The Dispossession of District Six

The complex aftermath of reparations in Cape Town.

When the South African government evicted her from her house in 1966, Juliega Cooper had only been to three years of school. She was 25 years old. Cooper’s mother could not read or write, and she never really understood the law effectively proclaiming that her neighborhood wasn’t meant for her. That law, the Group Areas Act, underwrote the removal of people of color from rural and urban places to shore up apartheid, the all-penetrating segregationist system that prohibited Black, white, Indian and so-called “colored,” or multiracial, South Africans from marrying each other, partnering in business together or living in the same places.

Before they were evicted, Cooper and her family members lived in an especially diverse Cape Town neighborhood, a densely settled half-square-mile precinct called District Six on a slope running up from the harbor. For 150 years, the neighborhood’s white news agents shared storefronts with Black tailors and Indian-born grocers. The Cooper family couldn’t afford electricity to light the rooms they rented. But the family nevertheless took in neighbors who were down on their luck — Christians as well as fellow Muslims. At one point, Cooper said, “there were five people living in our kitchen.”

But soon after the apartheid regime declared District Six a “white area,” police officers — acting as eviction agents — came in a van. “We can’t move,” Cooper recently recalled her mother pleading when the police arrived at her door. “We are poor. We can’t buy any other place.” One of the officers said, “We will tear this house down on top of you if you don’t leave.”

Cooper knew enough, though, to take along the papers proving she had paid rent on the third-floor rooms in which her family lived. Papers were important in apartheid South Africa: If you weren’t white, you needed to carry a pass to walk in white neighborhoods; if your complexion was dark but you wanted to remain with your “colored” siblings, you needed a paper to prove you were “colored” and not Black.

Over five decades of apartheid, people of color constituted three-quarters of the South African population. But 85 percent of land in South Africa was demarcated as “white.” When the new government took over in 1994, it made returning seized land a top priority. In the mid-2010s, 50 years after her family’s eviction, Cooper submitted their rent documents to a reparations program established by South Africa’s first democratically elected, Black-led government. In undertaking history’s most substantial effort to return white-owned land to people of color, the new government also sought to acknowledge that it was not just private property that had been stolen. On its land claim forms, it invited individuals to write “narratives” describing the immaterial riches apartheid had taken from them. Respondents chronicled the loss of friends and “family unity” after their neighborhoods were shattered. One reported that he’d suffered a “total loss of joy” after his eviction; others said their loved ones had died “of broken hearts.”

When I met her two months ago, what Cooper recalled best about her old neighborhood was that it was a community, a crowded but joyful quarter where children played tag and hopscotch together in the street long after dusk. Her mother, her brothers and sisters, and — after she married in the early 1960s — her husband had all lived together. But they’d had to scatter to far-flung, flood-prone “colored” ghettos on the city’s outskirts.

When the reparations program started in the ’90s, Cooper hoped it would reestablish the community she had lost. Her whole country went in with big hopes — that reparations would put a kind of happy ending on a tragic story and begin to re-balance the scales of justice. But after South Africa began to implement reparations, it found out that balancing was much more complicated than many had imagined. The program divided the communities meant to benefit — over whether to trust a good deed by the state and over who had suffered most and most deserved compensation. The people who could prove they lost something had once had something to lose, and the process threatened to leave out the most vulnerable, who never had any homes at all. And Cooper and others realized that what was lost couldn’t be returned just as it was. District Six wasn’t only land but a feeling and a memory. Once the reparations process began, fewer than 5 percent of District Six’s eligible claimants actually sought to claim land. Cooper told me that by the time she trekked to a government office to submit her reparations claim, none of her friends wanted to go back. “I went alone.”

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District Six represents a tiny portion of the millions of acres, most of them rural, taken from South Africans of color under apartheid. But it became South Africa’s most written-about and “politically significant” post-apartheid land reparations project, said Chrischen Julius, the director of a museum dedicated to the neighborhood. That’s partly because in South African memory District Six symbolized the cosmopolitan multiracialism that white leaders had sought to stamp out. If not for apartheid, “there was this sense that [District Six] should have been the heart of Cape Town,” Julius told me.

