District Six Forcibly Removed

District Six Forcibly Removed District Six, also known as Kanaladorp (‘kanala’ is a Malay word meaning ‘help one another’), is remembered with the disturbing events flowing from 11 February 1966, when the suburb was declared by the apartheid regime to be a ‘White area’ under the 1950 Group Areas Act. District Six had an intrinsic role in the development of the city of Cape Town. It was named in 1867 as the Sixth Municipal District of the city, and it began to grow after the freeing of those who were enslaved in 1833. With the passing of the Group Areas Act, residential areas were segregated on the basis of class rather than race. Before then, multiracial spaces, such as District Six, were not uncommon in most South African urban areas. The aim of the Group Areas Act was very much to “racialise” and segregate spaces and therefore the legislation was fashioned as the “cornerstone” of apartheid policy. It was primarily intended to eliminate mixed neighbourhoods in favour of racially segregated ones, which would encourage the separate development of South African races. During the earlier part of the apartheid period, a few years after the Second World War, District Six was relatively cosmopolitan. Among the multi-ethnic community, were thousands of Jewish residents from the 1880s until their departure to the more affluent areas in the mid-1940s and 1950s. However, under the Population Registration Act of 1950, the area was classified as “Coloured