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One of Cape Town’s most iconic historical buildings – that’s seen generations of black female workers clock in to labour behind its sewing machines – will be unveiled as a heritage site tomorrow.
The Rex Trueform factory in Salt River was reportedly, during apartheid, the sixth-largest clothing consortium in the world. Although it may have closed down more than a decade ago, it left an indelible mark on the community around it and is today celebrated as a classic piece of modernist architecture.
Tomorrow the Western Cape government’s provincial minister of cultural affairs and sport, Anroux Marais, with Heritage Western Cape, will unveil a Provincial Heritage Site plaque at the building.
The fame of the building has a lot to do with architect and academic Ilze Wolff. Her interest in the site was informed by her own family who worked there in decades past.
She told City Press about the symbolism of the building, particularly how it is intertwined with issues of identity, race and gender for the people of Salt River and its neighbouring communities.
“It means a great deal that the building will now officially be declared a heritage site, but particularly because the Rex Trueform building is symbolic of black women ... the company itself owes a huge debt to the black women who worked for it and made it as successful and big as it was. It is a monument to black female labour,” Wolff said.
Her book, Unstitching Rex Trueform: The Story of an African Factory, published in 2017, received the International Prize for Scholarly Works in Modern and Contemporary Art and Architecture.
