Special Report Transcript Episode 2, Section 3, Time 04:00

Cape Town artist, Roderick Sauls, was born at no 90 St Philips street, District Six. // As a child at seven years old were forced to move out because of the Eastern Boulevard they said were gonna come over our little house. We moved out, and we went out to Bonteheuwel and my family couldn’t accept that, especially my mother and my father who both worked in town. They actually rejected the whole idea but there was nothing they could do about it. I t was very emotional, I mean my one aunt just worked across the road there at [inaudible] had asthma. She couldn’t understand why she had to go and live so far away from town. And these people for me, I felt that even at the age of seven, I was losing my friends. People disappeared in the night, you never saw them afterwards, and you would go to school one morning and find that your friend is not there anymore. You know, the house is gone. I mean, the roads here, we used to play ‘blikkies,’ hide and seek. There was alley ways; my parents weren’t scared about it. We would hide, we would run around for blocks, miles away from where we stayed. People weren’t scared. But we couldn’t do that in the townships, because there was a complete new element you know, there was danger lurking all around the people so, there was a complete new thing. There was nothing out there, like I said, you could do window shopping, you couldn’t do that in Bonteheuwel, because in Bonteheuwel there was there was a house and a road, there was one little shop, miles you had to walk to the shop. And, for me the human factor of this thing was very important and that is why even in my work I like working with the human … I can relate to that because I do work on what the area was like. That becomes part … Because I still feel... people say I’m too emotional about this thing, I’m too sentimental about this thing, but I have to be sentimental, I don’t come from other areas to come and sketch what District Six was like. I actually come from … I felt it when I was pushed out and for me my pictures must tell that story. I’m sure people from other parts of the Western Cape, other parts of the country had the same experience, but I am talking about my own experience. I feel it with them as well when I talk about District Six, because I can only talk about District Six. I can read about all these other things and I can feel the pain, and I am not talking about something that I read about, whatever. If they talk about those things I can relate to that ‘cause it happened to me, and it happened to me early in my life where I felt I needed that freedom to say where and what I wanted to be in life.

Notes: Roderick Sauls in District Six; Paintings: District Six and its demolition

References: there are no references for this transcript