The District Six Museum in Cape Town marked its 30th anniversary, commemorating the forced removals of its residents under apartheid.
Joe Schaffers, whose family was evicted from District Six under apartheid, was at the District Six Museum to mark its 30th birthday. Joe Schaffers was born in District Six in Cape Town in 1939 and lived there for nearly 30 years before his family and thousands of others were forced out in the 1960s under the Group Areas Act. On Saturday, Schaffers, now an educator at the District Six Museum, was there to celebrate the museum’s 30th birthday. District Six was declared a whites-only area in 1966.
Forced removals started in 1968 and by the early 1980s, 60,000 people had been moved to the Cape Flats. ‘We eventually found ourselves in Hanover Park,’ says Schaffers. ‘You can imagine coming from the centre of the city where you are within walking distance of work, churches and recreational spaces … and you are suddenly uprooted.’‘It was supposed to be democracy, it was supposed to be restitution. A lot of people are still sitting out there waiting, a lot of them have died. They were looking forward to when they could come back and it hasn’t happened.’ Picture: The makeshift dancefloor at the Homecoming Centre was popular on Saturday as guests enjoyed a nostalgic playlist. The museum opened on 10 December 1994, with the ‘Streets’ exhibition, in the old Buitenkant Street Methodist Church. The permanent ‘Digging Deeper’ exhibition, launched in 2000, and built on the Streets exhibit, documents life in District Six. ‘It was in the shambles of the destruction of District Six that this museum was born, amidst the sadness of the demolished houses, churches and buildings,’ Judge Siraj Desai, chairperson of the District Six Museum board, said at the celebration on Saturday. ‘I was at Trafalgar High School in 1966. Our class was getting smaller as people were being evicted. You could see the sadness. It is that sadness and the memory of them having lived here that we must continue to keep alive,’ said Desa
DISTRICT SIX APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA FORCED REMOVALS HISTORY
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