Basically, under the apartheid government in 1966, 60,000 people were removed from an inner city multi cultural rural area. The government didn't appreciate the mix of religions ethnicities and belief sets that the people held in district six, though the residents enjoyed where they were living very much. They were moved from their homes in district six which was then bulldozed and flattened to the ground with the exception of some churches and mosques and made to move out to what is now called the Cape Flats, about two hours from the city center by car. So clearly, they weren't expecting "colored" and "black" people to be able to work.
In fact, they prevented this from happening by making them all carry pass books which showed whether or not they could work in an urban area, and they could only really do so when the white people needed help in the cities. Anyone at any time could ask them to see their pass book. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
Anyway, there were many interesting things to see in the museum:
This was the writer's floor, where tiles of different poems are written from the time period and place in the floor.
The center of the writer's floor.
This was a usual sight during the time of apartheid, whites were being aided by the government to become beneficiaries of everything and blacks and colored people (races as determined by the government) were cast aside and forced to live in segregated neighborhoods which often had very bad living conditions, outbreaks of many diseases and basically held a lot of poverty.
This is a hand written map of the streets in district six that is the floor of the museum and has the names of the people who lived there in the spots that they lived in.
Street signs recovered from the rubble and destruction of district six.
Noor, the man who spoke to us in the museum and a former resident of district six's home that he watched being demolished. His son was the fourth generation of his family to be born in this house, and his son was only three days old when they had to leave. He told a very touching story that I will attempt to retell:
He was very keen on pigeons when he was young and the man next door had pigeons. The man told him he could have pigeons when he was seventeen though at ten he was already very eager to have them. The night before his seventeenth birthday, he and his friends built a pigeon loft in his backyard and the next day he put the pigeons in there. Ten years later, he told his wife (in their new home, far away from district six, his old house already torn down) that he was going to leave the cage open and see if the pigeons would return home. They didn't. He was so upset he couldn't sleep.
On his way to work every day he drives through district six because he couldn't start the day without being there, and sure enough, he parked his car across the street from his old house and the pigeons were sitting on the remains of the old house. They turned their heads to look at him and he said that they seemed quizzical, as if to say "where is our home gone?"
So anyway, that made us all very sad and it was very nice to hear. He wrote a book about his life, actually, and it seems very interesting.
These are pictures of the current district six that was actually left vacant. Though it was planned to become an all-white neighborhood, the former residents fought back and prevented it from happening. Instead, the government left it entirely empty and it still is. Now, reparations are starting to come for former residents, many of whom are waiting for houses to be built for them on the land, some of whom are taking monetary reparations for the events.
Also, we went to the South African Museum, which had a lot of interesting cave paintings and ethnic tools, etc. But also it had a lot of animals in it, which was very interesting. They had extinct animals and their closest evolutionary relative, which I thought was very interesting, however, the only pictures I took in there were these:
That's all for now! Gonna drag my sick butt to bed!
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