District Six Museum & Cape Town Holocaust Museum
The field trip to the District Six and Holocaust Museums in Cape Town was educational and allowed me to think about the issues of apartheid in a new context. I was able to reflect on the reality of apartheid South Africa when I saw the names of people who lived on the different roads throughout the neighborhood and heard stories of apartheid from our guide. Before the field trip I hadn’t really reflected on apartheid South Africa in comparison to Nazi Germany. When I began to compare the two throughout the field trip the realizations were eye opening but also scary.
Residents of District 6 phrased it like this: “living was cheap and life was precious.” Life was good for these people until one day when they were ripped away from their homes and moved to forty-two different sites outside of the city. The problems that would arise from this are still evident today. Blacks and coloreds were moved from their homes in what would become (and still be today) townships. They were the Cape flats, and what happened to their homes in District Six? They were all destroyed for “ethnic cleaning.” As if being ripped from your neighborhood wasn’t hard enough, the government convinced people that if they sold their homes they would benefit from it. It doesn’t appear to me that the neighborhood has the lively atmosphere it once did before the 1984 destruction, and I’m not sure that it ever could again. If each person in South Africa at the time of apartheid was seen as a human being and not as a black person or white person than people would have lived more peacefully, but because of the new laws made in the country this wasn’t possible. When people moved to these townships what began to happen very quickly was overpopulation, and poverty. This means that people weren’t living in proper shelter (there was asbestos in the roofing of the homes), nor were they able to take care of themselves properly (people contracting diseases such as TB and HIV/Aids). The once thriving social lives of the people suffered as well, because now they had to wake up at 5am to get to work and when they made it home they had to take care of their families before sleeping and starting the process over the next morning.
How do these stories relate to Nazi Germany? The answer lies in the discrimination and the inhumane conditions people were placed into. In Nazi Germany it was the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s witnesses, and black men. In Apartheid it was the blacks and coloreds. Science can’t make sense of these horrific truths of racism, because all they can prove is that we are all part of one race, and that is the entire human race. So then why was this done and who thought it was ok? That is the question I think has to be answered so that you can pick up the pieces and learn from it so that it doesn’t happen again. What stirred some emotion up for me was that it was just a couple years after the Holocaust that the first racist laws were put into place officially in South Africa. The people who were running things knew what was done in Germany, and just as the Nazi youth and society had been brainwashed, so had the people running the government in South Africa. I think that one has to stop asking why they thought the things they did at the time and move to how could they think those things. This is because you can look at the history of Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa and get the answers of why they may have thought this treatment was ok, but it is harder to find out how a human being wouldn’t realize it wasn’t ok. I think you would have to change the mind of every racist for an issue like this to be fully resolved. What you can do to start that process is educate.
Now that it is 2011, we have to take what’s happened in the past almost century and begin some peace transformation. If we educate people on what happened during the Holocaust or during apartheid they will be more likely to see that what happened was inhumane and that we should not let it happen again. I think you can perhaps teach these things in a reverse manner. By this I mean that in Nazi Germany there was a subject in school called racial science and today you could teach a class on equality for example. Much of what I have learned about apartheid since I have been here has taken an emotional toll of me, but I know it is important and needs to be taught to many people. People have to really grasp what happened even if it is hard to bring it back to the surface. One reason the Holocaust, although it happened some time ago, hasn’t been buried in history is because it can be used as an educational tool.
When talking in the conflict transformation or peace building context, we must first educate others like discussed, but then plan for organized discussion on what things look like in present day. The museums are both very good educational bases for the issues of racism and injustice. Perhaps members or staff of the District Six Museum can develop some space for open discussions about the issues of apartheid, because at least in my opinion there hasn’t been enough. The reason I feel like way is because it is evident to me that while apartheid may have ended in 1994, it is still present. People are still living inhumanely in townships and on farms outside of Stellenbosch. Through my experiences at Lynedoch Primary I know that there is still injustice. Until those injustices have been addressed I think there is room for discussion.
Whoever would love life and see good days must keep his tongue from evil and his lips from the deceitful speech. He must turn from evil and do good; he must seek peace and pursue it. For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are attentive to their prayer, but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.
-1 Peter 3:10-12
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