This is a journey of understanding, from Signal Hill, in Cape Town, where the voices of our enslaved and exiled ancestors bid us well and offer protection on the journey …
… to the Kamiesberg, in Namaqualand, where our indigenous ancestors have dwelt for more than a thousand years …
… as we follow the path of an 1865 expedition to the Land of the Amacqua, led by Simon van der Stel, Commander of the Cape, under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company …
… for these three strands – enslaved and exiled, indigenous, and European, are inextricably linked in the history of this country.
I travel in the Company of the Wandering Womb, on the first leg of a journey of return towards Angola, the home of an enslaved ancestor who birthed her children in the slave lodge in the Cape. I join the journey because I am curious about the Kamiesberg, the mountain that bears my name, and what it means in terms of a heritage denied by the Company that traded people and spices – the Dutch East India Company.
I have been a collaborator in the project Nothing of Importance Occurred initiated by South African artist, Wendy Morris, since 2021 when I wrote the first of the Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist, Unpick Restitch: Doilies, Medorahs and Labouring Plants. Together we have organised Fieldguide Gatherings in South Africa (Cape Town Medical Museum and Paulshoek, Kamiesberg, April 2023) and have made three fieldtrips together (Cape Town to the Namibian border 2022, Cape Town to the Kamiesberg, Namaqualand 2023, and Windhoek to Aus, Namibia 2025). We have jointly presented the Fieldguides at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland (Nov 2024).
Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist is a series of small chapbooks designed to bring collaborators, audiences and readers together within the project, Nothing of Importance Occurred: Recuperating a Herball for a 17th Century Enslaved Angolan Midwife at the Cape. This is an artistic project aimed at recuperating missing narratives at the Cape through speculative investigations of plants-as-archive and storytelling-as-method.
Above: the Kramat Of Sheikh Mohamed Hassen Ghaibie Shah on Signal Hill, the starting point of our journeys
Featured Image: Kamieskroon at the foot of the Kamiesberge.
Read preliminary musings on the search for the name Kamies in an article published by Reclamation Magazine.