South Africa’s oldest Presbyterian church lies silently with its brother in the hills an hour and a half from Grahamstown. They have been sitting in quiet contemplation for a very, very long time; and will likely contemplate a long time still.
Today is day ten of fourteen production days at the National Arts Festival here in Grahamstown. Having drunk enough instant coffee to give my stomach a callous, I brought a bodum into the newsroom with me this morning. Mmmmm. Real coffee. The days are spent busily climbing through every market stall, theatre, coffee shop and street for photographs. The evenings are spent catching up on the parts of my life which are not strictly arts or Arts festival related. Which is a polite way of saying “Dear god, I have been busy these last days”. Out of the chaos, however, are a few more images. And a promise of a story as soon as I have properly slept.
Played by Bevan Cullinan, Gary the Tooth Fairy is a comedy play on at Festival in which Gary discusses life as a tooth fairy in modern South Africa. What was meant to be a simple photo shoot for an interview turned into an hour of running up and down the garden outside the Journalism building. Fairies are fickle creatures to tie down for an interview, you see.
7am. In the Grahamstown rubbish dump, stilt-walker Richard Antrobus picks his way through old tyres, broken plastic and mud the colour of offal. Of all the places I thought I would find myself on a Saturday morning – in my entire life – this is quite possibly the very last. Richard is being trailed by a team of three Rhodes University TV students who are filming his antics in the dump as part of a series of twenty four one -minute documentaries on Grahamstown behind the scenes of the National Arts Festival.
There is much that I have come to remember that I missed about university. Like learning – that feeling as though you are actually becoming smarter with each article read. Or that feeling of checking books out of the library as though you were becoming wiser for the exercise. Like the conversations that draw late into the night on the strings of ideas of the world as it could be. I’ve also come to remember exams – that periodic test of otherwise unshakable self-belief.
The night is a cold place. Empty streets freeze imperceptibly under sodium lights. The warmth of human life dances and slurs elsewhere, its echoes stumbling out into the cold midnight darkness before slowing, stopping. Retreating in nervous uncertainty. Never crossing the gritty line that the cold wind carves between the world of those who revel in the night, who stay warm and safe, and others.
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Living in the Eastern Cape is living in a graveyard. The bleached bones of stories pierce the landscape in silence, clung to by the sinewy dust roads poking off the tar where life still moves. They relinquish their stories only to those who go looking. Quietly asking passers by to take a detour, explore. There is a treasure down every vein of tarless dirt.
The streets are a mess. Vuvuzelas and singing crawl along up ahead. Someone was allegedly beaten up yesterday for getting too close. The local paper showed a pretty serious head injury on a fairly unhappy-looking man. He told the reporter that he had been assaulted for telling a protestor to stop throwing bottles at cars in the street. Brad, one of my journ classmates, is talking to the strike leader about the incident while Thomas and I circle the singing, dancing crowd with cameras, imagining angles, anticipating the dancing crowd’s moves. In South Africa, singing and dancing are as much a part of the protest landscape as violence. Read the rest of this entry »
The wind tumbles uncoordinatedly down the side roads. It’s the fastest thing in the quiet streets – not quite refreshing, but blowing hard enough to lift the heat from my skin, to make me believe that it’s not really as hot as it is. Dust crunches softly underfoot, leaping up in angry puffs as Yusuf, Katherine and I approach the community hall.
Camera in hand, I follow Hailey through the roads of Glenmore as the Sunday afternoon beats down on us. She, in turn, is following Ben Mafane, the township patriarch whose athletic frame understates his age. It’s easy to understand why he is dubbed the ‘Mandela of Glenmore’, having been a former boxer who now teaches the sport to many of the local youths. Some of them are with us, forming his entourage as we go from house to house.
