Sketches

Goema is a music of liberation.  It is a music of transcendence. Cape Town is a pirate city. We are a pirate of cultures. It's like Cape Town has pirated pieces of the whole world. Everything is gathered here. Cape Town is a port city after all, absorbing the world over hundreds of years. It's a touch of Europe, a little bit of India and Malaysia, it is a piece of Africa, there's Brazil in here and there's America and Israel and Maputo. Cape Town is not one thing: it is many things in one. The music of this city with multiple identities is called goema. The name originates with the Khoe people. The Khoe women played a drum, it was called a goma, because of the ox skin that covered the drum. The women would play and the men would dance. Over hundreds of years, bantu tribes migrated south, missionaries arrived, colonisers laid claim and slaves were imported to the city. As the music of these worlds collided and became a common language, the goma became goema. Th

Goemarati - you are welcome. Designing an inclusive intervention I'm not a designer. I trained as an actor and film-maker, and became an entrepreneur. But I've learned that design is at the heart of everything that we do - if not always entirely by design. So that makes us all designers, in an unconscious way. In people's homes, decisions have been made about where to put this painting in relation to that picture, where the chair stands in relation to the sofa, the pot plant in relation to the graduation certificate. These are all design decisions, but very few people doing this would consider themselves as designers.  Enjoying the foodcourt at the Manenberg Goemarati I watch my son, he's 14 months old, plot his routes. Even at this early stage of life, design is central. When we walk out of the apartment, he has a specific routine. He always turns right out of the door. He touches the geyser outlet pipe on the wall. He touches the neighbour's g

Dirty secrets? Not really. The Baxter is a public entity, audited, all dirty washing aired, and or turned into a production. No, the Secrets of the Baxter is a new experience that I'm excited about, something that Coffeebeans Routes has created in partnership with the Baxter Theatre. Sometime in 2010, Michelle Constant, CEO of Business Arts South Africa, joined one of our Jazz Safaris, and shortly after met with Baxter Theatre CEO Lara Foot. Michelle called me after the meeting and said Iain you have to have to have to meet with Lara and talk about creating a theatre tour together. So Lara and I met. And then months later, after lots of thought, myself and Lana Paries started putting things together. Very quickly we hit on the right mix, and in June this year we tested it out. Below is what it looks like, we think its a winner, will be interesting to see over the coming summer season how it does. Expect to see a lot about it in the media over the next year. We anticipate th

The St Louis Jazz Festival, in St Louis, Senegal Back in 1999, I attended the WOMEX World Music Conference and Marketplace in Berlin. One of the most interesting sessions there was one looking at creating a pan-African festival circuit, much like what Europe has, with festivals connecting, and making it possible for artists to tour festivals in Africa. 12 years later, we're perhaps marginally closer to that, but we certainly haven't made the kind of progress that was anticipated. Political instability is one reason, funding another, but one of the most crucial, I believe, is the lack of good, cost-effective, regional travel options in Africa. As you know, it is damn expensive to travel within Africa, far more so that to travel from somewhere in Africa to Europe. From the Sauti za Busara festival, Zanzibar, Tanzania, East Africa's most important festival  That is now starting to change. Once upon a time, there was Air Afrique, which made a lot of things poss

Hermanus is the armpit of the Western Cape, isn't it. What a way to destroy a coastline. We scream and shout about coastal mining or other issues, but I haven't heard an outcry about Hermanus. Hermanus is what fracking looks like. That coastal walk isn't enough to save it. And nor are the whales. Like the UAE, Hermanus needs to consider what it becomes when the whales (or oil) have gone. Just a coastline, endless bad food and tacky B&Bs with lots of dos and don'ts. And it's not just Hermanus, it's that whole strip from just after Hawston - Onrus right through to Hermanus is just an industrial wasteland of malls and warehouses and Tuscan retirement Villas on the N2. Graceless and creedless. (Do a quick search in your favourite search engine for Hermanus. You will find nothing that shows town centre, it's all sea and coast and hotels, and just about nothing featuring people, except for some archive portraits, click for  BING  and  GOOGLE  results ). 

Can design change the world? In South Africa, design entrenched apartheid. Our town planning was carried out on a design brief of isolation.  That was the apartheid blueprint.  Cape Town is splendid in its design dysfunction. Freeways and train lines divide neighbourhoods and isolate us into language groups; common recreation areas there are none;  in a city surrounded by the sea,  some of us have never even seen it! That is how isolated and immobile we are.  To enable the city, to undesign the trenches - metaphorical and physical - that divide it, we need design for dialogue. Design for dialogue - design that transforms physical spaces in a way that brings people together who otherwise would not be able to. In coming together we are able to discover  how similar - rather than how different - we are, and we discover shared resources. In these discoveries we are better equipped to act on opportunity. And if the design is right, there is the physical mobility available to get