The dockside slum — largely owned by white landowners — was, until the 1960s, the site of creative, exciting inter-racial and interfaith harmony, which was destroyed by apartheid legislation’s Group Areas Act in the 1960s.
The reason everyone knows this has much to do with the show that a dynamic cast is reviving at the Baxter Theatre. David Kramer and Taliep Petersen’s District Six: The Musical broke all box-office records in 1986, enjoying revivals and revamps here and overseas right up until 1990.
Why? As 70-year-old Vincent Colby, former District Six resident, cultural researcher and a “living encyclopedia” on the era, says: “The musical, which a few musos innocently put together for fun, stirred up memories for ordinary people that had been repressed. It was in fact cathartic and it brought a whole new audience into the theatre.”
If this catchy show — replete with distinctive klopse rhythms, Kaapse wit and a winning mix of sentiment, satire and invective — looked back to recover the past, it also became a vital trailblazer to the future. Following its success, the coloured community began, in a series of shows, to investigate and reaffirm its identity, and gradually, to make local theatre over in its image.
Today, indigenous Cape theatre — genre-busting, adventurous, lively — has become one of the most exciting sites of stage action. Kramer, for whom the show was a crucial station on his odyssey from singer-songwriter to theatre storyteller, attests: “We’re playing now to an audience bred, ultimately, by this show: much more sophisticated and aware, affirmed in their identity and revelling in it!”
That cultural rediscovery had significant practical and political dimensions too. Colby recalls that the idea of a “permanent memorial” to District Six grew out of discussions around the musical. “At last in ’94 we met in that old church hall, cried, looked at old snapshots and, from our first exhibition, stuck together with bubblegum, grew the state-of-the-art museum we have today.”
Indeed, the District Six museum has become much more than a site of memory: it is now a vital source of current thinking around identity as well as practical politics.
Currently, the museum is launching a multi-pronged educational series to “create a space for dialogue around themes of diaspora, dislocation and cultural identities in Cape Town”, which involves performances, movie screenings, lectures and debates.
Valmont Layne, head of research at the museum, observes that “the museum is a space where academic and ordinary people exchange ideas; we want to be proactive about issues such as land reclamation. District Six paved the way for the museum: it had a huge impact on public consciousness.”
At the time, he recalls, there were those in the anti-apartheid struggle who thought the show “sentimentalised the issues, but there is no doubt of the role it played as an imaginative intervention”.
Given the huge upwelling in public consciousness and identity since the embattled days of the late Eighties, is there value in reviving the show today? Layne is forthright: “I would still send newcomers to the show to learn from it. Also, District Six has a new topicality as ex-residents are in the process of returning, so the issues around the area are current again.”
To Colby, the musical, like the museum, has a topical function: “There are many other parts of the Cape that suffered under the Group Areas Act, and our work at the museum serves to keep these issues in the public mind. In that the musical helps raise awareness, it’s great it’s been revived.”
For the creative team — many of whom form a virtual company, having been with the show and other Kramer-Petersen spin-offs over the years — reviving the show gives them a chance to improve it. In Kramer’s words, “Theatre is only a paper moon, but its magic enables 600 patrons to have 600 different experiences of what it was like to live in District Six.”
There’s a simple, human dimension to this revival for cast members and former residents like Terry Hector and Danny Butler, which points to the show’s likely success this time round.
“What got lost in District Six was a communal caring and sharing still just an ideal in the new South Africa,” says Butler. “We are doing this show because we once lived like that — with respect, with joy, with dignity.”
Although greatly mythologised, District Six remains a vital fulcrum for its people’s recovery of communal pride and passion.