It’s the bopping crowds and flashy stage acts that people focus on at Cape Town’s Greenmarket Square Community Concert. But Nadine Theron found another audience: the people who call the square home.
“I don’t care if I can’t sleep now. When the people leave, then I can sleep. But now I’m hêppie ’cause I love music!”
Directly in front of the stage at the Greenmarket Square Community Concert are the fold-out chairs filled with families stacked around cooler bags (tonight’s supper). Pressed up against the backs of the deck chairs are the bouncing local tourists, miniature South African flags provided by the Department of Arts and Culture stuck in their dreadlocks. Behind them are the trendy young ones, loud laughter and glowing faces sipping beer out of plastic cups. Flashing cameras line the crowd and behind all of this, Linda Ndakrokra stands still, quietly, but smiling.
The fragile little lady guarding a plastic bag has a baby strapped to her back and could’ve easily been standing at a road side in the Eastern Cape. She almost disappears in the shadow that the street light throws through a tree on the edge of the crowd.
“In this bag is my baby’s blanket and my small duvet. It’s our beds. We sleep outside.”
Linda and her two friends call themselves “skarrellers” or “bergies” and public urban areas like Greenmarket Square are where they settle in the warm corners of the colonial buildings to go to bed.
“Me and everybody who sleeps outside are here because they love not sleeping. Every day that there’s a show here, I’m here. Because I like music. Music makes me hêppie.”
Her friend, Michael, doesn’t want to give his real surname. “I’m enjoying it verrry, verrry well,” he grins.
When asked about the crowd on his doorstep he simply says: “I don’t blame the people for filling up the square because they’re also enjoying the music. And when I hear the music, you see, my heart is rrreally, rrreally nice. It makes me feel allright. Rrrreally.”
Multimedia journalist Nadine Theron is a participant on the CTIJF Arts Journalism Programme
For more from the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, see our special report.