District Six Museum

Memorial museum to the cosmopolitan neighbourhood destroyed under apartheid

The District Six Museum is the most affecting historical museum in Cape Town. It occupies a former Methodist church on the edge of where District Six used to stand, and the centrepiece of its permanent display is a vast, hand-painted map of the lost neighbourhood, laid out across the floor and annotated by former residents with the locations of their homes, schools and shops.

Many of the guides are themselves former District Six residents, and the museum offers walking tours of the now mostly empty land where the neighbourhood once stood. Allow two hours, and consider the guided walk if you want to understand the scale of what was destroyed. It is closed on Sundays.

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A story
District Six was a mixed-race inner-city neighbourhood of around 60,000 people, declared a "whites-only" area in 1966 under the Group Areas Act. Over the following years the residents were forcibly removed and most of the buildings bulldozed. The District Six Museum, opened in 1994 in a former church, gathers the floor plan, the street signs, the family photographs and the stories that survived.

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