When it cleared District Six, the apartheid government deemed the area an uninhabitable “slum.” After evicting the district’s approximately 60,000 residents, it demolished their houses, even tearing up the streets and the sidewalks, planting vast fields of grass that never really flourished in Cape Town’s salt air. In the 1970s, foreign newspapers ran images of the South African police razing District Six; in the ‘80s, Archbishop Desmond Tutu spoke of the neighborhood when campaigning against apartheid overseas.

Land restitution in District Six also drew focus because progressive activists hoped it would proceed smoothly compared with the process in much of the country. The new South African constitution promised to restore stolen land, but it also enshrined property rights. White-owned plots couldn’t be expropriated unless the owners wanted to sell them. The promise of restoration felt possible in District Six because almost nobody owned anything there by the ’90s.

Christiaan Beyers, a South African-born social anthropologist who studies District Six out of Canada’s Trent University, told me that after the government declared the neighborhood a “white” area, it dreamed that international companies like British Petroleum would come anchor the neighborhood. But by the 1970s and ’80s, those kinds of companies didn’t want to be associated with the abuses of a regime condemned by the United Nations. The South African government built a white-only university on the District Six land, but few other white businesses or homeowners ever relocated there. Cape Town, Africa’s southernmost metropolis, is lorded over by a beautiful 3,500-foot-tall mountain. From the summit, the city looks like the pleats of an intricate sequined skirt, densely tiled with twinkling skyscrapers and the close-set metal roofs of little houses. But District Six is still a visible hole in the fabric.

District Six became one of the few substantial urban neighborhoods for which old inhabitants were invited to submit proof of prior residence. If their claims were approved, the South African government vowed to build brand-new houses for them there.

Today, Cooper is a very tall, slender woman who wears her hair pinned tight under a white turban. When we met, she told me she had gone to work in a factory when she was 12, lying about her age to secure the job. The white factory owner’s wife took it upon herself to teach Cooper how to sew during lunch breaks, launching her into a precocious career as a dressmaker.

The privations of her upbringing have been burnished into fond memories by time — and by the darker moments that followed. A few years later, the eviction disrupted that career, as well as her young marriage. The white clients for whom Cooper designed dresses had lived a 15-minute walk from District Six. After her eviction, she could no longer walk legally in their neighborhoods without carrying a formal “pass” signed by a white employer.

The site of her childhood had been extinguished, vanished — a remarkable annihilation even by the standards of apartheid, a regime dedicated to uprooting communities of color. The apartheid government demanded each adult in Cooper’s family buy a house in a “colored” area after their eviction. Unable to afford that, her husband had to move in with his parents. But he had 14 siblings, and “there was no place for me,” Cooper recalled. So “I had to put my son with my brother. I went to stay with a friend. Then I stayed with my sister, but I had to sleep on the floor.”

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When it established its reparations program, the South African Department of Rural Development and Land Reform invited not only people who had owned properties but also renters like Cooper and their descendants to submit claims. The hope was that the project would embody “a very expansive sense of restorative justice,” said Julius, the District Six museum director, by acknowledging that not only privileged landowners but everybody who lived in a neighborhood contributed to and had a purchase on it. The department also didn’t want to insist evictees move back, which might replicate the uprooting that was a hallmark of apartheid. Along with its vow to build claimants new houses, it offered an alternative: a cash payment of 17,000 South African rand, at the time equivalent to $3,300.

Cooper chose to submit a claim for a house. In South Africa, then, the cash offer was only a quarter of the money she’d have needed to buy a new Toyota Corolla. She felt it was “an insult” compared with her family’s suffering. She said her mother had been so grief-stricken after the evictions that she returned to District Six while she was alive, though doing so was illegal. Every Friday, she’d take an hour’s worth of buses 9 miles from Bonteheuwel, the distant “colored” area to which she’d been resettled, back to mosque where she’d been married. Then she’d sit down on its steps and cry.

But Arthur Peters — a Cape Town resident who had “colored” family members forced out of District Six — told me he urged his relatives not to bother with submitting claims at all. Out of nearly 100,000 people who were eligible to submit claims, only a few thousand are known to have done so, though the program was heavily advertised. The government still has not finished adjudicating all of the claims.

Peters met me at his multi-bedroom home in a formerly white-only suburb. It’s one of three properties Peters has bought since graduating in the late 1990s from the very university the apartheid government built on District Six. (The university integrated racially shortly before he attended.) Now an accounting professor, Peters grew up in an economically depressed, treeless “colored” area near where Cooper’s mother was resettled.

