• What colonial space does the entry point to?
• What does decolonizing space mean or entail for the author?

I read a piece by Huda Tayob, architect and architectural historian at the University of Cape Town. Her piece was entitled "Unconfessed Architectures" and points to a few stately homes from the Cape of Good Hope. She studies not only the homes and their gardens, but also the ghost stories of enslaved lives that are still today present in these homes. Many involve slave revolts, and include enslaved people (especially women) coming back to the homes or gardens, their footsteps still audible, "for those who choose to listen."

Tayob writes "Waves of forgetfulness cast populations out of records, onto shores and into mountains. Buried bodies, return only as footsteps, or in the broken shadows of forgetting... Where the right and ability to move as a black women continues to be deeply circumscribed in South Africa, the pattering footsteps at Waterhof, Welgelegen, Nooitgedacht, and Rhenish hold a space for those who “care to listen”. Her footsteps are a fragile and obscure reminder of an irretrievably subaltern past.³⁰ Through her footsteps, she returns as specter to unsettle history and architecture... Her disembodied footsteps speak not as sign but as presence, offering an embodied grammar of encounter."

Decolonizing this space means listening to the footsteps, remembering the horrible past, and the ways that the subaltern rose up, cared for each other and their oppressors, and most importantly, lived! They lived and inhabited space and to forget that is to allow for history and architecture to remain whitewashed, like the walls of the buildings in this piece.