Thanks for visiting this website & listening to our podcasts. “Talking with African Artists” is an opportunity for artists to talk about themselves and their art. Many discussions will be with friends made when I studied art in 1980s Cape Town and others I met later living in Johannesburg.

About me:

I came to Africa as a Yorkshire working-class girl, from a “hintigrated” Afro-Caribbean family of aunties and cousins. To live in the Cape in a neighbourhood that had itself remained ‘hintigrated’. In 2nd Ave, Harfield Village with two children and a couple of dogs, we would walk in the late afternoon, often accompanied by neighbours coming home from factories in nearby Lansdowne where many were textile workers. We followed whilst they paraded the street rehearsing for Carnival, much as my grandfather had done in Yorkshire with his band group. When I was a child, he would return from the pub, marching up Cavendish Street after working as a wool sorter, blowing the euphonium he played in Salts Mill Brass band, loudly announcing his return, and waking my grandmother to put his supper on the table seeing as cooking was “women’s work”.

Community

This Cape neighbourhood proved much like the one I remembered from my own childhood. With its corner ‘bubbe’ shop, where we could buy a sweet for a penny, and its factory workers that formed groups and clubs and competed in a music competition each year wearing matching uniforms.

Who practiced for this annual competition, the “coon carnival“? Their slim daughters with plaits brought my children home after eating dinner with the kids they played with in the next-door kitchen, bringing gifts of samosas with potato and peas, and on Sundays Koesisters, sticky, sweet, and rolled in coconut. Life in Cape Town was a surprise, not at all ‘darkest Africa’ but full of light, music, and celebrations that seemed more familiar than different.