When I was young, Oudtshoorn changed in March.
Not visibly, not all at once, but in the way a person changes when they are about to say something important. You see a slight shift in posture, a straightening of the back, a breath held just a moment longer than usual. The streets were the same streets. The buildings were the same buildings. But the town was putting on different clothes, and if you had grown up there you could feel it happening before you could see it.
Suddenly there were tents where there had been parking. Stages where there had been rugby fields. People from elsewhere, carrying with them the particular energy of people who have somewhere to be and something to see, filling the pavements with a noise that felt, to a child, like the sound of a world much larger than the one that existed the other fifty weeks of the year.
I didn't have the words for what I was watching. I just knew that something was happening to the town that the town could not entirely contain.
The music was the first thing that escaped. It didn't stay in the tents where it was supposed to stay. It leaked out and followed you down the street and was still with you when you got home, sitting at the kitchen table while you ate supper, changed now, altered slightly by the journey, but recognisably itself. A line from a song that lodged itself somewhere behind your sternum and stayed there for weeks after the festival had packed up and gone, long after the tents had come down and the parking had returned and Oudtshoorn had gone back to being quietly and beautifully itself.
I remember the way the light fell differently during those days. Or perhaps it didn't, and I only remember it that way because everything else felt different and the light had no choice but to follow. I remember the smell of boerewors from somewhere you couldn't quite locate, and the sound of a guitar from a tent you were too small to enter, and the specific feeling of being a child on the outside of something that was clearly, unmistakably, worth being inside.
The theatre was different. The theatre grabbed you by the collar. I remember watching performers doing things on stages that seemed to require a courage I couldn't quite account for. I saw adults and strangers standing in front of people and being completely themselves, or completely someone else, which amounts to the same kind of bravery when you think about it carefully. There was something happening in those rooms that had nothing to do with entertainment and everything to do with the specific experience of watching a human being take everything they had brought with them (all their experience and imagination and feeling), and make it visible, in real time, in front of you, with no possibility of taking it back.
I didn't understand any of this then. I was a child in the Karoo watching a festival happen to my town. I understand it now.
I live in Stellenbosch. Woordfees comes every year, and the town and the streets and the buildings are different, but it has the same quality of transformation. The same sense that the ordinary rules of the place have been temporarily suspended by mutual agreement, the way the rules of a braai are suspended when someone's oupa arrives and everyone just quietly accepts the new order. The same music leaking out into the night air. The same performers standing in front of rooms full of people, doing the irreversible thing of saying something true out loud to strangers.
And I understand now what was being planted in me all those years ago in Oudtshoorn, watching from the edge of something I was too young to fully enter. It was this: that human beings need to make things. Not to produce content, not to generate output, not to optimise for engagement, but to make things the way a child makes something out of clay without quite knowing what it is going to be until it is; drawing on everything they have seen and felt and survived and loved, and shaping it into something specific and unrepeatable. Accountable to the moment and to the people in the room.
A festival is not mere entertainment, but an important reminder that a song written by a person and sung by a person in a room full of people is doing something that cannot be replicated by any other means. That a poem read aloud by the person who wrote it, in a specific light, on a specific evening, to a specific audience that will never be assembled in exactly that configuration again, is not a delivery mechanism for content. It is the content. The presence is the point. The irreversibility is the point. The particular human being standing in front of you, nervous and alive and accountable, is the point.
I say this at a moment when we are being told, with increasing confidence and increasingly sophisticated tools, that the things humans make can be approximated, generated, optimised, and scaled. That the product can be separated from the person who made it and delivered more efficiently without them.
I don't believe it. Not because I am sentimental about human creativity, though I am, but because I have stood in a tent in Oudtshoorn as a child and felt something shift in me that required a specific human being to be present and generous in a specific room at a specific moment that will never come again. It required the courage and the irreversibility of a real person bringing a real thing into the world in real time, in front of people who had also made the choice to be there, which is itself a kind of creative act.
That is what festivals are for. That is what books are for. That is what The Story Station is for.
Come to Woordfees if you can. Buy a book written by a person who sat alone somewhere and tried to say something true, which is one of the braver things a human being can do. Read it slowly, in your own time, and notice what it does that nothing else does: the specific weight of one human mind pressing itself against yours through language, across time, asking to be understood.
We are still, stubbornly, magnificently, irreplaceably here.
info@thestorystation.co.za
PS: Happy Heritage Day for this week. Braai something. Eat it slowly. Tell a story. Listen to one. This is, I think, the whole point of having a heritage in the first place.