In Cape Town, the legacy of Apartheid makes gentrification's amnesia doubly painful. We go on the streets with the artists fighting against the forgetting

Text Ilham Rawoot

On the hilly roads of the neighbourhoods at the foot of the iconic Table Mountain, just outside the Central Business District, are official green direction signboards. One arrow points in the direction of ‘Woodstock’, the other ‘District Six’. Up until a few months ago, ‘Zonnebloem’ was written where District Six is now. But somebody changed it, in the middle of the night, when no one was looking. It sounds like a small thing, but it's a creative middle finger to the local government and to developers. The artists behind the defacing are telling us one thing: the history of District Six will not be forcefully removed, as its people were. District Six was once a diverse and colourful neighbourhood of coloured, Indian, and some Portuguese inhabitants, until 1968, when the Apartheid government declared it a whites only neighbourhood. Sixty thousand people were kicked out by police, their houses were razed to the ground, and they were pushed out to what is now the Cape Flats, much of which is ridden with poverty and gangsterism.

Courtesy of Ilham Rawoot

The area was renamed Zonnebloem. Today much of the land remains empty, the slopes covered in long dry grass overlooking the harbour. The government has promised, since the end of apartheid in 1994, to hand the land back to its previous owners. But that’s not happened, and the borders are shrinking inwards as ‘design hubs’ are set up on the edges: galleries, urban design and branding companies. The area is being split up into sections with new and sexier names, like the East City and the Fringe. People eat this stuff up: German students in ‘wir sprechen Deutsch’ (we speak German) signed guesthouses, young American voluntourists with blonde braids, and creatives looking for a ‘more alternative’ space.

Courtesy of The Burning Museum

Cape Town is a pretty city. It is also a city using art and design as a means of bullshitting its way through its social and racial inequality. This year, Cape Town is playing host to the World Design Capital, which sounds important and fancy. Few locals understand what it actually does, but get that it cost the local government a load of cash to earn the trademark. The reinvigorated ‘design’ buzzword is being used to pander to the will of major property developers and trendy businesses moving into Woodstock and District Six – traditonally low income black and coloured neighbourhoods with heavy histories. We've seen it before: Businesses come in, rents and rates go up, communities move out, wealthy, mostly white people, move in and ‘clean up’ the neighbourhood. Woodstock, with its Victorian brooky-laced houses with clear views of the mountain, is being compared to neighbourhoods like Brooklyn in New York, Hackney in London and Neukolln in Berlin, for the exclusive gentrification happening there for the same reasons as the others – cheap commercial and residential spaces, in good proximity and with good transport links to the CBD and the element of dodginess that is imperative for an artistic landscape. Gentrification is not new. The difference in Cape Town though, is that it is frighteningly reminiscent of the forced removals during apartheid.

Courtesy of The Burning Museum

The Burning Museum, a collective of five young Capetonian artists, are refusing to allow the faces of the community and its previous generations to be forgotten. So much so that they’re physically pasting them up on walls and bridges around Woodstock. The group made of Justin Davy, Jarrett Erasmus, Tazneem Wentzel, Grant Jurius and Scott Williams, sought out the archives from the 1950s to 1970s of photographs taken by the Van Kalker Photographic Studio, which stood on the main road for decades and captured hundreds of smiling families in front of forest or island paradise wallpapers. Along with these photographs, they also pasted a copy of the Natives Land Act of 1913, the apartheid law that enabled blacks to only own property in certain areas, totalling only 10 per cent of the country’s land. It is very difficult for the artists to track down all the people in the photographs because they did not have names attached, and many have already had to move out of the neighbourhood. “People’s stories were gentrified out of history books,” says Tazneem. “These are histories that don’t get told, that are unseen, invisible. But they are omnipresent.” In this way, for the Burning Museum, the wheatpastes have become a public gallery, reminding passers-by of their own friends and family. However, there is also the added hope that the images will be recognised by the people in the photographs, on the chance that they pass them by on Woodstock Main road.

Courtesy of The Burning Museum