Slow walk through Main Street

Last week-end, I experienced one of those — all too rare — refreshing periods of exhilaration that gave me renewed hope for South Africa as a country.

I attended a volksfees in the platteland!

Yes! A volksfees in die ware sin van die woord!

I hope that, when the annual Cederberg festival in the town of Clanwilliam comes around again — as it will, in May next year — you will make the effort to attend. Hopefully, it will lift your spirit as well!

Because, God knows, don’t we all need such experiences?

Right now, everyone seems to be complaining about the new South Africa. A feeling of darkness and gloom is enveloping us. Nothing is working out the way we had hoped. Though I am writing this blog post from the perspective of a white person (for reasons utterly beyond my control — I was born white), I have the sneaky suspicion that many black and coloured readers might understand, in broad terms, what I’m talking about.

Before I tell you all about Clanwilliam, let’s briefly go back in time to the mid-nineties. In the mid-nineties, those of us who had the power to vote in FW de Klerk’s referendum, voted for democracy. With our vote, we were effectively saying: let’s put the past behind us, let’s reject the old-fashioned and archaic thinking of the old National Party. Let’s work together to form a brand-new, modern country with a brand-new, modern Constitution.

So we voted, and we got all those things. Or so it seemed at first.

One of the remarkable things that happened during those first few years of post-apartheid bliss was the apparently spontaneous eruption of a number of Afrikaans arts festivals. Whereas, before, the Grahamstown arts festival was the only really significant major cultural event — if you discount all those boring Afrikaans open-air speeches by bloated cabinet ministers at the Voortrekker Monument — all of a sudden, every town from Oudtshoorn to Potchefstroom was breaking away from the stronghold of state-backed Calvinism to celebrate the freedom we all felt in our bones.

Arts festivals were the new Afrikaners’ way of saying: “Here we are, we are now a part of the new South Africa, we are no longer in the laager, we want to share what we’ve got with all South Africans.”

These festivals were open to all races. Most of them were quite raucous affairs, with beer-tents and flea-markets and wine-tasting and contemporary new theatre productions that reflected the new spirit of the times.

The middle and late nineties was a wonderful time to be a South African, and it was an especially wonderful time to be Afrikaans.

There was only one tiny problem.

People of other races — even Afrikaans people of the so-called “non-white” persuasion, to use the archaic Nationalist term — paid little or no attention to these cultural festivals. The festivals remained, for the most part, white affairs.

I’m not sure why! Can anyone help me here?

Was it because the average prices of accommodation, etc was too high? Did blacks prefer toy-toying by themselves instead of joining our volkspele? Did it have something to do with Maslow’s hierarchy? In what way was the new spirit of Afrikanerdom still out of touch with the rest of the country?

Be that as it may; as dissatisfaction with the new South Africa grew, as the centre started falling apart, Afrikaners started asking themselves very critical questions. Some of these questions were in the form of accusations and counter-accusations. Afrikaans columnists and writers, especially the liberal ones, were saying things like: “Our arts festivals are too white.” “These events are nothing but boerebasaars.” Once again, it was a closed discussion. Only Afrikaans intellectuals took part. No-one else paid any attention, least of all the previously disenfranchised communities, who had their own problems to cope with and couldn’t care less about the latest CDs by Juanita or Blackie Swart.

In the absence of feedback from other South Africans, and in response to disillusionment with the rampant slide towards incompetence and corruption in the ANC, young Afrikaners turned their own cultural revolution upside down. They gave up attempts to reach out to the rest of South Africa, and caved in on themselves. Thus, the De La Rey generation was born.

Of course, the members of the De La Rey generation had some kind of a point. These were important voices. But they remained voices removed from everyday reality. Like Julius Malema, most of these kids had never formed part of the struggle for or against apartheid, they had never taken part in the ghastly bush war, and they tended to sentimentalise and over-simplify the past.

Not only the De La Rey generation was spawned in this cultural vacuum, but also events like Die Huisgenoot Skouspel, the Rittelfees, et cetera. Having been rejected by mainstream South Africa, young Afrikaans singers retreated back into the laager where they spent most of their time singing to themselves in the mirror. It didn’t bother them any more that people attending the Skouspel were almost 100% white. It didn’t bother them that the only black faces of their own cultural façade were a very tiny percentage of token persona. And it certainly didn’t bother them when I failed to get some of my coloured colleagues into the gates at the Rittelfees.

