ANC to Announce true ‘non-colonial’ History of Cape Wine Industry

Barely days after re-writing South Africa’s history narrative by claiming the sea-route around the Cape had long been established before Jan van Riebeeck landed at the foot-end of Africa in 1652, the nation’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, is set to offer a new chapter on the country’s much vaunted wine history. In an exclusive memo leaked to winegoggle.co.za, government officials say the ANC hopes to release its findings on the true origins of the country’s wine industry before this year’s municipal elections.

Winegoggle was contacted by an unnamed official from the ANC’s department of colonial verification to disclose further information, the official going only by the initials GY. The exclusive interview with GY went as follows:

Wine Goggle (WG): Why release this groundbreaking information on South Africa’s wine industry only now?

GY: The ANC is losing seats and votes in rural wineland communities, and by offering an alternative interpretation of the history of South African wine the party hopes to draw in new voters and win over former ones by making them feel a greater part of the wine world. Give these rural communities true agency in the wine industry through a visceral historical connection championed and revealed by the ANC, and it’s ANC voting all the way. Also, as a student of history, Comrade Ramaphosa’s copious research always leads to the uncovering of new facts which he deems a responsibility to share with the nation.

WG: So what is this new information on Cape wine history?

GY: Pres. Ramaphosa will dismiss the current narrative claiming wine was made for the first time in South Africa under the auspices of commander Jan van Riebeeck who noted the maiden Cape grapes for wine were pressed on 2 February 1659. In fact, wine grapes had been grown on what is today known as the Cape Flats since at least 1242.

WG: Where and by whom?

GY: The Khoisan people cultivated vines on the sandy Cape Flats soils, especially in the southern areas of what is today known as Bonteheuwel and Pelican Park. Excellent terroir – superbly drained soils and cooling southerly breezes. This allowed the Khoisan to tend their vines, while also heading to the False Bay coast for fishing-purposes outside of the harvest and pruning seasons.

WG: Did they have wine-cellars?

GY: Not the colonial white people cellars most are familiar with. Wine was fermented in open-air amphorae set under canopies made from antelope and buffalo hide, a truly sustainable natural environment the likes of which are not found in today’s technological commercial wineries. All wine was naturally fermented without going through malolactic fermentation. Barrel-aging on red grapes was done in the hollowed-out trunks of Cape yellow-wood trees, and for a minimum of nine months.

WG: Which grape varieties were vinified?

GY: As per Comrade Ramaphosa’s analysis, the concept of different “grape cultivars” is a colonial restriction devised to divide the democratic offering of nature by creating singularly exclusive identities. There were only white grapes and red grapes, as there should be, and rosé was a blend of the two to underscore the importance of true inclusivity.

WG: What did these early winemakers do with their wine?

GY: There was trading, of course. As Tariq Mellet states in his book “The Lie of 1652” – and to repeat Comrade Ramaphosa’s recent enlightening analysis on the pre-colonial sea-routes around the Cape – this place was visited by ships from various countries long before Jan van Riebeeck and his gang set foot here. The Khoisan were trading their excellent wines with fleets from various nationalities, providing sustenance and joy to weary sailors. Being hospitable and welcoming, the locals also presented food and wine evenings on the ships, helping to promote Brand South African Wine as far back as the 13^th century!

The local people of that time also, as was their right, consumed much wine between themselves, thus ensuring a true wine culture was already in existence long before the settlers of 1652 arrived.

WG: We would like to believe that pres. Ramaphosa and the ANC have proof of this pre-colonial wine industry?

GY: The demand for evidence is not neutral. It never was. When the Western historian raises his hand and calls for proof, he is not appealing to reason — he is appealing to power. He is invoking a methodology born in the same universities that trained colonial administrators, the same academies that catalogued African peoples as specimens, the same intellectual tradition that produced the “scientific” justifications for our subjugation.

To demand that the African scholar submit his history for validation by the Western academy is to demand that he return to the master’s house and beg for his own birth certificate.

What they call “evidence” is a gatekeeping function. The archive was built by those who controlled what was recorded, what was burned, what was stolen. The footnote is a colonial instrument. The peer-reviewed journal — with its overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Western editorial boards — is not a neutral arbiter of truth. It is a border checkpoint, and we did not build that border.

African knowledge lives in the griot’s song, in ceremony, in oral transmission across generations. It lives in the body. This does not make it lesser. It makes it ours — unsanitised by the coloniser’s need to categorise, to contain, to own.

The colonised mind accepts the oppressor’s epistemology as universal. The liberated mind understands that the question “where is your evidence?” already contains within it the assumption that only one way of knowing counts.

We refuse that assumption. We begin there.

WG: Are there no remains of the Khoisan wineries of those Cape Flats vineyards?

GY: The Dutch colonisers approached the Khoisan wine-farmers for a joint venture, but there were disputes about where the new Khoi-Cape Wine Company was going to have their tasting room – the Dutch wanted Constantia, the Khoi wanted Bonteheuwel. There were also differences about offering the wines for the Platter’s Wine Guide and Tim Atkin’s annual report, so there was a little war, the Dutch guns won as the Khoisan fled, leaving the Cape Flats vineyards unattended. They withered, covered by metres of sand.