District Six: The Rainbow Nation We Seek

The District Six Museum in the Bo-Kaap neighborhood in Cape Town serves as homage to the former metropolitan district that was savagely destroyed by the apartheid government. District Six during the early 1900’s, was a compilation of many different races and religious groups, however the area was primarily Muslim. The apartheid government sought to separate the various ethnic groups that called District Six home as a means of furthering the demolition of their racial identity and self-worth. In 1966 the apartheid regime in South Africa destroyed every building in District Six and forced all of the people, both coloreds and blacks, out of their homes so that whites could come in and rebuild the area to their liking. The 66,000 people who were forcibly removed from the place they had called home for decades, were displaced into shanty towns or anywhere where they could find a place to momentarily live. Out of the six districts that Cape Town was divided into during 1867, District Six matured into the most cosmopolitan, up-and-coming district and that is why the apartheid government chose to destroy it and take it for themselves. After years of protests and outcries from the community, in these post-apartheid years, the new government is trying to rebuild District Six and make it back into what it once was. However, the amelioration process can not heal the wounds and scars that still permeate within the society and peoples whose families lived there and who also lived there themselves. Ironically, the government is making the families who want to move back to the area they once found shelter and comfort in, pay for a new home to be built on the land that their old homes used to stand on. Displaced former residents of District Six and the thousands of people who fell victim to the wrath of the apartheid government, have to this day only been paid a tiny fraction in money for the losses they have incurred from this atrocity. At the District Six Museum or “The People’s Museum,” our tour guide Noor, who helps own and operate it, told a chilling account of how three generations of his family had lived in the same big house on the corner of one of the district’s streets and how it was stripped away from them without warning or justification. He was almost brought to tears just recounting the story and he is only in his sixties. Noor had a first hand experience with the agony and savagery of the apartheid. The home that nurtured his relatives, past and present; the home that watched decades pass and times change; the home that bore witness to the maturation of his grandparents’ legacy through their offspring, was taken away in one day with the fail swoop of a bulldozer. District Six is the embodiment of the selfishness and lack of humanity that the apartheid unleashed upon so many innocent South Africans. Although steps are being taken in the right direction, the search for the ideal “rainbow nation” is still something of dreams, not yet tangible and not yet reached.