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Prestwich Place in Green Point, Cape Town, was supposed to be a site to remember and honour the enslaved who were buried there. Instead, it has become a place of forgetting!
By BONITA BENNETT
The South African premiere of the documentary film, ‘UnRest’, took place at the Sendinggestig Museum (often referred to as ‘the slave church’) in Cape Town during November 2025.
This powerful documentary revisits the uneasy legacy of human remains discovered at Prestwich Street in Green Point, Cape Town, in 2003, and could not have been more timely. It comes at a time when many of those who were involved in the ‘Hand Off Prestwich’ campaign from 2003 onwards were beginning to experience a restless unease about the storage of the human remains in an above-ground ossuary, where they were placed in 2008. Instead of the place assuming the role of a place of remembering and honouring, it has become a place of forgetting. This unease was a partial motivation for the making of the film.
Background
Prestwich Place was the name of a building in Prestwich Street, Green Point, that was demolished ahead of the construction of luxury apartments. In the process of excavating the site for below-ground development, human remains were uncovered. The South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA) was informed, as is required by the National Heritage Resources Act (NHRA), and the Archaeology Contracts Office of the University of Cape Town was engaged by the developer to fulfil the legal requirement for archaeological testing. It was concluded that the site had been a burial ground containing more than 2 500 individuals.
Invoking the restorative justice spirit of the NHRA, a coalition of individuals and organisations mobilised for the mortal remains to be left in situ and for the site to be preserved as a site of memory. They called for a moment of pause — a reflective opportunity for the city to contemplate the meaning of the discovery. It was hoped that it could serve as a permanent reminder to the city of the stories and people it had forgotten, and to facilitate healing through remembering.
Who were the dead of Prestwich?
During the colonial period, there were several burial grounds located at this west end of the city. In an 18th-century panoramic painting attributed to Robert Gordon, a Dutch military officer who was also an artist, the site is named as a ‘slaaven begraafplaats’ (slave burial ground). A report on the Prestwich Place burial ground concludes that the people who were buried at Prestwich Place may have been enslaved labourers, paupers and those who were not members of the established church at the time. The area was also occupied at the time by early immigrants as well as the Khoekhoe.
They were the people whose lives were most likely characterised by suffering and who were worked to the bone as they slaved away to build this city. Their deaths were probably unheralded, and ironically, they emerge as occupants of land at a time when the real-estate value of that land has escalated so much that it is out of financial reach of most Capetonians. Their emergence causes much more of a stir in the city than their deaths and burials would have done.
Exhumation and displacement
Deliberations about the future of the burial ground and the dignified treatment of the ancestral remains evoked strong reactions from several quarters at the time. A coalition of memory and heritage practitioners and organisations galvanised public attention and advocated strongly for a longer and more inclusive process of public awareness-raising. They were committed to highlighting the significance of this discovery, particularly because the history and legacies of enslavement at the Cape had been under-acknowledged in the past, and this presented as an opportune occasion for changing that. For a while, SAHRA was an ally in this view.
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In the film referred to earlier, archaeologist Nick Shepherd reminds us that this was the first major test case involving a burial ground for the NHRA, which was relatively new in 2003. Furthermore, he points out that the NHRA makes allowance for a 90-day public consultation period before archaeological testing was to take place. In the case of Prestwich, SAHRA allowed for the two processes to happen simultaneously, which in effect made non-exhumation as an option emerging from the public process a moot point, as the remains had mostly been exhumed by the end of the period.
Public meetings, workshops, weekly site vigils, newspaper articles and other forums of public engagement continued for approximately two years, with many competing voices and interests pitted against each other. Some archaeologists, physical anthropologists and other scientists were aggrieved that they could not have access to the exhumed remains in order to investigate the forensic details of their lives. The memory coalition, which in 2004 became the Prestwich Place Project Committee (PPPC), opposed the further handling of the remains, arguing that the scientific disciplines demanding invasive research on the human remains had not demonstrated how their research might contribute to healing and restorative justice for descendant communities. The PPPC felt that this was a further violation of the already battered ancestral remains.
