His slave forbears were traded and shipped from faraway islands like Java. Treated slightly better than other slaves because they were apparently artisans. They still faced unimaginable trauma and brutalisation.

His forbears were colonised by Jan van Riebeek and the Dutch. And later the British.

“Hulle land hier, hulle plant hier, hulle dek vir elke aunty.” (They land here, invade here and rape all the women.) 

The slaves’ descendants were further criminalised by racist laws of the white minority rulers of apartheid Republic of South Africa.

It was divide and conquer; some were labelled Cape Malay, others coloured, while a good few remained true to their roots as the indigenous and original people of the Cape.

Separate development kept them away from blacks, who in turn were kept away from whites. The system was so evil that it gave lighter skinned people of colour a few crumbs of privilege over their black compatriots.

The real history about these times were banned, embellished and didn’t appear in the textbook of this slave descendant child born on February 8, 1978 at the now long gone Peninsula Maternity Hospital in District Six. He would not know the full extent of what happened exactly 12 years and 3 days before his birth. That date – February 11, 1966 – remains one of the biggest blights in Cape Town’s history. 

On that day 60 years ago, the front page of The Cape Argus, which this boy of slave descent would eventually become editor of 43 years later in a free South Africa, screamed: “District Six declared a White Area.”

Sixty thousand people were forcibly removed to the windswept sandy stretches of nothingness that was the Cape Flats. Their homes reduced to rubble. Sixty years later, the land in District remains barren, as if cursed, save for the mosques and churches that were thankfully spared. Successive City Councils have failed to make amends.

Even in a free South Africa, the City of Cape Town entertained noise and nuisance complaints against a District Six mosque for its call to prayer. A mosque that had been standing for 100 years before a new resident on an elite property development on the fringes of District Six laid a complaint. A single complaint.

“The law, the law, the law, the law. Signs on benches, signs on doors. The devil’s law of the law, the law. What for? What for? What are all these laws for?”

There are still accounts of the unmitigated trauma of those misplaced. Stories of people dying of broken hearts.

“How could I ever say goodbye? Goodbye, to District Six? Surely, I’m allowed to cry and blow her one last kiss?”

He was around 10 when the boy first heard of District Six. A place literally wiped away by bulldozers was brought into his consciousness through song and stage. These musicals were his frame of reference.

Over some 40 years, visionaries David Kramer and the late Taliep Petersen exposed his generation to this tragedy their parents lived through. The musicals were now polished and won international awards. Members of its stellar casts, with links to District Six, and their upbringing in the klopse, Christmas choirs and Cape Malay choirs, won prestigious global theatre awards.

“We were cool, we were sharp, we could sing … and we stood on the corner, every daypractising.”

The young boy became a man, a rookie journalist, and would learn about the late Salie Daniels, whose life as a singer was portrayed through the character Kat Diamond in Kramer and Petersen’s award-winning musical Kat and the Kings.

The young man was obsessed and knew every word of dialogue and every lyric of Kat and the Kings. As the musicals took the world by storm with a distinctive brand of District Six storytelling, the young man was fortunate enough to interview Petersen.  

Broertjie was a character of arguably the most seminal work, District Six – The Musical. Broertjie was a street child played over the years by different boys who later became the leads of Kramer and Petersen productions. The young editor who grew up watching these stars was now writing profiles about them.

On Wednesday night, exactly 60 years after February 11, 1966, those four broertjies, who dazzled audiences all over the world, led a performance worthy of the occasion. It wasn’t a show; it was a commemoration that the now former editor was lucky to witness.

Loukmaan Adams, Emo Adams, Alistair Izobell, Jody Abrahams, and their supporting cast and band, brought Artscape to its feet. They shared the stage with those who played District Six characters before them, like Terry Smith and Giempie Vardien.

The musical tribute From Hanover Street prickled the consciousness. It was not lost on the now media veteran, aged 48, that in the Cape Town of 2026, families who live on the border of District Six, face eviction. The City of Cape Town plans to build a multimillion-rand concrete plaster on a festering wound created by the very people who tore District Six apart. It is to protect us from crime, we’re told, emanating from the Cape Flats and the townships where hundreds of children were murdered in gang wars and other violence just last year.

District Six is history. But we dare not forget its torturous lessons. We say never again. Yet, history is repeating itself.  

“When the Southeaster blows … in a street called Hanover. They’ll reap what they sow … District Six.”

* Gasant Abarder was born on February 8, 1978 – exactly 12 years and 3 days after District Six was declared a Whites Only area under the Group Areas Act. He became editor of the Cape Argus at age 31 and was lucky enough to be in the audience last night. And he did sing along to the Kat and the Kings songs in From Hanover Street.

* The show runs at Artscape until February 15. It deserves a longer run.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media. 

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