The Blind Vendor

District Six, Cape Town

Linocut on paper
Norman Kaplan, 1967

District 6 in Cape Town and South End in Gqeberha (previously Port Elizabeth) were mixed-race residential areas that developed near the docks in both cities. Under apartheid, there was no social provision for anyone not employed. Many people survived as street vendors. This man was always in a particular spot in District 6, feeding the pigeons as he waited to make a sale.

The history of forced removals in South Africa meant that District 6 followed the way of Sophiatown in Johannesburg, and residents were expelled en masse from 1965. Homes, businesses, dance-halls, cafes, public baths and libraries of these mixed (non-white) communities were razed to the ground, and the people were dumped in racially-stratified wastelands on the outer fringes of cities or removed to so-called ‘homelands’.

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