To be a somebody: Probing the roots of community in District Six

Abstract

The term community is a moving target, widely used and often misused in defining a group of people in a particular area or with similar cultural practices. In Cape Town the sense of a loss of community is precisely what residents of an area known as District Six mourn, following their eviction and its destruction in the 1970s in terms of the racial Group Areas Act. What was it they perceived they had? And what did they lose, following their removal to the Cape Flats? In asking these questions it is possible to get a clearer understanding of the way in which multiple perceptions and relationships stitch together a social cohesiveness that undergirds the notion of community. And what happens when it is lost.