Cape Town, South Africa – Lucy Campbell, with her long grey dreadlocks, stands animated in front of the thick stone walls of the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town’s city centre, her small frame accentuated by their towering height.The 65-year-old activist-turned-historian has a message for the 10 American students who have come to hear her version of the city’s history. Dressed in a black hoodie and blue jeans, Campbell is well-spoken but shows her disdain for Cape Town’s colonial past, often erupting in harsh language for those she blames for its consequences.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of list“This castle speaks to the first economic explosion in Cape Town,” she says at the beginning of her five-stop tour of the city. “It’s an architectural crime scene.”Campbell refuses to enter the 17th-century castle, which she sees as a symbol of the violence and dispossession that the colonial era brought to South Africa’s second biggest city.“That is where they used to hang people,” she says, pointing to one of the castle’s five bastions. It was built by the settlers of the Dutch East India Company, commonly known by its Dutch acronym, VOC. The VOC built the fortress as part of its efforts to establish a refreshment post between the Netherlands and other trade destinations in the East. The castle is now run by the South African military.Campbell, an accredited …
