I felt myself leaning forward in my seat as the cast of Rome and Juliet backed-up on stage in step with grief. The Dance Factory’s astounding performance of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy on show at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa, is literally enthralling.

Passionate performances with sweat-inducing energy are underscored by raw recordings of Vivaldi and Bach interspersed with evocative silence. My heart pounded in tune with thumping feet and plasticine bodies turned my head askew as this tragic love affair was played out on an understated stage.

While the troup entire is inspiring, the energy and passion behind this production is personified in its star and choreographer, Dada Masilo. The winner of the 2008 Standard bank Young Artist Award for Dance, 23 year old Masilo began attracting attention as an eleven year old jiver in the Joburg township where she grew up.
When she takes the stage now, it’s with a bold rawness – shaved, proud, head and bare feet that stomp out the rhythm of her soul.

She told Cue Radio “A lot of people get to see the work that I’ve made and I think that it’s gonna push me also in a different direction in terms of exploring, how to make work and choreography. It’s gonna help me grow as a dancer and choreographer. I’m just going with the flow, I’m letting what I do guide me I don’t really have any expectations at this point, I’m just going with my passion.” And that passion takes its audience hostage.

This a a powerful woman who delivers a powerhouse performance in a production with such heart that it left me shivering and drew me to my feet, along with many others in the audience at its conclusion.

I’m already looking for an excuse to enjoy an encore performance of Romeo and Juliet. Don’t miss it...if you're in the land of biltong and boerewors!    [read more]

Poverty is in your face in South Africa.

When you step off the plane you are immediately confronted by people begging – open hands; scams at the ready; people offering to carry your bags, watch your car, watch your back.

My experience of this poverty is grounded in Grahamstown – a city of 70,000 with 70% unemployment and a community divided between the affluent mostly white residents of a pretty, historic town and the black masses who live in the Apartheid-era townships that sprawl across the hills on the city’s fringe.

Sure, I’ve been exposed to beggars and abject poverty before – homelessness and drug-related crime are significant problems confronting Australia’s big cities and many other global cities I’ve visited. But it’s the scale, age and colour of the poverty that confronts and challenges you in South Africa. The problem looks exclusively black. Young children and teenagers approach you with folded bits of paper and elaborate stories – “I’m raising funds to go to a track meet in Cape Town”; “Please mother can you help me? I fight the good fight” - appealing to your compassion and sense of social justice. And, they frequently work in pairs or teams, targeting those of us with pale skin, cars and other marks of affluence in this divided society.

The knowledge that it’s this widespread poverty that fuels the extraordinarily high rates of violent crime in this country affects my responses. I find myself feeling fearful and defensive when alone on the streets. I walk quickly; eyes alert; lock the car doors while driving. I’m annoyed with myself for behaving this way – but this defensiveness is not just the product of hysterical media coverage. The statistics on rape and murder in this country are genuinely alarming and demand self-preserving behaviour. SA has the highest rate of reported rape in the world; violent assault and murder are associated with petty theft; and crime figures released last year revealed that people were less safe in their homes in some districts than on the streets due to a sharp increase in home invasions.

But fearfulness also fuels a climate which subjects the bulk of law-abiding black residents of this town to suspicion. I heard a moving piece of reporting about this experience from a black student here at the Rhodes University School of Journalism and Media Studies. He produced a radio monologue in which he described what it felt like to be a poor alien in his own town. To him, Rhodes was a world far removed from his own life in the township on the fringe. Here, he said, everyone has a car; food to eat and basic needs fulfilled. To him, life on campus was like a wealthy parallel universe to his own existence and experience of life in Grahamstown. His voice cracked when he talked of being confronted twice by the “Rhodes Police” (campus security guards who patrol the grounds) who assumed he was a threat because he was dressed like a township resident. He felt like a criminal because he was poor and didn’t easily fit into the affluent and prestige-conscious Rhodes community. This experience clearly angered and unnerved him. The humiliation in his voice was palpable.

