Recent news from Cape Town

Here is an excerpt from the latest email from my friend Hugh in Cape Town (received Tuesday, July 8). Notice the last paragraph, which relates to some of the problems that make the work of Cross-Cultural Solutions and its volunteers so important.

I have just returned from Grahamstown so I am putting things in order again. The festival was a hoot. The National Arts Festival is the biggest one of its kind in Africa, There are over 100 venues offering everything from theatre (main and fringe) to dance, music, comedy, visual arts, and literature. The action starts at 10am and finishes at midnight. The entire town is used including all the university facilities, theatres, concert halls residences, lecture theatres and parkes. The schools all provide their halls, gymnasiums as well as scout halls and drill halls. Theatre seating is improvised using scaffolding to create raked seating. The students union is turned into a nightclub and the townspeople get in on the action by creating street stalls, improvised restaurants, and taking space at the village green which is turned into a fair selling all kinds of crafts, trinkets, souveniers and junk as well as food.

The people of Grahamstown built a monument to the 1820 settlers about 25 years ago. Instead of a statue or a tower they opted for a cultural complex consisting of a concert hall, theatres and exhibition spaces and this forms the core of the festival. We saw two concerts here, one a formal programme of classical music and singing and the other a gala concert featuring the Cape Town Symphony doing an eclectic choice of pieces.

We saw an average of 4 shows a day, many of them one man productions usually lasting an hour or so. We also saw a fair amount of stand-up comedy, which the 2 boys loved ( the third, Tristan, is doing community work with a bunch of kids from around the world in something called Global Leadership Adventures). We stayed in a university residence which was spartan but for sleeping only because we were out on the town every day.

Highlights were a condensed version of Midsummernights Dream - only Puck's story and the thespians - played out in a large garden where the audience moved from scene to scene as the actors used different parts of the garden as backdrops - and the jazz festival which is a mini festival within the main festival. There were a number of international players so it was interesting to hear the different types of jazz being played.

Meanwhile back in Cape Town a cold front had set in and it came bucketing down. Yesterday the City announced that 16,000 people had been displaced due to flooding. The problem is that for the last 14 years the city has received about 45,000 immigrants per annum and there is no way that the city infrastructure has been able to keep up. So every year disaster management goes on high alert to try and help the indigent. Today the forecast is for more rain.