Cape Town - The Western Cape First Nations Collective (WCFNC) has reiterated its unwavering support for the River Club development, which is under way.
The R4.6 billion development is expected to house Amazon’s African headquarters and has been the centre of a dispute concerning the preservation of culture and heritage.
The collective today held a press briefing where it represented multiple Khoi and San leaders, including Gorinhaiqua, Gorachouqua, Cochoqua, Korana and Griqua, who support the development.
The collective said this would be the first time that the culture would get the recognition it deserved.
WCFNC representative chief Zenzile Khoisan said: “We have decided to act in our own interest, as what we have secured at the River Club exists nowhere else in South Africa.
“We have decided to engage the development directly and what we have been able to achieve in the development of the River Club, I challenge anybody to show me where in this country something like that exists for the Khoi.”
The Liesbeek Leisure Properties Trust, which is responsible for the development, has said it would include several cultural and heritage features as sites of memory and living cultural practice. This includes a media centre managed by the WCFNC, an indigenous garden, heritage eco-trail and garden amphitheatre.
“It’s going to be a world-class cultural and heritage precinct. Anybody who wants to deny the Khoi, that is part of the history of saying the Khoi must have nothing. Everybody else can have something but when it comes to the Khoi, they don’t want the world to know that the Khoi exist,” said Khoisan.
The matter has been part of a high court battle between opposing factions, wherein the Liesbeek Action Campaign (LAC) represented by the Observatory Civic Association and the Goringhaicona Khoi Khoin Indigenous Traditional Council (GKKITC) is seeking to stop the development of 150 000 square metres of concrete at the River Club site. They say the decisions by the City and provincial government to approve the development were invalid.
GKKITC high commissioner Tauriq Jenkins said: “One can’t put a museum on a concrete block that has decimated the heritage it alleges to celebrate. This is rather a Khoi Golgotha that signals rather as an epithet to a final solution on a site where dispossession and eventual genocide started.”
The site currently features the Two Rivers Urban Park, which according to the LAC is in danger of being destroyed as an environmentally sensitive floodplain that holds historical significance for indigenous communities.