The District Six Museum remembers the 60 000 people of colour forcibly evicted by the apartheid regime when Cape Town’s District Six was declared a “Whites Only”area in 1966. Most evictees barely had time to pack a single suitcase after receiving their eviction notices. So we re-created these suitcases, as if they had each been packed by an individual evictee. Then we placed them on the baggage carousels at Cape Town International Airport, so they could be seen by thousands of local and international visitors as they waited to collect their own suitcases. We also tied specially-designed luggage tags onto newly arrived visitors’ suitcases. Each tag told the individual story of a victim of forced removals in District Six and gave visitors a 50% entrance fee discount to the Museum. And we brought some of the evictees themselves to the airport to share their stories.
