Richard Rive

Here is the story of Mary and the Girls, of Zoot, Pretty-Boy and Oubaas, of the Abrahams family who came from Bo-Kaap, of Last-Knight the barber and his prim wife. This novel is written in tribute to the people of District Six so that we do not forget.

"Buckingham Palace", district six

Marion

['It is very funny for me. In Germany they treated me asan untermenschen. Here they force me to be part of the herrenvolk. But I cannot forget what they did to us in Germany. So my heart is with all the untermenschen, whoever and wherever they are.

They had taken our past away and left the rubble. They had demolished our spirits and left broken bricks. They had destroyed our community and left dust and memories. And they had done all this for their own selfish and arrogant reasons.

They had sought to regulate our present in order to control our future. And as I stood there I was overwhelmed by the enormity of it all. And I asked aloud, 'What men have the moral or political right to take away a people's past? How will they answer on that day when they have to account for this? For the past will not be forgotten. 

To  part is to die a little. We died a little when we parted from the District.

Many were forced to move to small matchbox houses in large matchbox townships which with brutal and tactless irony were given names by the authorities such as Hanover Park and Lavender Hill to remind us of the past they had taken away from us. There was one essential difference between the old places and the new ones. District Six had a soul. Its centre held together till it was torn apart. Stained and tarnished as it was, it had a soul that held together. The new matchbox conglomerates on the desolate Cape Flats had no soul. The houses were soulless units piled together to form a disparate community that lacked cohesion.

You know, it's a funny thing, but it's only in the District that I feel safe. District Six is like an island, if you follow me, an island in a sea of apartheid. The whole of District Six is one big apartheid, so we can't see it. We only see it when the white man comes and forces it on us, when he makes us see it - when the police come, and the council people and so on - or when we leave the District, when we leave our island and go into Cape Town or to Sea Point or come here to Kalk Bay. Then we again see apartheid. I know the District is dirty and poor and a slum, as the newspapers always remind us, out it's our own and we have never put up notices which say "Slegs blankes" or "Whites only". They put up the notices. When the white man comes into the District with his notices he is a stranger, and when we come out of the District he makes us realise that we are strangers. It's funny but that's the way I see it.

District Six is my favorite area in Cape Town. It’s because even though it has a haunted history for one of the last forced removals of apartheid South Africa, it still stands. You can still see the traces of that history in it despite the gentrification, while other places like Dewaterkant where a friend told me recently his grandmother was forcefully removed from have successfully erased all that history this is not true in District Six. There’s so many large empty spaces compared to any other area in CT, where it’s clear they were homes before. From what I learned at the District Six museum years ago, after the forced removals international and local pressure made redevelopment difficult for the government so in a way this is what has preserved this history unlike Dewaterkant that has gone through various waves of gentrification. Walking in it is to confront that history. 

For that reason I enjoyed this book which I must add reminds me a lot of Naipaul’s Miguel’s Street(which I did not finish) as both deal with an tight-knit urban communities facing hardship and are both love letters to a neighbourhood.

District Six is my favorite area in Cape Town. It’s because even though it has a haunted history for one of the last forced removals of apartheid South Africa, it still stands. You can still see the traces of that history in it despite the gentrification, while other places like Dewaterkant where a friend told me recently his grandmother was forcefully removed from have successfully erased all that history this is not true in District Six. There’s so many large empty spaces compared to any other area in CT, where it’s clear they were homes before. From what I learned at the District Six museum years ago, after the forced removals international and local pressure made redevelopment difficult for the government so in a way this is what has preserved this history unlike Dewaterkant that has gone through various waves of gentrification. Walking in it is to confront that history. 

For that reason I enjoyed this book which I must add reminds me a lot of Naipaul’s Miguel’s Street(which I did not finish) as both deal with an tight-knit urban communities facing hardship and are both love letters to a neighbourhood.

"Buckingham Palace", district six

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