A number of people in Cape Town produce a remarkable range of arts and crafts, working from the pavements and markets of the big city to deep rural enclaves, with every possible form of traditional artwork.

There's a lot of new work in traditional media, with artists constantly developing the African crafts repertoire.

These range from pretty tableware, Christmas tree decorations and magnificent embroidered cloths to the simplest of items such as key rings and candle-holders.

With characteristic inventiveness, South Africans have adapted every possible medium to a market that feeds both locals and tourists.

In addition to the standard materials such as beads, grass, leather, fabric and clay, pieces are made using telephone wire, plastic bags, petrol cans and bottle tops - even food tin labels are used to create brightly coloured paper mache bowls.

On sale on many a Cape Town street corner are objects made of wire, ranging from representations of the globe to cars and motorcycles - which are capable of manipulated movement - to joke cell phones and working radios.

Shops, markets and collectives dealing in African craft are thriving, providing much-needed employment and income in disadvantaged communities such as Langa, Khayelitsha and Delft, which offers a huge variety of wiring, or the Northern Cape Schmidtsdrift community of displaced San people who produce paintings that constitute an imaginative and highly coloured extension of ancient rock art.

During the festival visitor could browse the myriad of products available to the Arts Industry and thus create an income to the craft vendors.

Cape Town Festival Craft Market

Date: 26 – 28 April
Venue: The Company’s Gardens
Time: 10:00 – 19:00 (daily)

Cape Cultural Cuisine:

The distinctive Cape Cuisine menu is a voyage around the Cape of Good Hope and reflects all the traders who influenced the development of the Cape itself, Europeans, Indian and Malay, with various influences from Africa, Zanzibar and the Islands.

Cape Town is a city richly blessed with a cultural diversity most would never imagine. With the various cultures comes a unique special blend to each culture’s way of life, how their lifestyles differ, and the different blends of food each culture contributes to the Cape’s mysterious beauty.

This Cape Cuisine Festival is to give festival attendees more insight into the different foods of Cape Town’s cultures, and to lead them to a newly- found appreciation and enjoyment of the different cultures.

The different cultures basically derived from the ethnic variety and the faith that each ethnic group follows.

There are many cultures that make up Cape Town and all the cultural groups in Cape Town are familiar with each other’s foods, but there are specific foods that only belong are specifically linked to a particular race/ cultural group.

Programme 2008 Cape Town Festival -

Read more on the Cape Town Festival Programme 2008 on CapeTownMagazine.com.

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