Memories of ‘Removal’ in the District Six Museum

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I headed out to District Six very late in the morning. It was a wet spring day, and that made the morning seem colder and more depressing. But, I told myself, if I wanted to give myself the chance of visiting two museums today, I had to get going for the first one now.

Fortunately, District Six is not far. I took an uber because of the rain, and soon arrived in what seemed like an ordinary street with brick buildings. At the corner of Buitenkant and Albertus Streets was the District Six Museum.

Remembering the old District Six

Located in the heart of Cape Town, District Six was a neighbourhood of working class people of all races since the 19th century. Within its bounds was also Zonnebloem College, established in 1860 by the first Anglican bishop of Cape Town to educate the sons of local African chiefs and ‘transform them into black Englishmen’.

District Six was relatively neglected by the authorities. But left to themselves, the residents organically created their own community. Though not a wealthy district, District Six of the 1950s was full of life, and a whole gamut of cultures living side by side.

That all changed when the Nationalist government came into power. A series of laws were passed, increasingly separating the people into racial groups¹, socially and physically into separate neighbourhoods, public spaces, even hospitals and jails. Soon, you couldn’t visit across race lines without an approved reason. Blacks could only enter white neighbourhoods if they carried a previously issued pass (typically linked to jobs). Likewise, whites needed to apply for a permit to enter black neighbourhoods and explain why.

But though South African society was deeply unequal, people sort of lived near one another. So the first step was to physically move people into their “correct” group neighbourhoods, in order to prevent them from associating with one another. The ‘removals’ changed demographic topography in South Africa for the next two generations.

District Six was perhaps the best known site of apartheid ‘removals’^b, in terms of international attention. Today, the District Six Museum keeps the memory of the neighbourhood that was, for restitution to remain possible someday.

Stories from a human library

The museum was small. A high-ceiling centre was flanked by wall exhibits around, and galleries above. I began to browse the exhibits, but noticed a small crowd near the entrance around an elderly man. The museum had a guided tour, I thought, and joined them. Sure enough, the old man was a former District Six resident, Joe Schaffers. He was there as a sort of human library, to give scheduled talks.

He began with an overview of what was done to District Six and 40+ other Western Cape communities, and why. A litany of apartheid laws, and what they meant in practical life. Beginning from the 1950s, non-white people were told they were living “illegally” in “white areas”, and must remove themselves as soon as possible, even if the communities had been living there longer than the whites who had spread outwards to surround them².

Thus, communities more than 100 years old were uprooted to ‘townships’ far away, to provide living space for whites. Blacks to the Cape Flats, coloureds to Ocean View. The Cape Malays were luckier. Perhaps Bo-Kaap sprawled inconveniently up the foot of Table Mountain, and thus stayed as a “Cape Malay area”. But their non-Muslim neighbours were removed.

Township life

A ‘township’ in South African context isn’t, as you might assume, a well-planned suburbia to serve a growing urban population. Well, it’s purportedly planned. But if so, then the white apartheid government must not be very good at it. They barely had proper infrastructure. Roads were unpaved, water was a common tap, and there was not much electricity³. In that very same time period, even my just-independent impoverished developing country had more competent native town planners⁴.

Township life was a shock to the ‘removed’ people. Now, two-thirds of their salary went towards travelling to work. When they lived in the city, it was a 20 minute walk. They had to start the day much earlier as well, due to the distance. It was half a kilometre to the bus stop, and then the bus journey.

Suddenly you were raising a family while never seeing your children, because you have to go to work so early and return so late. Before, the close-knit community helped to mind the kids. That was now uprooted – but not all together. Re-settled with total strangers, under the impossible new pressures, some committed suicide. Others turned to crime.

“What is the obsession with skin colour?” Schaffers wondered aloud, as he must have wondered many times in his life. “100 million people, you prick their fingers, what colour is their blood?” Of course, all of us bleed red.

“We come from one race, the human race.”

The remembered life

Schaffers directed us to the map on the floor. The old residents still remember their streets, now long gone. Although District Six was never fully re-developed following the removals, most of it was demolished. The museum exhibits comprise of memorabilia from residents.

