There is this tsatsaxa (sadistic) joke we are forced to live with in South Africa. A place called Delft on the Cape flats, officially, a city in the Netherlands but also the name of a wasteland in South Africa. Two cities as opposite as night and day.

How depraved does a colonial imagination have to be to name a place of hunger, overcrowding, violence and state abandonment after a European city of canals and galleries? How cruel the joke when it does not stop there, but multiplies: Leiden, The Hague also Dutch place names stamped across a war zone.

Delft is policed like a threat and governed like an afterthought. Its people reminded that we are the problem: violent, drunk, unproductive gangsters. 

Yet drive just five minutes out of Delft, past the trauma and torture, and the world transforms. You hit Stellenbosch Arterial and suddenly the land is calm, manicured, green and lush. How? 

Thousands of hectares of vineyards stretch outward in neat rows, most bearing Dutch and French names.

A proximity not accidental but the careful planning of colonisers.

Because what we are seeing is not simply inequality; it is continuity. The same land. The same dispossession. The same beneficiaries, three centuries later, still extracting from stolen Khoikhoi lands.

How sick that Dutch and French descendants in South Africa managed to convince us, the Khoi and other African people, that there is nothing wrong with grape plantations on stolen land while we are left to destroy one another in overcrowded camps. 

How did this happen? How did vineyards become neutral? How did wine become “heritage”, while hunger became our personal failure?

The answer lies in a long, well-funded project of kakapusa (forgetting).

Millions of rands are still spent by universities, cultural institutions, and “heritage” initiatives in South Africa persuading us to ganganxa (grateful), for the vineyard. Grateful for dispossession. Grateful for slavery. Grateful for an economy that exploited our labour, erased our languages and culture, and then blamed us for the massacres.

What is never calculated, never placed on a wine label or tourism brochure, is the true cost of 300 years of vineyards. The human cost: families destroyed by forced removals; alcohol dependency via the dop system; gang violence rooted in spatial apartheid; communities like Delft, named after Europe and discarded in Africa.

Wine country is sold as peaceful yet existing next to Delft, dangerous and disposable.

To remember also that the land that produces South Africa’s most celebrated wines was once Khoi land. 

Its fertility was never a gift; it was stolen. When that land was taken, its people were pushed outward, first into labour compounds, then into courts and RDP homes, into what function as containment zones for continued dehumanisation. 

South Africa prefers the story where colonialism is over, where accountability has been replaced by exchange programmes and apologies without consequence. But colonialism did not end. It refined itself. It learned to ferment. It learned how to call itself viticulture.

But who will tell the next generation the truth if not us. Who will explain as we commemorate 367 years of violence of this invasive plant species, that beauty built on violence, heritage without justice is just branding, that denial does not erase the blood in the soil.

* Toroga Denver is a Khoikhoi First Nation fellow at the Munanai First Nations Institute.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media. 

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