Sederville youth celebrate heritage

It is Saturday night the 30th April and I am at the Clanwilliam festival sitting in the school hall of Sederburg High School. The crowd of friends, mothers, fathers, community and visitors is humming while we wait for the show to start. The DJ’s music fades, the stage lights intensify and new music begins, a group of five teenagers mount the stage from the audience and begin to hip hop: the crowd goes bananas whistling, shrieking clapping excitedly, it is awesome, it is joyful, wonderful.

These players are a group of young adults who finished school recently and have decided to form a theatre group in Sederville the township of Clanwilliam. They have participated previously in the Clanwilliam Lantern Parade of UCT’s Art Project. They are intimate with the Living Landscape Project in Clanwilliam and are now being coached in the making of their plays by Lavona from the Magnet Theatre Group. I can’t help thinking how wonderful it is to see the work of NPO’s bearing fruit, being owned by the community with which they have worked, and giving meaning and purpose to young adults

A play begins and takes the shape of a journey by donkey cart from Clanwilliam over the Pakhuis Pass and beyond. The cart driver is hilarious and so are his passengers as they joggle about in the cart pointing out places along the way, stopping and getting off the cart to enact histories of the places, Leipoldt’s Grave, old footpaths along the Cedarberg, Travellers Rest, the rock paintings, the Englishman’s Grave, Wupperthal. I am wondering what makes a group of teenagers choose the heritage of their area with which to make a play. The play is informed and serious with much comedy. The acting is excellent and the dancing creates special moments of pathos. A tall slender young man splits off from his break dancing and throws himself backwards into the most haunting lyrical dance, my throat constricts as I watch him floating, twisting, turning, each movement stretched to its limit.

On one of my many visits to Clanwilliam in the Cedarberg I met a woman called Janet from Sederville. We started talking about Cape Town which she told me she had visited once. “In fact”, she told me she had moved and travelled her whole life: she was born in the Biedouw Valley and had moved from there to Heuningsvlei, then from Heuningsvlei over the Pakhuis Pass to Clanwilliam, and then on to Eselbank after which she went to Wuperthal and then back to Clanwilliam. In between all this she visited Mitchells Plein in Cape Town.  I was amazed, she had travelled to places of which I had never heard.

This is the world of the play I am watching, it is the world in which these teenagers live, hope, forge identity and meaning. They are right in the centre of heritage work making a new world for all of us. This detailed work which draws on the intimate knowledge of a far flung local area is as important to our country as is the work of the grand narrative and we should continue to encourage it in the interest of social cohesion and citizenship. I know it is the work of the Archival Platform and thank you for this space in which the very local can be recognised and saluted.

Sandra Prosalendis is an independent heritage consultant

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