Foreword
Günther Komnick first sailed to the shores of Cape Town in the mid-1950s as a young man. So inspired was he by the everyday street life and bustle of the local people that he felt compelled to take up his camera and he set about capturing remarkable images that would in time become an indelible imprint of the memories of our yesteryears.

    When first introduced to Günther’s photographs in the form of old vintage black and white prints, I felt as if I had stumbled across a box of hidden treasures. Those images are today the contents of this book. In publishing Cape Town Memories of the ’60s Günther has created a legacy that will, I believe, remain unchallenged in its portrayal of a time that has since gone by.  
    Günther has experienced a fair share of tribulations in his own life. However, rather than dwelling on his hardships or those of others, he chose to explore and capture the moments of joy that certainly filled the streets of Cape Town.  
    This book serves as a testimony to the strength and endurance of a society and a time known to so many, and yet so few. Günther has provided a record of an era when, in the face of extreme hardship and adversity, people chose rather to live their lives embracing their own rich beliefs and traditions, and in doing so, demonstrating their unbreakable will to survive.
    Let us also salute the vision and foresight of Günther Komnick for having had the courage and perseverance to capture and preserve these precious moments that will surely take their deserved place amongst the historical archives of this nation.  

Introduction
History is a jigsaw puzzle; every little piece is vital to complete the whole picture. This compilation of black and white photographs from the heart of Cape Town during the 1950s and ’60s is such a historic collection of valued pieces. Each photograph evokes memories of special times, memorable places and people captured in inimitable surroundings. Most were photographed in luminous monochrome. It’s a given that colour pictures may excite, but black and white photographs truly distil the essence of yesteryear scenes and atmosphere.
    In every photographic collection some pictures whisper, some speak, others shout without words being necessary on the page. A few pictures sometimes need context, maybe a little amplification or even stories to augment their circumstance.
    The narrative of this collection plays out in a few specific enclaves of metropolitan Cape Town during an era of social and political discord, but the moments captured highlight the everyday life of the ordinary man and woman somewhat removed from the strife of things falling apart all around them. The pictures record the inquisitiveness and innocence of children being children, their music and their laughter.

Short historical background
Cape Town was founded during the mid-seventeenth century when the Dutch East India Company (DEIC) needed a refreshment station on their maritime spice route to India and the East Indies. Increased settlement size, health imperatives, defence and agricultural needs necessitated the importation of skilled tradesmen from India and the East Indies, farmers from Holland and slave labour from Africa, Madagascar, India and the Indonesian archipelago. Quite a few political exiles and criminals were also banished to the Cape of Good Hope by the Dutch hierarchy in Batavia. In time the settlement at the Cape expanded into a colony of several villages and towns, with Cape Town flourishing as the prime administrative and trading post.
    With the collapse of the spice market and wars raging between the European powers at the end of the eighteenth century, the DEIC went bankrupt. Holland was no longer a significant maritime power. The French threatened the sea route to India. Pre-emptively, Britain took permanent occupation of the strategic Cape settlement in 1806.
    During British rule and the subsequent Union of South Africa, the indigenes and people of colour were politically and economically marginalised. Disadvantaged communities drifted into loose enclaves of poverty within the city of Cape Town. The Bo-Kaap and District Six were two of these.

Bo-Kaap
Many of the photographs in this collection record life in the Bo-Kaap, an area situated on the rump of Signal Hill on the outskirts of central Cape Town. It was first settled by white colonial gentry. After the final emancipation of the slaves in 1838 it became ethnically and religiously mixed.
During the Dutch occupation of the Cape the Dutch Reformed Church held official sway. Other Christian Church denominations and Muslims were allowed to practice their faith only within the confines of their homes. The Asiatic Council of the Dutch East India Company via Van Dieman’s placaat, The Statutes of India of 1642, further declared that missionary work by faiths and sects other than the Dutch Reformed Church was forbidden and punishable with the death penalty. Under British rule at the turn of the nineteenth century the first mosque in Cape Town was erected in Dorp Street in the Bo-Kaap under the guidance of Quadi Abdullah Abdusallaam (Tuan Guru – Mister Teacher). He was a prince and political exile from the island of Tidore in the Indonesian archipelago. He was charged with ‘conspiring with the English’ and had resisted Dutch monopoly trade in the East Indies. Tuan Guru was banished to Robben Island in 1780. On the island he wrote the Quran and several religious volumes from memory. Released 12 years later, he established a religious school (madrassah) and mosque in 1709 on ground still registered in the name of a slave woman, Saartjie van de Kaap.
During the following century official neglect and poor social circumstances led to the dereliction of significant areas of the Bo-Kaap. Large areas were officially declared slums, but the Cape Town Municipality and heritage authorities refused permission for the occupants of these houses to rebuild or improve their homes. Some of these areas are depicted in this 1950/60s photographic essay. Slow restoration started during the 1970s. Sadly this was not through altruism, but to veneer a paternalistic face to the racist Group Areas Acts of the apartheid era. The Bo-Kaap presents a different colourful picture today, much loved by tourists, fashion houses and film producers.

