Reporting Cape Town

Nomphelo Ndayi, a pretty 17-year-old, swayed back and forth in front of a rag-tag group of youngsters, leading them in a sweet Xhosa choral tune. Meanwhile, a few 5-year-olds on the bleachers kept time on bongo drums that they beat with vigilant fervor.

If it weren’t for the Sakhuluntu cultural group, the children who were dancing and drumming at a small amphitheater behind the political science building at Rhodes University might have been begging on street corners, drinking in taverns or otherwise idling their days away in the impoverished rural outskirts of Grahamstown.

But thanks to Sakhuluntu, the kids were a gospel choir, a percussion ensemble and a team of dancers. Very hungry dancers.

“Merran, we are out of rice and the mothers would like to know what they should cook,” asked one of the boys from the nearby town of Trappes Valley. Merran Marr is the chairperson of Sakhuluntu, which was rehearsing for a show it would perform in early July during Grahamstown’s National Arts Festival.

“Well, we have plenty of maize, can’t she make a soup or something?” Marr asked. 

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Sakhuluntu started a decade ago when Vuyo Booi, a Trappes Valley native, started operating small arts program for youth in the one-room RDP house that was provided to him by the government. He wanted provide an alternative to the bleak township lifestyle, where high unemployment rates persist and many adults while their days away in shebeens.

“When you’re growing up in the townships, you think the things old people do are the things you have to do,” Booi said. “We want to make sure they have dreams." 

Year-round, the group offers daily workshops in drama, dance and art for children aged six to 17 in Trappes Valley and the nearby Joza township.

Three years ago, Booi brought on Marr, a trained art psychotherapist, to begin building partnerships with other South African organizations like the National Arts Festival.

For the past two years, the National Arts Festival has provided Sakhuluntu with a small grant to organize its own performance, which they call Art Factory, during the month-long showcase of South African theater, dance and music. In the first week of the festival, Marr and her staff walked the streets of Grahamstown to recruit children performing in white-face on the street for coins. They offered to feed them hot meals and give them an exposure to arts that most of them had never had.

“Once a child has had just some sense of hope ignited in them, even if they don’t have any input again after that, we hope that experience will remain within them and allow them to continue to aspire to something outside of their circumstances,” she said.

Each day, the children practiced dance routines and songs rooted in their Xhosa background, but with a contemporary twist.

“Cultural heritage is extremely important, but it often has no meaning to them in the reality of their lives,” Marr said. “So we try to teach them to make it a bit more contemporary.”

Trying to emulate the clowns and stilt-walkers they see on the streets of Grahamstown during the festival, the children smeared their faces with limestone dust they found at a local quarry.

In between spurts of bongo-drumming and gum-boot slapping, they rehearsed drama skits based on what they see daily in the townships (“A lot of drunken brawls, people staggering around and getting into fights,” Marr said).

To help with cooking, training the kids and managing the organization, Marr recruits the jobless young adults and parents from the townships.

“We’re trying to share our skills so that the organization isn’t so dependent on just a handful of people,” she said. “We’re trying to recruit youth who are just coming out of school, whose parents can’t afford to send them out for further training.”

 “It keeps you active in a physical way,” Ndayi said. “And it teaches you to be flexible. But it’s hard when the kids don’t listen.” 

This year, she also had help from two professional artists’ collectives: performance art group MixTape and Cape Town puppeteers Unima. Two days before the group’s final performance, two Unima puppeteers were helping the adult volunteers build two giant puppets – a grandfather and granddaughter - to use in a skit.

“Don’t paint the insides of the hands,” said puppeteer Daya Heller to a farm worker who was slathering an enormous paper-mache hand with brown paint. “We don’t have much brown paint left.” 

It was a testament to Sakhuluntu’s limited resources, which range from nonexistent to very minimal, in the best of times. The makeshift cooks and conductors Sakhuluntu recruits from the townships don’t work for money (there isn’t any), but simply for something positive to do. During breaks, the kids fashion costumes out of trash bags and painted cardboard boxes. 

“You teach them to make art with very little, because they have nothing,” Marr said. 

Despite their financial obstacles, Marr considers last year’s Art Factory to be a success – so much so, she said, that they nearly put themselves out of business.

Last year the children she recruited came to rehearsals consistently and formed a tight-knit group. In fact, last year’s program improved their skills so much that this year, some of them decided that instead of going to Art Factory they would stay on the streets and make money.

“It hasn’t been a consistent group,” she said. “Which has been very problematic to try to create a new show.”

“But interestingly, people have been commenting that the kids’ street performances have reached a different level this year – they’re much more innovative.”

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The day of the performance, a small group of Sakhuluntu supporters gathered in the amphitheater to watch. Art Factory started with a poetry reading, followed by two songs and a dance routine accompanied by maracas made of Coca-Cola cans with rocks in them.

What unfolded was a surprisingly cohesive show for a group of kids with no formal arts training and only a few days of rehearsal time. There were skits of warriors rescuing princesses and animals stalking through jungles. The giant puppets made their debut, staggering toward the audience with multi-colored hands outstretched. The older kids cheered and clapped while the younger ones burst into tears, turning their heads in terror. (“They always cry, I’m not really sure why,” said Unima puppeteer Ima Meleng.)

Afterward, Booi spoke about the importance of community organizations like Sakhuluntu. 

“Each and every day in the townships, there is something going wrong,” he said. “These kids need to see life as an achievement.”

During the afternoon of July 4, at least, it certainly was.

- Olga Khazan