The shy constellation that mirrors Table Mountain

Something curious happens above the southern horizon when the sky darkens enough for the Milky Way to reveal itself. It is not easy to see, and you need patience. If you find yourself in Cape Town, you need to leave the city lights behind, move towards what locals call the “Deep South”, along a minor, unlit road on the western side of the Cape Peninsula. You need a night without a moon, and a willingness to let your eyes adjust slowly to the sky.

There, faint against the southern sky, lies Mensa, a constellation that mirrors Table Mountain itself. Unlike Orion or the Crux, this constellation is shy. It does not announce itself with bold lines of bright stars. You have to face south/southwest, look for it deliberately and trace faint points of light against the deep southern sky. A modern app can help, too.

Once you see it, something remarkable becomes clear. Behind you rises the dark, quiet silhouette of the actual Table Mountain. In front of you, faint but present, is Mensa. Earth below. Sky above. And you, witness to a quiet conversation between a remarkable entity and her cosmic counterpart.

Mensa drifts quietly through the sky, crossed by the glowing mist of the Large Magellanic Cloud, as a celestial Tablecloth. The cloud itself is a neighbouring galaxy, visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere, hanging like a distant lantern in the darkness. From the southern slopes of Table Mountain, Mensa is visible for much of the year. Although it might be easy to miss, once discovered, it becomes difficult to forget.

The faint constellation offers a curious metaphor. As with Mensa itself, the relationship between people and Hoerikwaggo/Table Mountain has always been there. Today, it requires a conscious effort to see. You have to step away from the glare of the city, the noise, the distraction, the assumption that landscapes exist mainly for human use. You have to allow your perception to shift.

The constellation owes its name to a genius and one of the most remarkable scientific visitors ever to work at the Cape. In 1751, the French astronomer Nicolas de Lacaille arrived at the Cape of Good Hope with a two-year mission. Though barely in his late thirties, he was already regarded as one of the finest observational astronomers of his time. De Lacaille had come to the tip of Africa with an ambitious task. He was a geodesist, someone who specialised in measuring and understanding the Earth’s size, curvature, orientation in space and gravitational field. This was not straightforward, considering that there weren’t highly precise instruments. Determining the planet’s curvature required meticulous work on the ground, extensive triangulation and trigonometry. Within a matter of months he built a small observatory near Table Bay and started mapping. For nearly two years he worked almost every clear night, carefully charting stars that had never been systematically recorded before. The result was remarkable. De Lacaille catalogued nearly 10,000 stars, recorded dozens of nebulae and clusters, and filled blank spaces in celestial maps by identifying 14 new constellations.

Looking up from Table Bay, beneath the looming presence of Hoerikwaggo/Table Mountain in all her beauty, De Lacaille named the faint grouping of stars that echoed the mountain’s flat summit, Mons Mensae, “Table Mountain”. The name was later shortened simply to Mensa.

Amid a sky populated by gods, heroes and mythic creatures, a South African mountain quietly took its place among the stars, a terrestrial presence immortalised in the heavens.

One can imagine the astronomer stepping out from his observatory into a windy summer night, the dark outline of the real mountain rising before him, its tablecloth of clouds draped across the summit. Then, looking up, as he checked those corresponding faint southern stars, crossed by the glow of the Large Magellanic Cloud, he may have felt that the landscape itself had and deserved a place among the celestial divinities.

Let’s be clear. The idea of standing between the mountain and the stars is not new to this land. Long before the genius astronomer mapped the southern heavens, the night skies above the Cape were part of living cosmologies among the region’s first peoples, including the Khoi and San, whose presence in the landscape stretches back thousands of years, as well as later communities such as the Xhosa.

In an era without electric light, the night sky would have appeared in astonishing clarity, the Milky Way arching bright across the darkness. Stars were not distant abstractions but part of a deeply interconnected world of land, animals, plants, ancestors and seasons.

Across southern Africa, oral traditions describe constellations in ways very different from modern astronomy – stories of migration, rainfall and the movements of animals across the land. We cannot know whether the faint stars that De Lacaille later named Mensa were recognised as a distinct pattern in these traditions. But, certainly, the relationship between mountain, land and sky was already deeply embedded in the knowledge systems of the region’s first inhabitants.

Today, a growing initiative seeks to have humanity’s relationship with the mountain legally recognised. The Table Mountain Rights initiative invites people to acknowledge Hoerikwaggo/Table Mountain as a living presence within the community of life, with the ultimate aim of aligning law with this recognition. Through surveys and preliminary consultations, participants were encouraged to reflect on their personal connections with the mountain. The responses were striking. Again and again, participants described the mountain in deeply relational terms. The mountain was called an elder. A mother. A relative. A healer. A teacher. A source of wisdom. A protector. Some described it as a place of refuge during grief or transition. Others spoke about daily rituals of walking its slopes, or simply looking up at its changing moods from their homes. For many, the most surprising aspect was not what they felt, but discovering that so many others felt the same. Participants said they had always experienced a deep connection with the mountain but had rarely spoken about it.

Across cultures and throughout most of human history, mountains were rarely regarded as inert objects. They were understood as presences within the living world, as entities, and places where ecological, cultural and spiritual life intersected. Perhaps the same can be said of the deeper relationship many people have always felt with Table Mountain, and of the awakening that seems to be taking place today.

In the stillness between Hoerikwaggo and Mensa, the mountain, mirrored in the stars, seems to invite us to pause and notice that land, sky, animals, fungi, plants, water, soil and humans are deeply entwined. Once this relationship is truly seen, it can never be unseen. DM

Stefania Falcon is a Cape Town-based environmentalist committed to advancing social justice, intergenerational rights and rights of Nature. She currently serves as programme coordinator for the Wild Law Institute, while working closely with partner organisations and networks focused on wildlife and environmental protection in Africa and Antarctica.