The Afrikaans music industry was blossoming into a huge and very profitable niche market, and they no longer needed the support of the vast majority of South Africans who had, for reason of their own, chosen to distance themselves from the phenomenon.

The fact that this was developing into a very unhealthy state of affairs registered only with a small minority Afrikaans people.

Moreover, many of those who still felt marginalised and angry did not know how to articulate their sense of dissatisfaction. Bands like Fokofpolisiekar sprang up, with blistering anger, angst-filled tunes and brilliant (if somewhat obscure) lyrics, but theirs was a revolution without focus. Many of their fans probably followed them for the wrong reasons, and the new Afrikaans rock scene fizzled out into fashionable drug abuse and staged decadence even faster than their Voëlvry counterparts had done two decades before.

Only with the advent of Afrikaans hip-hop, a year or two ago, did it seem as if a bridge might after all be built between the young people of, say, Bellville, and the young people of Mitchell’s Plain. (I say might, because at this point I am still too painfully aware that those tattoo’s on the Ninja’s body is everything but authentic Cape Flats gangster-speak!) Be that as it may; hip-hop, I hope, is here to stay, for at least a while, and as long as the door is open, there is always the possibility that something truly innovative may be lurking just around the corner. Personally, though, I think the jury is still out on whether the youth of South Africa has the will or ability to create a truly multicultural metaphor on grass-roots level.

A shared set of multicultural symbols is not only something we desperately need for its own sake, of course, but such a collective sense of identity will almost certainly be our only effective weapon against the new wave of fat cats who are plundering and polarising South Africans just like their predecessors had been doing since 1948.

Having said all this, let’s get back to the Cederberg festival in the little town of Clanwilliam.

Yes! For this is the ONE Afrikaans cultural festival that, in this present day and age, is NOT too white, NOT part of the paranoid laager mentality of the De La Rey generation, nor overtly cynical and decadent like the Fokofpolisiekar imitators.

The Cederberg Festival is also NOT a gathering of idealistic armchair liberals, NOR is it a stronghold of racist Afrikaner right-wingers. It is simply a happy little place, a backyard, so to speak, where Afrikaans people of different backgrounds happen to find activities in common.

Most of the festival takes place in the town’s main road. There are clowns, there are donkey car rides for the kids, there are stalls with home-made food, there are “Rieldans competitions” organised by the ATKV (“rieldans”, for those of you who don’t know, is a traditional rural dance genre which has recently started incorporating bodily movements not unlike those of the late Michael Jackson), there are hundreds of Afrikaans people from different backgrounds rubbing shoulders with one another without as much as even a hint of racial tension.

I happened to walk up and down that street a few times, taking random shots with my BlackBerry. These are some of the images I got. I supplied fitting bylines in Afrikaans (those of you who don’t understand Afrikaans, please ask an Afrikaans friend to translate them for you!):

The street scenes playing themselves out in Clanwilliam made me wonder whether we had not been in too much of a hurry to try and “enforce” reconciliation in South Africa. Shouldn’t we perhaps sit back and simply allow cross-cultural exchanges to develop at their own pace? What if, instead of spending so much time panicking about the so-called big issues, we simply reminded ourselves of the everyday stuff that really count? Instead of accusing and pointing fingers at one another, as we have been doing on and off since 1995, should we not rather focus on the simply little things that ordinary people have in common?

Who knows? The real new South Africa may only be a donkey car ride away!

PS: For those higher up on Maslow’s hierarchy, who want more than just street parties, Clanwilliam has fine restaurants, too, such as the legendary Reinholdts (a wonderful dingy little place filled with ancient framed portraits of Afrikaans cultural icons such as Gé Korsten, Rina Hugo and a very youthful-looking Steve Hofmeyr) and friendly guest houses such as the magnificent Long House ( www.thelonghouse.co.za/ ). Apart from that, the Cederberg festival usually boasts book discussions, talks by well-known authors, art exhibitions, and a small number of really good theatre productions; among others, this year David Kramer visited the town with his famous Ellen Pakkies show.