A Case Study of South Africa’s Apartheid and its Effect on Landscape: District Six and the Cape Flatlands

Apartheid was the system of legal racial separation instituted by the National Party in South Africa from 1948 until 1994. As a result of its long duration, apartheid affected most facets of life in South Africa, and landscape was without a doubt one of these areas that was heavily influenced by this terrible system of racial discrimination and separation. One of the most interesting of such examples is that of District Six, in Cape Town. District Six was a former inner-city residential area of South Africa’s mother city and has become very well known for the fact that almost 60,000 of its inhabitants were forcibly removed by the apartheid regime during the 1970's.

            The area that was to become District Six grew up because it was so conveniently located to both the City and Table Bay. Soldiers’ families and then, in the 1830s, freed slaves were among the first to settle and by the middle of the 19^th century, a residential suburb for the whole spectrum of the Cape’s society had grown up.[1] District Six was so named in 1867, as the Sixth Municipal District of Cape Town and by the turn of the century it had become a large community predominantly made up of former slaves, merchants, artisans and immigrants, as well as a large population of Malay people brought to South Africa by the Dutch East India Company during its time in charge of the Cape Colony.  In 1900 it had a very cosmopolitan working class population of 30,000 with a majority of Coloureds and several thousand African and immigrant Jews. Being politically unimportant it suffered official neglect, and with appalling sanitation and heavy overcrowding, there was an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1901. As already mentioned the population was largely made up of 'coloureds', which is the South African term for anybody that was not white, and this included a very diverse mix of peoples; there were a large number of the 'Cape Malays', who were Muslim, as well as the native Xhosa residents. Furthermore, there were also small minority populations of Indians, Afrikaners and various other European descendants, who would have been classified as ‘White’. By the time that the Second World War started, District Six was still composed of a relatively cosmopolitan mix of people, however, as transport improved, wealthier Whites began to move out to the surrounding suburbs, such as Constantia. By South Africa’s standards District Six still remained a relatively ‘mixed’ place, but it was during this period that it effectively became the home of Cape Town’s Coloured people. Furthermore, we can see from the old District Six remains is that it was something of an 'urban ghetto,' with the houses usually being tiny and overcrowded, due to the socio-economic make up of the area.

            In particular and as already noted, District Six is notable geographically because of its location, which also in part explains its relatively quick growth. District Six is located in the central City Bowl of Cape Town, which makes it accessible only from the sea or from one direction by land, due to the fact that Table Mountain and the mountain range that forms it, limits accessibility. In a way this provided a degree of protection and shelter from the North, but more important was the fact that District Six was situated very close to the Cape Town docks, what is today known as the Victoria & Alfred Docks, which were and still are integral to Cape Town’s economy as a port town and originally as a refueling station for ships traveling the trade routes between Europe and Asia.
            This all changed on February 11^th, 1966, when the South African apartheid government declared that District Six was to become a whites-only area, under the Group Areas Act. There were vigorous objections from numerous and disparate individuals and groups, but the proclamation was enforced because the Group Areas Act had been signed into legislation in 1950 and effectively gave the apartheid-era government the right to designate areas to certain racial groups. Removals in District Six began in 1968 and continued on until 1982, during which more than sixty thousand people were forcibly removed and relocated to the sandy, bleak Cape Flat townships, some 25km away. These sixty thousand ‘disqualified’ people, most of them Coloureds, and some of them whose families had lived in the District for as long as seven generations,[2] were scattered to new mass housing on the Cape Flats.The government stated that these removals needed to take place in order to prevent inter-racial mixing and breeding, which was said to cause conflict in the area. Moreover, the apartheid government stated that the overcrowding that occurred in the District Six municipality, as is now the case in most townships, with row upon row of tiny houses served as a breeding ground for a number of gang and equally unsavoury activities.  Thus, it was during this period that all of the old houses and buildings were bulldozed, with the exception of a few Victorian cottages that were preserved for occupation by White civil servants and several places of worship; Mosques and, after fierce resistance to their destruction, several churches were spared.[3] For the rest, by 1982, District Six had been utterly destroyed.

