I spent a brief period of my early teenage life in District Six. This was during the early 1970s, when District Six was on the verge of complete destruction, and when its denizens were being moved, more rapidly, to places like Hanover Park or Retreat. It was on the Cape Flats where family members and community friends were moved to, by various means of coercion and consent.
In the Bo-Kaap, where I attended school – I walked all the way from Albert Street in District Six, through the Gardens to Vista High School – we spent many hours on the street corners and in the mosque on Upper Chiappini Street, which was built in the mid-1800s.
Whereas much of District Six was demolished by the time of South Africa’s first democratic election, political economic apartheid’s rampaging policies directed at places like the Bo-Kaap were replaced, seamlessly, by straight-up economic apartheid. It is a lot like the way that a place like Camps Bay was secured for white people (politically), and after apartheid it was secured for moneyed people. Very few black people had the money to own properties in Camps Bay, or anywhere along the Atlantic Seaboard, for that matter.
The Bo-Kaap, or Malay Quarter, has a rich cultural heritage which is being eroded by inducements, promises of cash, by gentrification driven by estate agents.
I guess if you wave wads of cash at relatively poor people, they would sell their homes, and in the case of the Bo-Kaap, their cultural heritage. We cannot possibly expect estate agents to understand the loss of cultural heritage of Malays and Muslims in the Bo-Kaap.
One of the problems is that the provincial government, and local politicians, seem quite uninterested in preserving heritage that is not Eurocentric or Western. Osman Shabodien, chairperson of the Bo-Kaap Ratepayers Association, has responded to the pernicious propaganda that foregrounds profit-making and painting the area white based on spurious (convenient) claims that the Bo-Kaap should not become a corner of cultural exclusivity.
“For decades, Bo-Kaap has been multicultural and we haven’t had any problems,” Shabodien has said.
“Many of us attended the St Paul’s Parish school, the St Monica’s Maternity Hospital was donated by the church – there’ve been Muslim, Christian and Hindus staying in the area for all the years… Gentrification doesn’t have colour, it has money and attitude that doesn’t tolerate other people’s cultures.”
It is a combination of profiteering and intolerance of “others” that is driving the political economic erasure of the Bo-Kaap as a heritage site by private enterprise under the protection of the state. This is not dissimilar to the pact between the state and criminal organisations in Sicily, which I have written about before.
The Bo-Kaap, and the City Bowl, is home to the oldest mosques in the country and, well, the rampant Islamophobia, and notions of exceptionalism (and indeed of exclusivity) is precisely what is driving the city of Cape Town towards an Airbnb paradise and luxurious residences for whites, very many of whom would prefer the city to be the capital of an independent Cape, as my old colleague Mondli Makhanya has suggested in City Press.
Bo-Kaap is in the way of white exclusivity and exceptionalism
Erasure of the Bo-Kaap is part of this grand project. Worse still, is that since the departure of Thabo Mbeki – a high point of whose presidency was what should have been an epoch-defining I am an African speech – there has been a type of double movement; whites have become emboldened to the extent that they (settlers of European colonialism) are claiming indigeneity, and at the same time ethno-centrism of a particular kind has laid down the law, in a manner of speaking, that nobody is sufficiently African unless “pure Africans” say so.
The latter is what Julius Malema and the post-Mbeki ANC bequeathed the country.
Stuck in the middle, as it were, are the coloured or mixed-race people, many of whom were born and raised and continue to live in the Bo-Kaap. For rapacious estate agents, the Bo-Kaap is in the way of profit-making, and for the Western Cape government, the Bo-Kaap is in the way of a white dominance in the Cape.
They have, of course, added colour with people who share their notions of (white/European/anti-African) purity and exceptionalism. It’s the same old story of European conquest and domination; co-opt a few natives and you have a veneer of legitimacy… and you feel good about yourself.
These days, when I go to the Bo-Kaap, I see a hollowing-out of spaces, interspersed by gentrification. This gentrification has resulted in displacement and is “pro tanto unjust in virtue of instantiating a distinctive nexus of domination between state actors, private landlords, and gentrifying residents”, as Daniel Putnam of Dartmouth University wrote in “Gentrification and Domination”, research published in the Journal of Political Philosophy in 2020.
Putnam cited, appropriately, the British sociologist Ruth Glass, who explained that once the “process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district… it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupants are displaced, and the whole social character of the district is changed”.
I always find it amusing that some of our compatriots travel to places like Türkiye, and admire the beauty of places like the Suleymaniye Mosque, but they don’t want to live anywhere where they can hear the athaan – the Muslim call to prayer, which the Democratic Alliance government of the province has, in one instance, considered to be a noise nuisance.
So…. you send in the estate agents to wave wads of cash, the bureaucrats approve construction, and the politicians drive the political economic (including social) agenda to remove non-whites and Muslims out of the City Bowl, and (probably) dump them in places not unlike Hanover Park and Mitchells Plan. When all is said and done, they will have established the racial grounds for secession of the Cape…. it’s not beyond the imagination.
We should probably enjoy the colour and vibrancy of the Bo-Kaap while it lasts – before it becomes a whites-only space, and we’re back to the era when my family and friends were driven from the City Bowl to the Cape Flats. Only this time, it’s not political policy, but economic practice. DM