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Vrystaat Arts Festival

08 July 2022

The Vrystaat Arts Festival celebrates its twenty-second birthday this year, a remarkable achievement! After two challenging years of lockdown restrictions, the festival team is excited to work towards various in-person events again, including the first ever mini-MARK in July, the traditional arts festival with all the familiar faces in October, and the second instalment of the festival's classical music festival, Vrystaat Klank & Klassik, in November.

From 12-16 July, the festival will launch the inaugural Mini-MARK on the Bloemfontein campus of the University of the Free State (UFS). This smaller arts and crafts market will mostly be concentrated around the Callie Human Hall and the Exam Rooms on the UFS-campus and will involve only curated, unique, handmade, high quality, authentic South African products and food stalls, and an open stage for entertainment.

The mini-MARK will also include a selection of theatre, music, and dance productions. A definite highlight on the theatre program is the debut comedy, Laerskool Noord, with Margit Meyer-Rödenbeck, Marion Holm, and Ilne Fourie. Something special on the menu for the little ones is Liewe Heksie en die Rolskaate. Several local musicians will perform at the Vulture Club during the festival week and the contemporary dance production, POP, with Bloemfontein-based dancer, Thami Majela, and French choreographer, Matthieu Nieto will also be on the stage.

Two productions hosted in collaboration with the UFS’s Drama and Theatre Arts Department are The dressing room and Hoe Later, Hoe Kwater. The dressing room is based on the real antics of backstage life during the production of a community theatre musical. The show is not a musical, but a very relatable comedy to anyone who has been through the hustle of being backstage during a production.

Hoe Later, Hoe Kwater is an Afrikaans translation by Pierre van Pletzen of Michael Pertwee and John Chapman's Holiday Snap, and stars Barend Kriel, Mark Dobson, Jané Schnetler, DJ Kruger, Danielle Doubell, Amira-Xandria van Biljon, Paquot.

From 2-8 October 2022, the customary Vrystaat Arts Festival, with a full program including theatre productions, literature festival, film festival, visual and experimental art, as well as a much larger arts market, will also be presented on the UFS campus. Keep an eye out in the press and the arts festival's social media platforms for more information on the October program.

Entrance tickets to the festival grounds and to the theatre productions are already for sale at https://www.webtickets.co.za/.

For more information about this year's Vrystaat Arts Festival, please email mark@vrystaatkunstefees.co.za or alternatively send a WhatsApp to 063 584 4379.

News Archive

Prof Antjie Krog speaks on verbalising revulsion and the collusion of men

2015-06-26

From the left are Prof Lucius Botes, UFS: Dean of the Faculty of the Humanities; Prof Helene Strauss, UFS: Department of English; Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, UFS: Trauma, Forgiveness and Reconciliation Studies; Prof Antjie Krog, UCT: Department Afrikaans and Dutch; Dr Buhle Zuma, UCT: Department of Psychology. Both Prof Strauss and Dr Zuma are partners in the Mellon Foundation research project.

“This is one of the bitterest moments I have ever endured. I would rather see my daughter carried away as a corpse than see her raped like this.”

This is one of 32 testimonies that were locked away quietly in 1902. These documents, part of the NC Havenga collection, contain the testimonies of Afrikaner women describing their experiences of sexual assault and rape at the hands of British soldiers during the South African War.

This cluster of affidavits formed the foundation of a public lecture that Prof Antjie Krog delivered at the University of the Free State’s (UFS) Bloemfontein Campus on Tuesday 23 June 2015. The lecture, entitled ‘They Couldn’t Achieve their Goal with Me: Narrating Rape during the South African War’, was the third instalment in the Vice-Chancellor’s Lecture Series on Trauma, Memory, and Representations of the Past. The series is hosted by Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Senior Research Professor in Trauma, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation Studies at the UFS, as part of a five-year research project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Verbalising revulsion

The testimonies were taken down during the last two months of the war, and “some of the women still had marks and bruises on their bodies as evidence,” Prof Krog said. The victims’ words, on the other hand, struggled to express the story their bodies told.

What are the nouns for that which one sees? What words are permissible in front of men? How does one process revulsion verbally? These are the barriers the victims – raised with Victorian reserve – faced while trying to express their trauma, Prof Krog explained.

The collusion of men

When the war ended, there was a massive drive to reconcile the Boers and the British. “Within this process of letting bygones be bygones,” Prof Krog said, “affidavits of severe violations by white men had no place. Through the collusion of men, prioritising reconciliation between two white male hierarchies, these affidavits were shelved, and, finally, had to suffer an embargo.”

“It is only when South Africa accepted a constitution based on equality and safety from violence,” Prof Krog said, “that the various levels of deeply-rooted brutality, violence, and devastation of men against the vulnerable in society seemed to burst like an evil boil into the open, leaving South African aghast in its toxic suppurations. As if, for many decades, we did not know it was there and multiplied.”

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