District Six
The District Six area, sited just south of the sandstone Castle erected by the Dutch East India Company in the mid-seventeenth century, was originally farmland. With population growth the city rapidly expanded in all directions. For better administrative purposes the city was divided into districts in 1867. One of the designated areas, District Six, encompassed the farmlands on the slopes of Devil’s Peak. During the South African gold rush there was an influx of prospectors and wealth seekers from all over the world. Many sought cheap housing in District Six. Poverty and unhygienic conditions caused outbreaks of typhus and bubonic plague. But the area survived these catastrophes and grew apace as a truly multiracial area. Ethnic groups from Africa, India, the East Indies, Zanzibar, Europe and even the far-off West Indies mixed in District Six’s melting pot. Religions such as Christianity, Islam and Judaism were practiced freely without rancour. Churches, mosques and even a synagogue stood cheek by jowl without fuss.
    Two prime District Six streets depicted in this photographic essay are Hanover Street and Caledon Street. Hanover Street, a busy commercial thoroughfare, virtually bisected District Six. It was named after Hanover Hall, a large mansion in the District owned by a builder, Hermann Schutte, who was apprenticed in Holland but originally came from the town of Hanover in Germany. Caledon Street, a mixed commercial and entertainment street, was named after Du Pre Alexander, the 2nd Earl of Caledon and British Governor of the Cape from 1807–11. It was down these two streets that the Coons (minstrel troops) of the New Year carnivals pranced in this book’s pictures.
    In its heyday District Six was known as Kanallah Dorp (essentially: ‘Please help me in the name of God’ Town). It was, and still is, the practice of many Muslim owner-builders to ask their friends and family to give a free helping hand in erecting their homes. The favour would be returned when others were in need. Areas of the District were also called Fairy Land. Another appendage Kanaldorp was applied because of the many canals and streamlets that had to be crossed to access the area from the Castle.
    For a while the area prospered and was the source of labour and artisan expertise for the city. It was then a place of racial and interfaith tolerance and social cohesion.
    Neglect by avaricious landlords, compounded by economic and social factors, saw its inevitable decay. Ensconced between beautiful and well-kept houses, areas of slums and poor hygiene mushroomed. Gangs roamed the streets. District Six was in dire need of modernisation, urban renewal and reconstruction programmes. Municipal indifference certified its demise.
    But it was the Group Areas Act, with its cruel racist policies, that dealt District Six its deathblow in 1966 when its fate was signed into law by Parliament. It was decreed, without due consultation, that District Six was to be razed to the ground and resettled by whites. The powerless citizens of District Six were scattered over the Cape Peninsula. Many were housed in match-box tenements hastily erected on the dusty, inhospitable sands of the Cape Flats, completely devoid of community cohesion and affection, and of essential services, and riddled with crime and social degradation.
    The lights, social warmth and neighbourliness of District Six disappeared. Bulldozers came and reduced the area to ashes and memories.
This collection of photographic pictures recalls some of the brighter and lighter moments of life in District Six. They portray ordinary people going about their ordinary lives in peace and harmony. It is all that its former populace can treasure.
    Cape Town Memories of the ’60s records many faces; with time their owners have become untraceable, anonymous. But they will forever live in these pages in loving memory of their graciousness, their warmth and their smiles.

