Jeevan Thiagarajah Archives

Galle Fort built on the Backs of African Slave Labour Jeevan Thiagarajah in Daily News, 25 March 2019, with this title“Slaves built Galle Fort” … …. with highlighting emphasis imposed by The Editor, Thuppahi The topic of the piece today was triggered by a conversation with the current High Commissioner in Colombo from South Africa, Ruby Marks, who has also posted on her Facebook page this passage, “Calvin Gilfillan, Head of Die Kasteel, affirmed what we suspected-the Dutch conceptualized and supervised, but it was the labour of an estimated 15,000 Africans brought from Portuguese and Dutch colonies, that did the back breaking work of actually building the Fort and the other ones scattered across Sri Lanka. I was shocked by how little was known in Sri Lanka about this. I visited the cramped quarters where the slaves were kept, the dungeons where they were imprisoned, and the cemetery-now a car park where they were ...

“Slaves built Galle Fort” – By Des Kelly Something, that I am afraid, not too many of us would have ever known, but for the fact that we “live & learn” until we die. I have always considered myself to be an avid reader, from a very early age, and always having been interested in the history of the Land of my birth, always imagined that the Galle & Colombo Forts were built by the Dutch who “ruled” the Island from 1640-1796, during which time, it was a combined effort of the Portuguese and the Sinhalese Kings co-ruled Ceylon, constantly fighting and “bickering” with each other, like, as the Sinhalese say, two “Pora-Kikili” (fighting cocks, or hens, as the case may be). So, I thought to myself, it was perhaps better that my ancestral predecessors “took over”. The Dutch, I thought, wonderful “builders”, as they were supposed to ...