A QUARTER of a century ago a limpet mine planted by the Ashley Kriel Detachment of Umkhonto we Sizwe ripped through the white Cape Technikon, under construction on salted earth in District Six. The original inhabitants had been forcibly removed by apartheid decree declaring the area for whites only and dumped on the sandy wastes of the Cape Flats. The land lay unused for years, largely because no whites would, or dared, build there. Then the apartheid government utilised a large part for the technikon.
The morning after the blast this newspaper’s page one lead story said: “District six Bombed”. That afternoon the Cape Argus’s page one lead declared: “District Six Opened”.
In a few short hours the then National Party government moved fast by renaming District Six “Zonnebloem” and opening it to all races.
Of course, it was far too little, far too late – a lesson which Israel should take to heart today in dealing with its own form of apartheid.
Many a former resident regularly returns to District Six, if only to visit. It culminates in an annual “homecoming”, a solemn march from the heart of District Six, starting at it’s once vibrant Hanover Street and back there to add to a memorial cairn. It is a painful experience of a people twice dispossessed, first by colonial slavery, then apartheid.
Now the renamed Cape Peninsula University of Technology has seemingly ridden roughshod over the gaping wounds of former residents by building student residences on the only land left in Hanover Street, and where the cairn is. It has angered the District Six Museum, which has complained the CPUT had not consulted it or any of the former residents, and wouldn’t even agree for months to meet, until they protested outside. That first meeting last Thursday night ended with what the university described as an amicable solution to work together.
Elsewhere we report today the museum disputes this, and has hit out, saying CPUT had not acknowledged the way it had violated the cairn memorial. Surely this should be unthinkable in the new South Africa. How can memorialisation be treated with such apparent contempt? Have we learnt nothing?