Fiona Macleod
An elderly woman who long ago mastered the intricate art of a crochet needle struggles to come to terms with using a pen. Gently she is coached to hold it in her right hand and draw lines on a clean sheet of paper.
Beside her a middle-aged woman is engrossed in sketching a suburban-style house with taps. These are symbols of a security and easy lifestyle she has never known.
The two women appear oblivious to the constant din from the 200-odd locals of various ages and artistic accomplishments crammed into the Matibidi school hall. Music blares out from a DJ’s sound system set up on a stage.
When visitors or dignitaries from the organisations behind this 30-hour drawing marathon manage to slip-slide along the muddy roads to the school hall, youngsters jump up on to the stage and welcome them with a dance routine.
The drawing marathon is one of three held over weekends for the 30 000-strong communities living on the edges of Mpumalanga’s Blyde River Canyon Nature Reserve in the past month.
They are marginalised, dirt-poor rural communities, created by forced removals. The average wage-earner – a migrant labourer, a teacher, or an employee at the Aventura holiday resort in the reserve – supports a household of up to 10 people.
The drawing marathons aim to identify and consolidate artistic talent in the communities. There’s a captive market for this talent right on their doorsteps – the Blyde River reserve is the Mpumalanga Parks Board’s most popular tourist attraction, with at least 200 000 visitors each year – but the communities are not taking advantage of it.
Most of the arts and crafts being sold to the tourists are coming from outside. Production is a lot cheaper and more organised in Swaziland, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, says John-Anthony Boerma, a project organiser from the provincial department of sports, recreation, arts and culture.
The department will train a core design team of 30 mostly post-school, unemployed youths, and a few elderly women. “This will give us a combination of tradition and youthful enthusiasm,” says Boerma.
All the participants in the drawing marathons who brought along artworks or crafts, or who showed talent, will be entered on to the department’s database. The design team will network with them, co-ordinating designs and products that will be sold inside the reserve and by vendors along the tourist routes.
“The market is competitive, so the design team must be sharp and must keep on top of changes in trends and demands,” says Boerma. “We want to move beyond curios and encourage their creativity.”
It’s an enterprising pilot project that has seen the department work hand in hand with the parks board and the Motlatse forum, the facilitating committee from the communities. There are plans to repeat the project elsewhere in the province.
One of the meanings of motlatse in seSotho is “never satisfied”, says the forum’s secretary, Lillian Kgalane.
“We have a tradition of arts and crafts here, but mostly they’re utilitarian items for everyday use.
“The people just didn’t know how to go about selling these items. Maybe now they can find some satisfaction.”
There is also a rich tradition of storytelling, which until now has been undocumented. During the drawing marathons, researchers from the sociology department at Unisa have been spending time with community elders to record these stories. Most are based on myths and legend, but many date to the time of forced removals.
Boerma says the plan is to incorporate the stories and traditions documented by the Unisa researchers into the products created by the team.
For the Mpumalanga Parks Board, the project provides a vehicle for reaching out to the reserve’s neighbours and sharing with them the benefits of tourism. There are a number of land claims on the Blyde River reserve.
The parks board is investigating upgrading its tourist facilities in the area, and was last week given R150 000 by the Development Bank of Southern Africa for a feasibility study.
Says parks board facilitator Christine Chiloane: “We have a lot of international tourists visiting the Blyde River Canyon. When this project is off the ground, they will ultimately determine whether it is sustainable in the long run.”