CAPE TOWN 2. MEMORY
This summer Laurie Taylor and Thinking Allowed travel to Cape Town.
Last summer the programme went to Chicago in the hope of finding researchers who were carrying on the great ethnographic tradition of Chicago sociology.Ìý Well his mission this year had rather similar aims.Ìý Laurie Taylor wanted to learn from South African social scientists about the other side of this celebrated tourist spot.
But what makes Cape Town so different is the recent end of apartheid, what is often referred to as the negotiated revolution of 1994.Ìý That transition and the hopes that it inspired, and dashed are a backdrop to every social issue, and of course each one of the programmes in the series:
In the second programme in the series he travelled to District Six, now a vast barren tract of land at the foot of Table Mountain.
The Group Areas Act of the late 1960s designated it a whites only area, prior to which it was a large, vibrant culturally diverse community.
A debate currently raging in Cape Town is how to deal with the memory of those forced removals, do you rebuild District Six and re-house all those who were cleared off to the Cape Flats or do you leave the leave the space empty as a memorial to a failed apartheid plan?
Laurie Taylor's guides through some of these painful memories of South African history are Professor , sociologist from the and co-founder of the , and Swedish social anthropologist Anna Bohlin.
Additional information:
E-mail Anna BohlinÌýto find out more details aboutÌýher research
The Politics of Locality: memories of District Six in Cape Town
Anna Bohlin
in Locality and Belonging
edited by Nadia Lovell
Routledge, an imprint of Taylor & Francis Books Ltd ISBN 0415182824
District Six Museum
Music:
Water from an Ancient Well
Performer: Abdullah Ibrahim
(track 5) from: Water from an Ancient Well
Black-hawk Records BKH 50207 CD
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