Welcome back, Hanover Street, goodbye Keizersgracht, as Cape Town City Council votes for renaming

Florence Jackson, an 84-year-old from Heideveld on the Cape Flats, sat in the Cape Town Civic Centre on Thursday 22 August to hear what she had been waiting for since June: the name of her beloved Hanover Street would be given back to the community of District Six.

Jackson, who grew up on 254 Hanover Street, until she moved to Heideveld with her family, described living in District Six, and particularly, Hanover Street as “inter-mixed and no distinguishing” between those labelled coloured, African and white by the apartheid government. If she and her family had not moved out of Hanover Street, she told Daily Maverick, she “still would have stayed there” and:

“We could walk from District Six to Sea Point. It was very safe there.”

Jackson, along with members of the District Six Working Committee, was in attendance at a full sitting of Cape Town City Council as councillors were to vote on whether or not Keizersgracht would get back its original name – Hanover Street.

In June, the District Six Working Committee, an advocacy group of former residents who are land claimants and are still waiting to be moved back to the area, called for Keizersgracht to be renamed Hanover Street. The renaming effort is part of a larger movement, which includes a court case, for former residents, mostly elderly, to be moved back to the area.

When District Six was declared a “Whites Only” area under the apartheid Group Areas Act, Hanover Street, the main commercial street, was named Keizersgracht Street and District Six was renamed Zonnebloem. Today, much of what was Hanover Street is filled on one side with bare, open fields and on the other side, the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. It is also the starting point for many protest marches in Cape Town.

When the public participation process opened between June and July, there were almost 1,200 comments, TimesLive reported. Of that number, 97% agreed to the name change.

On Thursday, with a resounding “yes”, the council agreed to the renaming. But, while debating the decision, councillors shouted at one another and blamed other political parties for the residents not being able to move back. While each political party present agreed this was a start to healing the indignity of forced removals, loud jeers rang across the room, even as smaller political parties spoke in the council chamber.

EFF councillor Mzubanzi Dambuza described the renaming as “camouflage” for the real issue at hand – the land that was taken away from the mixed community of District Six.

Councillors jeered and laughed at Dambuza when he said: “Our people must be given back what was taken from them – their land.”

African Christian Democratic Party councillor Charlotte Williams said the councillors “have no respect” as they kept shouting, even as she spoke of her personal experience in Hanover Street. Williams said she still remembered how, as a 10-year-old, she would walk with her aunt to the shops in the street.

But Williams was not the only who was upset. Marian Nieuwoudt, Mayoral Committee Member for Spatial Planning and Environment, who helped the District Six Working Committee with the process, was visibly upset at the councillors and said she was hanging her head in shame, because:

“We are behaving like children who are throwing a tantrum”.

After her speech, the motion was put through without any vote needed: the 208-member council said yes: Keizersgracht will be Hanover Street.

The District Six Working Committee said:

“This is a major milestone for the District Six community in the land reform and restitution process. We wish to thank the City of Cape Town, the provincial government, national government and all political parties who voted with their conscience.” DM