After the reparations program was announced, he wondered how the government could possibly deliver houses to both property owners and multiple generations of tenants who submitted claims upon the same spot. The idea of reparations for District Six sounded like a fantasy to him. In his house, Peters has hung family photos across his living-room wall. At the center of the display is a large black-and-white portrait of a mustachioed man in a three-piece gray suit — his great-grandfather Perry. A prosperous tailor, Perry Peters owned land in a lush mountainside enclave called Claremont. Because Perry was of mixed racial heritage, he lost his Claremont land under apartheid. But the government never razed that neighborhood, so his family couldn’t claim it back.

Because of this family history, Peters also resented that the reparations program seemed to “forget those of us who had already succeeded” materially. He believed that petitioning the government for redress was sentimental. “Who believes that place will ever [again] be what it was?” he asked me.

Peters’ attitudes were widely held. “There was skepticism, and the feeling it was a ploy,” Beyers, the social anthropologist, said of the land claims program. The only state District Sixers had ever known was a white supremacist regime. “It’s not as if, suddenly, it was a natural thing to reorient and think the state could be a force for good in one’s life.”

When Cooper submitted her claim, friends and family members ridiculed her for having any faith in a government’s promises. The building program suffered long delays, and they’d taunt her by saying, “You’ll die before you get anything.”

Even when, in the mid-2010s, the government finally began to erect apartments in the empty fields, Cooper still had doubts. “I looked at them and thought: But those are such beautiful flats! They won’t give those to us.”

In late February, I visited Cooper in her new house in District Six. In 2020, she’d finally received a second-story government-built flat in her former neighborhood. The block it’s on still has no trees and the staircase to her front door is made of raw concrete, but inside, the apartment is open plan and airy, with high ceilings, two bedrooms and a private roof deck with a view of the ocean. She’s one of about 100 District Six inhabitants who have received this kind of restitution — less than a fifth of the number who submitted claims for houses.

Many claimants died before receiving their promised houses. The national and city governments have been slow to process claims and greenlight construction. “We suffered such humiliation and pain” when evicted, a claimant named Ebrahim Mohamed told a South African newspaper in 2021. “We are made to suffer again and made to feel like fools. … We are being treated with no dignity [but] with the attitude that ‘you are getting your house for free, and you will get it when you get it.’”

Those who’ve returned also complain that they’ve been dumped into a neighborhood starkly different from the tightknit one they remember — a place of “substance abuse and crime,” one claimant told the newspaper. If you walk through the old District Six, you’ll realize that, contrary to the way it is often depicted, it hasn’t been empty for decades. Thousands of unhoused people — former District Six inhabitants with no papers to claim land, Black internal migrants and economic refugees from other African countries — have settled there in makeshift wooden shacks or tents. Last month, I went to one of these tent neighborhoods to speak to Iddi Faraji Challah, a Tanzanian national.

A slight, gravelly-voiced 40-year-old in finely cared-for white sneakers, Challah said he couldn’t find a job as a young man in his hometown, Dar es Salaam. After traveling to Cape Town in 2009, he landed work hawking supermarket coupon booklets at intersections. He tried several times to apply for asylum in South Africa as an economic refugee. In denying his claim, he said the government told him, “You have to deport yourself” — a flight or bus trip that could cost thousands of dollars.

So Challah settled in an undeveloped spot in the old District Six. He and the fifty-odd others living there called it Makotopola, named for a village in Tanzania. The community had developed their own names for parts of the area, like Vietnam for a bridge underpass, because one of them liked reading history and recalled how Viet Cong soldiers dug tunnels during the Vietnam War. They considered it home. Challah, who now lives in a blue tent suspended by ropes from the branches of a solitary tree, is aware of the claimants who believe his neighborhood is rightfully theirs. But he points out that his community includes some of the old District Six’s most vulnerable inhabitants — those without papers. And “home is home,” he told me. “No matter if somebody tells me, ‘I’m going to chase you from it.’”

For years, the local government has been trying to evict the unhoused population from District Six. “The police said they were ‘cleaning up,’” Challah said of a mid-2020 raid; officers roughly confiscated everything he owned, including his shoes and his cellphone. “I was just crying.”

