Proclamation 43, issued by the South African government on 11 February 1966, marked for destruction a community of more than 60,000 people living close to the centre of Cape Town. Mostly of mixed descent, ‘Coloured’ in apartheid typology, their suburb of District Six had been declared a white ‘group area’. The destruction of District Six would come to stand for the many similar episodes in other parts of South Africa, and would serve as a rallying point for the internal opposition to state repression that would lead to the collapse of the apartheid state some fifteen years later. More widely, systematic discrimination on the grounds of race in South Africa became the mark against which universal principles of justice and human rights came to be set in the second half of the twentieth century, building on the momentum of the US Civil Rights movement and crystallizing in the iconography of Nelson Mandela. As with other ‘defining moments’, the destruction of District Six acquired its meanings through political action, representation and ‘memory work’ in the years that followed. This chapter traces the strands of these meanings through to the recent past, in which some of the issues set in motion by Proclamation 43 remained unresolved.