Banners from churches, mosques, synagogues, sports clubs, political parties. Hanging from the ceiling was a ‘namecloth’. It was no more than a calico studio curtain from the university. The first ex-residents to visit the museum-to-be wrote their names and thoughts about District Six in felt-tip pen. Later, under the co-ordination of Faatimah February, the writing was hand embroidered to preserve them.

He drew our attention to one. It was a poignant declaration: Living was cheap and life precious. Now in Hanover Park, living is expensive and life is cheap.

Schaffers ended his session and asked if we had questions. How do you keep so young? asked a woman in the group. Given how old you said you were. “Born 1939,” he acknowledged. “I think it’s music,” he replied.

“Jumping around on stages – still doing it! From slave days, right through the worst times, it was music that kept people going. And that’s what keeps us going, and it’s what keeps me going.”

I was curious about District Six’s early name, Kanala Dorp (Kanala Village). The video refers to it as Malay in origin, but ‘kanala’ isn’t a Malay word I recognise, never mind one that means ‘helping one another’. Turns out, it derives from ‘kerana Allah’, or ‘for the sake of Allah (God)’. I wonder if Cape Malays, generations after banishment to the Cape, still habitually demurred their unconditional charities with the reply ‘kerna Allah’ – just like their archipelago brethren to this day.

Familiar phrases in the chronology

I spent a little more time examining the exhibits after the tour ended. As with the Slave Lodge museum, I was intrigued to find bits and pieces that were resonant to a Malaysian. Seriously, were these Anglo colonies all in the same Whatsapp group – or whatever was the equivalent back then?

The Cape Town/District Six chronology contained more intriguing remarks. From the Bo-Kaap museum I knew that in the Dutch period, the excuse for trafficking of labour from Dutch territories in the Malay archipelago was because they were necessary skilled labour. Indeed, early references to Malays or Muslims in the chronology refer to mosques and schools.

But in the late 19th century, racial stereotyping emerged for both Cape Malays and Africans. This coincided with deeper British involvement in the Malay peninsula sultanates. Suddenly, Cape Malays were described with the same stereotype assigned to their distant cousins in the homeland: lazy.

I also discovered that ‘kaffir’ was apparently a word used in South Africa to mean African(?). It means “disbeliever” in Arabic. I guess, the Dutch and British were Christians and would have been considered ‘People of the Book’ (ahlul Kitab) rather than kafir.

What shall become of District Six?

Today, District Six remains vacant. The ‘Hands Off District Six’ movement succeeded to stall re-development by the apartheid government. The Mandela era saw the start of land reclaims. However, only 2,400 families have returned. Not everyone had documents to prove they once lived in District Six. Others did not wish to be uprooted a second time.

After all, the District Six community was destroyed, and could never be reconstituted. The racial harmony that once was, could not be restored on ground now salted by decades of apartheid segregation.

But Schaffers was upbeat. The younger generation have become a bit more wise, he says. That is why I do this. They are looking at this differently than their forefathers before.

He is often invited for talks abroad. I’ve been to Denmark, Sweden, Scotland. I’ve just come back from New York. I tell them, I’m not getting younger. He laughs. The flights are getting too long.

Then he turned serious. “But [if] you can make the changes to make this little world we’ve got a different place. Then I’m prepared to do it, especially for our youngsters, the future. This is their little world. We messed up as adults. We gotta give them a chance.”

Footnotes:

