Soweto school children got an early taste of the Soweto Festival this year, as organisers focused all their attention on the interests of young people – including HIV education.
Since 2005 the township of Soweto, just outside Johannesburg in South Africa, has been putting on the Soweto Festival. Sponsored by the City of Joburg, the festival is designed to boost local businesses and has “a mandate to help the local community”, says festival project manager Zamo Dube.
Open to the public between 24-27 September at the Soweto Campus of the University of Johannesburg, the festival opened its doors to school children in the area a few days early, on Monday, 21 September. Dube says this was “to help target learners in order to help them find answers to the many challenges they face”.
Among these challenges, explains Dube, are access to higher education, crime, domestic violence and of course HIV/AIDS.
Helping the learners understand the HIV/AIDS landscape was the educational play Khululeka – It’s in our hands, a 46664 prevention initiative.
Based on the true stories of people living with HIV/AIDS, Khululeka weaves together HIV/AIDS facts using narrative techniques. Funny in parts, highly informative, and occasionally shocking, the play tells the story of the pandemic in South Africa and helps people understand how they can help to stop the spread of the virus.
And speaking to the learners is crucially important, says Tony Nene, one of the Khululeka actors, as it is children and young adults between 12 and 29 who are at the most risk of contracting HIV, adding that “by the time these kids get to university they have already experienced a whole range of things, not all of them good”.
Speaking to the university students, explains Nene, may be like putting the condom on after the damage has already been done.
“At a lot of schools there’s no formal sex education, which means a lot of these kids have experiences that they later regret. The focus has to be on when people start becoming sexually active, which in this country is about Grade 8 (14 years old). It’s like fashion: kids go to high school and think they need to have a boyfriend or a girlfriend and that they need to start having sex.”
But while the Soweto community still faces a number of challenges, both Dube and Nene believe that the Soweto Festival and Khululeka are making an impact on the learners and on the local community.
“We open the doors to the festival before it officially starts because we want to be able to speak to the learners as a group before they go on holiday,” says Dube. “This way we get their undivided attention. These kids face so many challenges growing up here: violence; uncertainty over whether or not they will be able to get a bursary to go to university; uncertainty over career choices; HIV/AIDS and so on. We did some research after last year’s festival, going round to the schools in the area and finding out what the learners’ experience of the festival had been like, which gave us direction on what to focus on this year.
“That’s why this year we have the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, 46664, various tertiary institutions, Soweto TV, companies that are looking to attract young talent and so on to help provide answers to the learners’ questions.
“A number of the students who came to this event before the festival officially opened have received bursaries; some of the students now work on Soweto TV. The festival is having a real impact,” Dube says.
“I think learners are starting to become consciously aware of the threat of HIV/AIDS,” says Nene. “Even though we get a lot of questions that show ignorance, which highlights the need for further education, yesterday [Monday] a lot of students were asking me about condoms, which suggests they are aware of the need to condomise if they’re engaging in sexual activity, which I think is great.”
For Sibusiso Siwela, one of the students at the event, seeing the play and attending the Soweto Festival makes him realise that despite the challenges he faces he still has options.
“The play was inspirational. It made me realise that AIDS is real and it affects everyone no matter how old they are,” he says. Siwela adds that while he had previously thought that he would struggle to either attend university after school or get a job speaking to people at the stalls had given him hope for the future.
In addition to daily performances of Khululeka at The Storytelling Boma, sponsored by 46664 and Jozi FM, for the duration of the festival, 46664 ambassadors Tender Mavundla and Chaka Mingz will be performing on Saturday and Sunday respectively on the main stage.
In addition, free testing facilities at the festival, facilitated by 46664 and run by New Start, an HIV-counselling and testing organisation, will allow visitors at the festival to get tested and counselled confidentially.