Gato

Striking in Gato are the Piedra di Butishi (pitcher stones), or Piedra di Indjan (Indian stones), so called because Indians are said to have buried their gold beneath them. On Curaçao Piedra di Butishi occur almost only at Gato and nearby Papaya. The large yellow-brown stones are often as round as a cannonball and sometimes as much as a metre across, a rare geological phenomenon. Elders used to tell that they had grown out of the ground, and the nice thing is that this is even still true: the large round stones were gradually pushed upwards by geological conditions and by their shape, and so came to lie on the surface.

Feral cats

Gato is a small former plantation between Souax and Papaya on the Weg naar Westpunt. The neighbourhood owes its name to the many feral cats that once roamed here (gato is Spanish for cat). Seru Gato, which stands in the middle of the neighbourhood, is called Se(ru) Shon Sana in popular speech, after a former owner of Gato. Of Shon Sana's little house only heaps of stones remain among the abundant cactus growth. Her grave, which lay more along the main road, has now disappeared completely.

Once the land here was heavily worked and many low stone dams were built to hold water longer and to counter erosion. They are called faha (belts) and were used to "tie down the knoek (estate)": "pa faha cunucu".

Gato is bordered in the north by Seru di Gato, part of the ridge that runs from Souax to Grote Berg.

A generous lady

The very rich widow of Reverend Rasveld, Sybrechtje van Uytrecht, owned various plots and many houses in Otrobanda — such as those now known as restaurant de Gouverneur, the Gelt Dekker Institute and the Kurá Hulanda Museum. She also "owned" the plantations Ascencion, San Pedro and Malpais and 70 enslaved people. In her book Verhalen uit het verleden (Stories from the past), Els Langenfeld writes that the widow had no children and was rather generous: she distributed her possessions — whether or not through a will — to family members, but also to her enslaved people: thus 13 of them — after her death on 9 August 1811 — were assigned the Kurá di Kunsje in the former Klipstraat in Otrobanda, with the 9 lean-to shelters (afdaken) built on it.

Land swap

Langenfeld writes that these shelters had to make way for the widening of the Klipstraat so that the newly appointed governor Abraham de Rouville could go by carriage from his house, Huize Belvedere, to the waterfront and from there to Fort Amsterdam. Because according to Sybrechtje's will the land was not allowed to be sold, it was swapped for a piece of land on the Westwerf. The governor had 9 new shelters built on it (now located in the Ferdinandstraat). These heirs were also assigned the small plantation Gato.

Petrus Janzen, who had already received his freedom from the widow in 1803 for faithful service, became overseer of Gato. In total, in 1868 there turned out to be 18 persons who could be identified as descendants and thus were heirs of Kurá di Kunsje and Gato.

The heirs of Gato

In those days people of colour were designated in documents according to their skin colour: on Curaçao a mulatto was a child born of a white and a black person; a mestizo (mesties) was born of a mulatto and a white person, and by Sambo a child born of a black person and a mulatto was formerly meant, according to Langenfeld. (In Latin America a mestizo is a child of an Indian and a white person.)

And so among the 13 new owners of Gato were the mulatto boy Frederik Marthien Pietersz, the midwife Mariana, the mulatto girls Leentje and Maria Gerarda, the mulatto woman and washerwoman Cathrijn with her mestizo son Thomas, who was a shoemaker, the black woman Maria Loucia and her sons Philipus Sint Jago, Bicento and Francisco. Finally, Maria Catharina Silvianna, alias Swaantje, and her son Joseph, and the sambo Juan Mingeel, alias Minguel Sambo, also belonged to the heirs of Gato.

Sybrechtje's condition was that Gato should remain forever in the hands of the enslaved and their descendants and that no mortgage might be taken out on the land.

Gato was not worth much then: the soil was infertile and there was little fresh water. Only when Gato became interesting as a residential area did discussions arise, followed by many lawsuits, about who was the rightful owner of the land. The owners of the adjoining Souax, the Ferrero family, and the Pietersz family were pitted against each other. Warning signs still stand at Gato as silent witnesses of the ownership dispute. Gato is nowadays built up with various (multi-storey) houses and apartments.

Sources

• Langenfeld: Verhalen uit het verleden: de slaven van Gato (Stories from the past: the slaves of Gato)
• Brenneker – Sambumbu – various editions

With thanks to: Frensel Mercelina, François van der Hoeven, Andre Rancuret and Mongui Maduro Library.