D1.8.24: [Untitled]

D1.8.24: [Untitled]

Newspaper Clippings

Bleek remarks on the unruly audience at a recent public meeting convened by municipal commissioners inarticulately proposing unrequested municipal reforms worsened by a bungling of sensitive topics. The public does not respond well to poor or incomplete proposals. A public meeting is the wrong forum for presenting intricate evidence or holding lengthy talks on municipal reforms and extramural sepulture (burial outside the central city limits). All but two of the commissioners subsequently resigned, saddling the municipal secretary with an unfair burden. Therefore, Cape Town needs a higher executive office vested with superior authority, like an archetypally English mayor or Dutch burgomaster. He then critiques requests to extend Cape Town's overcrowded cemeteries and underscores the Malay burial ground of the Lion's Rump as a public health concern. Bleek takes issue with flashy local funerals and states his preference. He proposes a basic organisational structure for how a new Malay cemetery on the Cape Flats might be managed and structurally secured.

Printed newsprint glued on paper

06 April 1865

One cut-out column of printed newsprint mounted on foolscap folio (warped).

Mayor (their superior authority), municipal organism, burial grounds, cemeteries (a new one is needed away from town), Malay cemetery (on the sloping sides of the Lion's Rump), water (is poisonous downwind of cemeteries), Flats (Cape Flats)

Pressed clippings of Victorian current affairs opinion pieces by Wilhelm Bleek. Published in Het Volksblad on Thursday, April 6th, 1865. Interestingly, Bleek incrementally recommends the Flats as a place to relocate the dead, foul industry (the Stercus Company), and then the living coloured population (which collectively refers to the Malay and Hottentots) more obliquely. The Malay cemetery on the 'Lion's Rump' (Signal Hill) arguably refers to the extant Tana Baru (Muslim) Cemetery, founded c. 1790 above the old quarry, in present day Bo-Kaap (Kessler, Lee, & Menning, 2016: 113; Laffan, 2017: 210).

Van de Sandt de Villiers & Co.