Place and Bioethics: A Pilgrimage in the Castle of Good Hope 

The Castle of Good Hope is a dark place. Some rooms, like the torture chamber, are literally dark. Others, like the governor’s house—the place where Dutch governors lived and proclaimed laws that further enslaved, oppressed, and exploited black South Africans—are filled with streams of light, but the darkness is still felt. This is the place where The EthicsLab led a pilgrimage when it hosted the 2025 Global Health Bioethics Network Summer School in September this year. For this meeting, 60 bioethics scholars from all over the world travelled to Cape Town for four days. Together with Jantina de Vries, we wanted to develop a situated account of bioethics, work we also undertook with Donna Andrews earlier this year. To do this work, we organised a pilgrimage to the Castle of Good Hope, the earliest fort built by Dutch settlers employed by the Dutch East India Company (VOC).

While for Dutch settlers the Castle represented a triumph over nature and a site of protection, for displaced Khoe groups it represented colonial conquest, disrupted relationships with nature, and continues to be a symbol of apartheid oppression. But for many, the Castle is also a site of resistance, resilience, and tenacity—a space where we can also remember what it means to be human, to be re-membered with each other and with nature. This is deeply ethical work.

For the pilgrimage, inspired by our work at the Restitution Foundation, we wanted to create an embodied experience of what it means to be and think in and from a place—not a universal place, but a material place. To do so, we anchored reflection in different sites at the Castle. For example, we explored the torture chamber; various statues of resistance figures; the gardens; and a current site of protest dedicated to apartheid activists who were killed by apartheid security forces and whose families have been denied justice (by Haroon Gunn-Salie). Across these sites, we developed themes ranging from law and power, science and colonialism, and resistance, to gender and erasure, amongst others. Participants were divided into groups and went on self-led tours through the different demarcated sites. For many, the experience was a powerful connection to South Africa’s history. And while the experience was very much focused on Cape Town, the pilgrimage also allowed participants to think about the places they came from, and the layers of history those places and people represent.

In developing this pilgrimage, it was also important to reflect on how bioethics served as a critical anchor point. Questions of power, inequity, oppression, and resistance are deeply woven into the fabric of South Africa, a country marked by inequality, racism, and gender-based violence, but also remarkable scientific advancement and leading research institutions. Yet histories of oppression and resistance seldom feature in our stories of progress and scientific advancement. Together, this group reflected on what it means to do bioethics while taking questions of place and history seriously.

We then came back together as a larger group to sit and debrief. Some sat in silence; others were enraged; others’ eyes were red and swollen from weeping. Together, we worked through difficult questions of what it means to remember the past, to recall that our present is deeply connected to that past, and how deeply connected we are to one another. That too becomes a site of ethical reflection. Through song—perhaps an embodiment of our collective experience—we began to feel these connections.

And in doing this work together, and in facilitating those connections, it became clear to everyone that this must be a collective endeavour. This work requires that we grapple with how we have come to occupy our positions in the world; that we come to see how our understanding of the world is deeply informed by the many layers of history that came before us; and that ethical reflection and practice require recognising that our freedom is tied to one another. In doing so, we might just stumble towards the light.