Descendants of South African Slaves Honored In Museum’s Slave Calendar

What role did slavery play in the shaping of modern nations, and how is its legacy impacting contemporary thought and policy?

These are important questions for Americans, but also for South Africans, and people from scores of nations who have committed crimes against humanity. They’re the kind of questions that might be answered in a museum.

Iziko Slave Lodge Museum in Cape Town worked with Geometry Global/Cape Town to bring more visitors and attention to the museum. The result is a stunning photographic story told in a calendar format.

The work reminds—or informs us for the first time—that over 71,000 slaves were forcibly brought to Cape Town between 1653 and 1856. Treated as property, many were renamed after the calendar month in which they arrived in the Cape. To this day, the region has many thousands of people with surnames like Junies, Augustus, September and November but very few know why.

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There are more slaves today—27 million—than at any time in history.