This study is a contribution to the programme of memorializing District Six through the site-specific stories that are shared in research, education, and the co-curated spaces of the District Six Museum. When buildings, streets, street names and place names are erased from a landscape; when cultural, economic, religious, and educational spaces are shut down; then people’s connections to place are disrupted, diverted, reimagined, often lost to future linked generations. These connections, however, continue to live on in people’s memories - individual and collective, sometimes lying dormant waiting to be triggered into wakefulness and visibility. In the case of District Six, these memories have lived on as nostalgia about a recent past with the trauma, often, edited out. Consequently, District Six has frequently been rendered as a stereotype - a friendly, unproblematic, tolerant, kanala place, where grand narrative re-enactments provide a sense of closure for some or evokes a sense of renewed anger about the stories not told and the unfulfilled restitution process. The stories of women factory workers are a case in point, where the closing down of factories and the subsequent loss of livelihoods are remembered in two ways. Firstly, through a lens of nostalgia premised on the idea that the past was a better place when we had jobs and could feed our families. Secondly, this recent past is also remembered with a sense of unresolved anger that people are less important than profit margins and real estate - a mentality that resulted in the export of cheap labour factories overseas and gentrification. This study explores the stories of two women clothing workers from District Six. I mapped out the important clothing factories contained in the stories of the two women I interviewed like, for example, the Ensign Factory that was in a section of District Six now rezoned as part of Woodstock. The site and its surroundings have taken on a new corporate brand but still lives with the spectral traces of the old District Six. I make these and other District Six fragments more visible through the stories of Ruth Rosa Phala-Jeftha and Farahnaaz Gilfelleon, using the District Six Museum’s oral history methodology – one steeped in a critical pedagogy where the storytellers have agency and are invited into a co-curated sense-making and interpretive process. / Dissertation (MSocSci)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Historical and Heritage Studies / MSocSci / Unrestricted

The study investigates traces and historical origins, socio-economic, political and cultural lives of 'black servants' who worked and lived at the Zwartkoppies Farm and other establishments owned by Sammy Marks through photographs, oral histories and Archives. Furthermore, I interrogate the notion of representation by exploring the house as a colonial object and the site as exclusive and perpetuating divisions in a democratic South Africa. The decision to employ oral histories is so as to give these servants the freedom to represent themselves in a space where their voices have been muted in their presence. The history of labour in Southern Africa serves as my point of departure so as to better frame my research. This study reflects on the effects of colonisation and apartheid characterised by injustices and marginalisation which is to this day still are reflected in the silenced narratives of South Africa's dark history. / Dissertation (MSoSci)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / University of Pretoria Bursary and DITSONG Museums of South Africa Bursary / Historical and Heritage Studies / MSoSci (Heritage and Museum Studies) / Unrestricted