The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgementTown of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Cape Published by the University ofof Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University INHERITED MEMORIES: PERFORMING THE ARCHIVE Town Cape of Universityby Nadia Davids (DVDNAD003) SUBMITTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN In fulfillment of the requirements for the degree PhD Drama Drama Department, UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN Date of Submission: 7 September 2007 Supervisor: Dr. Zimitri Erasmus, Sociology Department, University of Cape Town Co-supervisor: Yvonne Banning, Drama Department, University of Cape Town TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedications Page p 3 Acknowledgments p 4 Abstract p 6 A Note on the use of Terms p 7 Town Prescript p 8- 10 Cape Traces of p 12-35 Introduction p 36-46 Methodology University p 47-65 PART ONE: TRACES I Children of District Six p 66-89 II A House of Memories p 90-111 PART TWO: WALKING III The Cape Town Carnival p 112-134 IV Re-Imagining Carnival p 135-163 PART THREE: MOVING V Moving Theatre p 164-190 Town VI Performing the Past for the Future p 191-199 Cape List of Illustrations of p 200-203 Bibliography p 204-222 University 2 Dedicated to the memory of my grandfather Dr. M.A. Ebrahim. 1920-1988 Town Cape of University 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This thesis was guided and supported by two wonderful and brilliant women, my supervisors, Yvonne Banning and Zimitri Erasmus, who were challenging, generous, and dear throughout the process. My Head of Department, Mark Fleishman, is to be thanked for providing me with an intellectual safe-house and for giving me the opportunity to work on his exceptional play, Onnest’bo. I thank Valmont Layne for entrusting me with work at the District Six Museum that enlarged my understanding of the world, and for always listening and responding with such enthusiasm. I am grateful to the following people for different moments of inspiration, kindness, and support during the years it took to write this thesis; Ram Subramanian, Matthew Dalby, Julian Jonker, Myer Taub, Lara Bye, Kay McCormick, Leslie Marx, Vincent Kolbe, Mac Mackenzie, Noor Ebrahim, Margaux Bergman, Thulani Nxumalo, Jennie Rezneck, Shamiel Jeppie, Ciraj Rasool, Ina Roux and Dilemma, Robin Jutzen, Jolene Stupel, FundiswTowna Sayo, Kathy Erasmus, David Ricketts, Pari Shirazi and my teachers Gail Weldon and Rosanne Hinds who always let me write and paint this place. I thank the staff at the District Six Museum for always being so welcoming. Cape I thank my family, in particular my parents, Joe andof Shereen Davids and my grandmother, Mary- May Ebrahim for agreeing to share their memories. I thank my sister Leila Davids, a reader of faith, comfort and dazzling insight. Finally, I thank John Gutierrez, whose support enables me in more ways than I can say. This thesis would not haUniversityve been possible without the financial aid of two A. W. Mellon Fellowships. In addition to funding my Masters and Doctorate at the University of Cape Town, they also made provisions for me to visit the University of California Berkeley and New York University, where I was fortunate enough to audit classes by Abdul JanMohamed, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Tavia Nyong'o. 4 There is a place for us all at the rendezvous of victory. (Aime Cesaire, 1939) Town Cape of University 5 ABSTRACT This thesis explores the way in which words, memories, and images of District Six are mediated and performed in an attempt to memorialised a destroyed urban landscape. It expands the borders of ‘performance’ to include oral (re)constructions of place by ex-residents, which in turn opens a space for a reflective analysis in which Marianne Hirsch’s psychodynamic theory of ‘postmemory’ is explored through the phrase ‘Children of District Six’. It traces the role and influence of ex-residents in shaping the politics and poetics of the District Six Museum and argues that orality and performance are singularly sympathetic in evoking and remembering the aesthetic, cultural, and political realms of District Six. It then shifts towards an analysis of two creative projects; Magnet Theater's Onnest’bo and the Museum’s Re-Imagining Carnival in which the themes of place, home, loss, exile, resistance, advocacy and restitution rotate around experiences of forced removals in general and District Six in particular. A thematic cord is created between these performance pieces and oral testimoniesTown and their combined mediation of the many archives of District Six. Through an engagement with the performative odysseys and attendant archives of Re-Imagining Carnival and Onnest’bo the thesis examine metaphysical Capeenactments of material loss, engages with tactics of re-construction of place and experienceof through memory, connects the psychic worlds of memory and performance and suggests an ideological flow between oral history, witnessing, and theatre. It is an exploration underpinned by the question of the role of performance in memorialising national narratives and the potential of creative mobilisations of memory in enacting psychic restitution. Both Onnest’bo and Re-ImaginingUniversity Carnival are link ed to the District Six Museum, and as such the Museum, its methodologies, ethics, ethos, and work with tangible and intangible heritage serve as an essential ideological foundation from which these creative visions emerge. 