The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

the post‐apartheid present, and the institutions, relations and discourses embedded in its
production and reproduction. It also served as a model for a number of community‐based
memory projects and fledgling ‘community museums’ elsewhere in South Africa in areas
like Lwandle in Somerset West, Crossroads and Protea Village in Cape Town, East Bank in
East London and South End in Port Elizabeth. Much like the District Six Museum, these
new museums emerged largely on the margins, outside the structure of national
museums. 68
The District Six Museum operated as a hybrid space of research, representation and
pedagogy, through which relations of knowledge and varied kinds of intellectual and
cultural practice have been brokered and mediated between different sites, institutions
and sociological domains. Its first exhibition, Streets: Retracing District Six, was created out
of residues and materials from the landscape of District Six, and made use of documents,
photographs, memorabilia and artefacts. The exhibition contained a large map painting of
District Six, which spread over most of the floor space. The original old street name signs
of the District were displayed in hanging columns, overlooking the map. This collection of
street signs had been acquired from the leader of the demolition team that had bulldozed
District Six, and who had saved them in his cellar. Displayed in the Museum, they became
tangible signifiers of the materiality of the District. On the edge of the map, transparent
display cases containing District Six earth and stones revealed the excavated fragments of
domestic life: bottles, shards of crockery, cutlery and children’s toys. Through Streets, with
its layering of visual representation, recovered artefact and detailed documentation in the
recreated spaces of the District, the Museum constituted an “archaeology of memory”
which attempted to reconstruct the material fabric and social landscape of District Six in
imaginative terms. 69
68 Ciraj Rassool, ‘Community museums, memory politics and social transformation: histories,
possibilities and limits’ in Ivan Karp, Corinne A Kratz et al. (eds), Museum Frictions: Public
Cultures/Global Transformations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming).
69 Peggy Delport, ‘Signposts for Retrieval: a Visual Framework for Enabling Memory of Place and
Time’, in Ciraj Rassool and Sandra Prosalendis (eds), Recalling Community in Cape Town, pp 34‐38;
Tony Morphet, ‘An Archaeology of Memory’, Mail and Guardian, 30 February 1995; Ciraj Rassool,
‘Community museums, memory politics and social transformation: histories, possibilities and limits’.
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