‘Fields of Play’: the District Six Museum and the history of football in Cape Town1

Abstract

This article examines the distinctive features of the District Six Museum’s memory work on the history and heritage of apartheid forced removals in Cape Town, and shows how these approaches were applied in the museum to a project through which a new exhibition on the history of football in Cape Town was created. Since its inception in December 1994, the District Six Museum has become one of the most prominent examples of new museums whose methods of work are based on participation, annunciation and inscription, and a model of memory work based upon the idea of knowledge ‘transaction’. The practice of the District Six Museum poses challenges for conventional museum methods both in South Africa and internationally. In 2008, the exhibition ‘Fields of Play’ was produced by the District Six Museum, after three years of collection and focus group work which drew upon these participatory methods. While excitement about the 2010 World Cup – the first to be held on African soil – was reaching fever pitch in South Africa, the District Six Museum created a complex exhibition of the history of football in Cape Town in relation to the spatial patterns of removal and displacement under apartheid. The exhibition showed how football became an arena for holding on to the past, for embracing and displaying the resources of modernity, and for acting out modes of citizenship. This article shows how the District Six Museum’s exhibition went beyond conventional sports exhibitions such as the hall of fame and those created for the purposes of marketing and public relations.