Amid the scar tissue of District Six, a new museum is helping to heal its ravaged community. Tony Morphet reports
THE buzz around the museums and galleries gets louder all the time. Like a beehive after a long winter, the political spring has suddenly brought a lot of fresh activity. New collections, exhibitions, policies, even institutions. Some big and subsidised; some corporate and careful and others local and lively.
The District Six Museum in Cape Town is a good example of the last. The landscape is a national symbol of compulsion, dispossession and plunder — scar tissue which still hurts even to look at. In the waste the Technikon sits like a melanoma — secondaries spreading through the yuppie cottages. But down at the north corner, in Buitenkant Street, the new museum is recovering the ravaged community.
The initiative is private. Former residents set up the Museum Foundation and began to raise the money to renovate the Methodist Church which had served the community in the glory days of the 1940s and 1950s. In December Dullah Omar opened Streets, its first official
The exhibition is visually, texturally and thematically stunning. Curated by Peggy Delport, but the product of a broadly shared vision, it works more as an art installation than museum display.
The core is a collection of street signs from the District, which hang like ladders from the upper balcony at the north end of the hall. David Elrick, an overseer from the Department of Community Development, under instructions to dump them in the Bay, picked them from the rubble and hid them under his house instead. A risky thing to do.
Now back to mark the symbolic spaces, the street signs have become signifiers of extraordinary power. Layer after layer of meaning sediments around them. They float above a huge carpet-map of the district which covers the central space of the hall floor.
Visitors walk over it and those who remember special sites (stalls, bars, cinemas, homes) mark them in on the clear plastic cover sheet. The streets are drawn and labelled in blue, like the signs; the land spaces are ochre, orange and yellow to catch the light from the upper window in the north wall. Looking down from the balcony is like viewing a painting, or a carefully excavated and labelled archaeological site. The museum creates an archaeology of memory.
On the east and west sides of the hall above the balcony there are translucent banner photo- reproductions of figures of the District. Some are famous and dead — others well known and very much alive — still others ordinary and obscure.
At the opening, Omar, himself once a resident of District Six, grew larger in the light of the leaders hanging above him: Dr Abdurahman and John Gomas on the one side; Cissy Gool, Moses Kotane and Benny Kies on the other.
The artefacts lead the eye but it’s the connective links between them that focus the layers of meaning. A good example, but only one of many, is the official street registers for the area. They look like just long lists of names on official paper but if you follow the changes from 1867, when the District was first named, through 1901 when the first removal took Africans out to Ndabeni; to 1966 when the Whites Only declaration was made and ultimately to 1981, the date of the last removals, what you see is people being simply rubbed out of the record.
Occupations are the first to go: individually listed in 1867 they give a marvellous sense of the variety of the working life of the area, but by 1901 they are gone. Then the names of the residents are thinned — and finally as the demolition proceeds, the streets are emptied. No wonder the signs were meant for the bottom of the Bay. The official script had cleared the ground even before the bulldozers appeared. This is the way holocausts are made.
What sets the District Six Museum apart from other initiatives like it is the way in which it stages the recovery of the past. The symbolic space is exceptionally well structured; its solid and specific detail draws out interpretation and recollection, resonating together the real, the half-remembered, the suppressed and the purely symbolic.
The result is that it both stimulates and contains the most intense outpouring of memory and feeling among people who suffered the humiliation of losing their place in time.
Since the opening of Streets the hall has been witness to literally dozens of cathartic scenes: a surge of recognition triggered by a dim photograph or a place name; neighbours finding and greeting each other after 25 years and being shaken to tears.
The museum has its problems, naturally — with money, with competitive battles for influence and ownership, with struggles over what goes in and what stays out. It also has some special advantages, in particular the fact that the memory of the removals is still present among the living. The people who come through the door and write their names on the 25m of calico are the same ones who knew the place before it was devastated.
The cultural powers that be might usefully take a close look at what “working with the community” is really like. Everyone has the slogan but I haven’t seen it mean more than it does in Buitenkant Street.