Some of Cape Town’s Displaced to Go Home

When Fatima Benting moves back to her old neighborhood this year, she knows she won’t find her favorite movie houses or the fish markets where she once shopped, or the factories where friends used to work. Soon after she left District Six a generation ago, bulldozers knocked down her home and those of her neighbors, dug up their streets and their sidewalks, erased their history.

Still, even though she is 88 now and frail, Benting is determined to return to the site of District Six on the slope of Table Mountain, a short walk from the city’s harbor.

Her dream is to once again feel part of a close-knit community, where neighbors know neighbors and relatives live nearby. All that ended for her after 1966, when the apartheid government said the area called District Six was just for white people and began to forcibly resettle its 66,000 residents in scattered townships far from their roots.

For nearly half a century under South Africa’s white-minority government, forced removal was a fact of life for millions of South Africans who weren’t white. The Group Areas Act of 1950 let the government restrict an area by race without regard for its inhabitants. Those pushed out by whites would be resettled by race -- usually on much less desirable land, frequently among strangers.

“They put some people here and some people there. They put us all over the show,” Benting said.

Benting and 24 other former District Six residents will move into a townhouse complex being built just for them. They’ll be part of a pilot project aimed at rebuilding not just the physical neighborhood of District Six but also the community networks the removals ripped apart.

“To leave your happy home, to have to go and start from the beginning again, it’s not easy,” Benting said. “It became just a life of survival.”

Benting is one of about 1,700 District Six residents who successfully claimed land in their former neighborhood under a national land-restitution program. Because of her age, she’ll be one of the first to return. Homes in the pilot project are reserved for people in their 80s and older and who are running out of time to fulfill their dream of going home.

The houses will sit close together, with shared courtyards and walkways to encourage communication and friendships. But they won’t echo the rickety and rambling mix of architectural styles of the old District Six; they’ll be modern and sleek. Those who watched their homes being plowed under say daily reminders of what the neighborhood used to look like would be too painful.

The government said destruction of District Six was justified as slum removal and hoped to redevelop the prime downtown land as a white commercial and residential area. It was renamed Zonnebloem, which means sunflower in Afrikaans, then along with English one of the nation’s two official languages. A new street grid was superimposed on the old one. A sprawling whites-only technical college went up on some of the land. But much of the land remained empty -- partly because of protests against the removals.

Of all the buildings in District Six, only a handful of churches and mosques were spared the bulldozers. One old church was converted in 1994 into the District Six Museum. Visitors who arrive there step inside to encounter an enormous map that covers most of the first floor. It’s a grid showing the old neighborhood streets before most of them were destroyed.

Each day, former residents arrive and stand on the map, trying to get their bearings, which they can no longer do easily in the neighborhood outside. They are given felt-tip pens to write their names where they once lived -- and, often, they weep as they do so.

“It’s cathartic,” said Terence Fredericks, a former resident who is the museum’s chairman and a trustee of the District Six Beneficiary and Redevelopment Trust, which has been working to coordinate efforts to rebuild the area for those forced out.

“We were dispersed,” he said. “We lost our sense of identity. This is a place where we can come to find a way to connect with our community.”

District Six wasn’t paradise. Many people who lived there were poor. More often than not, they rented their ramshackle homes, which absentee landlords let crumble over the years. Outsiders looked at the decrepit structures and called them slums. But the buildings in the area, if shabby, were often beautiful -- many of them two-story structures in the Georgian or Cape Dutch styles, some with wrought-iron balconies and fretwork much like that of New Orleans’ French Quarter.

From the streets of District Six, people awakened to the sound of the foghorn in the harbor. They could look out their windows at the splendor of Table Mountain or the ocean.

The neighborhood included ornate movie houses. There were dozens of family-run shops -- crowded general stores, tailors, bakeries. People walked to the stores and to their jobs in the ginger beer bottling plant or the textile and candy factories. They ran into one another on the busy sidewalks and socialized in their churches and mosques, their boxing clubs and choir groups and gossipy barbershops.

District Six’s population was diverse, with Jews and Christians and Muslims -- Indians, Malays, blacks and some whites. The majority were classified as “colored” because of their mixed race.

Benting, whose father ran a butcher shop, remembers neighbors sharing with neighbors, even if there was little to go around.

“If you hadn’t got anything, someone would come give you sugar, tea, anything. We would just leave our doors open and walk into town,” she said.

She also remembers the comfort of living in one house with her extended family and having other relatives close by.

But when the government resettled the families, it made no effort to keep relatives together. One family member might be sent with his wife and children to Mitchell’s Plain; his sister and her family could find themselves ordered to Mannenberg, miles away.

“Where is your family? You don’t know. You have to take trains and taxis to find them. It’s not easy to connect. It becomes a whole lot of searching and looking for telephone numbers. We lost touch. We don’t know anymore the family or the cousins,” said Benting’s daughter, Sophia Sultan, who will move into the townhouse with her mother and her own husband and two children.

She described the ordeal her mother went through when, as a Muslim, she undertook her pilgrimage, or hajj. Part of the ritual of the pilgrimage involves taking leave of one’s relatives, but because the forced removal had scattered them so far and wide, Benting had to travel for days to do so.

“This is the saddest part of what happens when you break up a community. Often, you find out a family member has died six months after it happens,” Sultan said.

Benting now lives miles from downtown, in a nondescript subdivision next to a weedy railroad track. When she filed her claim for land in District Six, she had to submit papers to prove that she’d once lived there. She was also asked to name people who had lived nearby -- which was no problem. She doesn’t know her neighbors now, she said.

But in the new townhouse complex, Benting’s next-door neighbor will be her cousin, Ismail Petersen, also 88, and with whom she recently reconnected.

“Ooh, I’m so excited. I’m very, very excited. I can’t wait to go back. I thank the Almighty,” Benting said, clapping her hands and giggling at the thought of her new home.

Just talking about District Six brought back so many memories for her. She asked her daughter to bring out the scrapbooks of old photos, and reminisced about being a schoolgirl, about the view from her old house and about the house itself, with its reception room, wooden banisters and balconies.

Her daughter said she worries a little that her mother expects too much from her return -- but she’s hopeful too.

“It’s going to be good to go back, even if it’s just to let my mom enjoy all what she’s lost, that togetherness. If they can just rekindle a little bit of support, that would be good,” Sultan said. “But this has all taken its toll.”