1. “Race” under apartheid definition has no relationship whatsoever with sociocultural groups or ethnolinguistics. The apartheid understanding of race is actually a modern one. It is based on the pseudoscience of “scientific racism”^a, exacerbated by ideas from Nazi white supremacy, which survived the defeat of Nazi Germany to take root elsewhere. The ideological nature of “white” in particular can be seen in how the apartheid government was forced to continually tweak the definition and re-classify individuals throughout the apartheid era to get the result they wanted. ↩︎
2. Within ten minutes, the talk already illustrated to me why South Africa is pro-Palestine. The description might have described the lawfare and creep of illegal Israeli settlements into the West Bank just as well. ↩︎
3. Pogrund, B. 2015. Robert Sobukwe: How Can Man Die Better. Jonathan Ball Publishers. ↩︎
4. Certainly the white areas were much better planned. However, I think if you were good at something, it’s actually not easy to purposely do it badly in one case and not another. Especially since, just from a purely selfish capitalist POV, it’s bad for your own economy to obstruct your workers getting to work. Structural changes are infrastructure; the effects persist even when you stop. ↩︎
5. The demographics were different in the Federated Malay States, so the form this policy took was different as well. In the peninsula, the division kept migrant Indians for plantation work, migrant Chinese for mining and commerce, and Malays for agriculture and low ranking public service. The post-independence constitutional protection for native Malays meant to recover native land ownership and economic sovereignty has, over six decades, largely succeeded. But it does not address inequality in general, resulting in minority groups feeling neglected, and in some respects even an inversion of the original problem. ↩︎

^a Origin of scientific racism

Prior to the 18th century, you may use ‘white’ as an adjective, to describe a Caucasian people whose ethnic identity you did not know. But ‘white’ wasn’t itself an ethnicity, just as it is absurd to claim ‘brown’ or ‘yellow’ or ‘black’ ethnicity (with the possible exception of black Americans, due to the mass severing of ethnic lineage there as a result of slavery).

Scientific racism arose in Western Europe during, ironically, the Age of Enlightenment. It all began with the botanist, Carl Linnaeus, who came up with the taxonomic system we use in biology today. Though limited by its reliance on observing appearance, it was useful as an attempt to classify species.

The idea was a sensation, and spurred a flurry of classification in other aspects of science as well. Inevitably, it was extended to human ethnicities, in an attempt to classify humans in a way that’s more objective than the self-descriptive ethnic sense that was the historical default up until then.

However, the Enlightenment Age was also the Industrial Age. The scientific and technological breakthroughs that it made possible, encouraged Europeans to think of humans as the ‘pinnacle’ of evolution (i.e.; that species evolution formed a hierarchy, and that there was a ‘perfect’ direction to evolve towards). It didn’t take long for them to extend the logic to humans, with themselves as the ‘most evolved’ humansⁱ. The problem is, evolution is not a linear progression, and this logic was wrongⁱⁱ.

• ⁱ Kenyon-Flatt, B. (2021, March 19). How Scientific Taxonomy Constructed the Myth of Race. Sapiens (archived). https://www.sapiens.org/biology/race-scientific-taxonomy/
• ⁱⁱ Wheeler, Q., Valdecasas, A.G., Cánovas, C. (2019, September 3). Evolution doesn’t proceed in a straight line – so why draw it that way? The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/evolution-doesnt-proceed-in-a-straight-line-so-why-draw-it-that-way-109401

^b Euphemisms of apartheid

After reading and writing a bit more on this topic, it struck me how the language of apartheid was basically doublespeak, especially at the end.

Evictions were ‘removals’, as if what was being removed were inanimate. ‘Townships’ were actually just ghettos. ‘Bantustan’ – lands meant as “tribal territory” for “Bantu people”, but without being selected by the tribe for having basic criteria such as water and food availability – re-branded as ‘homelands’. Apartheid discrimination morphed to terms like ‘differentiation’ and ‘separate development’.

One can’t help but think of today’s “voluntary emigration” for “better housing” ⁱⁱⁱ, and the one-sided euphemism and passive language that’s now basically a meme^iv.

• ⁱⁱⁱ Pita, A. (2024, January 17). ‘Voluntary emigration:’ The euphemism of the Israeli extreme right to depopulate Gaza. El Pais. https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-01-17/voluntary-emigration-the-euphemism-of-the-israeli-extreme-right-to-depopulate-gaza.html
• ^iv Johnson, A. (2024, January 9). Coverage of the Gaza War in the New York Times and Other Major Newspapers Heavily Favored Israel, Analysis Shows. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2024/01/09/newspapers-israel-palestine-bias-new-york-times/

Carbon offset information to Cape Town, South Africa

A return flight between Kuala Lumpur and Cape Town via Dubai produces carbon emissions of approximately 5,987 lbs CO2e. It costs about $48 to offset this. 

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Have you visited the District Six Museum? What were your reflections?