Long Ago Citizens by Bryan Heseltine
Cape Town’s urban formations are both settled and constantly shifting. Take Windermere, which, like District Six, was reconfigured by the apartheid bulldozer. Bryan Heseltine (b. 1923, Addo, SA – d. 2008, UK) started making photos in Windermere (now Kensington) in the late 1940s. He was especially interested in this mixed-race neighbourhood’s black population, who lived in shack settlements between 8th and 12th Avenues. As he had done in Bo-Kaap and District Six before, Heseltine paired his deliberate gaze with an empathetic eye. His vivid portraiture—exhibited in Cape Town in 2013, the first time since 1952—summons a moment of fragile grace. In 1958 Windermere was reclassified a “coloured” area, its black residents forcibly relocated.