“Cleaning up” was the phrase the apartheid government had used to clear District Six in the first place. The attendant woes that arise when desperately poor people inhabit a space — petty crime, drug use — conflicted with the former residents’ time-burnished memories of the neighborhood. One of Julius’ goals with her museum is to do the delicate work of “educating” the old District Six’s inhabitants about how the memories they so desperately want restored may, in fact, be fantasies.

The idea that District Six was no “slum” but the “heart” of Cape Town — devalued temporarily by a white supremacist state but destined to reemerge as the true representation of urban possibility — became tremendously important under apartheid. “The removals were so violent,” Julius told me. “And after that, people developed a very particular idea of District Six that is nostalgic, that repairs that loss, that paints that picture of a happy community — a community that looked out for each other.” Remembering their lost home as a rich place, culturally and even materially, “gives meaning to [the evicted inhabitants’] decades of suffering.”

She worries, though, about this idealization of the memory of District Six. At her museum, Julius also mounts exhibits about child labor, the victimization of women, and the Black people who lived in the area and were evicted well before the “colored” inhabitants. “Sometimes [the former inhabitants] don’t like the work the museum does,” Julius said. “Some people insist there were never any Black people in District Six. That it was entirely ‘colored’” — a proud creation of a mixed-race community that found itself marginalized even before legal apartheid began.

These days, District Six’s old residents congregate most often on a tremendously active District Six Facebook page. Daily, they post sentimental paintings of the neighborhood and photos of joyful weddings, of choirs, of teeming fish markets. Some former inhabitants, like Peters’ relatives, wouldn’t want to go back to the deep poverty that gave rise to such dense living. But many of them actually no longer remember the neighborhood as poor. “Our terrace in Mount Street was a beautiful palace in the sun,” one Facebook commenter wrote. “I’d swear on my life … the stately pillars holding the veranda’s curved roof up … [one] must have felt like royalty to walk down the ornamental stairs.”

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In apartheid’s immediate aftermath, South Africa focused on emblematic reparations programs like District Six. The hope was that these would communicate the new government’s new values. Now District Six stands as a warning against symbolic reparations projects.

Away from the cities, far more land has been returned to South Africans of color after white farm owners sold their properties to the government. Thirty years after apartheid’s end, these rural reparations projects are also shrouded in a sense of disappointment. Much of the land had been changed since its original inhabitants were evicted, and life there demanded things of the claimants — skills, say, like operating large commercial lychee packhouses and exporting the fruit to Europe — that made restitution more of a burden than a gift.

After apartheid ended, millions of people who’d been stuck in Black countryside “reserves” sought to move to the city. They have no claim to urban reparations. For all the celebration of the District Six reparations program, “it’s done a limited amount to address residential segregation from the apartheid era,” said Beyers, the social anthropologist. Many progressive activists who originally championed the program now see it as a little too focused on restoring a remembered past over effecting justice in the present. Beyers said the government put “a huge amount of resources” into resolving the District Six claims while, on Cape Town’s outskirts, thousands of “kids are dying of diarrhea because there are no latrines in their neighborhoods.”

South Africa’s reparations program wasn’t prepared to address the theft of potential futures as opposed to the theft of concrete pasts. Its architects may not have thought as thoroughly as they could have about these questions: What do the victims really long for? What would make them whole? What does the lost thing represent? And who are the victims right now?

District Six was one of the first reparations programs to explicitly return property stolen by white people to people of color. It’s worth thinking about what South Africans didn’t think about when they commenced it: How to help people who’ve long been victimized by a state trust any act that state authorizes. How to head off divisions within communities that are meant to benefit. How to distinguish between the material theft and the memory of that which was stolen, and how to deliver the latter. How to balance reparations claims with contemporary social-justice priorities.

But the District Six reparations isn’t all a sad story. It offered some people—like Juliega Cooper—a sense of recompense, even if an imperfect one. When Cooper moved into the apartment, she found that it did not quite restore everything she had lost. But it did give her something else: a kind of independence she’d never had before, in the form of a home she owns, not rents, and out of which she can’t be booted.

When I visited her, I asked if the new apartment in any way made up for her eviction.

“Yes,” she murmured. “You know, when you stay with other people, you have to be subservient. All those years, in all the places I stayed, I sat and prayed. Over and over, I asked God: ‘When will I get a place that feels like home?’ Now I see that was a place where I could be my own person. Where I don’t have to beg others. And I truly never imagined it would feel like this.”