Background Information

Notes:

Memorialisation in a democratic South Africa is as old - or young - as the District Six Museum . The Museum opened its first major exhibition in 1994, in the year of South Africa ’s first democratic election. In 2004, the first returnee families – former residents of District Six who were forcibly removed as part of the violent effects of the Group Areas Act – moved back into their old neighbourhood. The building of new homes in the historic community, together with proposals for a Heritage District and sustainable community tourism, illustrates some of the opportunities and challenges of South Africa ’s land restitution process, public memory, and memorialisation. 

The District Six Museum ’s tenth anniversary provides a symbolic opportunity to reflect on one of South Africa ’s oldest historical neighbourhoods, and also on a young nation and its relationships with its variegated pasts. Now poised to play a role in the redevelopment of District Six, the museum will continue to speak to past and future generations of citizens and residents by building upon Western Cape legacies of community cultural development and innovation. 

As part of this process of cultural reconstruction in Cape Town and South Africa more generally, we propose to host an international conference that expands our current development theme – `Hands On District Six’. Through the Hands On District Six Conference  the museum will provide a critical space for reflecting on emerging practices of the District Six Museum , as well as on challenges for building a humane and democratic public culture in South Africa , ten years into its democracy.

To indicate the temporal and spatial resonance of the process of reconstruction, we call explicit attention to Landscapes of Postcolonial Memorialisation, particularly of displaced histories and places. The conference will explore the relationships between landscapes and postcolonial memorialisation in terms of human rights, urban justice and the creation of civil society. It will bring together residents, practitioners, urban professionals and academics interested in exploring reconstruction and memory in the context of societies working through the legacies of social violence, trauma and injustice.

These themes will be situated within and against an emerging Africa n and transnational framework of sites of conscience – places of memory committed to using their histories to foster civic dialogue and promote democratic and humanitarian values – a framework that the District Six Museum has been instrumental in shaping. Working in partnership with the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience, of which the District Six Museum is a founding member, we have organized sessions, workshops and performances about sites of conscience from around the world where landscapes of public memory have been activated for ongoing struggles for democracy and human rights. At the same time, the conference will explore the shape and meaning of sites of conscience in the South Africa n context in particular and will include the launch of an Africa n sites of conscience network.