ABSTRACT

This chapter describes an excavation of photographic and oral remains obscured within the author's family archive by racism and overshadowed by the iconic District Six story. District Six originated in the 1830s and many early residents were emancipated indigenous KhoiSan and slaves from Asia and Africa, who gradually adopted the label ‘coloured’ and, by the late nineteenth century, ‘coloured identity had crystallized’. In 1995 a temporary exhibition about District Six was planned to run for only two weeks. But it was such a popular success that it developed into a permanent museum. The nineteenth-century umbrella category ‘coloured’ masks the clustering of creole identities, which cohere through popular cultural processes in colonial inner-city spaces such as District Six. The curatorial strategies of the District Six Museum have created a heterotopic framework that holds a range of imagined memories and ways for identities to be empathically mirrored back to former residents and others who experienced apartheid displacements across the city.