Where is home?
While I was at the loveliest birthday dinner with our brand-new friends we had met just four days earlier, I was asked what it felt like to call America home. Behind the question was the horrible legacy of slavery and the possibility of rootlessness. “Do you feel connected to Africa?”
I answered, “Of course.”
Home is the most complicated and yet simplest thing.
A couple of days after that birthday dinner, I visited the haunting District Six Museum. This space tells the story of a once-vibrant community that was destroyed under Apartheid and left thousands displaced and forcibly removed.
In explaining the area’s significance, the museum describes “home” for those who lived there:
District Six before its destruction under Apartheid, was a community representative of diversity on a number of levels – language, religion, economic class, geographical area of origin – and became a living example of how diversity could be a strengthening characteristic of a community and need not be feared. It was a vibrant community of freed slaves, merchants, artisans, labourers and immigrants, with close links to the city and the port. It represented the polar opposite of what the Apartheid government, inaugurated by the National Party coming into power in 1948, needed people to believe and internalise.
District Six thus became one of the main urban targets for destruction in the city of Cape Town.
On 11 February 1966 it was declared a white area under the Group Areas Act of 1950, and by 1982, the life of the community was over. More than 60,000 people were forcibly removed to barren outlying areas aptly known as the Cape Flats, and their houses in District Six were flattened by bulldozers.”
