Cape Town — South Africa's "mother city" of Cape Town is renowned as the country's most beautiful for tourists, but there's no escaping the destruction of apartheid when you visit.
On your way from the airport to the city's seafront accommodation, you can see a huge ugly scar against the lower slopes of the famed Table Mountain.
The scar, now covered in weeds and rubble, was once the vibrant, colourful and multi-racial community of District Six. Situated conveniently alongside the city centre where many residents worked, it was first established as the Sixth Municipal District of Cape Town in 1867. But beginning in the late 1960s, it was demolished by the perpetrators of apartheid, who forced its people to relocate to the remote, sandy wastes outside of town.
Since the advent of democracy, work to redevelop District Six has begun, but progress is slow and only small sections have been rebuilt. However, if you want to see what District Six used to look like and learn the story of how apartheid ripped the community apart, there is the District Six Museum.
Arriving there for a visit, we were greeted by Noor Ebrahim, a tour guide who was evicted from his home during the 1970s.
Noor reminisced with passion of how diverse the area was, with people who were classified under apartheid as "white", "coloured", "black" and "Asian" all living as one undivided community – until 1966, when the area was declared "white" under the apartheid law known as the Group Areas Act.
The forced removals started in 1968, beginning a process in which more than 60,000 residents were relocated to the "Cape Flats" – townships such as Manenberg, Heideveld, Delft, Langa and Khayelitsha. The houses on the "Flats" lacked basic amenities for a decent life. The government promised work to all those who were relocated but the jobs did not last.
In 1970, people's homes in District Six, as well as some places of worship, were flattened. Noor was one of many who watched as their houses were being crushed by bulldozers.
One of the churches that remained standing was the Buitenkant Street Methodist Church, situated between District Six and Cape Town's city centre. During the 1980s, as the struggle against apartheid reached its height, this church was named the "Freedom Church" when it became a venue for anti-apartheid meetings and a place of sanctuary for victims of police brutality and protestors trying to escape detention.
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Today this church is the District Six Museum.
In the middle of the building, taking up most of the floor, is a plastic mat which displays a map of District Six. Former residents of the area who visit the museum write their names on the streets on which they lived.
Suspended from the ceiling is a calico cloth about 1.5 metres wide and 10 metres high. It is embroidered with the names and stories of people who were forcibly removed from their homes. One gets to see exactly how they felt.
Along the stairs leading to the first floor of the museum, and against a wall, are original street signs, collected by a bulldozer operator as he was demolishing the properties. He later handed them to the museum.
The museum also recreates a typical District Six room and even a hair salon, and there are plenty of images of the way it used to look, as well as histories explaining how and why apartheid removals were conducted.
With its photographs, stories and recreated scenes, this museum is definitely the place to visit if you want a taste of the District Six struggle.
