District Six Museum, Cape Town

When caught up in the holiday gaiety of Cape Town’s incredible natural beauty and cosmopolitan urban delights, the city’s dark history is easily forgotten. But like any responsible traveller, you don’t want to be that person – ignorance, however unintentional, is not what you’re about. Which is where a trip to District Six comes in. 

Once a lively, multiracial, inner-city district, the devastation of District Six under the Afrikaner regime began in the mid sixties and is still remembered in this area today. 

Here you will witness harrowing, personal accounts of how people were treated during the country’s apartheid years, that – although specific to this small inner-city district – will ring true for the majority of non-whites living across South Africa at this time. 

The once-vibrant-cultural-centre was declared a whites only area in 1966. Largely made up of a non-white community, around 60,000 of District Six’s residents were given an eviction notice like no other. Having been forcibly removed and displaced to the barren lands of the outer-city realms, the majority of their homes were then bulldozed by 1982 in an attempt to completely destroy their memory. And the segregation didn’t stop there. Once relocated, they were then marginalised further dependant on race, meaning that mixed couples and – in extreme cases – families, were made to live apart. 

The end of apartheid, in 1994, saw part of District Six turned into a public museum aiming to tell the stories of its former residents; today, packed to the brim with artefacts, photos and expressive art, District Six is much like a living memorial.