Over a cup of tea Stephen Gray looks back at the highlights of this year’s Cedarberg Festival
They came from five towns. They came from the mission station in the mountains. They came in 4x4s packed with labourers. They came in decorated donkey-carts to the Cedarberg Festival in the Western Cape’s Clanwilliam. Say the name soberly, or it comes out as Klein Willem.
They came like village folk in those dreaded Thomas Hardy setbook novels to celebrate some community ur-feast. Here it was the bountiful rooibos tea crop. The rains were right this year for a miracle, the harvest was in without mud and undue birdshit.
At outlets in Main Street, ringing with moppies and goema-goema bands, you could buy sackfuls of indigenous herbal tea: with or without lemon flavour, from Oudam or Biedouw Valley (more tangy), Khoisan tea that is caffeine free, Khoisan Organic, all to be supplemented with Rooibos Liqueur from Emil’s Place.
Rooibos, I also had to learn, comes in the form of moisturising soap, as natural body lotion, bath salts and bubblebath. Even your wavy locks or greying moustache may be tinted with the Cedarberg Mountains’ own rusty beverage. Best sweeten with honey.
At the start four years ago, this festival was a drunken disgrace. Stupefied bodies, screaming insults, blocked the traffic on the cheapest of the wondrous winelands hereabouts, on alternative fuels unchanged since the days of slavery. As Hannelie Smit the tourism organiser says, it all had absolutely to change. And it has.
Now, in the beer garden, the locals queue for the show of location farce, all about Ouma’s son who turns to crime in the big city, but good lad brings her back a fridge. The bar is deserted. Police reservists spin through on their bikes without lights, sucking lollipops.
In the village halls the troopers of the new grassroots South African drama draw crowds packed to the rafters. An official forewarns us not to be offended by any coarse language and already the spectators are howling with laughter. The main group is still all white, but the schoolkids are no longer: they are the future integrated generation, as everyone knows and, yearning for anything beyond dire TV fare, they behave impeccably.
Seldom have I witnessed a performance feat like Pedro Kruger’s in an ingenious and heartrending piece called Lyf. Lyf is about the body, a semi-functional one at that, because he is “alternatively advantaged” that is, a victim of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and about as attractive as a crab. He starts in a state of undress, trying to get a sock on with a hooked stick. He plays cripple on the keys, for this is music theatre, and he works in a hospice for Aids patients, because he makes them feel a lot better. He ends in a suit and is to marry happily ever after, holding our tearful respect for the unlikely and off-beat with consummate skill.
Ditto for Wie Kan dit Hou (drawn from P G du Plessis’s sketches), with Alexa Strachan making do, solo on a stage with toilet-style lighting and no acoustics. She just bashes out her wares and reaps a whirlwind of applause.
And ditto for the extraordinary duo of Susanne Beyers and Joanie Combrink with Dalk is Ons Almal S. Drawn partly from a superb novel of post-war working-class life in the Cape by Jeanne Goosen (Ons is nie Almal S nie, recently reprinted) and from other Goosen pieces, they proceeded gamely. With humour flat as a pancake, they slogged out that Old Brown, mark-my-words, pitch-perfect vernacular of the usherette at Parow’s Victoria bioscope, smoking Cavallas.
This was an exquisitely accomplished museum-piece; no English-language writer would ever attempt such a dolefully funny reminiscence.
The celebrity of the occasion as always was the late and prodigious C Louis Leipoldt. (Previous festivals have featured other locals such as Hennie Aucamp and Adam Small.) He was to be honoured in the menu of the final banquet.
But the crowds were not into seeing the exhibit of his historic links to that remote Anglo-Boer South AfricanWar. To be frank, between hot showers of autumn rain, they were dancing in the present-day streets.