My visit to the 2016 National Arts Festival in Grahamstown was more than just a day trip with two friends to a colourful annual event in one of the Eastern Cape’s prettiest towns. It was immersion in beauty, memory, and truth.
We set off shortly after sunrise, and after making our way inland to King William’s Town, we decided that the coastal route would make for a more scenic drive, and allow for a decent breakfast stop.
Our chatter was lively, and we had a 90s music mix for a soundtrack. The driver, knowing of my love for Tori Amos, turned the volume up a notch whenever something from Little Earthquakes played. The appreciated gesture did not go unnoticed.
Family of mine have lived in what was known as the Albany district (a mostly agricultural area around Port Alfred, Bathurst, and Grahamstown) for decades. They farmed for a good few years, and we were frequent visitors during that time.
I know that route well, but haven’t travelled it in ten years. It’s a strange feeling, being surprised by the familiar. There was more of that to come.
Breakfast with M&J
We stopped for breakfast at M&J’s, a café at Birha Crafts, an arts and craft centre in the middle of nowhere. I’m sure people must actually live around there, but where exactly that is, and it is they do, I don’t know, although I suspect it has something to do with either farming or arts ‘n crafts.
The craft centre was much as I remembered it. It wasn’t a regular stop on family trips, although I do recall buying a set of touristy “witchdoctor bones” there when I was 10 or 11 years old. A sign of things to come, in a way, and a source of much consternation for my mother.
The café itself is one of the most exquisite things you could ever see. If the walls aren’t plastered with old photographs and bits and pieces from wrecked ships, they’re covered with graffiti from people who’ve visited.
There are chairs and tables, low sofas, a beat-up old piano, and small tables veiled by doilies and crowned with kitsch, shiny ornaments.
The shelves around the counter near the entrance are laden with homemade wonders. From chocolate brownies to flapjacks, and from pickles and preserves to goodness knows what else.
It’s run by husband and wife (or vice versa) M&J, who are fine examples of Eastern Cape people at their most endearing.
I had the herbed scrambled eggs with toast. A very filling portion, and just what I needed to face the great unwashed hordes of the festival… But first, I had to taste the marmalade one of our trio got with his breakfast.
I’m quite fussy when it comes to marmalade. The line between bitter enough and too bitter is a fine one, and is easily transgressed. This, however, was like sunshine in a jar.
As we got back to the car, the friend who had been served the marmalade surprised us with bottles of the stuff as sweet mementos of our day trip.
Lick the Road – It’s Bittersweet
It’s a short drive from Birha Crafts to Port Alfred, and the closer we got to the town, the more I became aware of the stillness where there was once laughter.
The family visits stopped shortly after my aunt’s death. Given what unfolded, there was no longer any reason to visit. It’s the heart of the Sunshine Coast, but, for us, that light is dimmed.
The road to Bathurst meets the coastal route just before the town of Port Alfred. It passes through farmland and past sheep dips and a big pineapple before entering the late 19th century village which is home to the (in)famous Pig and Whistle Inn. That’s where you’ll find South Africa’s oldest continuously licensed pub.
The village is more colourful than I’ve ever seen, but a few things were gone, including Elizabeth’s Herb Nursery. It’s a hidden gem of a place, and I have every intention of returning. Especially because I’ve yet to actually see the big pineapple close-up.
The Habit of Arts Festival
I was 13 or 14 years old when I first visited the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, and had never seen anything quite like it. For a misfit in a small coastal town where art and culture have never been priorities, it was revelatory.
The place was crawling with hippies, the icy air was thick with the smell of incense, cannabis, damp wood chips, and food stalls, and I had never before seen so much art in one place. It was exciting and overwhelming, and it also offered me a chance to see something of the New Age 90s boom up close. Looking back, I think that was perhaps the first time I realised how liberating art can be.
I returned to the festival several times over the following years, although I must admit that it was only ever to visit the markets.
That changed in 2007, when I had the privilege of working at a pop-up bookshop, run by Exclusive Books, at the National Arts Festival.
I was able to trawl the markets, attend a piano and violin recital, watch a film, and see Pieter Dirk Uys in a Bambi Kellerman show. I was also able to get my heart broken for the first time, and that by a guy who grew mandrakes in a flower pot, and gave me a gift of frankincense, myrrh, and benzoin.
It was that heartbreak that led to me coming out to my mom and brother a few weeks later. Not easy, not comfortable, but profoundly liberating.
This Time Round
This year’s visit to the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown was the first in nine years. I wasn’t sure what emotions or memories would arise, but thought it a chance to make new memories; a chance to see the festival through new eyes.
Time didn’t allow us to see any shows, so we trawled the Village Green Market, had lunch, trawled the market some more, and then stopped in at an art centre hosting several exhibitions on our way out.
Much had changed. The Village Green Market is no longer on the Village Green, but on university rugby fields. It was bigger and more spacious than I remember, but lacked the charm and esoterica of the market of my teens.
I saw really beautiful things, from jewellery and clothing to ceramics and metalwork, but the prices being charged were Cape Town and Northern Johannesburg prices, not Eastern Cape prices.
Also, I thought the Fringe wasn’t as In Your Face as it had been in previous years. There were fewer hippies, which meant less cannabis and incense in the air, although I was glad to see that some of the familiar food stalls were still there.
I was able to indulge my National Arts Festival tradition of Hare Krishna (International Society for Krishna Consciousness) food for lunch, which we ate at a table in the food court tent. We sat with a woman who turned out to be a high school teacher from Durban.
