The City Agency

15/10/2026

Reposting from Prof. Dr. Fadli Zon, Minister of Culture of the Republic of Indonesia, who opened 'There Was Something Here Before' at Erasmus Huis, Jakarta.

We were honoured to welcome the Minister and his team to the opening, together with the Dutch Ambassador, the South African Ambassador, representatives of Erasmus Huis, collaborators, invited guests and members of the public.

'There Was Something Here Before' examines Cape Town and the histories and forces that continue to shape the city and its inequalities. Within this wider story, the exhibition traces Cape Town’s historical links to Indonesia and the broader Indian Ocean world — histories of movement, exile, enslavement, migration and cultural exchange that remain present in the city today.
We are pleased to share the Minister’s reflections on the exhibition below.

English translation of the Minister’s original caption:
For more than three centuries, the movement of people across the Indian Ocean connected the Indonesian archipelago with Cape Town, South Africa. People from the archipelago who were exiled and enslaved became part of the history of Cape Town’s formation.

This history is brought to light by Zahira Asmal through 'There Was Something Here Before' , an exhibition I attended the opening of at Erasmus Huis, Jakarta. Bringing together archival materials, audio recordings, personal testimonies, artworks and interactive design, the exhibition traces the journeys and historical presence of people from the Indonesian archipelago in Cape Town.

The exhibition reminds us that traces of Indonesian culture are also embedded in the histories of cities far beyond the archipelago.

06/10/2026

🇮🇩 Opening Exhibition Highlights
There Was Something Here Before menghadirkan sebuah malam yang dipenuhi percakapan, pertemuan, dan penemuan.

Turut hadir H.E. Marc Gerritsen, Duta Besar Kerajaan Belanda untuk Indonesia, Timor-Leste, dan ASEAN; H.E. Mpetjane Kgaogelo Lekgoro, Duta Besar Afrika Selatan untuk Indonesia; serta Menteri Kebudayaan Republik Indonesia, Fadli Zon.

Zahira Asmal, Fadli Zon, dan H.E. Marc Gerritsen berbagi refleksi tentang sejarah, ruang, ingatan, serta hubungan yang telah melintasi Samudra Hindia.

Para tamu menjelajahi karya-karya Zahira, bertukar cerita, dan menemukan jejak sejarah yang tersimpan dalam setiap karya, memberikan gambaran tentang berbagai lapisan hubungan yang diangkat dalam presentasi ini.

Dan ceritanya masih berlanjut. There Was Something Here Before dapat dikunjungi hingga 23 Desember 2026 di Erasmus Huis.
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🇿🇦 Opening Exhibition Highlights
There Was Something Here Before brought together an evening of conversations, encounters, and discovery.

Among those in attendance were H.E. Marc Gerritsen, Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to Indonesia, Timor-Leste and ASEAN; H.E. Mpetjane Kgaogelo Lekgoro, Ambassador of South Africa to Indonesia; and Minister of Culture of the Republic of Indonesia, Fadli Zon.

Zahira Asmal, Fadli Zon, and H.E. Marc Gerritsen shared reflections on history, place, memory, and the connections that have travelled across the Indian Ocean.

Guests explored the works, exchanged stories, and discovered traces of history held within each piece, offering a glimpse into the layers of connection explored throughout the presentation.

The story continues. There Was Something Here Before is on view until 23 December 2026 at Erasmus Huis.
Come discover the stories for yourself.

Erasmus Huis Jakarta Zahira Asmal Dutch Embassy Indonesia Fadli Zon Kementerian Kebudayaan RI

30/09/2026

🇮🇩 Sabtu, 3 Oktober 2026
Program Publik

13.00 — Exhibition Walkabout bersama Zahira Asmal

14.00 — Pemutaran Film: UnRest
Film karya Siona O'Connell dan University of Pretoria ini menelusuri kembali penggalian di Prestwich Street, Cape Town, serta perdebatan seputar warisan, ilmu pengetahuan, keadilan, dan pengakuan. Film ini juga berkaitan dengan Concealed, bagian dari There Was Something Here Before.

