Lodge, only occasional barred openings faced outside. The rooms surrounded an inner courtyard, where roll call was held in the morning and then work gangs dispersed across Cape Town.

The Dutch East India Company built the lodge in sixteen seventy-nine—a trading corporation that then governed the settlement at the Cape. People it owned were kept here. They grew vegetables in the nearby Company's Garden, worked in the hospital and warehouses, built fortifications, and unloaded ships. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the building sometimes held around one thousand occupants: enslaved people, convicts, and people with mental illness were kept here together.

Jan Smiesing was born in the Iziko Slave Lodge in sixteen ninety-seven. His mother, Manda Gratia, was an enslaved teacher and a senior female overseer. His father, a Dutch Company employee, left the Cape when the boy was about three. Jan grew up here and became a schoolteacher himself at seventeen.

The school occupied part of the same enclosed building. Children were taught Dutch, Christian doctrine, reading, and writing; at the same time, they were required to obey and respect their owners. For teaching, Jan received a small payment, food, and clothing. In his surviving notebook, arithmetic exercises, alphabets, a hymn, and medicinal recipes appear side by side, some in Tamil. In the Iziko Slave Lodge censuses, he was called Jan Smiesing—that is, Jan, son of Manda. On the notebook's pages, he signed himself with his father's surname: Jan Smiesing.

He repeatedly asked to be freed. On November eighth, seventeen thirty-one, the Company's council agreed: Jan taught well, had been baptized, spoke Dutch, and another teacher had already been found for the school. But it imposed a condition. Jan had to hand over Gerrit van Rio de la Goa, another enslaved man, to the Company. The chief surgeon was instructed first to examine Gerrit van Rio de la Goa and certify that he was healthy and fit for work.

Only after this substitution did thirty-four-year-old Jan receive his freedom. A month later, he was able to marry Anna van Dapur, whom he had met here and with whom he was already raising children. He lived as a free man for three years.

Roughly where the museum entrance hall now stands, there was once a classroom for boys. Jan's notebook is kept in the Cape Archives; he did not write in it about his freedom. Gerrit van Rio de la Goa's name and the requirement to check his health survive in a Company record.