6 A NOTE ON THE USE OF TERMS Finding the appropriate register with which to write about ‘race’ in South Africa is a complex task. I have chosen, (in keeping with the practices of my supervisors), to parenthesise the word ‘race’ as a reminder of its pseudo-scientific construction in the nineteenth century. Conversely, I invoke the terms black, white, and coloured without parenthesis, and understand them as signifiers for identities that are in a constant state of flux and instability. Where appropriate, I may expand on a term, such as ‘black African’ or ‘coloured African’. Throughout this thesis, you will find Afrikaans (and occasionally isiXhosa) words and phrases. Rather than create a glossary, I have explained or translated each term in the footnotes. Town Cape of University 7 PRESCRIPT In 1867, the land between the Castle of Good Hope, the harbour, and the foot of Table Mountain was named the Sixth Municipal District of Cape Town. Its location ensured close and enduring commercial ties with the city and the port. Its population of freed slaves, immigrants, merchants, artisans, and labourers drawn from throughout Africa, Europe, and the East created a religious, cultural, ethnic, ‘racial’, and political heterogeneity that lasted until the beginning of its demise in 1966. The apartheid government declared its intent to demolish District Six in 1966 under the ruling of the 1950 Group Areas Act, a law that forbade interracial living and demarcated discrete zones of ‘racialised’ habitation. The government bolstered its decision by citing the pseudo practicality of razing an area it described as a slum. The process of removing and bulldozing the homes of 60 000 people took nearly a decade. By 1977, the landscape was flattened and the majority of its inhabitants scattered throughout the far-away, wind-swept areas known as the Cape Flats. The government had achieved two things; it had seized potentially expensive real estate near the city centre, and it had erased a place withTown a history of successful intra-cultural and interracial living. Today, the area of District Six remains a silent, visual testimony to the tyranny of forced removals and the reduction of a vibrant, integrated urbanCape landscape into an immense tract of desolation. Described as one of the most culturallyof dynamic , cosmopolitan, and diverse areas in South Africa, it demands a restitution process that is creative, complex and attends to more than just the agonisingly slow bureaucratic process of building homes. The District Six Museum and the District Six Beneficiary Trust are currently implementing separate, though parallel, processes of restitution. While the Trust and the South African government are administering to the physical relocation and housing of the victims of forced removals, the Museum is engaging with creative narrative, visual,University and aural archival projects that are geared towards addressing and contributing to an emotional and psychological homecoming. This thesis uses three such projects, Traces, Re-Imagining Carnival and Onnest’bo, as a prism through which to refract issues of history, performance, and memorialisation and to pose a question around the seemingly special relationship between District Six and the disparate and continuous creative responses it engenders. To write about District Six is to understand that it’s very destruction insists on the 8 democratisation of memory and the enlargement of the category of memorialisation. To work with the District Six Museum is to witness how the act of remembering District Six is to defeat apartheid; the system predicated on ‘racial’, class, and ethnic hierarchies and separateness is toppled when people invoke a space in which those borders were transgressed, refused, and sometimes remade. To listen to the stories of ex-residents is to partake in the re-structuring of society and to participate in a country where restitution is both a physical and symbolic practice. This is not to imply that restitution can be adequately or successfully executed through imagination and creative inquiry alone, but that there are moments (however fleeting and transitory), in which a temporary restoration is actualised and a long-term cultural inheritance is formed. It is in these moments that the possibilities for the development of a future District Six are conceptualised. Researching District Six and performance drew me towards trying to find a language that could document a national narrative composed of private pain, in addition to accommodating a theoretical discourse without alienating readers from outside the academTowny.