Two-dimensional engagements: photography, empathy and interpretation at District Six Museum^*

* All images used in this manuscript are the author’s own

Abstract

As one of six internationally recognised ‘Sites of Conscience’ in South Africa, District Six Museum in Cape Town has been at the forefront of the community museum movement since its inception in 1994. Organised by those directly affected by apartheid’s Group Areas Act, the Museum is dedicated to preserving and fighting for the rights and memories of those who were forcibly removed from their District Six homes between 1966 and 1982. A uniquely intimate space, the Museum seeks to balance empathy alongside what it calls ‘critical non-racialism’, as it engages in the ambitious project of re-defining racialised communities in post-apartheid South Africa. This paper explores the tensions between criticality and empathy in relation to District Six Museum’s photographic collection. Focusing particularly on the problem of perspective-taking, this paper analyses the ways in which gradual changes in the Museum’s visitor demographic are compromising its non-racial project. Based on qualitative research that suggests contemporary visitors are less likely to engage in the kind of reconstructive, politicised imaginings that the Museum’s displays require, this paper suggests that empathy, rather than a tool for critical engagement with District Six’s history, is increasingly becoming the means through which alternative memories of District Six are silenced.

Keywords:

• Photography
• empathy
• race
• South Africa
• community museums
• interpretation

Acknowledgements

My sincere thanks to all the staff at District Six Museum, who allowed me to spend three weeks conducting the research for this project in 2012, and who gave up their valuable time and energy to help me with this research. Thanks particularly to Tina Smith and Noor Ebrahim for allowing me to interview them. Thanks to my advisors at the time, Zoe Norridge and Michelle Kelly for their support and intellectual generosity, and to the University of York English Department, for making a trip to the District Six Museum possible in the first place.

Notes

* All images used in this manuscript are the author’s own

1. For notable exceptions to this trend see: Smith (2010); Modlin, Alderman, and Gentry (2011); Arnold-De-Simine (2012); Witcomb (2015); Smith (2016).

2. After the Population Registration Act of 1950, citizens of South Africa were assigned permanent race status as either ‘Whites’, ‘Bantu’ or ‘Africans’, ‘Coloured’ and ‘Indian’. These classifications determined people’s access to work, education, and freedom of movement in South Africa. Whilst these categories were initially rejected by a post-apartheid government that advocated an official policy of ‘non-racialism’, race has continued to be salient mode of self-identification in South Africa, and these terms are now popularly used in contemporary censuses, and for affirmative action programmes in the workplace. As such, in line with other researchers, contemporary racialised terms are used in this paper without scarequotes ‘to refer to the social construction of bodily difference’ and in recognition of the fact that these constructions have, and continue to be, ‘inseparable from other fault-lines of difference and repertoires [sic] of power’ in South Africa (Posel 2010, 161). For more on this see: Posel (2001a); Seekings (2008); Posel (2010).

3. Whilst the term ‘coloured’ is often regarded as an outdated, and offensive racial moniker in the Euro-American tradition, within South Africa it has accrued a very distinct socio-cultural meaning. Originally little more than a spurious racial category invented by the Apartheid government to refer to those who were broadly be considered to be ‘mixed race’, since the early 2000s, a growing coloured movement has sought to legitimise ‘colouredness’ as a politically grounded, socially experienced identity, and a significant proportion of the South African population continue to self-identity as ‘coloured’. For more on this see: Erasmus (2001); Adhikari (2005, 2008).

4. Selected works to have emerged from ‘coloured’ District Sixers include: Rive (1986); LaGuma (1967); Maart (2004).

5. Under the 1994 Restitution of Land Rights Act, those (non-white) citizens who were dispossessed of their land and homes by the Group Areas and Native Lands Act are entitled to apply for governmental compensation. This is often financial, but in some cases (as with District Six), applicants can request resettlement on the land they were dispossessed of. In District Six’s case, where the land is still unoccupied, the District Six Beneficiary Trust submitted a group claim on behalf of ex-residents, which explicitly fought for the rights of tenanted District Sixers as well as landowners. These proceedings have not been without controversy however, and debates over entitlement to restitution are ongoing. For more on this see: Beyers (2007, 2010); Ernsten (2015).