The Slave Calendar

When over 71 000 slaves were landed at the Cape of Good Hope between 1653 and 1856, they were stripped of everything, even their names. Treated as property, many were renamed after the calendar month in which they arrived in the Cape. To this day, the region has many thousands of people with surnames like Junies, Augustus, September, and November — but very few know why. The limited-edition, outsized Slave Calendar connects the story by recording each month through an emotive black-and-white portrait of a slave descendant carrying that month’s name — from John January to Regina December. A simple calendar became front-page news and reached an audience of 33.7 million on no budget, and is now an ongoing museum exhibition at the Iziko Slave Lodge Museum.