The festival failedto connect to its major market of young, single Afrikaners who floodinto the UK in their thousands
Adam Welz in London
London’s Afrikaans community arranged its first major singing and dancing arts and crafts get-together here last week.
UKkasie, billed as the first Afrikaans cultural festival to be held outside South Africa, took place overfour days during a heatwave in a vast exhibition hall and conference centre at Wembley, a stone’s throw from the famous football stadium.
The first thing that struck me when I approached the conference centre on Saturday is how goddamn healthy everyone looked compared with the averageBrit.
Scores of strapping barrel-chested young men threw back Castles whilechatting up rafts of impossibly good-looking young women, all ratherwell-maintained and all seemingly dressed by the same expensive OxfordStreet equivalent of Edgars.
Gimme a few stadia, I thought, and I could havemade up 50 rugby teams, with cheerleaders, nogal! Afrikaans was oneveryone’s lips and no one seemed particularly interested in much except the Boks’s win over the Wallabies that afternoon and where to go and get pissed in the evening. The very conservative line-up of acts inside wasn’tthe centre of attention with these folks, as poor attendances at a number ofthese attested.
Enormous clouds of smoke rose up from a parking lot next to the hugehangar-like exhibition space as Neil Taljaard and a his fellow-workersslaved over hot gas fires to produce piles of boerewors rolls to be sold tothe queuing faithful for 3 (more than R30) a pop.
Jaco Hansen, owner of SA Jol, a small company that organises ”South African events, sokkiesand braai’s” estimated that they had sold more than 6000 in two days.
Inside the venue were rows of stalls selling and promoting everything eg Suid Afrikaans, from Stellenbosch University to overpricedProtea flowers and little squatter shack souveniers. Awful oil paintingswith sterling price tags hung skew on sackcloth-covered backdrops and youcould pick up promo pamphlets for the Voortrekker Monument and win a laptopcomputer while listening to Afrikaans radio via satellite.
Koeksusters wentfor 3,75 (R40) for three and you could buy every Afrikaans CD youhad ever wanted to: every Afrikaans clich, alive and well in the dull yellow glow of sodium space lights.
Behind a hessian screen was a small stage that played host to a number offree shows during the day. Shine4, an Afrikaans quartet of Spice Girlwannabe’s, gyrated and caterwauled though a batch of song- and-danceroutines, watched by hundreds of sexually-frustrated boytjies lounging onrows of the white plastic chairs no self-respecting Sarfie beer garden wouldbe seen dead without.
The stall of Breytenbach Prinsloo, a London-based legal firm specialising in working visas and other issues close to many United Kingdom-based South Africans’hearts, attracted a fair bit of attention.
Hannes Breytenbach explained that many of his clients weren’t seeking to emigrate to the UKpermanently, but were interested in obtaining British passports to usealongside their South African ones to make travelling and doing business inEurope easier.
Many of the young people I spoke to at UKkasie were not thinking in terms ofleaving home permanently, and if the noise during the rugby match againstthe Australians (broadcast on big screens in the hall) was anything to go by,the average Afrikaner in London is as patriotic as they come.
One of the few dark faces at UKkasie was that of formerMpumalanga premier Matthews Phosa, in London to perform in a show with the sametitle as his book of Afrikaans poetry, Deur die Oog van ‘n Naald.
Not muchof a performer, unfortunately, Phosa was nonetheless keen to talk about theissue of the large number of young South African professionals moving toLondon. Depending on whose figures one trusts, there are now between 47000and a million South Africans in the UK.
Phosa, who felt sad about the large numbersleaving South Africa, said: ”We need them to help us develop back home.”
However, he felt itunproductive to engage in a debate on the morality of leaving versus staying, believing it was more important to address thereasons why large numbers of white professionals were leaving and to encourage them unreservedly to ”celebrate” their return.
Neef ”Duimpie” Strydom and his crew from the Suid Afrikaanse Volkspele Groepwere certainly not constrained by contemporary good taste, and manifestedtheir Trekker heritage with determination, wearing long frillydresses, waistcoats and Abe Lincoln beards throughout, despite thesweltering heat.
A rather humourless man, Strydom explained that his group hadtravelled to London through Belgium and The Netherlands to demonstrate aspectsof Afrikaner culture. One of his sidekicks, Jannie van Heerden, was more open and enthusiastic andencouraged me to come to their show that ended on the high note of themforming a symboliese ossewa (symbolic ox wagon).
By aiming at a religious, conservative, 35-plus family crowd, UKkasie failedto connect to its major market of young, single Afrikaners who are floodinginto this city in their thousands and who would rather jol to Koos Kombuisthan listen to old Bles Bridges records.
The fact that so many young people were there despite an overwhelmingly old-fashioned programme ofevents is a testament to the demand that exists for cultural events in thecommunity, rather than approval of that which was on offer.