            The result is that today this considerable area of prime urban space still remains largely undeveloped, in large part because there was such a strong revulsion against this act of the apartheid government, and as such District Six was eschewed and completely avoided by private developers.[4] In fact, this area has remained a desolate, wasteland, lying completely unused for many years, until the government decided to build the Cape Technikon University on it, although it is worth noting that for the most part this land is still undeveloped today. Furthermore, the area has undergone a name change and is now known as Zonnebloem. The most obvious result of the bulldozing of the area by the apartheid operatives on the landscape is that it has left completely barren, in stark contrast to the surrounding suburbs of Cape Town which are all heavily developed and built upon. However, the effects of this bulldozing and forced removal have been numerous and not completely direct. What I mean by this is that the population that was forcibly removed had to be resettled and this had a fairly major impact on another landscape, that of the Cape Flats, due to the influx of these sixty thousand people. 

            One such area on the Cape Flats is Khayelitsha, which means ‘Our New Home’. It was established by the government in 1983 in an attempt to deflect and control the influx of African people who were pouring into squatter camps in the Cape Flats region. This area grew up as a direct result of the apartheid governments policy of forced removals. Khayelitsha lies among sand dunes on the Cape Flats, 28 kilometres from the city, and was the first official allocation of land for African housing in the Cape Town area in more than 20 years. At this point it is worth noting, that although the area is named the Cape Flats there were in fact a large number of sand dunes prior to the zones settlement. Due to the apartheid resettlement, the government instituted a wide-scale policy of bringing in bulldozers, ironically quite possibly the same bulldozers that were used to destroy these people’s homes back in District Six, in order to flatten the dunes to make the area better suited for settlement.[5] Various kinds of housing schemes were developed in the Cape Flats, including the policy of site-and-service for ‘informal’ housing.[6]

            However, one aspect of the landscape that really interests me is the appearance of huge high-powered lampposts in these settler areas, as these lampposts are an excellent symbolic representation of how landscape is directly influenced by the people that come to inhabit a place. What I mean by this is that the lampposts were, at least initially, erected because of the fact that crime was so widespread in the township regions. These lampposts are some 56ft (17m) high and stand taller than anything else on the landscape, baring in mind that there are no tall buildings in the townships and that the Cape Flats have become very nearly completely flat. The result is that these lampposts stand out clearly and are very visible throughout the area. At the top of each pole is a cluster of high-intensity lamps, which shed a very large pool of bright yellow light. This form of lighting was first applied in Soweto in the early 1970’s to counter the tsotsis (a South African word for a thug or small time gangster) who, preferring darkness for robberies, easily knocked out ordinary street lights by throwing stones at them. However, these lights on their tall posts were beyond their range and fire arms were not ubiquitous, or widely available by any means, at this time. But this device soon transcended its original application: it was most useful to the security forces in maintaining control in Black townships.[7] High level lights sprouted in almost every township ‘location’ in the country, even in small rural townships where crime was hardly a problem because of their use in controlling the African population during times of unrest and also due to their symbolism as objects of apartheid control over the township and its inhabitants.                         
            In a similar vein, there were other effects on the landscape of Cape Town due to the removal of people from District Six onto the Cape Flats region. It is worth recognizing as a side note, that the large plains of the Cape Flats is the area that joins the peninsula to the mainland and is what is commonly referred to as a marine plain. This means that the geology of the area is predominantly sandy, which shows that at one point Table mountain was actually an island. However, more importantly what this means for the population that was moved there is that the area was not particularly well suited to the growing of crops or plants due to its sandy composition, and thus it also does not provide particularly suitable grazing lands. Ellis & Galvin write in their article, Climate Patterns and Land-use Practices in the Dry Zones of Africa, that: "Subtle differences or small changes in temporal climate pattern can have significant effects on land use."[8] In this case, however, it is a subtle and fairly small change in terms of distance that has such a huge effect on the geological composition of the area and thus also the potential for its land uses. This also very closely linked to Wisner's article that asserts that the system of apartheid led to a collapse of rural livelihoods, driving people to the cities, while apartheid's tight control over African residential location and employment ensued that high density settlement and unemployment would follow.[9] This can clearly be seen in the District Six situation, where people were forced to move to the high-density townships on the Cape flats. It goes without saying that because of the very limited amount of space that the apartheid government allowed for African settlement, those areas that were so designated became highly densely populated. Khayelitsha was no different, the landscape was transformed from an underdeveloped marine flat into a populous region in very little time at all, and the result was the throwing up of make-shift housing. The landscape of Khayelitsha came to be dotted with thousands of shacks, often made with tin, wood, cardboard and corrugated iron, which have all been haphazardly put together to provide some form of shelter against the elements. In fact, Khayelitsha has gone on to become one of the quickest growing townships in all of South Africa and now houses nearly half a million people, most of whom are still black Africans. The transformation of the landscape has been bleak, at least from the outside when one ignores the vivid, colourful and energetic culture that the area’s population brings with it, which in part explains why it has grown up as one of Cape Town’s main tourist attractions today. However, ignoring these cultural developments, the area has been transformed from what was once a beautiful, coastal plain into an overcrowded mess, which is often lacking in certain basic sanitary functions. 

