On the pavement of the church square, a slavery monument designed by Wilma Cruise and Gavin Younge was unveiled in 2008. It consists of eleven black granite blocks with texts commemorating the contribution of the enslaved to the reconstruction of Cape Town. On the top and sides of one of the blocks, several words are engraved, such as: Guma songs, Ramkie, Stammother, Kitaab, Afrikaans, Stamouers, Piering, Baadjie, Piesang, Rotang, Baie, Koeksuster, Tamaletjie, which show the different regions and languages that embodied the enslaved people in the Cape. The statue next to it depicts former Prime Minister Jan Hofmeyer, who, as a member of the language society, campaigned for the recognition of Afrikaans as an independent language. In the nineteenth century, both the enslaved people and their owners of Dutch descent spoke Afrikaans, the lingua franca of the Cape. Enslaved people contributed significantly to the development of the language. Written Afrikaans appeared in Arabic rather than in Latin script.

Sources

• Younge, Gavin (2017). The Mirror and the Square ‒ Old Ideological Conflicts in Motion: Church Square Slavery Memorial, in Public Art in South Africa: Bronze Warriors and Plastic Presidents edited by Kim Miller & Brenda Schmahmann. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 53-70.