The conversation was convivial. We enthused about Hare Krishna food, and she told us how she had brought some of her students to the festival for a few days. I thanked the Gods silently that there are teachers like her – people who believe in and are passionate about the power of art.
The exhibitions we saw at the Carinus Art Centre before we made our way back home included Tori Stowe, Peter Midlane, Roxandra Dardagan, Sally Scott, Anthony Stidolph, Nicky Rosselli, Charmaine Haines, Martin Haines, Richard Pullen, Lucas Bambo, Monique Rorke, and Sandy Diogo.
The work was all of exceptional quality, but the real highlights for me were Tori Stowe’s drawings, and the ceramics by Charmaine and Martin Haines.
You Don’t Need Eyes to See – You Need Vision
My visit to the Grahamstown National Arts Festival this year certainly did stir things up inside me, but not in the way I expected. There were no teary flashbacks and no shouldacouldawouldas connected to 2007 or any other year, for that matter.
I didn’t see the festival through the eyes of one starved for culture, for the unique, and the different. Instead, I experienced it as one who is an artist in their own right, as one whose beat, as a full-time journalist, covered lifestyle, arts, and culture, and as one who numbers artists of all sorts among their friends.
More than that, I experienced it as one whose life is dedicated to the traditional craft tenets of truth, beauty, wisdom, and love, encountered in mystical and mundane experience.
A few days before going to the festival, I asked if anyone from a Facebook group for Pagans in the Eastern Cape would be at there on the day we had planned to go. No one responded affirmatively, so I left it at that – until I saw, much later, that someone had asked if it was a Pagan festival.
The question made me think.
My response was that, while the festival itself is not Pagan, it’s not out of keeping with my own craft (which, while not explicitly Pagan, retains the memory of paganisms that stretch across Europe from the ancient Near East, with the occasional nod to Africa and India).
Religion and faith, whether Pagan, Christian, or other, has been the arts’ greatest patron.
The oldest art in the world is paintings on cave walls in Africa; paintings that convey something of the spiritual beliefs and realities of people who lived thousands and thousands of years ago.
In Sumerian myth, the goddess Inanna received from Enki, god of wisdom, the Me – the divine powers that are the arts of civilisation. Included among them are the visual, spoken, written, and performing arts.
Theatrical performance was a major component of the Urban Dionysia in ancient Greece. Dionysus himself was the god of theatre, plays, and choral song. In those rites, theatre was not entertainment, but an act of worship, an act of encountering the divine.
I’m convinced that true artistic creativity flows from mystical experience – even when artworks are rooted in or comment on the mundane. That mystical experience is not confined to the artist, either – it’s also found in the “moment of art”, when a viewer or reader or listener engages with or encounters something other in a work of art, be it a performance, recital, painting, sculpture, or book.
Also, a visit to a festival such as the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown provides ample opportunity to find ritual tools that are handmade, unique, have artistic merit, and are very different to the stuff that lines the shelves of almost every single esoteric shop.
The festival also would have been a lovely atmosphere in which like-minded people could have interacted in a way that doesn’t involve a computer or mobile device screen.
Perhaps next year. If I do manage to get there next year, it will hopefully be for an overnight stay, because one day there just isn’t enough; not if you want to see the markets and take in some of the shows.
Heaven in a Bowl
The Grahamstown National Arts Festival has changed. I can’t say that it is for the better or for the worse – all I can say is that it has changed, and that the change was inevitable. One of the things that hasn’t changed is the presence of ISKCON’s Hare Krishna food stall, and the wonderful dishes they serve up.
It was thanks to their stall that I discovered rice and dhal, a simple dish I’ve nicknamed Heaven in a Bowl. The dhal is cooked so that it becomes something like a soup, which is then poured over rice. It’s inexpensive, easy to prepare, and very, very tasty.
I’m not entirely sure where the following recipe comes from. I may have copied it from the ISKON publication called The Higher Taste, which I got on my first or second visit to the festival, after chatting to one of the Hare Krishna devotees inside the Anglican Cathedral of St Michael and St George. The photo isn’t mine, but only because I haven’t cooked dhal in a while.
Mung Dhal
1 cup mung dhal
7 cups water
1 cup chopped tomatoes
1 medium marrow, peeled and cut into 2.5cm cubes
5 tablespoons ghee (clarified butter – however, it works with ordinary butter or with cooking oil)
½ tablespoon fresh ginger, minced
1½ tablespoons cumin seeds
1 tablespoon black mustard seeds
1 green chilli, minced
¼ teaspoon hing/asafoetida (if you can’t find it, use a little garlic)
1½ teaspoons turmeric
Salt
Fresh coriander/cilantro leaves for garnish
In a large saucepan, heat 3 tablespoons of ghee (or butter or oil), and add the turmeric, hing, and dhal. Fry for 30 seconds on medium heat.
Add the vegetables and fry for one minute.
Add the water, salt, chilli, and ginger. Bring to boil over a high heat, and then cover the pot and leave to simmer for one hour or until the dhal has dissolved into a thick soup. Remove from heat and set aside.
In a small frying pan, heat the remaining ghee (or butter or oil). When hot, add the cumin and black mustard seeds. When the seeds start to crackle and dance, pour the contents of the frying pan into the pot of dhal – be careful, because it can sputter.
To serve, place cooked rice (basmati is best) in a bowl or on a plate, and pour over some of the dhal. Garnish with a few fresh coriander leaves.
Picnic in Akeldama 
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