“This is part of my legacy, and I want to encourage the youth to always remember where they come from,” says Soraya Martheze who is the subject of a short documentary about her experience of the District Six forced removals.

The 59th anniversary of the start of the forced removals was commemorated earlier this month.

Ms Martheze, 67, says the 15-minute documentary, 31 Chatham Street with Soraya Martheze, is about the Dry Docks area of District Six, where she and her family lived in Chatham Street.

The documentary came about after the District Six Museum’s oral history programme team approached Ms Martheze to tell her story. A member of the team, Ayanda Mpono, interviews her in the film.

Ms Martheze says her son, Azeez, encouraged her to tell her story.

“I never thought that sharing this story would be so emotional,” she says.

She describes how she became overwhelmed with emotion when she returned to District Six in 2022, settling in Cross Street, as part of the restitution process.

Ms Martheze lived in District Six until she was 11.

“It was a community that was rich and vibrant, and everybody knew each other,” she says.

After her parents divorced, she lived with her mother, Salegga Cassiem, in Bo-Kaap, but she continued to visit her father, Abobaker Cassiem, who stayed on in District Six until he was forcefully evicted in the 1970s.

As an adult, Ms Martheze moved to Mitchell’s Plain, then Stellenbosch and Goodwood until her return to District Six in 2022 as a resident of the Hanover Street complex, which was part of the third-phase restitution process for returning claimants - Ms Martheze’s late father in this case.

While she complains about snags in the new complex (“D6 claimants have mixed feelings about flats,” Southern Suburbs Tatler, June 6, 2022), she says those who have returned are started to rebuild a sense of community and “growing to know each other better”.

The museum’s oral history programme project manager, Matthew Nissen, adds: “As the oral history team, we are trying to build a canon of knowledge that fills in the gaps about what life was like in Cape Town before the forced removals because there is so much nuance that can only be revealed through oral history.”

Mr Nissen says the team spent a lot of time conceptualising the documentary with Ms Martheze critiquing the drafts, reviewing the final draft and getting her input as to the direction of the film.

31 Chatham Street with Soraya Martheze will be part of the District Six Museum archives. The documentary can be found on the District Six Museum’s YouTube channel.

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