The Amani Arts Festival celebrates African Human Rights Day in Khayelitsha with a contemporary African aesthetic. Expect site-specific visual art, music, performance art, film, spoken word/hip-hop poets, dance, and children’s creative workshops celebrating cultural diversity.
The festival is presented by African Artists Unite as One, a voluntary community of Pan African and local South African artists based in Cape Town and engaged in cross-culturally collaborative projects and exercises.
Amani forms part of a wider, ongoing series of cultural projects exploring cultural perspectives and socio-economic issues. “We are very aware that xenophobia is caused by, among other factors, economic deprivation to language diversity (including South African languages),” says Suzy Bell, performance poet, festival director and founder of the Amani Arts Festival, “but key is the current lack of service delivery that creates potential xenophobia hot-spots as identified by the Social Justice Coalition (SJC), in communities like Makhaza, Harare and Site B in Khayelitsha. But as the University of Witwatersrand Forced Migration Studies Programme rightly points out, the key trigger of violence against foreign nationals and ethnic minorities has been local competition for political and economic power.”
African Arts Unite as One has worked closely with civil society and have linked up to share voices, uniting with key players like the SJC, the African Arts Institute and most crucially, Scalabrini Centre together with Sonke Gender Justice, Black Sash and PASSOP in their dynamic Unite as One campaign.
30 October
11am to 5pm
@ Lookout Hill, Khayelitsha
