Is this an instance of “white monopoly capital” flexing its significant muscles to exercise soft power in a new sector? Perhaps it is simply sportswashing, part of a public relations strategy. Or is it just possible that Stellenbosch FC’s purported vision — “To build a sustainable football pathway for the Cape winelands region and to be a catalyst for social upliftment” — can be taken at face value? I like to think that it can.
Stellenbosch — as a town, as a university, as the hub of a network of socioeconomic capital, as a symbol — is changing. It has been changing, slowly, for a while. But one senses, among a number of its movers and shakers, an impatience with the speed of change.
The looked-for acceleration is more discernible in the arts sector. It was prominent at an event held in August to announce the second edition of the Stellenbosch Triennale (scheduled to take place from February 19 to April 30 2025), at which curators Khanyisile Mbongwa and Mike Tegere Mavura laid out a manifesto for the Triennale under the theme “BA’ZINZILE: A Rehearsal for Breathing”.
Invoking a state of stillness and calm, but also “persisting” and “insisting”, this respiratory rubric is an expansive one. It suggests a process of survival, healing and reparation (“ukuphefumla ngenxeba — to breathe through the wound”), as well as acts of experimentation and improvisation, with “jazz as a black tradition” another point of reference. The Triennale will be undertaken in a spirit of reflection towards activism: a rehearsal for “changes we aspire to enact in the real world”.
Sixteen artists of colour have been invited from across the global south to make works on-site in the Oude Libertas precinct, responding to local conditions and using local materials. This approach (rather than shipping works from around the continent and the world) will reduce the Triennale’s carbon footprint. It also aligns with the aim of the Stellenbosch Outdoor Sculpture Trust, the NPO driving the Triennale: bringing contemporary art to a broad audience by mounting free exhibitions.
The main Triennale programme includes From the Vault, an exhibition that will “exhume archives and engage with buried museum collections”. Billed as “an unravelling of history, an undoing of narratives”, this is imagined as a kind of Oedipal tussle, a wrestle with the ghosts of curators past at sites of institutional power like the Rupert Museum and the Stellenbosch University Museum.
The dance between tradition and innovation — the balance of affirming and subverting received norms — also characterises the Toyota Stellenbosch Woordfees. Unquestionably one of the country’s major annual arts festivals, Woordfees has it all: music and drama, literature and visual arts, dance and comedy. There is fine food and wine. There is serious discussion.
This year, the Woordfees organisers have worked hard to convey to prospective visitors that theirs is not an exclusively Afrikaans festival. They also rightly resist the false assumption that “Afrikaans” means “white”. And with the recent announcement that Woordfees and other key players in the arts sector have launched the Festival Enterprise Catalyst (FEC) project, enabling artists to tour their works in a sustainable circuit, Stellenbosch remains an important site of SA arts pilgrimage.
• The Toyota Stellenbosch Woordfees takes place from September 28 to October 6.
This article originally appeared in Business Day.
CHRIS THURMAN: A dance between tradition and innovation
Stellenbosch remains an important site of SA arts pilgrimage
Image: Supplied
My son, a newly minted football fanatic, tells me that he supports Stellenbosch FC. He is at that preteen age when following a winning team is all-important (in the English Premiership, he is a 100% behind Manchester City) so Mamelodi Sundowns might have seemed the obvious choice.
But the rise and rise of Stellenbosch FC is an under-heralded but significant SA sports story. Within five seasons, the club has leapt from the National First Division to being a Premier Soccer League title contender, qualifying for the MTN8 and the CAF Confederation Cup.
This is not an unfamiliar pattern in the world of professional club football; a big cash injection tends to be followed by on-field improvements, building a club’s brand, bringing in new supporters and generating more revenue, resulting in self-perpetuating success. In the case of Stellenbosch FC, the money behind the good news story is Johann Rupert and Remgro, via the Stellenbosch Academy of Sport.
CHRIS THURMAN: A story of mothers and daughters and survival
Is this an instance of “white monopoly capital” flexing its significant muscles to exercise soft power in a new sector? Perhaps it is simply sportswashing, part of a public relations strategy. Or is it just possible that Stellenbosch FC’s purported vision — “To build a sustainable football pathway for the Cape winelands region and to be a catalyst for social upliftment” — can be taken at face value? I like to think that it can.
Stellenbosch — as a town, as a university, as the hub of a network of socioeconomic capital, as a symbol — is changing. It has been changing, slowly, for a while. But one senses, among a number of its movers and shakers, an impatience with the speed of change.
The looked-for acceleration is more discernible in the arts sector. It was prominent at an event held in August to announce the second edition of the Stellenbosch Triennale (scheduled to take place from February 19 to April 30 2025), at which curators Khanyisile Mbongwa and Mike Tegere Mavura laid out a manifesto for the Triennale under the theme “BA’ZINZILE: A Rehearsal for Breathing”.
Invoking a state of stillness and calm, but also “persisting” and “insisting”, this respiratory rubric is an expansive one. It suggests a process of survival, healing and reparation (“ukuphefumla ngenxeba — to breathe through the wound”), as well as acts of experimentation and improvisation, with “jazz as a black tradition” another point of reference. The Triennale will be undertaken in a spirit of reflection towards activism: a rehearsal for “changes we aspire to enact in the real world”.
Sixteen artists of colour have been invited from across the global south to make works on-site in the Oude Libertas precinct, responding to local conditions and using local materials. This approach (rather than shipping works from around the continent and the world) will reduce the Triennale’s carbon footprint. It also aligns with the aim of the Stellenbosch Outdoor Sculpture Trust, the NPO driving the Triennale: bringing contemporary art to a broad audience by mounting free exhibitions.
The main Triennale programme includes From the Vault, an exhibition that will “exhume archives and engage with buried museum collections”. Billed as “an unravelling of history, an undoing of narratives”, this is imagined as a kind of Oedipal tussle, a wrestle with the ghosts of curators past at sites of institutional power like the Rupert Museum and the Stellenbosch University Museum.
The dance between tradition and innovation — the balance of affirming and subverting received norms — also characterises the Toyota Stellenbosch Woordfees. Unquestionably one of the country’s major annual arts festivals, Woordfees has it all: music and drama, literature and visual arts, dance and comedy. There is fine food and wine. There is serious discussion.
This year, the Woordfees organisers have worked hard to convey to prospective visitors that theirs is not an exclusively Afrikaans festival. They also rightly resist the false assumption that “Afrikaans” means “white”. And with the recent announcement that Woordfees and other key players in the arts sector have launched the Festival Enterprise Catalyst (FEC) project, enabling artists to tour their works in a sustainable circuit, Stellenbosch remains an important site of SA arts pilgrimage.
• The Toyota Stellenbosch Woordfees takes place from September 28 to October 6.
This article originally appeared in Business Day.
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