‘If they gave me a house, I’d take it tomorrow’
All I want is to die under this mountain.” Noor Ebrahim, a slightly-built former messenger for Reader’s Digest, has returned to the area where he grew up. Now retired, he likes to remember the old days; he can point out his school — “it was tough” — the mosque where his family prayed and the spot where his father ran a ginger-beer business. Today, though, this area of Cape Town is a wasteland. Table Mountain towers over the once-famous multiracial community of District Six, which was destroyed by apartheid bulldozers and has never been rebuilt.
Reconstructing District Six could have been the ultimate regeneration project for a country keen to show the world an integrated face as South Africa prepares to host the World Cup. The murder last Saturday of the right-wing AWB leader Eugene Terre’Blanche, and the release of figures that highlight growing economic inequality, point to something di… [more]
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