Creative Cape Town

photo by Yasser Booley

@Lydia Williams Centre For Memory, Chapel Street, District Six

24th September 2010

Re-membering District Six. Where do we start? In the District Six museum on Heritage Day? No, no -backtrack. Start in 1901 when its first residents were forcibly removed. No man, further back, further. To 1820, ja -   Lydia Williams is born – a slave, freed at age 18, a woman who lives on in the memory and imaginations of those whose heritage has a home in this area. You don’t know the story? Come, come, sit down now. Listen.

The table is set in Chapel Street’s Lydia Williams Centre For Memory. Cups, plates; saucers, even. Paper and plastic table cloths, cut-out paper flowers, doilies, streamers.  What’s there to celebrate about an area that was so strategically ravaged that it sits largely silent and empty now? A lot, it turns out.

Lydia Williams is a heroine of hope and a symbol of emancipation who lived from 1820 to 1910.  In her day she was a woman known for decorating her home in District Six for the upliftment of all. Through her hospitality and open heartedness, her house became an informal centre of learning, laughing and letting go of frustrations. This was part of the spiritual nourishment that accompanied her breads and meals. Or so the story goes. Today a collection of toddlers, teens and tannies trekked from old Horstley Street to this Centre where they heard stories, danced together, ate and spoke in much the same spirit.

Celebration, it turns out, is an effective way of dealing with having one’s heritage confiscated and eradicated. “How do we take that trauma and use it in a positive way?” asks Tina Smith, curator of the District Six Museum. “The museum brings that dialogue into the centre of the conversation.”

“We’ve used the traditional tastes of District Six” she explains, to reawaken an awareness of traditional rituals like weddings and funerals typical to the era and area. A cake made of tinfoil, coloured cardboard, icing and marshmallows makes its point. The perception that those living simply have no time or place for creative expression is very much put to rest at this gathering. And suddenly the band begins.

Robust dancing between senior citizens and juniors ensues, and afterwards, some of us settle in the sun. Children are playing all around us, children who’ve come from townships far and further to learn about what has been taken and what cannot be lost. They’ve been brought here by organisations affiliated with the Diaspora of District Six and the youth leaders are hard at work to keep them out of harmless mischief.  Some are fitting fake silver plates over their front teeth in their mimicry (or is it mockery?) of Western cape cultural codes.  Others are climbing the tree or playing on the paving. An elderly lady breezes by easily. She is 90, I’m told, with ten children and fifty grandchildren.  Myth and memory aside, this is heritage – looking forward without flailing and without forgetting.

So how do we re-member District Six?
I’m sucking on a soet koek and Poet Malika Ndlovu’s words ring clear…

“this wind is a wounded witness
She will not be still
Not until we are listening”

- and dancing, and eating and speaking and singing.  Let’s start here.