Camissa: The River That Remembers Us
Heritage Month Reflections on Water, People, and Becoming
The Forgotten River Beneath Our Feet
Before there were streets and buildings, before Company Gardens and canals, there was water. It rose from the springs of Table Mountain and came tumbling down in streams, gathering into what the Khoi called Camissa — the place of sweet waters. For centuries, this river sustained life at the Cape. The Khoi and San drank from it, rested by its banks, told stories in its shade. Later, enslaved men and women from Java, Bengal, Madagascar, Mozambique, and India touched its current as they bent under forced labour. Fresh water was the first mercy, and the first demand.
Camissa once ran openly down into the town. The Dutch East India Company carved it into canals, forcing its body into stone, bending it to their fort and gardens. But water has memory. It seeps under walls, reappears in unexpected places, refuses to be silenced. Today, buried beneath tar and pavement, Camissa still flows. And if you pause long enough, you might hear it whisper under your feet.
At the River’s Edge: A People Gathered
The river was never just water. It was a meeting place, a barzakh — a threshold where lives, languages, and faiths collided. Khoi pastoralists led cattle to drink. San hunters rested with skins and stories. Dutch settlers drew buckets to quench their fort. Slaves dug trenches, carried wood, and planted gardens for a company that claimed the river as its own.
Yet at the same banks, something else was happening. Free Blacks, exiles, manumitted slaves, and the first Muslims of the Cape gathered here. The Auwal Mosque — our first mosque — rose near the Camissa’s streams. Qur’an recitation and children’s laughter mingled with the sound of water. Out of pain, a people began to form.
African Camissa: A Wider Circle
Patric Tariq Mellet calls this heritage African Camissa. It is more than geography; it is an identity — a wider circle of becoming. In his telling, Camissa is the place where Khoi, San, enslaved Africans, Asian exiles, and their descendants all drank from the same stream, forming a new community beyond the colonial word “Coloured.”
Stuart Hall once said identity is not a fixed thing we inherit, but a process of becoming. Camissa is that process made visible in water — always moving, always reshaping, carrying traces of every stone it has touched.
The River of Resistance and Remembrance
Water has always been resistance. Hājar ran between the hills in desperation, and Zamzam burst forth in the desert — the well that still feeds millions of pilgrims. Camissa, too, gave life to those who were bound in chains. The VOC tried to control it, but enslaved hands touched it daily, and their songs flowed into it.
In my own writing, I have tried to follow these streams:
- The Legend of the Silver Tree — a story of shimmering roots in mountain mist.
- The Mother Tongue of Tasbih — where Afrikaans, written in Arabic script, became a stream of prayer.
- Tamat — a reminder that completion is never an ending, but a living beginning.
- Hājar — the Black mother whose faith turned thirst into a sacred inheritance.
All these pieces flow back into Camissa. The river is not only history — it is memory itself, resisting erasure.
Heritage Month: Listening for the Water
September often gives us monuments, parades, and neat stories of “unity in diversity.” But heritage is not polished granite or rainbow slogans. It is water that refuses to stay in its channel.
Camissa is buried, but not gone. It still seeps under Cape Town, carrying whispers of Khoi clans, slave lullabies, Qur’an verses, and the rhythm of ghoema drums. It reminds us that heritage is not just what we are handed, but what we choose to remember and honour.
Closing Reflection
The Camissa River still remembers us. It does not flow in straight lines. It curves, divides, disappears, and resurfaces — like our histories, like our families, like our faiths. To walk in Cape Town is to walk above water, on layers of memory that never dry out.
The tree shimmers still, for those who know where to look.
The river flows still, for those who choose to listen.
🎥 This reflection also lives as a video.
Watch it on [Instagram]
Adli Yacubi 