Poverty alienates. Poverty allows crime to thrive and drives fear. Here, poverty is inescapable but its victims are too frequently made to feel invisible. They’re there in the statistics and the media sub-texts, but their voices are too rarely heard. Next time I’m asked for money, I shall ask for a name and a story in return.    [read more]

I’ve never been so stimulated in a public toilet. Get your mind out of the gutter! I mean intellectually. There I sat…on the loo, reading quotes about journalism from Nelson Mandela and Oscar Wilde inscribed on bathroom tiles that covered the walls of the cubicle.

The toilets in question are housed in an extraordinary building in a provincial city in the poorest region of South Africa. The Africa Media Matrix is home to Rhodes University’s School of Journalism and Media Studies in Grahamstown.




Built at cost of 26 million rand (approximately A$4million), and on the back of extraordinary vision, it melds state-of-the-art technology with African culture and journalism history. And wittily, at times irreverently, it tells the story of South African media struggles and champions media freedom through clever interior design that makes you gawp…particularly while using the ‘facilities’.



Let’s start the tour back in my favourite toilet cubicle…yes, I have a favourite loo here. It has tiles that quote both Nelson Mandela the founder of the Rainbow Nation and Matt Drudge – the founder of online gutter journalism. Mandela’s tile reads: “Freedom of expression is not a monopoly of the press: it is a right of us all”… appropriately, Matt Drudge’s says: “I go where the stink is”.

I was busted by a student while photographing these tiles. She said: “Wow, I’ve never seen someone take a picture of a toilet before”. I responded with the obvious: “I’m Australian”. She looked at me with judgemental understanding. Australians are the butt (a little toilet humour :) of many South African jokes. Another tile quote from Alfred Eisenstaedt seems appropriate at this s-bend (yep, more toilet humour!): “When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear”.



OK, let’s leave the loos and take a walk around the building. In the vibrantly coloured foyer is a Venda drum – made of clay, its skin-covered top is gonged to announce functions and gather staff and students. It sits beneath a mosaic wall which spells “news” in sign language and Braille. This wall houses video screens that channel student-productions, promote the School’s activities and carry and news from around Africa. Tall tables used for feasts and talk-fests are also covered in mosaic tiles portraying proof-reading symbols and carrying more inspiring quotes from journalism history, including this one from the crusading anti-Apartheid editor, Donald Woods, who was forced into exile in 1978: “Why was I, a fifth-generation white South African, Editor for 12 years of one of the country’s longest established newspapers (Daily Dispatch), escaping in disguise in fear of political police?”



Media Freedom is a major theme of this building. Behind the reception desk hangs a cloth printed with section 16 of South Africa’s constitution which guarantees free speech. Elsewhere in the building, curtains are printed with the text of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers" ; a copy of the 1991 Windhoek Declaration, which called for an independent, pluralistic and free press, hangs on a wall; and newspaper flyers and front pages relay flashpoints in South Africa’s struggle for democracy and an unfettered media.



The tea room is a slice of 1950’s activist journalism - it’s a tribute to Drum magazine, the publication which gave a platform to many influential black journalists including Nat Nakasa, who wrote: “The writer can make his choice. Bow to the social conventions and the letter of the law and keep within the confines of the white world. Or, refuse to let officialdom regulate his personal life, face the consequences and be damned”. Nakasa suicided while exiled in New York in 1965.



But this building isn’t just about symbolism and story-telling: here, art intersects with state-of-the-art technology. Colourful baskets woven from telephone wire adorn one wall of the foyer – they’re strung with a piece of thick blue high-speed cabling that represents the 35km of the stuff that weaves throughout the building, making it the ‘fastest’ edifice in Africa. This is contrasted with quirky wire radios, made by a local trader, which are triggered by sensors near the entrance to the radio studios. The building also houses a television studio and production labs adaptable for convergent journalism operations. They’ll be in full swing later this week when the AMM becomes the hub of radio, print, TV and online coverage of the National Arts Festival.





And the high-tech isn’t restricted to the building’s interior. Wrapped around the exterior is a Times Square-style electronic ticker which transmits local headlines to the Rhodes community. Yes, it’s totally OTT, but it laughs in the face of Africa’s tech-challenged, disconnected status and brashly signals the readiness of this institution to meet the future head-on.



