District Six and District Six Museum, Cape Town
The Story of a South African Community Removed
Nov 15, 2009
District Six is an area of prime land in Cape Town’s city centre that is deserted and overgrown. The reason? The forced removal of 60,000 residents during the apartheid era to make it a whites-only area, but the impact of an international outcry halting plans in between the bulldozing and habitation by white people.
District Six Museum
The District Six Museum is perhaps the leading museum in Cape Town and is close to some of Cape Town's other leading visitor spots, including Company's Gardens, the Iziko Slave Lodge and the South African Jewish Museum and Holocaust Center . The difference at the District Six Museum is that the events are told as an account by the displaced people themselves. The center-piece is a large map on the floor, where previous residents have labelled where they used to live by hand. It doesn’t require words to realize the sheer number of people the District Six ‘clearance’ affected nor the devastation it caused to the tight-knit communities. The map says it all.
For a museum, the building is tiny, which adds to the coziness you imagine the previous inhabitants must have felt in their neighborhood before they were sent away. It’s filled with photographs of families, houses being razed to the ground and excerpts of panic-filled accounts of the desperate days when the people lost their homes. There is even a reconstruction of a home, laid out invitingly with a bed, kitchen and trinkets that had been lovingly collected over a lifetime. The whole museum gives the sense of strong people privately suffering, and visiting is an emotional experience.
District Six – Filled With Nothing
It must be even more of a tragedy for every single person who lost their home and community to see that nothing has been done with the land that was once their homes. The apartheid government cited several reasons for imposing the Group Areas Act on the district. It was previously a cosmopolitan area made up of residents from a number of ethnic origins, but the government used this as a reason to separate different races, stating that interaction between different races bred conflict. They also called the area a dangerous, crime-ridden ‘slum’, which should only be destroyed rather than rehabilitated.
In 1968, the government started removing families after declaring it a whites-only area and by 1982 more than 60,000 people had been moved 25km away to the Cape Flats township. Not only were communities and sometimes families ripped apart, but people were no longer able to keep their jobs near the city with no sensible method of commuting, or spare money to do so.
At some point after this happened, the international community expressed their outrage at such an inhumane treatment of people from a whole district. The government froze its actions before the next steps of introducing white residents to the area could take hold.
Future of District Six?
Fifteen years after the end of apartheid and the situation is vastly unchanged. There have been half-hearted plans and attempts to offer the displaced residents the opportunity to move back to District Six, but it seems that their hopes have been dashed again and again as plans have never really taken effect. A dozen or so modern apartments have been built on the corner of the land, which is the extent of the moves towards making District Six a thriving community once again. Recent talks indicate a memorial or garden will be built as a permanent mark of respect to the people who were wronged. The impression is of course, that those very people would rather return to the land that is theirs, even if it is almost fifty years since they were sent away.
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