This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

26th April 2008

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My idea was a simple one: to spend a day visiting naval and maritime museums on opposite ends of the Cape peninsula; and to do it using public transport or going on foot, eschewing the carbon-guzzling preferences of most well-heeled South Africans exploring their own country.

Suffice it to say that the day-trip took longer than I thought it would.

I spent more time walking and waiting than I did in museum mode. Still, the chief advantage of my scheme was that it allowed me to enjoy the fantastic sea views from the coastal stretch of the Cape Town-Simonstown train, where the track hugs the shore as it makes its way from Muizenberg through the sleepy towns along False Bay before pulling into Simonstown station at the end of the line.

The grey corvettes and gunships moored in the bay are an impressive (and slightly disturbing) reminder that Simonstown’s determinedly naval atmosphere is not simply a tourism-oriented historical recreation – it is, after all, the functional base of the South African navy. Its harbour-village charm, combining fine old architecture and crumbling paint, also combines sailors in crisp white uniforms with haggard characters who’ve spent too long looking down the business end of a bottle.

At the entrance to the SA Naval Museum, there’s a sign carrying an implicit warning to keep your wits about you: “INDEMNITY. Entrance into any naval establishment and participation in any activities are done at own risk.” But it’s a harmless place, really.

In fact, it’s a museum of the old school, the kind that invites descriptions such as “quaint”. Everything is neatly laid out and carefully displayed, as you would expect from military types, but the chief impression, surprisingly, is one of clutter. Newspaper clippings and wartime propaganda, stories of highly decorated soldiers, a smorgasbord of memorabilia (models of ships, trophies, photographs, mugs, bells, portraits, semaphore signalling devices), plaques from ships and naval regiments named after colonial or apartheid cronies, mock maritime scenes manned by mannequins: these are all lumped together, without discrimination or commentary.

There are labels on many of the glass-fronted cabinet displays and signs next to some of the items on the walls, but for the most part it’s left to the viewer to make sense of the museum’s collection in his or her own time, practising a form of imaginative discernment. This is actually quite refreshing in a world of “nanny museums” that explain, interpret and clarify, creating a kind of mono-narrative for their visitors.

It is also problematic – like all South African state institutions, the navy cannot claim an incontestable “proud history”, and some explicit acknowledgement of this is required. Perhaps, in defence, it could be argued that the navy was not as complicit as other military forces in fighting against rather than for the greater national good; and there is, admittedly, a display describing the post-1994 amalgamation of seven different armies (SA, MK, APLA and some “homelands”).

The role of the navy in World War Two is less ambiguous, because the common enemy of European fascism can easily be identified as a “baddie” and the brave allied forces as “goodies”. It’s understandable, then, that many of the displays emphasise this period in SA’s naval history.

If a hint of jingoism surfaces here, it seems to be a natural extension of Simonstown’s history as a British naval base. The SA Navy was formed in 1922; prior to this, the harbour at Simontown was host to members of the British fleet. (Just down the road, tucked inconspicuously behind the St Francis of Assisi Anglican Church, the Simon’s Town Musuem has further information about the British occupation of the Cape.)

At the naval museum, there is more than one paean to Admiral Nelson, who had a stint at the Cape early in his career before he became an icon of British dominance at sea. Probably the most disconcerting of these is his saintly depiction, alongside St George, on the walls of a chapel inside the museum. Apart from the mural, this “church” has a complicated history dating back to 1816, when it functioned as a dockhouse. 

Immediately below the chapel are two halls: one representing supplementary maritime services (non-seafaring vehicles like helicopters and fire trucks) and the other an armaments hall. The latter contains an array of torpedoes, missiles, cannons, depth charges and other weapons of war. It struck me as odd that these instruments of destruction should be placed in such close proximity to a chapel. Then again, I thought to myself, soldiers and sailors going off to war need all the divine solace they can get.

Certainly, the irony of conjoining the sacred and the deadly seemed to be lost on the young naval officer who was taking a tour group of schoolkids through the museum on the day that I visited. Hearing him offer a dry description of the different methods used to torpedo a ship, I was reminded that military men think about death differently from the rest of us.

Nevertheless, the museum also has clippings of newspaper articles and photographs describing some of the navy’s peacetime activities: mercy missions to Bangladesh and Tanzania, oil spill clean-up operations (including penguin salvaging) and ocean rescues. We civilians shouldn’t be too judgemental.

The other half of my day-trip was less successful. Having made my way to the Cape Town Waterfront, I went in search of the SAS Somerset, the world’s last remaining example of a “boom defence” vessel (previously used to patrol and maintain the anti-torpedo and submarine barriers that protect harbours from attack). The ship is ostensibly a “floating museum”, although on-board visits are rarely allowed. It was not indicated on the Waterfront’s plethora of maps and signposting, but I eventually found it behind the aquarium, moored in a hidden corner of the harbour, tucked between a noisy construction site and an unused launching pier. A handful of tourists passed by while I was there, but they were understandably more interested in the seals lounging at the water’s edge than in the unobtrusive ship (the only evidence of its renown being two small buoys marked “SAS Somerset”).

I had more luck at the Iziko Maritime Centre in the old Union Castle building – not really a museum per se, this has, since 2006, acted as a kind of replacement for the defunct SA Maritime Museum. It houses a small collection of models as an aesthetic complement to the John H. Marsh Maritime Research Centre. Marsh was a unique character, an intrepid historian-cum-explorer and photographer-cum-archivist who documented the naval adventures on the Namibian (then South-West African) “skeleton coast”, reported on the annexure of Prince Edward and Marion islands, and was given access to take photographs at restricted ports during the Second World War.

The Union Castle line was, of course, the major sea-link between South Africa and Britain for almost a century. Those with an interest in this connection will enjoy the models of the Windsor Castle, the Durham Castle and various other ships that docked in Cape Town over the years – a great number of which were subsequently sunk, either by German torpedoes or by peace-time catastrophes. Indeed, the catalogue of sinkings, with depressing ratios between survivors and the dead, is a sobering reminder of the risks run by those who take to sea.

The most moving exhibit is a multi-media retelling of the sinking of the SS Mendi off the south coast of England in February 1917. A combination of misty conditions and the blundering of one Captain Henry Winchester Stump, who recklessly piloted his own ship (the SS Darro) into a broadside collision with the Mendi, left 607 men dead – almost all of them black South African soldiers who had enlisted in the Native Labour Contingent and were heading to France to fight “for king and country”, in the hope that England would return the favour by helping to change conditions for black people in South Africa. History shows that this did not happen.