14.45 — Percakapan Pameran: We Are Here
Zahira Asmal bersama Bonnie Triyana dan Isna Marifa
Cape Town membawa Indonesia di dalam dirinya, namun sejarah hubungan ini belum sepenuhnya dipahami. Ketiganya membahas perjalanan manusia melintasi Samudra Hindia, pengasingan dan perbudakan, penghapusan sejarah dan perlawanan, serta apa yang lahir darinya: rumah, komunitas, budaya, dan rasa memiliki.

16.00 — Teh dan kudapan dari Cape
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🇬🇧Saturday, 3 October 2026
Public Programme

13:00 Exhibition Walkabout with Zahira Asmal

14:00 Film Screening: UnRest
UnRest, a film by Siona O’Connell and the University of Pretoria, revisits the Prestwich Street excavation and the debates and controversies it brought into view — heritage, science, justice, recognition and the limits of each.

14:45 Exhibition Conversation: We Are Here
Zahira Asmal with Bonnie Triyana and Isna Marifa
Cape Town carries Indonesia within it, yet the history of this connection remains incompletely understood. Zahira Asmal, Bonnie Triyana and Isna Marifa explore the histories brought into view through There Was Something Here Before: the movement of people across the Indian Ocean, exile and enslavement, erasure and resistance, and the enduring connections between Indonesia and the Cape. The conversation asks not only what was lost, but what was made in its place — home, community, culture and belonging — and what these living inheritances might mean today.

16:00 Tea and treats from the Cape


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22/09/2026

EXHIBITION ANNOUNCEMENT

There Was Something Here Before
by Zahira Asmal

2 October – 23 December 2026
Erasmus Huis, Jakarta - Indonesia

Cape Town carries Indonesia within it.
For more than three centuries, the two have been bound together by the movement of people across the Indian Ocean. Many of those who built Cape Town were exiled and enslaved from these islands. 'There Was Something Here Before' follows those connections back across the ocean, returning these histories to the places from which they came.

'There Was Something Here Before' examines the making of Cape Town and the structural inequalities that continue to shape the city and wider Cape region through representation, memory, spatial access, culture, politics and economics. Bringing together research, archival material, photography, sound, art, personal testimony and interactive design, the exhibition reveals the city not as a fixed place, but as one continually made through movement, labour, struggle, care and acts of restoration.

It asks not only what was lost by those who were exiled, enslaved, displaced and forgotten, but what they built in its place: communities, architecture and cultures that endure. Rather than treating the past as complete, the exhibition turns to the present, asking how South Africa and Indonesia might re-enter each other’s lives - and what these shared histories might make possible now.

What would it mean to build cities that remember - and honour - the people who made them?

'There Was Something Here Before' was created by Zahira Asmal with support from the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Indonesia. Over the coming weeks, we will share the histories, people, places and ideas that make up the exhibition, alongside a series of events in Jakarta - free and open to all.

Public opening
Friday, 2 October · 19:30

Erasmus Huis
Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands
Jalan H.R. Rasuna Said Kav. S-3
Kuningan, Jakarta Selatan 12950
Indonesia

For more information, visit the See project website - link in the comments.

03/06/2026

Today marks 16 years of The City.

What began as an idea has become a vehicle for research, gathering, storytelling, exhibitions, urban projects, archives, conversations, collaborations, travels, and countless encounters with remarkable people.

Over the years, The City has taken many forms, but its purpose has remained remarkably consistent: to pay attention to the places we build and inhabit and honour the people and stories that shape them.

At the heart of our work is a belief that cities should be more just, inclusive, and equitable. Whether through research, curation, documentation, or public engagement, we have sought to better understand the forces that shape our urban environments and to contribute, in our own way, to addressing the inequalities that continue to define them.

We are deeply grateful to everyone who has contributed ideas, commissioned work, collaborated, shared knowledge, opened doors, trusted a process, or simply accompanied the journey.

Sixteen years later, we are still learning, still curious, and still excited about our cities.

Thank you for being part of the story.
The City is a space for all.

25/05/2026

Africa Day | Stimela

For Africa Day, we return to Hugh Masekela’s Stimela the coal train.

