District Six (Afrikaans: Distrik Ses) is a residential neighborhood in Cape Town, South Africa, located next to the city's CBD. In 1959, people of color were banned from the area and most of them were resettled in Gugulethu. In the following years, District Six was then declared a whites-only area and most of the residents were resettled in the Cape Flats. Over the course of a decade, over 60,000 of its inhabitants were forcibly removed and in 1970 the area was renamed Zonnebloem, a name that makes reference to an 18th-century colonial farm. At the time of the proclamation, 56% of the district's property was White-owned, 29% Black-owned, 26% Coloured-owned and 18% Indian-owned. The vision of a new white neighbourhood was not realised and the land has mostly remained barren and unoccupied. The original area of District Six is now partly divided between the suburbs of Walmer Estate, Zonnebloem, and Lower Vrede, while the rest is generally undeveloped land.
On 17 December 2019, the Arts and Culture minister, Nathi Mthethwa, gazetted the renaming of Zonnebloem to District Six after the District Six Museum launched a campaign earlier that year to have the old name brought back and some residents applied to the South African Geographical Names Council in 2018 for the same.