Juxtaposed against the ticker is a rusty pre-World War One printing press which decorates the garden. Visitors are invited to cross the garden via stepping stones made from brick tiles extracted from the floor of Grocott’s Mail – the oldest independent newspaper in South Africa. The paper is now owned and operated by this journalism school and used as a training facility for its students. Shredded Grocott’s printing plates are woven around pots at the building’s entrance and, back inside, old printing blocks and trays from the paper decorate the walls. This is a building that looks to the future without forgetting the past.

Eight degrees and more than a dozen outreach-projects are driven by the people of the AMM. There are some 50 staff and over 500 full-time students attached to this place and at the healm is the zeal behind the AMM, Head of School, Prof. Guy Berger.



Other AMM highlights include:

• Teardrop shaped lampshades made from woven 16mm film that light the internal stairwell



• The TV camera and tripod in the foyer painted in bright, traditional design by an Ndebele artist
• The banner at the entrance to student computer labs which bears the image of Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing, made from bottle tops
• The confidence of the building: it screams the successes of its occupants and graduates with their achievements and outputs proudly championed on its walls.    [read more]

While thousands of immigrants sheltered in pseudo refugee camps in Johannesburg, I ran the gauntlet between the international and domestic terminals in a city riven by violence.

I arrived in South Africa four days ago - trying to pretend I wasn’t afraid. Fear is the stuff of life here. I’d been warned – about rape; AIDS; Joburg airport gangs; car-jacking; being murdered for my mobile phone; home invasions; xenophobic violence. Only a week before I left, the violent attacks on immigrants that claimed over 60 lives in South Africa, threatened to ground me as Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) issued a ‘do not travel alert’ for Joburg entire and all SA townships. The central piece of advice I’d received was “whatever you do, don’t leave Joburg airport”.

So, when it became apparent that I’d have to collect my luggage and walk between terminals, amidst a construction zone, to catch my connecting flight upon landing in Joburg, I felt obliged to be scared. And I was apprehensive. But even before I got off the plane, I felt more alive.

Welcome to Africa – land of contradictions that swallows your soul whole and makes you bend to its desires.

I’m here for 5 weeks to work on a journalism project at Rhodes University in the sleepy provincial city of Grahamstown which bursts alive during the South African National Arts Festival. But I’m also here on a personal journey…to push my boundaries, challenge my preconceptions and confront my fears.

Grahamstown is home to approximately 50,000 people - only 6,000 of them white – where the scars of Apartheid still require acute care. It’s home to a world-class university; several prestigious private schools and many churches. But the city is crippled by seventy percent unemployment; rampant poverty and governmental neglect.

It’s also a town whose landscape bears a striking resemblance to my own little village of Bungendore via Canberra. Rolling hills, colonial architecture, even gum trees appearing in the Rhodes grounds unexpectedly between the flaming aloes that colour the bush. But there the similarities end. Here, life is cheap and the battles for justice which found their armoury in this Eastern Cape region during the Apartheid years are not yet over.

I’m writing this at the end of National Youth Day on June 16th – a day which commemorates the anniversary of the 1976 Soweto student uprisings. On that day about 200 young people gave their lives in a protest against forced instruction in Afrikaans which turned violent when security police opened fire on the uniformed students. Ahead of the protest, one student wrote in The World newspaper: "Our parents are prepared to suffer under the white man's rule. They have been living for years under these laws and they have become immune to them. But we strongly refuse to swallow an education that is designed to make us slaves in the country of our birth”.

Tonight the anniversary is marked by poignant advertisements on the SABC in which little children say they dream of a day when they don’t have to fear rape and murder and xenophobic violence. It’s a wake-up call for dreamers like me who would like to believe Nelson Mandela’s Rainbow Nation vision is still an achievable reality. But the extraordinary capacity of South Africans to laugh in the face of adversity, and persevere in the presence of hardship, provides real inspiration and gives this interested observer hope.

As I explore this city and the township on its fringe, Joza, listening to myriad voices and looking below the surface dirt of violence, crime and poverty that stereotypes South Africa, I'll do my best to pedal that hope to you.    [read more]