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Home > South Africa: Making amends for apartheid: the resurrection of District Six

Contributor [1]
Thursday, March 18, 2004 - 02:00
Categories: 
Land & land rights [2]
Issue Number: 
148 [3]
Article-Summary: 

Dan Ndzabela, aged 82, stood at the foot of Table Mountain and looked out to the sparkling blue sea. He smiled. "It's good to be home," he said quietly. Mr Ndzabela was standing in District Six, the scene of one of apartheid's most notorious travesties. Now, in his dying years and a decade after the end of white rule, some justice is finally his. Until the 1960s District Six was Cape Town's most vibrant quarter. Blacks, coloureds, Jews and immigrants from all over the world bustled thro...read more [4]

Dan Ndzabela, aged 82, stood at the foot of Table Mountain and looked out to the sparkling blue sea. He smiled. "It's good to be home," he said quietly. Mr Ndzabela was standing in District Six, the scene of one of apartheid's most notorious travesties. Now, in his dying years and a decade after the end of white rule, some justice is finally his. Until the 1960s District Six was Cape Town's most vibrant quarter. Blacks, coloureds, Jews and immigrants from all over the world bustled through its cobbled streets and crammed into colonial-era houses. Its diversity represented everything apartheid opposed. In 1966 the area was declared "whites only" under the hated Group Areas Act, and the first bulldozers rumbled in. Houses were levelled, streets wiped from the map, and an entire community dismembered and banished to squalid townships on the marshy Cape Flats.

Category: 
ICT, Media & Security [5]
Oldurl: 
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category.php/land/20883 [6]
Country: 
South Africa [7]

Source URL: https://www.pambazuka.org/node/21641

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