Ilima Agro-Musicology and Festivity
The Academy is a creative response to the dominant reality defining rural livelihoods (of poverty, underdevelopment, inequality, lack of access to promised essential services and promised constitutional rights, poor access to information and ecological crises). This is the lasting legacy of genocide, colonisation and apartheid that rural people have faced over some 3 centuries. The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown (from March 2020) have worsened these conditions.
ChosiChosi draws creative and spiritual inspiration from the African calabash which symbolises unity and solidarity. Resilient and adaptable to climate change, it grows and thrives in all African countries, and other parts of the world. Whilst primarily used as a food, it is also used as a container for milk and small household solids, as an input in making crafts and bows for bow music, and other uses. It is therefore a powerful transformative tool for raising and expanding the potential of rural children.
PROBLEM ANALYSIS
The main problem for this project is the limited opportunities for rural children in Keiskammahoek to learn, grow and develop their knowledge, skills and potential. Given the historic and systemic limits to their lives, Keiskammahoek’s children are structurally disabled from realising the promise of a post-apartheid South Africa. In this contemporary South Africa, they are still subject to the dictates of racialised, gendered access to opportunities, resources, information, knowledge and assets.
The mid-March closure of schools and day-care centres (due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown) have disrupted the learning, growth and development of these children. The community and government do not yet realise the extent to which the arts, crafts and heritage can play a powerful role to address the new yearnings, needs and challenges introduced by the pandemic.
Keiskammahoek has natural, heritage and human resources it can rely on to build better futures for its children. The local heritage resources represent sites through which black people marked their days of pre-colonial sovereignty and used in their resistance to dispossession. These are the resources the Academy will draw from (with the calabash as the flagship).
Rural children deserve the best. By being exposed to the versatile calabash, black rural children will be enabled to reclaim a positive African identity as their solid foundation upon which to grow as agents to transform a racist, sexist, unequal world into one of equity, justice, freedom, creativity and sustainable development.
Impact
The intended impact was the exvactiation of lost cultural knowledge, artistic skills as basis of self - knowledge by underprivileged rural children.
The main challenge for this ambitious vision to start materializing was the changes and challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic had brought ,which became a time of crisis and trauma for so many rural dwellers. COVID-19 has imposed so much fear, depression and a build up of mental health issues for children and communities not just in Keiskamahoek.
Within the first two months of the project local children have already discovered new knowledge of their culture and artistic skills through:
The exposure to indigenous bow music
The history of choral music
Bead making and
Indigenous music orchestration
All the above mentioned activities brought a sense of belonging and a lot of creative ways that children were able to grasp information.
The project funding has enabled a sense of independence and a drive for transferring pure knowledge that can lead children to think of themselves as young movers and shakers by using creativity as a tool for social transformation and an economically viable society from below.
