Drive into Cape Town on the Nelson Mandela Boulevard and look to your left just before the city centre. On the lower slopes of Devil's Peak there is a long, oddly empty stretch of land: rough grass, roads that lead nowhere in particular, and a handful of old churches and mosques standing on their own like guests who arrived after the party ended. Most visitors assume nobody has got round to developing it. In fact it is the site of District Six, once one of the liveliest neighbourhoods in Africa, and it took the apartheid government the best part of fifteen years, and a great many bulldozers, to make it look like that.
A Neighbourhood Like No Other
District Six took its name in 1867, when Cape Town was divided into municipal districts and this one happened to be the sixth. Close to the harbour, it filled with exactly the kind of people a port city attracts: freed slaves and their descendants, Muslim families with roots in the Dutch East Indies, Xhosa workers, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Indian traders, Portuguese and Greek shopkeepers, Afrikaans and English-speaking labourers, and sailors who came ashore for a week and stayed for forty years.
By the 1960s around 60,000 people lived here. It was crowded, noisy and often poor, and nobody who grew up there pretends otherwise. But it was also something apartheid insisted could not exist: a place where people of every background shared streets, families, food, weddings and funerals, and where the call to prayer drifted over the rooftops alongside church bells. Its spine was Hanover Street, a jostling high street of fish sellers, tailors, barbers, cafés, bioscopes and corner shops, and off it ran the Seven Steps, the neighbourhood's informal meeting place, still remembered in songs and stories today.
Apartheid said that people of different races could not live together. District Six had been quietly proving otherwise for a hundred years.
The Sound of the District
If District Six had a soundtrack, it was jazz, though not quite the jazz you would hear in New York. What came out of these streets was a uniquely Cape sound, mixing American swing and bebop picked up from records and passing sailors with marabi, church hymns and, above all, the goema beat of the Cape's own street music. Every New Year the Kaapse Klopse minstrel troupes, a tradition rooted in the celebrations of enslaved people on their one day off a year, marched through the city with banjos and brass, and many of them came from District Six. Its dance halls and clubs were where a generation of musicians learned their trade.
Saxophonist Basil Coetzee was born in District Six, and the pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, then known as Dollar Brand, came up through the Cape Town jazz scene it helped to feed. In 1974 the two recorded a piece called “Mannenberg”. It was named after one of the bleak Cape Flats townships where removed families were being dumped, and it became the unofficial anthem of the struggle against apartheid. The most famous piece of South African jazz, in other words, is a song about where District Six's people were sent.
The district fed writers and theatre too: Alex La Guma was born here, Richard Rive's novel Buckingham Palace, District Six brings it vividly back to life, and Taliep Petersen, who grew up in the district, later co-wrote District Six: The Musical with David Kramer.
Then Came the Bulldozers
There had been a warning: in 1901, during a bubonic plague outbreak, the authorities used public health as a pretext to move the area's Black African residents out to Ndabeni. Then, under the Group Areas Act of 1950, the apartheid government set about dividing every town by race, and on 11 February 1966 District Six was declared a “white” area. The official justification spoke of slums, crime and “interracial mixing”, and the last of these was the real objection.
The removals began in 1968 and continued until the early 1980s. Families who had lived in the same house for generations were loaded onto trucks and taken to the sandy, windswept Cape Flats: Manenberg, Hanover Park, Bonteheuwel, Mitchells Plain, Lavender Hill and others. Their homes were knocked down behind them so that nobody could return. Only the places of worship were spared.
The Real Cost
Let me be clear about what the greatest tragedy was, because it was not architecture. It was people. Around 60,000 residents lost their homes, and with them the things no government can rebuild: neighbours of a lifetime, family a street away, the corner shop that gave credit until Friday, the mosque or church their grandparents had attended. They were sent to places with few jobs, little transport and none of the social fabric that had held them together, and many Capetonians still trace the gang violence that plagues parts of the Cape Flats back, at least in part, to the shattering of communities like this one. Former residents describe the removals as a bereavement, and they are not exaggerating.
The Land Nobody Would Touch
The final twist is that, having destroyed District Six, the government found hardly anyone willing to build on it. The area was renamed Zonnebloem, but the “Hands Off District Six” campaign of the 1980s made the land politically toxic. A technical college, now part of the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, went up on one section; much of the rest has stood empty ever since. In 2004 Nelson Mandela handed over the keys to the first homes for returning families, but restitution has been painfully slow, and many of the original claimants have died waiting.
The old street names were not all erased, and one of them stopped me in my tracks when I first arrived in Cape Town: Tennant Street. Finding my own surname on a street sign in a neighbourhood built on dispossession was what first sent me digging into my family's past, a story I told in The Slave Trader in My Family Tree. It is a reminder that in this city nobody's history is entirely separate from anyone else's.
What Might Have Been
The human cost will always come first. But the scale of what was lost only really becomes clear when you imagine it still standing. Think of New Orleans: an old, crowded, multicultural port quarter built from African, French, Spanish and Caribbean influences, which gave the world jazz. Today Bourbon Street draws millions of visitors a year, and nearby Frenchmen Street is where people go to hear the real thing in small, packed clubs.
Now picture District Six in 2026 if it had simply been left alone. Hanover Street lined with restored Victorian shopfronts and balconies. Jazz clubs where the next Basil Coetzee is cutting his teeth, a few doors from a Cape Malay restaurant run by the original owners' great-grandchildren. The Kaapse Klopse marching home through the streets that made them, and the Seven Steps crowded on a Friday night. All of it ten minutes' walk from the Company's Garden and with Table Mountain as a backdrop that New Orleans could only dream of.
This is not fantasy: across the city, the Bo-Kaap shares much of District Six's Cape Malay heritage, escaped the bulldozers, and is now one of the most photographed neighbourhoods in Africa. District Six was larger, more diverse and musically richer. It could have been Cape Town's French Quarter, its Harlem and its Soho rolled into one.
New Orleans has Bourbon Street. Cape Town has a field of grass on the slopes of Devil's Peak, and it did not have to be that way.
New Orleans has bulldozed its own history too: much of the old jazz district of Storyville was demolished for a housing project, and a highway was driven over the heart of Tremé. But what makes District Six different is that it was not destroyed for a road or for profit. It was destroyed simply to keep people apart.
Visiting Today
Start at the District Six Museum, opened in 1994 in an old Methodist church on Buitenkant Street, where former residents have written their names onto a huge floor map of the streets where their homes once stood. Then walk up through the empty land itself and look down over the city. It is quiet up there, which is exactly the problem. On my city tours I always bring guests here, because you cannot understand Cape Town without understanding this hillside. Come and see the scar for yourself, then go and listen to some Cape jazz. “Mannenberg” is a good place to start.