District Six Photos

District Six

District Six, located to the east of the city center, was a multicultural district where 60,000 people of different ethnic backgrounds lived in a vibrant, colorful community. In 1966, the area was declared "For Whites only" and the people, some of whom had lived here for generations, were dispersed to various townships.

The reason given was the relatively high crime rate, which was increasingly encroaching on the surrounding (white) residential areas. Today there is evidence that these attacks hardly ever took place. The real ulterior motive was that the whites in the so-called "City Bowl" wanted to keep to themselves and feared political attacks from District Six. With the resettlement, the apartheid government struck at the heart of the people's lives, "urbanized" them and thus took away their identity.

The entire district was razed to the ground. Today, there is still a lot of unused land here. This is likely to remain the case in some sections, despite the buildings already constructed in the 1980s (Technicon and others), some new construction projects on the edge of the area and the fact that land is to be returned to former residents and their surviving dependants.

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District Six