A Talk by Nadia Davids: The Chronicling of Memory in District 6, Cape Town
On March 25, I attended a talk by Nadia Davids entitled “Performance in the Aftermath: Mourning and memorializing District 6. Davids spent her childhood in District 6, Capetown, and following its demolition, has written several plays and novels in efforts to keep its memory alive. “An Imperfect Blessing”, her debut novel, was shortlisted for the Pan-African Etisalat prize for literature, and her most recent novel, “Kept Fever,” will be published in 2025. I knew nothing about the subject before attending, but was entranced by the beautiful, poetic words that characterized Davids’s talk. This is a summary of her discussion.
Recently, Nadia Davids visited her in-laws in San Jose California. Her relative was gravely ill, she shared, and in “the way that often happens when someone is transitioning between this world and the next, the family spent their days in conversation that was lucid and reminiscent in trying to decipher the mysteries of loss, the slipperiness of time.”
They discussed how landscapes could change; how the Bay Area had shifted from a region once covered in beautiful farmland to one cold suburb after the other, each lacking personality.
Davids is no stranger to the transformation of land. She reflected on how the “land that [her] family and community once lived, an area in Cape Town called District 6, was once claimed by a powerful force that understood much about [its] extractive value,” but nothing about its culture, its traditions, or the spirited individuals that brought it to life.
Davids recounted how District 6 constituted a former region of Cape Town. It was a vibrant community filled with all different kinds of people: “freed slaves, immigrants, merchants, and laborers.” In 1966, however, the South African government announced the impending demolition of District 6. This was during apartheid, and the 1950 Group Areas Act had been passed, which forbade interracial living. All at once, the 60,000 residents of different races and backgrounds were required to pack their bags and leave. District 6 was home no longer.
Still, the ghost of District 6 remained in the city. It was re-designated exclusively for white South Africans, but plans to re-populate the region fell through. The district became known as ‘the scar of Cape Town,’ an empty shell in the center of a bustling town. “It is an almost space, something liminal … nearly always on the precipice of becoming,” Davids described.
So, while packing her bags for the last day of her trip to California, Davids took in the chaotic scene of luggage around her and felt transported into the shoes of the female relatives who had stood just like herself. They stood with the knowledge that they would soon have to leave—not returning from a trip—but forced to depart permanently from their homes.
Davids’ “mother’s aunt,” one of these women, spent the “last decade of her life with boxes packed with stuff in her hallway because she believed that with democracy, she would be able to go home and live out her days back on the mountain facing the sea.” While Davids does not live with the same constant sense of dislocation, in that moment she shared her aunt’s emotions of departure. She experienced a growing realization of her sense of loss surrounding District 6, recognizing how those who had lived there were growing older. Their memories were fading, and their “storied approach to this neighborhood … was coming to an end.”
In a tribute to their experiences, Davids has dedicated her work to chronicling the memory of District 6, but explained how she often fails to pinpoint exactly which aspects of the neighborhood she wishes to highlight. To Davids, District 6 is a fairy land. It is a place where “one can get stuck. Where time freezes; where one loses a sense of place and memory.” Many who were forced to leave are lost in this fairy land, forever in a purgatory between the period before removal and after it.
The District Six Museum does world-leading practice-redefining work around museumology and community-based memorialistion. As do a wide network of South African scholars, activists and artists who collectively and over generations, have worked to both restore and engage with the memory of District Six. - Davids
In this way, District 6 — its existence, its destruction — was but a memory. For years, Davids had attempted to learn more about the home her family was forced to leave before she was born, “haranguing [her] immediate and extended family.” While her family proved to be “conscious participants in historicizing,” photographs and videos were much more difficult to come by. Perhaps one could find “some positives that exist of the annual carnival, a few seconds of people loaded with their belongings under trucks, but not … the destruction.”
Yet, one day, Davids was contacted by a filmmaker. He informed her that he had been given Davids’ grandmother’s film reels from the 1960s, and would send her the videos. These reels contained family vacations, gatherings, and something unique: footage of District 6 being demolished. Watching the film, Davids viewed how her “grandfather seemed to be trying to take in all that he could,” capturing the demolition of his home while it was ongoing. As Davids described, watching the destruction felt otherworldly: “a stage direction from Hamlet: enter ghost.”
Davids explained how many directors have attempted to capture the demolition into art forms. However, Davids has found few depictions that meaningfully represent the destruction of District 6. She contended that most representations were too “busy.” They hoped to “gather up the fragments,” to repair and replace, but were too hasty in doing so. “We were too quick to memorialize, I think we forgot to mourn,” she lamented.
Inspired by the discovery of her grandmother’s film, Davids became motivated to search for the one exception she knew of, the one piece of art that she believed perfectly encapsulated this tragedy.
As she recounted, it was 1988, and former residents had gathered in a community center to share memories of their former home and mourn together. At this event, she viewed the film “Dear Grandfather, You’re Right, but He’s Missing,” Eunice Unnard (1984). The film depicted “long tracking shots that lingered over what had been lost and what remained.”
She described: “A church, a mosque, and the rubble and empty playground, earth, rocks, crumbling walls, cobblestones, vast emptiness, desolation, loneliness, and over the wind … the creak of a child’s swing, the mother calling to the child.”
Davids’ hunt for the film was not easy; it took several failed attempts before she managed to find a four minute clip. She had remembered the movie as black and white, yet the clip was a complete reversal of her expectations: it was vivid, almost psychedelic. Instead, her memory had “configured it as black and white in the same way as the pictures of the district that were shown to [her] growing up.”
From this experience, Davids was increasingly curious about watching the full film, and through a series of contacts managed to finally procure a copy, which she played clips of at the event. Reflecting, she explained that most works about District 6 had been made post apartheid, insistent on picking up pieces to rebuild. “They took on the task of nation building,” she described.
Instead, this movie was made in the “cold room of apartheid … It’s an inspiration of collective memory of an active siege, archives of an active result.” To Davids, it served as an example of how tragedies like these could be represented: “not to surmount sadness, but to try and understand it and to engage with it.”
The process of mourning and memorializing tragedy is a difficult one; Davids’ tireless search for a singular film clip is a testament to this. Yet, for an hour in Smith Warehouse, she carried on the memory of District 6 with poignancy and grace. To an audience thousands of miles away from the “scar of Cape Town,” Davids brought forth the ghost of those who once lived there, not to repair what was lost, but to honor it. And in doing so, she stepped into the immortalizing role she desperately sought to find.