The Minstrel Carnival, a short overview by Dr M. Cassiem D’arcy
Music was the refuge of the slaves and the disadvantaged freed men and women during the years of Dutch and British colonial rule from 1652 to 1910; and no one could take that innate human attribute away from them. Many slaves made music for their masters in little bands; they even made the instruments.
     New Year’s Eve celebrations were reserved for the slave owners and employers. Slaves and servants had to serve at the many midnight balls and parties, pour the wine, serve the food and play music for the dance floors of the overlords. The second day of the year was generally a ‘free day’ for the slaves; free to sing and dance and prance in the streets of Cape Town.
     All slaves at the Cape of Good Hope were officially emancipated on 1 December, 1834. This act was celebrated on various days in December for many years, but later amalgamated with a New Year’s Carnival. Troops of minstrels celebrated their manumission and the new year by marching and singing through the streets of Cape Town. During the mid and later years of the nineteenth century formalised Christmas Choirs marched through the streets and serenaded the faithful on Christmas Eve. Those of Eastern origin, called Nagtroepe, and later Malay Choirs, marched through the streets playing on guitars, mandolins, saxophones and ghoema drums. They tapped walking sticks and sang as they moved from house to house on New Year’s Eve where they sang old Dutch songs, sea shanties and fast-beat humorous moppies. At every stop they were rewarded with koeksiesters and tea, non-alcoholic ginger beer or soda water. These choirs were somewhat staidly dressed, with colourful blazers coordinated with white or grey pants. They were much influenced by the refined singing and choral renditions of visiting American troupes, such as the Virginia Jubilee Singers.
     By 1887 the Dantu brothers formed an athletic and singing society, the Cape of Good Hope Sports Club. This triggered the formation of many other regularised troupes appended with colourful names such as The Darktown Fire Brigade, The Boarding Boys, and The Young Ideas.
     The minstrel carnivals started towards the end of the nineteenth century, and in turn were inspired by the visit of performing troupes of romping, stomping Afro-American minstrels, such as the Christy Minstrels outfitted in colourful attire and painted faces. Their vibrant songs and dances electrified audiences. The Cape Town Coons (or Kaapse Klopse) acquired their clacking ‘bones’, tinny banjos, whacking tambourines and strident trumpets and mixed them with the Eastern ghoema drums to provide a romping, stomping, walking, cane-tapping cacophony in the streets of Coon (Minstrel) Cape Town. Thousands joined the troupes and soon there were some that reached more than 500 participants. Some even marched on stilts. Wave upon wave would cavort, jump and dance down the streets of Cape Town in later years.
     The name 'Coons' stems from the patterns of paint on their faces imitating the natural facial markings and colours of the racoon animals of North America. The Hatcha-mericans troupes, dressed in huge North American Indian feathered head-dresses and warpaint, were much feared. They banged on huge drums and flashed imitation tomahawks, sending the devil’s terror into young spectators who would flee to the safety of their mother’s skirt. A few troupes, known as The Bits and Pieces were adorned in a variety of worn and torn, ‘distressed’ costumes, mimicking movie stars such as Charlie Chaplin as The Tramp, or some other outlandish character, evoking much mirth and cheers from the crowds that lined the streets of District Six from Hanover Street, through Caledon Street or Darling Street, then up Wale Street and via Rose Street in the Bo-Kaap, down to the Green Point Track.
Competing troupes on the Green Point Track were judged on dress, songs, music and other attributes. Competition was fierce and rowdy. Large silver cups were at stake and prestige for the winners would last till the following year.
     From the 1970s doom for the carnival was on the horizon. The now dubbed Minstrel Carnival went through rough times during the apartheid era. The destruction of District Six by the apartheid regime, and the dissipation of the participants of the troupes to far-flung tenements and matchbox houses on the inhospitable Cape Flats, seemed to be a death blow to the Minstrel Carnival. The Cape Town City Council added further injury by banning minstrel marches through the streets of central Cape Town. The Cape Town Minstrel Carnival was moribund and almost faded into obscurity.
     With the advent of the ‘New South Africa’ and its famed Constitution, the Minstrel Carnival has been resurrected, but not without rancour between organisers, and is forever plagued by funding and administrative problems. The Minstrel Carnival has however been favoured with the appellation of being a ‘tourist attraction’ by tight-fisted vested interests. The future of the Carnival hangs by many threads.

Bibliography
Ancestry 24 – The Origins of District Six
http://ancestry24.com/the-origins-of-district-six/
Davids, Achmat  (1980) – The Mosques of Bo-Kaap
Institute of Arabic and Islamic Research, PO Box 2059, Clareinch 7740, Cape Town
Erasmus, Zimitri (Editor) (2001) – Coloured by History, Shaped by Place
Kwela Books, Cape Town
Muir, John (1975) – Know Your Cape
Howard Timmins, Cape Town
Mustafa, Isgak (Samodien) – Oral information
Belgravia Estate, Cape Town
South African History Online (SAHO) 1700s – The number and origin of slaves at the Cape
History Matters Blog. http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/1700–1799