Quest to Remembering Die Vlakte
Mogamad Qasim Ras occupies a quiet yet profound place in the memory of Stellenbosch, not because he left behind an abundance of written records, but because he carried within him a history that few others could testify to. His life traces the arc of Die Vlakte itself, from lived community to forced removal, and then to a long and unfinished struggle for recognition. Growing up on Andringa Street, Ras belonged to a world that was systematically dismantled when residents of Die Vlakte were uprooted and relocated to Cloetesville. Yet what distinguishes him is not only that he experienced this rupture, but that he refused to let it settle into silence.
Memory as Advocacy and the Refusal of Erasure
In the years that followed, Ras turned this refusal into a sustained practice of advocacy. The memory of Die Vlakte became his life’s work. He did not carry it privately, but took it into public spaces, conversations, meetings, and institutions, wherever there was an opportunity to make it heard. Together with others in the Die Vlakte Forum, he helped to build a collective voice that insisted on recognition, restitution, and dignity. They took the message of Die Vlakte to anyone who would listen, and often to those who would rather not. Universities, public platforms, community gatherings, and policy spaces became sites where this history was retold and reframed. For Ras, this was not repetition for its own sake. It was a deliberate act of keeping the memory alive, of refusing erasure, and of transforming personal recollection into a shared and political claim. His advocacy gave continuity to a community that had been physically dispersed, ensuring that Die Vlakte remained present not only as a place of the past, but as an ongoing demand for justice.
Narrating Die Vlakte in What the Soil Remembers
His participation in the documentary What the Soil Remembers marks an important extension of this work, and offers perhaps the most public expression of the memory he carried. In the film, Ras does not simply recount events. He walks, points, recalls, and situates. He becomes a guide through a landscape that no longer visibly exists, yet remains vividly present through his narration. The film itself operates as a form of memorialisation, weaving together testimony, landscape, and absence to reconstruct Die Vlakte as a space that continues to speak. Through Ras’s voice, the soil is made to testify. His narration anchors the film in lived experience, ensuring that what is remembered is not abstract history, but a world of relationships, homes, and everyday life.
The international trajectory of the film underscores the significance of this testimony. It premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2023, where it received the Ammodo Tiger Short Film Award, one of the most prestigious recognitions for short films at the festival. From there, it travelled to major international platforms, including the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival, the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and the BlackStar Film Festival in the United States. It also received Best International Documentary Short at the Regina International Film Festival in Canada, along with further recognition at festivals in China and Russia. That a story rooted in the specific history of Die Vlakte could resonate across such diverse global contexts speaks to the depth and universality of the memory carried by its narrators. Ras’s presence in the film ensures that this global recognition remains grounded in a deeply local, embodied experience.
Mapping a Vanished World: Memory as Counter-Archive
Perhaps the most remarkable dimension of Ras’s contribution lies in his work with Dr Siddique Motala’s counter-surveying project of Die Vlakte. This initiative brought together former residents and researchers to reconstruct a landscape that had been systematically erased, using a combination of oral history and geographic information systems. At the centre of this process was Ras himself. His memory became the backbone of the mapping exercise, guiding researchers through streets that no longer exist and homes that have long since been demolished. Drawing on his lived experience, he was able to identify and plot more than 300 sites, including houses, shops, and social spaces, effectively re-inscribing Die Vlakte onto the map.
What makes this act so significant is not only its scale, but its epistemological force. Ras was not recalling in a nostalgic sense. He was performing a form of counter-archival work. In a context where official records either erased or fragmented the life of Die Vlakte, his memory functioned as a method of reconstruction, translating lived experience into spatial knowledge. Researchers have described this as a form of counter-surveying, a practice that allows memory to operate as data, capable of producing a digital archive of a lost community. His ability to walk through spaces that had been replaced by parking lots and university buildings, and to point out where walls, rooms, and neighbours once stood, reveals a deeply embodied form of knowing. It is this quality that elevates the survey beyond a technical exercise. It becomes an act of restoration, returning dignity to a community by making its presence visible again.
In this sense, the map that emerged from this project is not simply a representation of the past. It is a form of memorial in its own right. It holds within it the traces of lives, relationships, and everyday practices that apartheid sought to erase. Ras’s contribution ensures that this map is not abstract or detached, but rooted in the intimacy of lived experience. That he could recall and reconstruct such a vast spatial history from memory is extraordinary. It positions him not only as a witness, but as a custodian of Die Vlakte’s spatial memory, someone who quite literally redrew a vanished world into existence.
To write Ras into history, then, requires a different approach to memorialisation. It is not about filling in every detail or producing a complete biography. Instead, it is about recognising the form of his contribution. His life invites us to think of memory as an active practice, one that maps, narrates, and insists. A commemoration of Ras should therefore foreground his insistence on justice, his role as a narrator of lived experience, and his extraordinary capacity to reconstruct a lost world from memory.
Ultimately, memorialising Mogamad Qasim Ras is inseparable from memorialising Die Vlakte itself. His life cannot be disentangled from the community he remembered so vividly. To honour him is therefore to take seriously the work he began, to recognise memory as both archive and action, and to continue the unfinished task of restoring what was taken.