Guga S´Thebe and District Six

 

Our entries will be a little out of order. Monica wrote our entries for the retreat this weekend, but I’m going to return now to Friday morning, before the retreat.

February 13, 2026

              We are currently on our way to the weekend retreat for the three schools, taking a pause at a white sands beach on the other side of Table Mountain. This aquamarine surf is a welcome transition from our tours this morning—of District Six and the museum that memorializes its communities and their forced scattering, and of Langa itself, a tour run by the remarkable arts center here, called Gugustebe.

              In the District Six Museum, students read testimony and saw pictures of the entire little city just to the side of downtown, from the castle, east—the city shown before the whole place was flattened at the behest of the apartheid government in order to serve as new view development for whites only: the community was destroyed and its multiethnic inhabitants were sent to racially designated areas reflecting the 1950 Group Areas Act. A woman hosting a cousin at the museum heard our students asking each other questions they could of course not answer and she beckoned them over and told her story. Her parents were of mixed race and when they were forced from their home were separated to two separate racially designated areas. She couldn’t live with her father because she was too light skinned for him to be safe tending her. Their family, like their community, never recovered.

              We stood earlier on the fallow, beaten lands where the city once thrived: an international outcry prevented development of the desired white neighborhood and preserved the hillside scar as a reminder of violence to land and people and as a prayer for return.

              The harder tour of the day was into some of the neighborhood in Langa. We began at the Dompas museum, the old courthouse used to process Dompas violations. In the nineteenth century, Langa was a place to house migrant labor; but later, after the Group Relocations Act, Langa was designated a township for Blacks only, and people were brought to the courthouse and jailed if they failed to have the Dompas, which you couldn’t get if you weren’t registered with a company in Langa, and you couldn’t be registered with a company in Langa if you were a woman. If you were from another township, you would need a special pass to come into Langa.

               Our guide wanted us to see the continued hardship following the many violences done to Black South Africans after a colonial project which continually dispossessed the native peoples, and then, with a government spread thin, gave them far too many opportunities to stay and wait to be somewhere slightly better. 

              The guide in the back of our march had both given us historical context for Langa but also said we were getting the poverty tour; he prefers to give the progress tour. Gabby said going from the childcare centers in one of the blocks and having the best fifteen minutes of her life to then walking out and seeing where those children lived was not something she had words for.

              We reflected in Guga S'Thebe, a beautifully built campus for the arts—ceramics, music, painting, and more—with studios for creating and teaching artists learning to make a living turning discarded plastics and wax cartons into saleable art. I told students I know they came out of that neighborhood tour with many feelings, the weight of what they saw, their voyeuristic implication in it in what might have felt like treating families like exhibits in a zoo. And I spoke a lot, because I don’t need kids spinning out in a helpless staring-at-the-ground guilt. They have reasons for inviting you into their homes and showing you how they live, I said. They want you to witness and speak what you saw. That doesn’t make it easier. But I want you to think of all the things that are true—Gabby’s joy and hard witness, the progress tour we might as easily have taken, this place of vitality and art all around us. This is true also. Alana added that this has been the most welcoming, joyous place she has ever visited. And that too is also true. Mr. Magidman spoke of students’ hearts in all this, in all the richness of their feeling. I shifted one last gear to say you need to look with honest eyes, not polite eyes—don’t be so polite you don’t notice the trash everywhere, but ask why. Notice honestly, and deeply ask why. Yes, have all the feelings, but we raise you to be leaders here in Hands for a Bridge. You are scholars, artists, and activists. Open your hearts; observe with honest eyes; ask why; and use it to see to next possible steps; and where and when you can, organize, stand each other up, and act.

              Also we ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with smoked beef crisps.