The NHRA makes it possible for descendants of uncovered human remains to have input into their treatment. Because of the absence of records, members of the PPPC positioned themselves as proxies for the imagined community of the unnamed dead. They argued that requiring people who had been systematically disconnected from their pasts, and whose records of genealogical connections of that period were dependent on the selectivity of the colonial archive, was an unjust requirement. In addition, PPPC put forward the argument that biology was only one strand of connectivity and claimed connection through the lineage of indigeneity and of the enslaved at the Cape.
Unfortunately, a tribunal upheld the developer’s rights to proceed with construction on the burial ground. One of the main arguments was that the developer had followed due process and had full rights to develop the property despite the tribunal members’ empathy with the substance of the appeal and proposals made by the coalition. It became clear that, at that time, the existing regulations did not make adequate provision for the treatment of sensitive and socially charged discoveries such as this.
Archival records show that the burial ground was at one time marked on official maps, but over time it had ‘fallen off’ the city maps. For this reason, it did not trigger any attention when building permission was applied for and granted. This disappearance or displacement from official cartographic records feels like a fitting metaphor for this hidden and forgotten past. It seems to be happening again.
Prestwich Memorial / TRUTH Coffee Shop
The Prestwich Memorial, located on the corner of Buitengracht and Somerset Roads, is a product of compromise. Having lost the appeal to have the ancestral remains re-interred in the ground, PPPC joined District Six Museum as community representative voices to work with SAHRA, Heritage Western Cape and the City of Cape Town on a plan for an alternative memorial site and process. At the time, reburial was not an option, given that no land was available, and the proposal involved building an ossuary at a nearby City-owned site for the above-ground interment of the remains.
The process proved to be extremely frustrating for the two community-based entities, as methodologies and values were not shared with the other entities. After a very fraught process, the ossuary was complete, and the remains were transferred there on April 25, 2008. Oversight of the ossuary was then handed over from the City’s Heritage Department to Facilities Management, and soon after a coffee vendor was installed so that the rental from the shop could support the running costs of the ossuary. Encountering a coffee shop in a space where human remains are kept is puzzling to many people who encounter the space by chance.
The coffee shop operating in the space is ironically named ‘TRUTH Coffee’. The side of the ossuary that was intended as a memorial garden has, in effect, become the coffee shop’s outdoor space. The ‘TRUTH’ brand has overtaken the identity of the memorial, with the ossuary becoming invisible in the face of its marketing. In other words, the ancestral remains seem to be falling off the city map once again. On an average day, patrons enjoying premium coffee from what has become a celebrated roastery in the city seem oblivious to the intended nature of the space and what lies beyond the brick wall that separates them from the boxed human remains.
In 2023, the City commissioned consultants to assess the space and make recommendations for its improvement. In a parallel process, a number of interested individuals (some of whom were involved with PPPC) have gathered to think through how to make good on the failings of the compromise and how to ensure that the humans interred in cardboard boxes in the space truly find a final resting place that is as dignified and respectful as the ways in which we deal with our familial dead. Their place in the ossuary feels uncertain, transitory and forgotten.
‘UnRest’ has reminded us of this unfinished business of compromise. Since its launch and subsequent sharing on social media several thousand times, it has signalled that this is the moment to advocate for broader recognition and visibility of these ancestors of our city.
Bonita Bennett started her working career as a high school educator. She has been a social justice activist dating back to her student days in the 1980s and, since leaving formal teaching in 1992, has been involved in the non-profit space. She is a memory studies scholar and has been active in the museum and heritage sector for over 20 years. She currently works as an independent practitioner, with her last full-time position having been as Director of the District Six Museum in Cape Town, where she remains engaged as a research associate and as a member of its board of trustees. She has been a key player in developing dynamic and inclusive memorialisation initiatives in Cape Town, focusing on eclipsed and untold stories about the city’s painful pasts. Together with her independent work, she currently holds a post-doctoral position at the University of Pretoria, researching ways in which university campuses, culture and collections can benefit from intentional decolonial strategies with a special focus on the Global South.
