District 6 was a lively, working
class area with a rich cultural life and generations of neighbors building
community and home since 1867. After the 1950s Group Areas Act, which allowed
the government to declare and restrict a neighborhood to a single race, 99
years after this district was created, South African government declared this
highly desirable neighborhood between Table Mountain and the center of Cape
Town for white people, and began extensive demolition as the residents stood
witness to purposeful theft and violent disregard for home, a calculated
obliteration of a community that had been fully integrated for a century. A
Hands off District Six campaign successfully put the taint on the project, and
the whites for whom the area was intended conscientiously stayed away. And now
the area, aside from some recent homes for police and army personnel and a
technical college, remains a vast empty yellow wound between Table Mountain and
Cape Town, a memorial to the racial theft and violence of apartheid life.
Before fully entering the museum,
Polly gathered students and reminded them that they are guests on this land, to
think, as they listened to the stories and took in the exhibits in the museum,
to consider the reservation-based peoples and their histories and present
conditions, and the violent incursions of colonialism around the world. And she
told students to thank the ancestors for the knowledge they would bestow on
this land.
Our guide through the museum, Joe
Schaffers, or we think maybe he was also Youssef (Joe) Sharief Rassool, moved from
vivid relatable detail to global perspective, teaching and provoking us a great
deal. Specific details included the kind of trust people had before they the
community was shattered and removed 36 kilometers away to the Cape Flats: Every
child’s mother was everyone’s mother. If you dropped a bag and went somewhere,
it would be there when you returned. A tab at the grocer’s meant you were
trusted to pay later and the grocer was trusted not to alter the tab, and such
trust was a piece of neighborhood intimacy. I have a student from Somalia who
this year explained what it was to move to Seattle, where doors are closed and
his family is isolated from neighbors living just on the other side of a wall.
What is tragic about District 6
is the dehumanization and theft that occurred there, but also the willful
destruction of what was clearly a paragon of diverse religions, cultures and
backgrounds, living together in open accord. Joe catalogued the numbers of
religions in a breathtaking list off the top of his head, and said there
existed total acceptance of every one by everyone. But then they were removed,
and not as a community—as individual families: sent to new place without stores
or clinics or community centers or playfields or neighborhoods. The
architecture was destroyed, yes, but the culture of the city and the intimacy
of the neighborhoods too was entirely annihilated. And as more and more people
were added to the population, Joe said, it was inevitable that, like
increasingly crowded rats, they turned on each other, grew territorial, and gangs, theft, garbage in the townships is no surprise.
Ubuntu, Joe said--community, togetherness, connection, kindness or person to person--it's a lot of rubbish. The concept held out to inspire the tourists is not lived in South Africa. No one is born a racist, but for two generations and more, people have been taught that segregation is right and natural, and this has become embedded deeply in the way people view others and themselves. So Joe holds it as his mission to change the mindset. He fully embraces each one, teach one, and to show people, through District 6, what is still possible and what has been broken and how deeply, and perhaps we will witness and teach ourselves those whom we meet, with total acceptance, brotherhood, Ubuntu.
In the afternoon, after the ferry to Robben Island was cancelled for the afternoon due to turbulent waters, we went to Bo Kaap, a neighborhood that, like District 6, had a colored population made up of the Indonesian Malay families who once supplied labor to the building of Cape Town. Unlike District 6, it was not razed. There were so many mosques--and like the churches, synagogues left alone in District 6--they were respected and feared because of their international reach that Bo Kaap was left alone. Its houses are each painted in vibrant colors, which is why it's the cover of Lonely Planet South Africa year after year. There is a story of drunken merchants who used the colors to find their home, unlikely because of Islamic prohibitions on alcohol; our guide said the colors were instead a defiant expression of individualism in response to Apartheid. And it has become a vivid representation of the rainbow nation.
We arrived in the neighborhood just in time for the call to prayer. Our students are being called in so many ways.
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