Proclamation 73 is a project between Zara Julius, Chandra Frank and eThekwini History Museums that explores the Durban archive as it relates to neighbourhoods in Durban North and Durban South that, under South Africa’s apartheid regime, were designated for people racialised as Coloured and Indian under the Group Areas Act (GAA).
We are creating a visual online archive to create a family album of Durban North/South communities and our various histories. Our aim is to offer an open-access visual memoryscape of these communities, and challenge notions around race and space in Durban. Towards the end of 2018, we will curate an interactive exhibition of our research in Durban with eThekwini History Museums that will bring together these reflections on land, space, families and racial hierarchies under Apartheid, which continue to shape our present day understandings of each other and ourselves.
This project challenges how one may take these two histories, which are often read differently and independently of each other, and create and present them together – questioning what has been silenced, which narratives have been forgotten, and how we may turn the gaze around in a way that allows these Durban archives to speak to each other in the present day.
We need your help to piece together these stories!
Collaborate with us!
- Was your family forcibly removed from Cato Manor and relocated to Durban North/South?
- Was your family racialised as “coloured” or “Indian” during apartheid?
- You are invited to submit photographs from your personal family albums that document your homes, family/friend gatherings, community, social events, school events, etc that date any time before 1994. We are also interested in receiving copies of written letters or any such archives you feel are of particular interest.
Proclamation 73 is a not-for-profit project in partnership with the Goethe-Institut South Africa as part of the Goethe-Institut Project Space (GPS).