The National Gallery’s exhibition of images of District Six is a valuable reconstruction of our collective memory, writes NEVILLE DUBOW
Question: Name the place in Cape Town that was destroyed and where the residents were forcibly emoved to the Cape Town townships?
Answer: District Six
Question: Name the building that was erected through the heart of District Six?
Answer: The Technikon
THE fragment above is one of the “general knowledge” questionnaires that, together with archival photographs, form the documentary section of the exhibition at the South African National Gallery, District Six: Image and Representation. The exhibition is a joint venture between the SANG and the District Six Museum (from which the questionnaire originates, as part of a collective documentation project).
Nearly 30 years after the Nationalist government declared the District to be a white group area, this is a timely show. No less so when talk of a truth commission is all around us. The answers to the questions about who was displaced and why are well known; the matters of complicity and compensation are still to be settled. The questionnaire encapsulates a sociological crime that still has to be answered for. The hollow ironies still reverberate. One of the new street names given when District Six became whitewashed as “Zonnebloem” was Justitie Straat. Orwell would have smiled grimly at that.
It is hard for any Capetonian to be objective about District Six. If by objectivity one means an absence of emotion, let me declare myself. As one of the Capetonians involved in the “Save District Six” campaign in the 1970s, I find it hard to write without emotion.
District Six and its cynical destruction remain a synonym for one of the most brutal acts of social engineering born out of apartheid ideology and rationalised by Pretoria as slum clearance. It literally tore the heart out of the city; and it is a wound that has never
But, at least, by the 1970s, when the last of the houses had been bulldozed, there was near common consensus – an expression of collective will on the part of most Cape Town citizens: the ground was to be treated as salted earth – no one was to build there and pressure was put on entrepreneurs to keep out. For a while this remained amazingly successful, so much so that the government was forced to use the Technikon as the thin edge of the wedge. Where nobody else would build, the Technikon would put its footprint. And it did.
Despite pleas by concerned citizens and by architects, planners, sociologists; despite the fact that alternate sites had been identified, the Technikon under its then head, Dr Theo Shippey, insisted on going ahead. I can recall convening a public meeting at the Irma Stern Museum where Shippey was presented with weighty technical and sociological evidence as to why the Technikon should not be built in the district. It made no difference. The nondescript, no-face buildings that sprawl on the site now, are a monument to that intransigence. They are one of the reasons why District Six, no matter which interest group wins the present squabble over its future, can never be what it once was.
As Milan Kundera has reminded us, the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. The exhibition at the SANG is about remembering. Its stated theme is Image and Representation. Its range is broad and eclectic. There is a core of “recognised” artists, from the ingratiating Cape Picturesque of a Gregoire Boonzaaier and his clones, to the more tough-minded approach of an Erik Laubscher; its emotional pitch ranges from the austere surrealism of a Fred Page to the febrile vibrating compositions of a Max Wolpe.
But this is not where the emphasis of the exhibition lies. The images are for the most part modest. Their styles of representation are predominantly descriptively realist and often sentimental. Given that the work was selected on a thematic basis, with a broad inclusion of self-taught artists – including former residents of the District, new names like Roderick Sauls, whose work is rooted in personal associations – this is not something to carp about. It’s a democratic selection – warts, weaknesses and all. But it’s also one of the strengths of the show that it does not pretend to be other than it is, an ingathering of collective memory.
Most of the work on view was done after the buildings were bulldozed. (The pious government apologists at the time were at pains to point out that the machines of destruction were not bulldozers, but “front-end loaders”.) The destructive process itself does not feature as a dominant theme in the show. Instead it reconstructs memory.
Remembering cannot disengage from idealising and even sentimentalising, and there’s a substantial selection of the latter. If poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity, then many of these images are a kind of demotic assembling of nostalgia and longing and loss.
Curiously enough, one of the most telling images on the show is seemingly one of the blandest. This is a modest watercolour by WG Bevington of 1918. It is a view down the mountain slope towards the bay. There’s not a house in sight but it tells its own story of why the district was a good place to live. You could see the bay, and you could walk to work. None of which can be achieved from the windblown wastes of the Cape Flats to which the District’s residents were consigned.
Whatever form the new District Six takes, it can never be the same. In the politically correct 1990s you could never have graffiti saying: “You are now in Fairyland.” Nor can the Seven Steps be reconstructed, except as pastiche. But there is still a lot to be learnt by reading these images of loss and the longing they represent – a closely woven urban texture, a human scale, a space for eccentricity, an opportunity to know and not fear your neighbours, and a life that could be lived on the street.
Memory can become myth. But the enduring reality of District Six, mythic and memorable, is how fiercely its spirit is cherished.
That is what we have to build on.
District Six: Image and Representation runs at the National Gallery until February 2 1996