Effects of
District Six
SASHA MARTIN
Reporting from Cape Town, South Africa
12 April, 2013
Coming from a
different continent brings a freshly innocent perspective. Curious foreigners
read about South Africa, of the ills of apartheid, always being left with a
feeling of closure because of the ANC’s success in 1994. When these curious
foreigners then come to South Africa, they expect to see recovery. I expected
this. At first, this is what I thought I saw, distracted by the loveliness of
the beaches, views and diverse night life Cape Town has to offer.
This façade
dissolved when I realized who was mainly enjoying these aspects of Cape Town
with me: White people. Blacks and Coloureds, instead, try to sell ice cream on
the beach or sell drugs on Long Street. Street signs even give way to Afrikaans
and English. Where is the Xhosa ‘EXIT’, the Zulu ‘Look both ways’? The new
‘Rainbow Nation’ encourages a more accepting society, but there are clearly
many wounds still exposed.
One of these
open wounds is the hurt of District Six. After the government declared the area
White only, thousands were forced to move to townships. With a force that can
move thousands upon thousands from
their homes, how could the ghost of apartheid not still aggressively linger in
Cape Town?
District Six
seems to be slowly forgotten by locals as time wears on and foreigners appear,
for the most part, unaware of it, but those who were directly affected by the forcible
removals remember it. One of the main commemorations of District Six is Cape
Town’s District Six Museum.
Joe Schaffers, a curator there, makes it his mission
to tell as many people about District Six as possible so that it will not
happen again. His account of District Six illuminates how apartheid still affects
people today.
At 28-years-old,
Joe Schaffers and all his friends and family were forcibly removed from
District Six. Joe moved to the township of Hanover Park, separated from friends
and all that was familiar to him.
“When you think you’re safe, and someone
breaks in to take it away, you realize you’re not that safe… what represented
comfort no longer exists,” says Joe, touching a picture of District Six
entitled “42 sites of removal.” One of the remnants of old homes was his.
“Many died of
broken hearts,” Joe says, referring to those extricated from their homes in
District Six.
Pass Laws created under apartheid removed Blacks
and Coloureds from ‘White areas’.
“If you were
injured,” Joe gestures toward a White visitor, “and if the ambulance that came
to help you was an all Black ambulance, they couldn’t help you. You’d have to
wait for a White ambulance. Even if you were at your last breath; too bad.”
Pass Laws are
‘in the past’, but their ramifications are still present today, as especially
seen in townships. The gangs we see today, Joe explains, developed according to
the relocation’s placement from District Six, organized by race.
“It’s like putting a bunch of rats together in
a small space; they’ll start killing each other.”
Joe further
explains the reason behind youth unrest and the ‘gangsterism’ it encourages,
saying, “If you didn’t listen to your parents, you would were given a
hiding!... Moms and dads would leave the house for work and around half past
five or six in the morning and would return at six or seven at night! ... This
leads to unstable township homes!”
He also
discusses the dissolving of education and the decline of health with the relocation.
Joe continues on to say that “barrack-like
structures” make up the townships, and because they are “so hastily built and of
poor quality,” when people had to settle in, the structures “developed cracks,
leaks and dampness, which gave rise to respiratory illnesses such as TB, bronchitis,
pneumonia, and asthma.”
Today, the
museum helps not only to remind the community and visitors of District Six, but
to also heal wounds. At the District Six Museum, ex-inhabitants of District Six
are encouraged to write their names on the floor map and memory cloths to
psychologically reclaim the areas they used to live in.
“Kids blame
themselves,” says Joe in regards to children living in the townships,
“and they need
to know it’s not their fault. They are constantly being brought down. The need
to know that just because they’re born into this, doesn’t mean it’s their fault
for being who they are.”
Joe speaks of
how the story of District Six is so often lost in the new attitude of
comparisons: “It’s all about the ‘I have’ and the ‘I have not’s’.”
As addressed by
informative posters in the Museum, Hands of District Six (previously called
Friends of District Six) lobbied against any development in District 6.
Mr. Schaffers
has dedicated 35 years to working with displaced communities. The City Council
recommended him for the Service Excellence award.
When asked how
to fix the damage incurred with the evacuations of District Six, Joe smiles and
says, “To take things forward by acceptance of each other: unity.”
Curious tourists
and I might have initially expected recovery, but the process of healing
apartheid’s deep wounds will take the patience of years to come. Unity, as Joe hopes for, is hopefully
soon to come.
Women in the World and the Ripple Effect Section, Sasha Martin:
I made my own major, The Nature of Emotion as investigated through literature, psychology, anthropology, cognitive science and other interdisciplinary fields, and am minoring in Creative Writing. I created Unleashed for the general empowerment and knowledge of women and men everywhere, and continue to be involved as editor, designer and writer. I am an editorial and PR intern for City Lights. I happen to love the Unleashed staff quite dearly, as well as readers like you. It's amazing what words can do! Feel free to email me at Unleashed. I hope you enjoy!
