A Short talk presented as part of the commemoration of the 1913 Natives Land Act, for the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA), hosted at the District Six Museum.
22 November 2013
Good Evening to all! Thank you to GIPCA for creating this platform for creative practitioners, and for allowing an exploration of questions around the critically important land question. I know this is a packed programme, those of you who are here tonight are here because the question of land has meaning for you and I want to thank all of you for attending tonight.
I want to start by naming things very carefully by calling things by their name.
Yesterday, we opened this event at Prestwich memorial. Prestwich Memorial was created to house the bodies of people who were found at the Prestwhich burial site, which is not in that space. Rather, the bodies were found during the construction of a fancy New York style loft apartment called the Rockwell and were moved several times before the creation of the so-called memorial. Nick Sheppard reminded us that we were sharing the space with 1629 bodies. These bodies are bodies of the ancestors to many people in Cape Town all around us, and it is important to acknowledge their presence in that space, and the violence that the legacies of racial slavery continues in the lives of the decedents of those very bodies who’s presence we shared last night.
Tonight, we are kindly hosted at the District Six Museum. I am sure that many of you are aware of the forced removals, which took place under apartheid. It is also important to acknowledge the dispossessions, which took place earlier in this very space, as early as 1901 black people were relocated from D6 to Ndabeni. In this light, I would like to thank the museum and all the staff of the museum for all the hard work they do in their fight to have District Six proclaimed as a national heritage site. Their work cannot be understated, as this important space of District Six continues to be contested through contemporary spatial practices and culture led urban regeneration.
Why start in Prestwhich memorial? A place that is a reminder of the very bodies that have been removed, and removed and removed again to the aushuary? Why start their? And why continue at the D6 museum tonight? For me, using these two spaces are important because they tell a story about his city. One of the elements of that story, is the layeredness of time. In other words, the times we call pre-colonial, colonial, post-colonial, apartheid, post-apartheid are not chronological. Rather, this very space tells the stories not of one force removal during apartheid, but of multiple forced removals. The space of district six is not only about the group areas act. The 1901 forced removals in this area to places like Ndabeni happened before the 1913 land act. In the same way, the burial ground in Prestwich dates back to when slavery existed in the Cape. Therefore we understand a before and after the land act not marking the land act as the key moment. Rather there are many other moments, which form part of a more long-standing logic that we have yet to unravel and fully grapple with. And this is the kind of layered time that I speak to. So when we speak about historical injustice it is not some abstracted term, but rather specific, as far as describing particular logics of dispossession and disavowal through the legacies of racial slavery, through colonialism and through apartheid.
This brings me to the subject of social injustices through contemporary spatial practices. As a spatial practitioner and artist I am interested in how spaces, experiences and lives have become dislocated in the present. Cape Town exists in a complex relationship to the global. What I am arguing here tonight is that contemporary spatial practices are not only a result of neoliberal practices, but rather that these contemporary spatial practices re-capitulate historical injustices in the everyday. The work of the Land Invasion Unit, and the everyday practice related to the clearing of rough shelters in D6 and in the city, as well as the work of the CCID and the maintenance of the perception of a clean, safe and caring city.
Earlier this year, I was part of a debate, which was hosted here in the District Six museum. This debate was a result of collaboration between the District Museum and the African Centre for Cities, and a response to the Urban Design Framework for the so-called Fringe innovation district, which imposed the renaming of parts of District Six as the Fringe. The debate and event gave voice to a written document and comments, which the D6 museum submitted in response to the UDF.
Describing the Fringe as a social discomfort, they write that the memories, sensibilities, creativities and everyday practices of those who were excised from the city centre and District Six are marginalized in the Fringe’s designation of “the creative” and “the innovative”. In other words – whose definitions of creativity are being referenced – they asked. Politically, the naming of the Fringe displaces the long-standing memory work of the museum in addressing the legacies of forced removals and their work around marginalized histories of slavery and colonial violence in the city that are deeply tied to forced removals, as well as their long-standing work to declare the entire district as a heritage site.
Naming is an important exercise of power, and in re-naming and branding the area as the Fringe, what is being severed is a deep connection of people whose lives are marked by dispossession and forced removal. Questions of memory, heritage and more broadly contestations around land and ongoing embedded forms of erasure, are trumped in the name of design and regeneration.
I want to end on the questions around culture, and what constitutes the creative and who engages in creative practice? Is it possible to expand the archive? Is it possible to think about the creative and the contemporary without re-thinking the concept of time? How do contemporary stylizations of Cape Town serve to erase local histories, with the effect of re- entrenching historical injustice in the present?
