Ling Sheperd
I waited an entire year to see the Camissa Create Heritage Tour. It wasn’t just worth the wait, it was an affirmation.
It is one thing to erase and another to INVISIBILISE, and on Saturday night I felt seen watching this. I had an experience a few years ago with a wine glass in my hand kiki-ing on a wine tour and on the farm was small museum, and I saw my mother’s surname.
Place of Sweet Waters
It was sobering. Both my parents with Dutch surnames. I always knew about enslavement, and was privileged enough to receive a western education on tertiary level, with access to their libraries. But it was self-study, no guidance, no real effort around me to understand the enslavement history in Hui !Gaeb (Cape Town) and only visited the slave lodge as an adult. Thanks to Transcending History Tours for their work in showing visitors what this place of sweet waters (Camissa) holds at its core.
But it was never enough. I am angry that at school we were taught this sanitising version of our histories and then also invisibilising the deep culture that seems to follow so-called coloured South Africans into an ever raging and rabid debate of having no perceived culture, that is actually embedded in the rocks, sand, soil and blood in our veins. It is an exegesis, in that it dispels the academic fodder we have only had to reference, and latter being inaccessible at that too, and by using artistic performance to teach, embrace and honour our ancestral ties. It is also a home-coming because even within our community, large sectors of it keep us out. It is an ongoing social experiment in exclusion.
But we are here…
HA DA GE A | ÔS IS HIE
Visibilising a Dispossessed People
In its second annual presentation The Camissa Heritage Tour Theatre Production performed at Artscape from 26 to 28 September 2024 offers a profound exploration of South Africa’s colonial past and its connections to the Netherlands, focusing on the narratives of the Indigenous San and Khoi communities who have inhabited the region for thousands of years. This site-specific performance, adapted for theatre, guides audiences through significant locations such as The Castle of Good Hope, highlighting the resilience of these communities against settlers and the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Through this artistic and educative project, it brings awareness to the history of slavery in the Cape and the impact of Dutch colonisation. The name CAMISSA, meaning “place of sweet waters,” serves as a poignant reminder of water’s enduring role in cleansing and healing.
Camissa Heritage Tours by Camissa Create is directed by Luke De Kock and supported by #CoCreateSANL (Netherlands Consulate & Embassy in South Africa) and Artscape, this project aims to engaged audiences in a new perspective on history, heritage, and culture through performance.
I hope Luke and the cast continue this forever, I hope it is compulsory learning in schools at primary level, especially in Hui !Gaeb. It is not even about reclaiming for me, it is about VISIBILISING people, the past, and the future that informs it by people with the right and generational memory to do so. It takes courage, grace and respect to do this work and we are grateful.
I am forever in awe, gangans.
THIS IS NOT JUST A HISTORICAL ALLEGORY,
IT IS A SPIRITUAL JOURNEY.