            All in all, both District Six and the Cape Flats region of Khayelitsha prove to be most interesting and informative examples in showing us the effects of apartheid era legislation on the South African landscape. From both examples we can see how the landscapes has been drastically changed due to the implementation of the Groups Area Act. Also, what proves to be even more interesting is how the dual forces of crime and apartheid-era governmental control interacted to lead to the construction of these monstrous lampposts, a clear example of how landscape is reflective of not only the people that come to live in the area but also of the powers that seek to control them in a non-democratic country.

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[1] David Goldblatt. South Africa, The Structure of Things Then. The Monarch Press, 1998, Pg 185.

[2] William Finnegan. 1987. Crossing the Line. New York: Random House.

[3] David Goldblatt. South Africa, The Structure of Things Then. The Monarch Press, 1998, Pg 185.

[4] David Goldblatt. South Africa, The Structure of Things Then. The Monarch Press, 1998, Pg 185.

[5] Michael Krause. Sacred and Secular Spaces in Khayelitsha. http://www.rondeboschunited.org.za.

[6] David Goldblatt. South Africa, The Structure of Things Then. The Monarch Press, 1998, Pg 186.

[7] Idem. Pg 185.

[8] Jim Ellis and Kathleen A. Galvin. “Climate Patterns and Land-Use Practices in the Dry Zones of Africa.” BioScience. Vol. 44, No. 5, Global Impact of Land-Cover Change (May, 1994). Pg. 342.

[9] Ben Wisner. “The Reconstruction of Environmental Rights in Urban South Africa.”

Human Ecology, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Jun., 1995). Pg 263.

District Six and Human Relations Area File Layer.

    First off, it took me some time to actually locate the "Human Relations Area File Layer." The first specific layer that I applied was the "Prevailing Type of Dwelling: Shape of Roof," which proved to be almost completely useless as most of South Africa and all of the Cape region was classified as "semi hemisphere" housing, thus providing little variation for comparison. However, what this does tell us is that the type of native housing throughout South Africa would have been relatively consistent, which would mean that there would be a degree of similarity in the effect of houses on the landscape, at least from an aesthetic point of view and I would imagine from an environmental perspective.

    Furthermore, when the "Settlements Pattern" layer was applied to the map, South Africa once again was completely covered by the same colour - indicating that the whole country was "Nomad or fully migratory." It is worth noting at this point that this information is without a doubt outdated for the most part because it ignores the effects of modernisation. However, this map does allow us to examine how historically the land would never have been permanently settled on.  This is consistent with the "Subsistence Economy" layer, which once again shows that all of South Africa was essentially an area where "Gathering contributes most." This is exactly what one would expect from an area in which the population was migratory and nomadic, as they would gather their food supply from the land and moving according to the seasons. As already stated, the effect of this would be that there was very little if any permanent settlement before the era of colonisation and 'modernisation.'

Africamap and its education value.

There is no doubting the value of Africamap as an educational tool. First off, I think that Africamap's real value comes in its visual presentation of data. I blogged about population settlements in the Cape region in an earlier blog, and here Africamap was incredibly valuable in illustrating the distribution and density of populations throughout the region. While, it may sound simplistic but I really did not realize, until I mapped population by cell, that the Western Cape region of South Africa was so sparsely populated. In terms of from a historic perspective this makes sense because of the fact that colonizers originally settled in fairly focused regions for reasons of trade and protection.  Furthermore, and from an environmental perspective, with the layering tool it is also possible to examine the water channels and rivers in a region. When this was done for the Western Cape region, it became clear that despite the fact that much of the inland region is arid there were still a large number of riverbeds throughout.

I think that the real strength of Africamap comes with the map layering ability that it provides. As a historian I really like the ability to overlay contemporary maps on top of the current map, thus not only gaining insight into what people's understanding and perceptions were of an area in the past but also seeing how the area has changed. I would, however, like to see even more options for historic map overlays because at the moment there are only ten options. I believe that these different historic overlays are of great value because they clearly display the different views and biases of their makers.