Cape Town’s District Six and the archaeology of memory

South Africa’s Table Mountain is Cape Town’s signature — the distinctive profile of a world tourist destination, and a contender for hosting the Olympic Games in the coming millennium. But the mountain also has a more ambiguous history. For the Portuguese, the flat slab of sandstone and the adjacent jutting pinnacle of Devil’s Peak was Adamastor recumbent, a giant who was the glowering force of nature. For the Dutch, these barren rocks were home to runaway slaves who constantly threatened firebrands and the desperate revenge of people without hope. More recently, the mountain has been scarred by a massive destruction of cultural property, the removal of an entire community from the lower slopes of Devil’s Peak. When slavery was finally abolished in 1838, government compensation had been invested in property, and streets and row houses were built outwards from the castle and the shoreline, reaching up towards Devil’s Peak. The new suburb was named in 1867, when the municipality was divided for electoral purposes, and this area became District Six, a ‘doorstep dormitory’ for inner-city industry by the early years of the twentieth century. District Six derived a distinctive character from its port-side location, and as the first destination of many immigrants to South Africa. But this cosmopolitanism was counter to a deep-rooted segregationism, a wish to preserve privilege and cauterize miscegenation that found its logical extreme in apartheid. Throughout the 1970s, bulldozers worked the lower slopes of Devil’s Peak, raising clouds of white plaster dust in the dry, hot summers and miring in the red earth during the winter rains. By the close of the decade about 60 000 people had been moved from their homes because they had been classified ‘coloured’. Thirty-one years after District Six was declared a ‘whites only’ residential area, a land commission was convened in a disused church housing memorabilia of the destroyed suburb. Amid photographs, artworks, collected street signs and archaeological exhibits, the commission heard testimony from one-time residents who had spent half a lifetime scattered in resettlement areas away on the windy Cape Flats. The commissioners ruled that District Six should be returned to its former occupants, recognizing their inalienable rights. This second history of the area — from the beginning of its destruction through until the initiation of its reconstruction — is a case study in the alienation and restitution of cultural property.