The bulldozers were back in District Six last Tuesday, but this time it was to build, not destroy, and this time Noor Ebrahim was happy to see them. Three decades ago they rolled into his neighbourhood to erase a multiracial community that was an affront to apartheid, levelling houses, shops and cinemas to make way for a whites-only enclave.
Perched between the foot of Table Mountain and the Atlantic ocean, a stone’s throw from the centre of Cape Town, District Six was a maze of winding streets and alleys that 60 000 people — Asians, mixed-race ”coloureds”, Africans and whites — called home. Its destruction was one of apartheid’s most notorious forced removals and a symbol of the greed of minority white rule in South Africa.
Now, it is hoped, District Six will symbolise rebirth, or at least the possibility of redressing historical injustice. This week the bulldozers were laying the foundations for new houses, which will be given to former residents.
It is an ambitious and unique attempt to recreate not only the bricks and mortar but also the spirit of a community.
Ebrahim (60), a Muslim who was classified coloured because his grandfather was Indian and grandmother Scottish, said: ”District Six was a place of harmony, everybody mixed in happily together. It was a vision of what South Africa might have been. That’s why they destroyed it. I cried the day the bulldozers came.”
The first phase of the reconstruction, 24 units in a townhouse complex for the elderly, should be ready within months.
Then building will start on a web of streets and houses over 40ha for the
1 700 former residents who have applied to return. The rest of those who were evicted are either dead or chose cash compensation instead.
The project, a collaboration between the government and the District Six beneficiary trust, is billed as a symbol of healing.
Stanley Abrahams, a retired pastor and one of the trust founders, said: ”Four million people were forcibly removed, but it is the scale of District Six — so many people who had been here for generations — which made it infamous.”
Cape Town was one of the first European settlements in Africa, for centuries home to Portuguese sailors, Dutch and English farmers, Chinese labourers, Lithuanian Jews, native Africans and coloureds. No neighbourhood was more jumbled than District Six, where factory workers and professionals brushed shoulders on cobbled streets lined with Georgian and Cape Dutch two-storey structures.
Cricket and football were played in courtyards, and music halls and theatres were packed most nights, Ebrahim said. ”It was almost obligatory to know how to sing and dance.”
But there was enough crime, grime and poverty in 1966 for the then housing minister, PW Botha (later to become president), to declare District Six a slum and its inhabitants in need of relocation.
Joe Schaffers (64), who was forced to leave in 1975, said residents had not believed the threats at first. ”We thought it was a bloody joke; that there was no way they were going to rehouse 60 000 people,” he said.
But Botha was serious and as houses — shacks, in many cases — were built in townships on the windy and remote Cape Flats over the next two decades, District Six was emptied of non-whites and their homes were demolished.
After clearing the original 90ha site, the apartheid government built a sprawling, whites-only technical college. But it failed to lure big corporations to what was prime real estate after protests by former residents, who believed, implausibly at the time, that one day they would return.
As a council health inspector Schaffers, who now works in the District Six Museum, documented the bleak existence of those who were dumped in distant settlements such as Mitchells Plain, Guguletu and Valhalla Park.
”In winter time it was so cold when the north wind blew,” he said. ”Rain came in through the walls.”
As host to atomised, alienated families the Cape Flats bred criminal gangs that plague the Western Cape province to this day, and rebuilding the district will allow some former residents to escape that.
But Schaffers warned that returnees could be disappointed when they realised the architecture and ambience they knew had gone for ever.
”They’ll have the view of the mountain and the sea, OK, but it’ll take 40 or 50 years to build a new community.” — Â