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It is said that there are more than 3 000 shipwrecks off the coast of South Africa. This should hardly be surprising, given that our coastline, particularly the section around the Cape, which was originally christened Cabos das Tormentas (Cape of Storms) by Bartolomeu Dias, the first Portuguese explorer to navigate around the foot of Africa, can be exceptionally dangerous in rough weather.

Given this fact, coastal warning mechanisms have always played a vital role in maritime navigation and safety along the country’s coastline. One of the very first such warning systems was lit on Robben Island.

Lying just 14 km north of Cape Town, Robben Island is completely exposed to the often violent and windy surf of the open Atlantic Ocean and, for that reason, has proved a significant nemesis to ships entering or leaving Table Bay. It was Jan van Riebeeck, the first administrator of the Dutch victualing station and trading settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, who first ordered bonfires to be lit on the island to warn the ships of his company of its rocky dangers. Although the exact date that these bonfires were first lit is not known, they are mentioned in Van Riebeeck’s diary from 1656. They were placed on the highest point of the island, now known as Minto Hill, the location of the island’s current lighthouse, which was erected in 1864.

Such primitive methods would remain the chief form of coastal navigation for the next century and a half, for it was only following the change in administration at the Cape, at the turn of the nineteenth century, that moves were made to erect more permanent warning structures.

When the British took occupation in 1806, the Cape was, in the words of South African historian Cornelius de Kiewiet, “economically more underdeveloped, politically more inexperienced and culturally more backward than any of the other greater colonies of settlement”. Thus, having recently emerged as the world’s principal naval, imperial and trading power, it was essential that the new government give “coherence to the vague and inchoate structure of the colony, so that it might more adequately be fitted for the place which it was finding in the new empire”. One aspect of this strategy was a pioneering, at least in the Southern African context, infrastructure programme to support and enhance its fundamental maritime trading function.

Given the rocky dangers of Table Bay, one of the most important infrastructure requirements was a permanent lighthouse. This need was most fully appreciated by Sir Rufane Donkin, who governed the colony between January 1820 and November 1921, while Lord Charles Somerset was on leave in England. He commissioned the construction of the colony’s first permanent lighthouse towards the end of 1820, tasking the project’s design and execution to German-born architect Herman Schutte. (Having arrived in Cape Town in 1790, Schutte was, by the time the lighthouse was commissioned, one of the colony’s foremost architects, having worked on some of the town’s most prominent buildings, including the Public Library, the Slave Lodge, the Freemason’s Goede Hoop Lodge and the old Government House, in Newlands.)

The site chosen was particularly strategic, being on a north-westerly promontory known as Mouille Point, in the yet-to-be-developed suburb of Green Point. Thus, it would provide warning signals to ships entering or leaving Table Bay but, more importantly, it would help guide them around the northern edge of the peninsula, down along what is now known as the Atlantic Seaboard.

Construction took much longer than originally expected, largely as a result of Somerset’s decision to halt the project following his return from leave on the basis that he had not been consulted on the matter. However, he was soon convinced of the necessity for the lighthouse and con- struction resumed.

Details of the exact duration of construction, as well as the labour and materials used, are sketchy, but it is known that, once com- pleted, the lighthouse cost the colonial government £6 420 (about R10.5-million in today’s terms).

The Green Point lighthouse is quite conventional in design, being a solidly built 16-m-tall brick lantern tower with a gallery rising from the centre of a single-storey keeper’s house. Painted with large, bold red and white diagonal stripes, the lighthouse can hardly be missed and is now considered one of Cape Town’s most iconic landmarks.

While the Green Point lighthouse was completed at the end of 1823, it was only officially lit for the first time on April 12, 1824. As it was built during an age before electricity, it was equipped with Argand lamps fuelled by sperm whale oil, a highly prized illuminant of the day, as it produced a bright, odourless flame. Such was the brightness of the lamps that the light could be seen six nautical miles away, a distance of 11 km. This would be the principal method of illumination for the next century, for it was only in 1922 that the lighthouse would be electrified with the installation of third-order dioptric flashing lights, which extended its range to 22 nautical miles. Four years later, much to the annoyance of local residents, a foghorn was also installed.

Despite being 192 years old and a listed provincial heritage site, it is still in full working order and bears the honour of South Africa’s oldest operational lighthouse among the country’s fleet of 45 lighthouses from Port Nolloth, on the north-west coast, to Jesser Point, on the north east.

The Green Point lighthouse tower is open to guided tours from Monday to Friday.