A song of breath, metal, memory and mourning.

Stimela carries the sound of men travelling from across Southern and Central Africa to work in the mines of Johannesburg. From Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Lesotho, Botswana, Eswatini and beyond - men were drawn into the machinery of extraction, leaving land, family, language and home behind.

Johannesburg was built through this movement.

Its wealth, infrastructure and modernity did not emerge from nowhere. It was carried by migrant labour. By African bodies moving across borders that were themselves violently drawn. By men who went deep into the earth so that a city could rise above it.

And yet, this history also tells us something else.

Johannesburg has always been cosmopolitan. It has always been made by movement, by arrival, by language, by exchange, by people coming from elsewhere and becoming part of the city’s life.

This is something to treasure, not to police.

In a country and continent shaped by arbitrary borders, colonial extraction and selective gain, we have to ask what it means to keep reproducing exclusion. What does it mean to fear the very movement that built our cities? What does it mean to criminalise the presence of those whose histories are already woven into the making of this place?

Stimela reminds us that migration is not new. African movement is not an interruption of the city. It is one of its foundations.

Let the memory of the great Hugh Masekela return us to something larger than fear: inclusion, integration, dignity and exchange.

We can be more than inherited borders.
We can be more than scarcity.
We can build cities that remember who built them.

31K likes, 2K comments. "Hugh Masekela The Late [Living] Jazz Legend Performs Stimela"

18/05/2026

Reading the City Through A Man of Good Hope

We live in a time when movement and migration are constantly placed under suspicion. Yet people have always moved. For necessity and survival. For trade, curiosity, joy, wonder - and sometimes simply to wander.

During Africa Month, we return to Jonny Steinberg’s “A Man of Good Hope”, a book whose title carries its own historical weight. The Cape of Good Hope was named in relation to passage, promise, conquest and wealth - the belief that this route around the Cape would open a way to Asia.

Centuries later, Assad, a young Somali man, arrives in South Africa carrying another kind of hope: not imperial, not extractive, but human. The hope of safety, dignity, and rebuilding a life. But Assad arrives in a country already deeply fractured by colonial and apartheid spatial planning. He lands in Cape Town, where poverty is pushed to the edge, where displacement is repeated, and where the poor are too often treated as a problem to be hidden rather than people to be housed, protected and included.

Blikkiesdorp, created as a “temporary” relocation camp ahead of the 2010 World Cup, is central to this reading. It was part of a city-making logic that sought to “clean” poverty from view while selling Cape Town as a world-class destination for tourists and investors. But temporary solutions have a way of becoming permanent conditions.

Assad begins to see how different South African communities were shaped differently by apartheid, and how these histories continue to produce fear, resentment, scarcity and uneven access to the city. What is striking is that even a man fleeing war is jarred by the violence he encounters here and yet he is still able to understand something of the historical violence that shaped the local population.

The tragedy is that the anger is not directed at apartheid’s architects, its beneficiaries, or the systems that continue to reproduce inequality. It is too often turned against other poor and vulnerable people.

So we ask: would this violence take the same form if spatial justice had been served? If people had been returned to land, neighbourhoods, opportunity and dignity? If cities were built for residents first?

What exchanges might have been possible? Trade, friendship, family, travel, language, culture - the ordinary and extraordinary possibilities of African movement.

South Africa once represented a promise. It still does. But constitutional values mean little when our cities remain organised through exclusion, distance, insecurity and abandonment.

A city that cannot hold dignity for its residents will struggle to hold dignity for newcomers too.

04/05/2026

Note: This post contains references to human remains.

Before Cape Town became a city of streets and property lines, it was shaped by systems of enslavement. From the 17th century, people were enslaved and brought to the Cape from across the Indian Ocean world. They built the early infrastructure of the colony and became the fabric of Cape society itself - yet their lives and deaths remain largely unacknowledged. Many were buried on the edges of the colonial town, in ground later absorbed into the expanding city.

In 2003, during construction in Green Point, these burial grounds were uncovered. Excavation was halted, briefly. What followed was a negotiation between development, the state, and civil society one in which the demands of development were prioritised over the claims of the dead. Thousands of bodies were exhumed. Calls to preserve the site as a place of memory were dismissed. Construction continued.

