MAHALA: By Ben Fogel, images by Bazil Raubach and Zoe Henry. This was the third time I attended the Grahamstown National Arts Festival, now as a fourth year student at Rhodes University. The role that the festival plays for the town has become increasingly apparent as my own interests and work have increasingly shifted out of the bubble of Rhodes into the outlying townships that surround Grahamstown.

Unemployment in Grahamstown hovers around 70%, and the majority of the city’s (yes it’s a city, we have a cathedral) population still live in townships, lacking access to basic services. Situated on the hills directly opposite the University, the location of the townships in some respect symbolizes an antagonism that exists in Grahamstown. A city of underground resistance from Makana to the birth of black consciousness, rubbing up uncomfortably alongside Grahamstown the colonial city, the British settler outpost set up to clear the Xhosa off their land. As well as the site of a university which still bears the name of that arch-imperialist megalomaniac Cecil John Rhodes. The Festival serves as a break from this everyday disjuncture; although it is the one time of the year where the majority of the students are out of town, the various businesses dependent on student clientele do good business as a sea of visitors from South Africa’s artistic community and travellers from all around the world, descend on the town for ’11 Days of AmaZing’ – the decidedly lame slogan of the National Arts Festival.

Traders from all over the country set up small stalls at two key locations in town, the more bourgeois ‘Village Green’ located on the rugby fields next to the Bantu Steven Biko Student Union building. At the Village Green, one can find everything from R15 Chow Mein, hippie capitalists floating tie-die merchandise for R300 a pop, trancekop wares and a small group of hip new designers from across the country like Cape Town’s Intsangu brand. The Village Green is still very much a white space, reserved for the mostly white families who travel to Fest every year and have the cash money to splash on crafts. It’s always amusing to see some Afrikaans family from the Free State stop and stare in bewilderment at a giant Buddha bong at one of the several head shops operating in the locale.

Read more