A hundred years of history

Trafalgar High School in Cape Town's District Six is a hundred years old this year. One of Cape Town's top schools, it was established in 1912 and has a proud tradition of perseverance through adversity during the upheavals of the forced removals of the Apartheid clearances. It has produced some of South Africa's famous personalities and politicians, and many of its teachers are legendary. Happy Hundredth Birthday Trafalgar.
My photo is of the old, long ignored "boys" door that has been preserved over the years. There is also a "girls" door on the other side.

Desolate

Stormy weather today and an apt backdrop to the once bustling suburb of District 6 at the foot of Table Mountain, which is now a monument to the atrocities of the Nationalist government. Most of District 6 has been lying deserted since the brutally sad days of the seventies and eighties when an entire community was forcibly removed to clear the area for "whites only". But apparently there is going to be a lot of development here in the coming year as land claims are sorted out and things get going.

Flying past

Flying past on the Nelson Mandela Boulevard this afternoon I could clearly pick out the subject of my post yesterday - the Moravian Chapel in District Six. It is the white building right in the centre of the photo. You can see all the open space that was left vacant, as Cape Town's builders and architects refused to build on sites that has once been part of the vibrant community that was District Six, and even today, I am not sure what will become of it. There are probably many land claims and much land restitution to be concluded still.

Standing proud

The Moravian Chapel in District Six is one of the few buildings that escaped demolition by the Nationalist Apartheid Government after District Six was literally razed to the ground following the forced removal of its residents once it was declared a white area in 1966. It is now part of the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. In 1999 it housed the District Six Museum, which has now moved to Buitenkant Street. For more on the history of District Six, visit the site of the District Six Museum.