This is not an isolated moment. It sits within a longer history of removal: from enslavement, to forced removals under colonialism and apartheid, to the ongoing redevelopment of the city for a global, elite urban imaginary.

Today, at the Prestwich Memorial, the remains of those who made the early city possible are held in an ossuary placed in cardboard boxes. Stacked. Stored. Contained. Keeping these lives in a state of transience, not fully acknowledged, returned, or at rest.

In post-apartheid Cape Town, land is excavated for development with urgency. The result is a city that builds over its past while keeping it at a distance.

Visitors have written:
“Respect is returning them to us, their people.”
“Rethink this memorial.”

If the enslaved were among the founding makers of this city, woven into its social and cultural fabric, what does it mean to keep them here, in boxes?
What would it mean to move beyond containment - to recognition, to restitution, to rest?
What would it mean to uncover this history fully - not only in moments of development, but as part of how we understand the city itself?
And what kind of city do we become if we continue to build without reckoning with what lies beneath?

Photographs by Zahira Asmal.

27/04/2026

Freedom Day. 32 years of democracy.

To reflect on freedom, it is necessary to return to Robben Island - not as a single story of imprisonment, but as a longer history of exile, resistance, and removal.

Long before the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, the island functioned as a place of banishment within a wider imperial network. Figures such as Krotoa were removed from their communities, while Tuan Guru and Tuan Matarah were exiled from Indonesia for resisting Dutch colonial rule. Their presence situates the island within a broader history of global anti-imperial struggle where the Cape was not peripheral, but connected.

By the 19th century, the island held those cast out through illness and stigma. In the 20th century, it became synonymous with political imprisonment. Yet even within this history, forms of isolation were uneven. Robert Sobukwe was held in enforced solitude under a special legal provision, denied even the limited solidarities available to other prisoners.

The consequences of this isolation extended beyond the prison itself. Families were left waiting and relationships mediated through censored letters, restricted visits, and prolonged absence. The labour of endurance was not only carried by those imprisoned, but by those outside. Figures such as Winnie Mandela occupied this space of waiting, negotiation, and political continuity, though their roles are often less fully held in public memory.
Robben Island remains visible from the city. Its outline is familiar.

Yet visibility has never guaranteed understanding. Memory requires work. It is unevenly held, differently valued, and continually reshaped. What is remembered and what is allowed to fade continues to shape the present.

Photographs by Zahira Asmal.

22/04/2026

On Earth Day, conversations about the environment often focus on conservation and sustainability.

In South Africa, these conversations cannot be separated from land.

The Natives Land Act restricted Black South Africans to just 7% of the country’s land, fundamentally restructuring access to resources, livelihoods, and ecological systems. This was not only a social or economic intervention - it was an environmental one.

The Group Areas Act extended this spatial logic into cities, entrenching patterns of exclusion that continue to shape land access today.

Colonial expansion also transformed the Cape’s ecological landscape: indigenous vegetation was cleared, wetlands altered, and species extinct or driven away from environments they once inhabited.

These are not parallel histories - they are the same history.

Today, land ownership remains deeply unequal.
National land audits show that approximately 72% of farms and agricultural holdings are owned by white South Africans, while Black South Africans own around 4%, with coloured and Indian ownership making up the remainder.
Despite decades of reform, only a fraction of land redistribution targets have been met.
But land is not only a resource to be managed or extracted.

It is memory.
It is ancestry.
It is relationship - between people, and between people and the environment.

Not all land needs to be productive to have value.
Not all land needs to be cultivated to matter.

Land can hold, restore, and simply be.

To be separated from land is not only to lose access -
it is to be distanced from memory, from ecology, from possibility.

And yet, much of this remains difficult to see.

The histories embedded in land.
The ecologies that have been erased.
The relationships that persist, even when obscured.

Perhaps Earth Day asks something more of us:
To look again.
To attend to what is present, and what has been made invisible.
To recognise the interwoven ecologies - social, historical, environmental - that shape this place.
And to imagine forms of care that restore not only land, but our relationship to it.