An organisation in the Cape is attempting to lure kids in gang-infested areas away from criminal activity and into artistic creativity. Adam Haupt reports
I’m lurking about the former mental institution Valkenberg’s isolation cells and beginning to wonder just how the organisation CRED (Creative Education with Youth at Risk) came to be located here.
The eerie building feels more like a prison than a place of emotional healing. Valkenberg’s institutional architecture, with its heavy doors and tiny cells, provides an interesting juxtaposition to what this organisation hopes to achieve. CRED’s work is concerned with the country’s high crime rate and gang activity. It does not, however, support the discipline and punish routine advocated by those who call for the reinstatement of the death penalty.
Instead, the organisation is “trying to create alternatives to gangsterism and crime, to occupy youths’ minds, to touch their souls”, says CRED’s programme manager John Fredericks. According to Valda Lucas, CRED’s co-ordinator, they are involved in creative outreach programmes and diversion programmes as well as youth lobbying and advocacy.
Their creative outreach programme was piloted last year at Pollsmoor’s B4 section, where about 180 youths were awaiting trail. A number of artists, including Prophets of da City’s Shaheen and Ready-D, spent much time with the young inmates in a series of creative workshops on drama, music, dance, visual arts and creative writing.
The idea was for inmates to explore their creative selves and to find constructive avenues for their frustration. The artists would therefore provide basic training in dancing or drama, for example, and the youths would rehearse with these instructors for the final in-house show and tell.
But it wasn’t all pretty pictures and fly rhymes. “It’s not easy working with prisoners,” says Fredericks, commenting on how the youths try to “push time”.
His antidote: “You’ve got to try and engage them. You’ve got to meet them in their minds.”
CRED’s fundraiser, David Tosco, has directed a documentary in Pollsmoor, unusually titled [be-for(e);], about the workshops. The documentary gives one a sense of how tentative the protracted process of reaching out to troubled youths must have been, even though some success has already been achieved.
Watching it, one realises that some of the CRED workers are, themselves, former inmates. CRED worker Bongani Kula, for example, was an inmate of the prison’s B4 section when the film was shot.
“The pilot project, as a whole, has been endorsed by all relevant government departments – Justice, Safety and Security, Correctional Services, Education – and the University of Cape Town’s Institute of Criminology,” says Lucas.
A number of other workshops have since been conducted in Western Cape prisons. She says that they did much lobbying for financial support, but could only initiate their planned township roadshow after having secured additional funding from an organisation called Open Society.
The roadshow runs from September 23 to October 4 and will tour townships, including Guguletu, Elsies River, Manenberg, Khayelitsha and Langa.
Lucas says they have negotiated with a number of municipalities – like Tygerberg municipality, which “doesn’t have a youth strategy” – about involvement in the road show. The idea is to sustain the energy that CRED creates by training local communities’ youth leaders as roadshow facilitators.
Lucas notes the importance of using township youth leaders and artists “so that the children can feel this is someone who understands me”.
Ultimately, the idea is to keep kids off the streets and out of prison by allowing them to experience the decidedly healthier adrenaline rush of rehearsing for concerts or plays and then performing for their friends. This education is a vital contribution to the country’s cultural future as schools do not provide this kind of lateral stimulation.
The road show won’t be like Shell Road to Fame, breezing into town; rather, it will be conducted in consultation with communities to determine which sectors of their neighbourhoods need to be targeted.
“It may happen in a (drug) merchant’s place where the children actually are,” says Lucas, “You may go in and talk to the children there and say `Hey this is actually what we want to do. What do you think? Or are you too geroek (stoned) to do it? Can you be sober enough to do it? Can you try?'”
They’ll also use the organisation’s already existing radio drama Moenie, which is mostly in the prison lingo called Sabela to engage kids. This is where CRED programme manager John Fredericks’s talents and street credibility enter the picture.
Fredericks, who did time in prison many years ago, left his day job to devote his energy to youth work and television scriptwriting. He will head the creative writing workshops so that kids can discover constructive avenues for self-expression.
“Who knows?” says Fredericks, “There could be many Quentin Tarantinos out there.” Fredericks is a graduate of the screenwriters’ laboratory, Scrawl ’98, and the only participant to have been invited by the course principal, Colin Vaines, to return to Scrawl ’99.
Artists or concerned citizens, look out for CRED at a ghetto near you.