Return
By 2003, work had started on the first new buildings: 24 houses that will belong to residents over 80 years old. On 11 February 2004, exactly 38 years after the area was rezoned by the government, former president Nelson Mandela handed the keys to the first returning residents, Ebrahim Murat (87) and Dan Ndzabela (82). About 1,600 families were scheduled to return over the next three years.
The Hands Off District Six Committee mobilized to halt investment and redevelopment in District Six after the forced removals. It developed into the District Six Beneficiary Trust, which was empowered to manage the process by which claimants were to get their "land" back (actually a flat or apartment residential space). In November 2006, the Trust broke off negotiations with the Cape Town Municipality. The Trust accused the Municipality (then under a Democratic Alliance mayor) of stalling restitution, and indicated that it preferred to work with the national government, which was controlled by the ANC. In response, DA Mayor Helen Zille questioned the right of the Trust to represent the claimants, as it had never been "elected" by claimants. Some discontented claimants wanted to create an alternative negotiating body to the Trust. However, the historical legacy and "struggle credentials" of most of the Trust leadership made it very likely that it would continue to represent the claimants.
Read more about this topic: District Six
Famous quotes containing the word return:
“The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making.”
—Lillian Smith (1897–1966)
“The mother as a social servant instead of a home servant will not lack in true mother duty.... From her work, loved and honored though it is, she will return to her home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure, cleansed of all the fret and fraction and weariness that so mar it now.”
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935)
“A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)