District six
Here, the land is not empty—it is absorbing. Holding pain in its layers.
This project traces not only what remains physically, but also what endures emotionally: stories etched into the broken bricks, grief embedded in concrete, grass growing over old streets, weeds pushing through cracks where walls once stood.
Saplings root themselves in silence, drawing sustenance from soil steeped in memory.
This work is a collaboration with those who return—not to reclaim, but to remember. To map out memory against a shifting landscape, and to ask what it means for land to hold loss, and still grow.
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District Six was once a vibrant, multiracial neighbourhood near the centre of Cape Town, alive with music, food, faith, and everyday community life. In 1966, it was declared a “whites-only” area under apartheid’s Group Areas Act, and over 60,000 people were forcibly removed. Families were scattered to the distant Cape Flats, and homes were bulldozed to rubble.
Decades later, District Six remains largely unbuilt. Political deadlock, broken restitution processes, and an inability to imagine a just future have left the land in limbo—a no-build zone haunted by silence. Nature has crept in: grasses, flowers, and weeds push through cracked concrete and old street grids. The soil, soaked in memory, feeds new life. It is a landscape shaped by absence, but not emptiness—where the trauma of displacement lingers in the air, and yet the earth still adapts, remembers, and grows.
This collaborative project began when my brother-in-law, Mark, asked me to photograph him in his former neighbourhood—District Six.
What emerged from our walk was a deeply personal entry point into a much broader story—of loss, erasure, and the complexity of return.
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This project grows from a personal, uneasy connection to District Six, shaped by family memory and inherited silences.
When my brother-in-law Mark and I became family, we uncovered a shared connection to District Six. My grandfather had his GP surgery there, a family doctor in the community; Mark grew up just streets away. Both were forced to leave when the area was demolished—though under very different circumstances.
My grandfather’s stories of District 6 were warm and rose-tinted, told around the dinner table and framed by whiteness. Mark’s memories are visceral—of a home, a community, violently erased by the Group Areas Act.
When Mark asked me to photograph with him in District Six, it sparked a shared inquiry. As we walked the land and traced family stories, we uncovered unexpected overlaps—our relatives had worked together, played on the same streets. The destruction of D6 didn’t just displace people; it severed communities.
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This project takes shape through ongoing collaboration with families who were forcibly removed from District Six. Together, we return to sites of former homes—walking the area, sharing memories, and making photographs that trace how memory remains embedded in place. Routes to school, corner shops, and places of worship resurface through conversation. Small acts of care are recalled in details: the position of a front step, the slope of a road, a neighbour’s wall.
This work does not seek to reconstruct what was lost. Instead, it holds space for what persists—layered, complex, and often unresolved. The land, still largely empty due to political deadlock and stalled restitution, has become an accidental archive. Plants grow through concrete. Rubble shifts with the seasons. A bridge still stands, though it leads nowhere. What remains is not static: memory moves through soil, grief sits alongside adaptation, and the ecology of the site continues to reshape what was left behind.
blues for district six
Abdullah Ibrahim
early one new year’s morning
when the emerald bay waved its clear waters against the noisy
dockyward
a restless south easter skipped over slumbering lion’s head
danced up hanover street
tenured a bawdy banjo
strung an ancient cello
bridged a host of guitars
tambourined through a dingy alley
into a scented cobwebbed room
and crackled the sixth sensed district
into a blazing swamp fire of satin sound
early one new year’s morning
when the moaning bay mourned in murky waters against the
deserted dockyard
a bloodthirsty south easter roared over hungry lion’s head
and ghosted its way up Hanover street
empty
forlorn
and cobwebbed with gloom Dollar Brand