The District Six Museum
District Six was named the Sixth Municipal District of Cape Town in 1867. Originally established as a mixed community of freed slaves, merchants, artisans, labourers and immigrants,
District Six was a vibrant centre with close links to the city and the port. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the process of removals and marginalisation had begun.
The first to be forced out were black South Africans who were displaced from the District in 1901. As the more prosperous moved away to the suburbs, the area became a neglected ward of the city.
On 11 February 1966 it was declared a white area under the Group Areas Act of 1950, and by 1982, the life of the community was over. More than 60 000 people were forcibly removed to barren outlying areas aptly known as the Cape Flats, and their houses in District Six were flattened by bulldozers.
The District Six Museum, established in December 1994, works with the memories of the District Six experience and with that of forced removals more generally.
Buried
Covered by the dust of defeat –
Or so the conquerors believed
But there is nothing that can
Be hidden from the mind
Nothing that memory cannot
Reach or touch or call back
Don Mattera, 1987
Sandra Prosalendis, former Director of the District Six Museum.
The District Six Museum has broken with the traditional ideas of museums and collecting. It has created and implemented the concept of an interactive public space where it is the people's response to District Six that provides the drama and the fabric of the museum.
John Matshikiza - Mail and Guardian.
There is something about walking into that old, wooden-ceilinged church, where the descendants of slaves used to worship and sing and talk, that brings oppression, genocide and redemption into a single space that my mind can take hold of, without being overwhelmed. The tobacco-stained detail of Welcome Dover stoves and a mother's doek and her hand in her armpit as she tries to come to terms with the death of her son in another act of Cape violence, deliberate or accidental.
Megan, Union of Students in Ireland.
Cape Town and Ireland have so many similarities in love and hate. Help to reclaim the spirit of one community.
In solidarity, Arial Dorfman, Chile.
The past is not easily erased. After the Nazi's destroyed Warsaw the Polish people rebuilt the city as it had been. Let us hope you can also reconstruct this District where you used to live in peace.