Should living culture be relocated, again?

Fish Hoek’s The Galley, an Indigenous-run restaurant on the Beach front in Cape Town’s, dispute reaches beyond a restaurant lease. It asks whether cultural rights can be meaningful when the places sustaining Indigenous culture are exposed to commercial competition.

Fish Hoek’s history makes the question urgent. Under apartheid, the beach was designated for white use. “Formerly Whites-Only” is not a decorative detail; it describes a landscape where public access was organised through racial exclusion. The end of apartheid did not automatically restore the cultural relationships disrupted by that exclusion, nor guarantee Indigenous communities' meaningful access to places tied to identity.

The dispute must be understood against colonial dispossession of Khoikhoi and San Peoples and apartheid’s racial ordering of land and public space.

Fish Hoek: a landscape older than the colonial map

The Cape Peninsula’s history predates European settlement. For Khoikhoi and San Peoples, it is an ancestral landscape of memory, identity, spirituality, livelihoods, knowledge and belonging. Its coast, caves with rock art, Khoisan fishtraps, freshwater sources and mountains cannot be reduced to property values, leases or commercial revenue.

Peers’ Cave above Fish Hoek valley is a significant archaeological site documented in the official Khoisan Heritage Report (2021) adopted by South Africa’s Cabinet at the time. Excavations in 1927 uncovered remains commonly called Fish Hoek Man and evidence of ancient occupation. The wider coast also records Indigenous relationships with marine resources and fishing, challenging accounts that begin Cape history with colonial arrival.

The Khoikhoi and San are distinct peoples often grouped under “Khoisan”, despite diverse histories and livelihoods. Their presence predates Dutch colonial rule in 1652. Colonial expansion, land appropriation, labour exploitation, epidemics and colonial institutions profoundly altered their relationships with land and resources.

The Galley: a commercial site with a cultural life

At first glance, the dispute over The Galley appears to concern a commercial lease. The restaurant has operated at Fish Hoek Beach since 1987 under the stewardship of Herbie and Mathea Eichel. Mathea Eichel identifies as a Cape Khoi woman belonging to the Cochoqua community.

According to reporting by Cultural Survival, the premises became more than a place to eat: a small museum showcased Indigenous culture, while a space at the back was used for ceremonies, cultural gatherings and community activities.

A traditional Indigenous wedding held on the beach in September 2021 illustrated how the area could serve as a setting for cultural practice.

The Galley cannot simply be moved elsewhere

For Khoisan communities rebuilding their relationship with Fish Hoek, the argument is not simply that The Galley has hosted cultural activities. The restaurant, beach and mountain form one interconnected cultural landscape. The Galley is woven into that living relationship: a cultural place to gather, access the beach, house cultural artefacts, share knowledge and celebrate a landscape whose meaning exceeds commercial use. Its significance cannot be detached from its location and transferred intact elsewhere.

Suggesting that cultural activity can simply continue elsewhere risks repeating historical displacement. Khoisan communities have endured forced removals and exclusion from places central to identity and belonging. Losing this reclaimed space would not be a neutral change of address; it would interrupt recovery from historical trauma. Culture is not restored by moving objects into a substitute room. It is sustained through relationships among people, memory, place and practice.

The Galley has evolved beyond the terms of a commercial lease. Mathea and the restaurant serve as cultural stewards, enabling Khoisan communities to use the space, house and share artefacts, gather and celebrate the wider cultural landscape. This stewardship is inseparable from the location: mountain, beach and restaurant are parts of a living whole. The impact extends beyond Khoisan communities.

Mathea’s stewardship also serves families using the beach, local pensioners and school children from historically disadvantaged communities affected by forced removals from Fish Hoek to areas including Ocean View. She supports educational bursaries for children of single mothers and people in nearby Masiphumelele. These contributions do not replace the cultural argument they show the wider community value at stake and the many people who could be affected by its loss.

The question is therefore not simply whether a restaurant or tenant can be replaced. It is what happens when a living cultural hub is severed from the landscape in which a community is rebuilding after a traumatic past. Any decision must confront the cumulative harm of renewed displacement and the devastating effect on efforts to restore continuity, dignity and belonging.

The Galley’s cultural role does not automatically confer private ownership, guarantee a lease or establish formal heritage status. However, its cultural significance remains relevant, reflecting decades of community relationships, practices and living heritage that a lease alone cannot capture.

Section 31: a constitutional promise

Section 31 of the South African Constitution protects the rights of persons belonging to cultural, religious and linguistic communities. It provides that they may not be denied the right, with other members of their community, to enjoy their culture, practise their religion, use their language, and form, join and maintain cultural, religious and linguistic associations and other organs of civil society. Section 31(2) makes clear that these rights may not be exercised inconsistently with any provision of the Bill of Rights. Section 30 also protects everyone’s right to use a language and participate in the cultural life of their choice, subject to the Constitution.

These provisions recognise culture’s collective dimension. Cultural life requires spaces to assemble, maintain associations, transmit knowledge and practise traditions. If those spaces disappear without consideration, cultural rights risk, becoming promises without substance.

International standards and living heritage

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) offers an important restorative framework which South Africa voted in favor of on 13 September 2007 Article 11 addresses Indigenous Peoples’ rights to practise and revitalise cultural traditions and customs and to maintain, protect and develop past, present and future manifestations of their cultures. Article 12 addresses the right to manifest, practise, develop and teach spiritual and religious traditions, including access to cultural and religious sites.

Article 25 recognises distinctive spiritual relationships with traditionally owned or otherwise occupied and used lands, territories, waters and coastal seas. Article 26 addresses rights concerning lands, territories and resources traditionally owned, occupied, used or acquired.

UNDRIP’s  importance lies in the principles it articulates, including Indigenous participation and the protection of cultural relationships with land. Read alongside constitutional protections and relevant domestic law, it helps explain why culturally significant places cannot always be assessed solely through their economic use.

Indigenous cultures are living systems sustained through land, language, knowledge, ceremony and intergenerational relationships. Losing access to a place can harm the wider community, not only its immediate users.

Reconciliation must mean more than remembrance

Fish Hoek’s history as a formerly “Whites-Only” beach gives this controversy a significance that cannot be separated from South Africa’s constitutional transformation. A space once structured by racial exclusion should not be assessed as though history has no bearing on the present. The question is not whether the past should dictate every contemporary decision. It is whether the past will be acknowledged when public institutions decide whose relationship with a place deserves consideration.

If the coastline is valued only for the price it can command, South Africa risks preserving the scenery while losing the stories, relationships and living cultures that make the landscape meaningful. The answer is not to declare commercial interests illegitimate before the facts are examined. It is to reject the assumption that commercial value is the only value that can be measured, or the only value that should count.

The Khoi and San Peoples must not be remembered only as peoples who once belonged to the land. Their histories and cultures are part of it's present and future. Constitutional reconciliation requires more than memorials, official statements and occasional celebration.

Read more & sign the petition: https://savethegalley.co.za/

* Samuel Stanley is an Indigenous Legal Fellow with ACRRA(African Communities Resource Rights Alliance). He is a lawyer focusing on the intersection of indigenous peoples rights advocacy, international human rights law and climate justice.(www.acrra.org)