Walkabout: Kewpie Daughter of District 6 Exhibition

Presenters: Keval Harie (South Africa) – Attorney and Director at Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action (GALA)  & Tina Smith (South Africa) – Curator: District Six Museum

In 2018 the District Six Museum, in partnership with the GALA Queer Archive, debuted the exhibition Kewpie: Daughter of District Six at their Homecoming Centre. Kewpie was a well-known hairdresser and performer who lived in District Six in the ‘50s and ‘60s. The exhibition was a vibrant display of Kewpie’s personal photographs depicting her community of “girls and the gays”.

The extensive Kewpie Photographic Collection, housed at the GALA Queer Archive, spans the 1950s to the early 1980s showing Kewpie’s extensive social circle, friends, family, performances, parties, excursions and everyday life in the area. The photos reflect the changing physical and political landscape of District Six amidst the atrocity of the apartheid government’s campaign of forced removals in the 1960s and 70s. While the horror of forced removals is a relatively well-known chapter in South African history, Kewpie’s photographs presented the opportunity to engage with an alternate perspective of this well-documented period.

The public programme that ran parallel to the exhibition was extensive and included workshops on hair-styling, costume-making, public art, group oral history and reflection, as well as dialogues, exhibition walkabouts, screenings, and a queer Heritage Day Parade honouring Kewpie. The exhibition had a further 3-month run at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg in 2019.
Kewpie’s legacy lives on through the queer and District Six communities as individuals share and complicate the Kewpie Story. The photographs have offered young queer people a compelling recognition of queerness that has existed in their neighbourhood. The collection is continuously activated through academic explorations, referenced in artistic endeavours and honoured as an iconic South African ‘transcestry’. The photographs currently up on display at the Homecoming Centre are a smaller selection of the original exhibition, initially displayed for the Kewpie Legacy workshops in 2023.