District Six: A sore that continues to fester

District Six was once the melting pot of the city, a place that represented the possibility of an egalitarian citizenship.Picture: Independent Newspapers Archive at UCT

District Six was once the melting pot of the city, a place that represented the possibility of an egalitarian citizenship.Picture: Independent Newspapers Archive at UCT

Published Feb 11, 2017

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Cape Town - Exactly a century-and-a-half ago when bureaucratic tidying up led to the city’s division into six districts, the bland numerical designation of the sixth precinct erased from the town plan its prettier original name, Kanaladorp.

Yet, from 1867, irrepressible District Six -renowned, notorious, loved and loathed - remained its teeming, rambunctious self - Kanaladorp by another name, but still the inerasable heart of Cape Town.

Picture: Independent Newspapers Archive at UCT

This is both true and untrue.

Erasure, in the material sense at least, was the brute consequence of a later sweeping bureaucratic gesture; the proclamation 51 years ago today of District Six as a white area. Over two decades more than 60000 people were forced out, most to the windswept sands of the Cape Flats.

Picture: Independent Newspapers Archive at UCT

What was not erased was the spirit of the place, a restless longing in the hearts of the dispossessed. Yet, more than 20 years after the collapse of apartheid, that longing remains for the most part unrequited.

Picture: Independent Newspapers Archive at UCT

In 2017, there’s an arguably wry significance in the Malay, or Behasa Malaysia, derivation of the district’s old name. Karna Allah means “with the help of God”, and many today could be forgiven for believing that only divine intervention will resolve the long, bitter struggle for restitution, restorative justice, and a sense of being at home, again.

The District Six Museum, which has long been at the forefront of sustaining the memory of what was probably always the liveliest, edgiest part of the city, makes the point that there are “ways of remembering the past which inspire us to think of a new way of being citizens”.

Picture: Independent Newspapers Archive at UCT

Restitution, the museum reminds, “should run much deeper than being a housing project”. “In addition to the important return to the land, it involves the return of dignity, the affirmation of rights, the assertion of cultural identity as well as respect for valuable local knowledge. It is a reminder that the past really does matter.”

Picture: Independent Newspapers Archive at UCT

District Six was the melting pot of the city, the place that represented the possibility of an egalitarian citizenship intolerable to the racialist ideologues of the mid-20th century.

Destroying it was more than a complicated factor of urban development - and restoring what was lost is, equally, not just about housing and bulk services. Most agree that District Six will never - cannot ever - be the same.

Yet, as the sore continues to fester - and the scarred land ages - year after year, the risk lies in believing there is nothing more to be done.

As the more recent demands - not just for housing, but a greater and more meaningful restorative justice - suggest, the attempted erasure of District Six remains a costly failure.

Writing a year ago, Weekend Argus columnist Ryland Fisher noted, poignantly and challengingly: “Giving people back

their homes or their land seems to be the easy part. Giving them back their souls might prove to be more difficult.”

Weekend Argus

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