San and Khoi Culture in Flatfontein is vibrant and thriving through the youth’s artistic expression despite challenges

The community’s painful history and complicated legacy, is aptly told through an exhibition titled Places -In Me: A Photovoice Exhibition that opened at Origins Centre at Wits on Saturday amid scintillating performances by a traditional Khoi San and a hip-hop group from Flatfontein.

By Edward Tsumele, CITYLIFE/ARTS Editor

Somewhere in the Northern Cape, 15 KM from Kimberly, there is a unique settlement of a proud people whose ancestors have for the longest of time, before anyone else known in history, traversed the valleys, hills, forests and mountains of Southern Africa, hunting for food and engraving their life’s journey on rocks.

However, this unique’ community’s rich history and cultural heritage, and how they came to be on this part of South Africa is complex. This is because it includes wars in which their ancestors were made to be a part of by the Apartheid Government. The elderly people of the San and Khoi Communities of Flatfontein, would still remember vividly how they fought the border wars alongside the South African Defence Force in both South West Africa and Angola.

These wars were not their wars. Having of course been roped into the war that raged between those fighting for the independence of Namibia as well as participating in the civil war of Angola, that painful past is still with them today. Even affecting the current generation of the youth who were even not born, but instead were born in the new South Africa, a country to which this community was settled just before South Africa attained its freedom in 1994.

This painful history and complicated legacy, was told on Saturday at Origins Centre at Wits where a travelling exhibition titled Places -In Me: A Photovoice Exhibition that opened amid scintillating performances by a traditional Khoi San group from Flatfontein -and wait- a hip-hop group, also from Flatfontein. The exhibition is the result of a collaboration between an international research team, COSMO-ART, and two Platfontein based NGOS, the Southern African San Community Development Organisation (SASDO) and San Community Development (SANCD).

The project comes from a common desire to gather together and make visible the perspectives that young people in Platfontein have on their place in South African society through the way they see the place where they live.Equipped with cameras, the project was to document different aspects of their environment that are important, relevant and interesting to them. Then interviews contacted in 2022 made it possible to collecting the authors’ points of view on their pictures. Th exhibition therefore proposes a dialogue between photos and expression by the nine young women and men who took part in the photovoice project.

The photographs and the voices of platfontein’s young people speak of the beauty, suffering and aspirations, disappointments and of shifting identities. In this visual exploration, the images capture and convey the individual perspectives of the authors, how they see themselves, how they define themselves and how they relate to the world, and how they perceive as important or different.

The audience hosted by the French Institute of South Africa, which was also one of the several partners that brought this exhibition to life, witnessed these two performances from the youth of Platfontein, looking at their lives from two, and one may add contradictory aspects of their lives.

A theatrical performance by the one group dealt with the deep traditions of the San and Khoi people through dramatizing a marriage ritual. We were able to get an insight into how the San and Khoi people married with regards to their rituals accompanying a marriage.

The story was nuanced but putting it in simple terms, when a young man identified a suito in the community, a delegation was sent to the young woman’s family to ask the family to allow for the marriage to take place.

However, the intricate and delicate negotiations did not always go smoothly under which the girl would be ‘stolen’ and taken to the young man’s family where she practically suddenly becomes his wife from the very first day that she is taken there. From here hard negotiations would begin, starting with a very hostile exchange of words, and sometimes a physical altercation would take place between the two warring families. However, at the end cool minds would prevail and emotions contained to be replaced by a wedding celebration.

The other group which is made up of young talented hip hop musicians from the community, who compose music in their mother tongue, but when performing their songs, there is nothing to suggest that this is music performed by a group from an ancient ethnic group. Except for the language, otherwise they could be a hip-hop group from any of the townships in Gauteng. Their stage demeanour is modern, and so is their overall presentation of their music. This group is so talented and their presentation so sleek that they are a hip-hop label manager’s dream. The youngsters are of course a product of popular South African contemporary culture.

However, an academic researcher, who spent number of years researching the existence of a vibrant hip-hop culture in Flatfontein explained that their lyrics are actually hard hitting as they reveal the deep fissures in their community, their frustration with lack of opportunities, the prejudice they experience from local communities who think of them as less than human and the general lack of services delivery and infrastructure experienced by this community.

However, what became clear is that this is a culturally thriving community, whose language is thriving among the residents and the youth play an important role in preserving this language through their musical expressions and the local radio station which broadcasts in the local languages.

In fact, listening to the youth who were part of a panel speak so fluently, and so confidently, one even wondered about the general perception which holds in some academic and cultural circles that the Khoi and San languages risk being lost. Yes, that is correct among especially particularly dispersed and isolated San and Khoi communities in Southern Africa/. But certainly, that is not the case with the Flatfontein community. Their language and culture is alive and thriving and thanks to the cultural immersion of their youth who are bringing their language into the contemporary world through their artistic expression.

.Places -In Me: A Photovoice Exhibition is on at Origins Centre, Wits University, Johannesburg.