Teaching with Puppets

The Talking Hands puppets from Grahamstown are unusual.

The famous Grahamstown Cultural Festival draws tens of thousands of lovers of theatre, dance and music from all over the world to this town in the Eastern Cape Province for 10 days every year. The almost life-size puppets even perform Faust in Africa. In Flight - an experiment in light, colour and dance - they sweep through space and time. Sometimes the puppets are as tiny as a finger and are just five in number. They also entertain passers-by in the main shopping centre or in the large square in front of the cathedral.

Throughout the year they are there for the schoolchildren of the region who are mostly underprivileged Black children. They transform the dry lesson materials of what "you may or may not do" into happy lessons, where one learns through play. The majority of boys and girls who take part in this program discover for the first time in their lives what is meant by the words creativity and artistic development.

The puppeteer who has managed this is Elyse van Houten. She is in her early 30's and a graduate of the Rhodes University in Grahamstown where she studied drama. Since the turning point which brought apartheid to an end, even this formerly very conservative and pure white educational establishment, which still carries the name of Cecil Rhodes, has taken up the multi-cultural concept. Elyse, together with Sivuvile Funze and Wandisile Nyikilana have formed a team. Both are equally gifted artists and have pedagogical talents which they bring to their puppetry. They are advised by educationists, doctors, pharmacists and psychologists from the university and various municipal departments. They are concerned about problems such as teeth-cleaning, hand washing, clean water, healthy nutrition, co-operation rather than non-co-operation, but also explanations about the dangers of smoking and drinking, about sexuality and power, and of course AIDS. The puppets are used to portray how one should behave.

The three of them make all the puppets themselves, and also think up the plays. They pack their puppets plus equipment into large cardboard boxes, plus the stage scenery, and aim at particular types of schools in the province - township and farm schools - and develop lessons there with the teachers and school children. There are more than 300 schools in the surrounding area. In South Africa half the Black population is under the age of 18 years.

"In a real theatre the performance is the thing, and we also have many spectators at the Cultural Festival" says Elyse, "however a theatre ticket is not something the people we really want to reach with our message feel compelled to buy. Now as previously, our theatre public is the small, predominantly white upper strata. What African child has ever been to a theatre? For this reason we go to the children, and sometimes perform in the main shopping street in Grahamstown. Just recently an old man came up to me and said thank you, as it was the first time he had heard how dangerous cigarette smoking was!".

In the meantime, Sivuvile and Wandisile have brought out for me in the puppet workshop a giant tooth made from polystyrene. It folds out. It is already a bit broken and completely brown underneath. This is dental caries. I look inside at the Cola can and sweet paper. It is better to have a large mouth full of healthy, white teeth and a toothbrush shows how one can clean them.

"When we go into schools, we first of all make things with the children and the teachers, then the play is studied, and finally, there is a show," the two tell me. I get to see the show with various puppets directly in the railway station grounds, where the troupe has a workshop. It deals with environmental problems, and how one prepares good drinking water. I discover that "most children drink water from ponds, streams and rivers, and must often carry it kilometres to their homes. Above all, the farm workers have no access to clean drinking water. Many children become ill again and again as a result. Consequently it is so important for us to do an educational play about keeping clean the stretch of water from which drinking water is taken."

The puppeteer-education team like travelling to the farm schools in particular. It is here that help is most urgently needed. The Eastern Cape is one of the poorest regions of the country and the backwardness is not going to be removed overnight. The people live in the main from agriculture, and are occupied on large farms and fruit plantations when there is work at all. The schools for the farm children often consist of two classes, one for several age groups for the "young ones" and the second one for the older age groups. Not much more than writing, reading and calculating are on the timetable, and sometimes the classes are half empty, the students are busy on behalf of their parents in agricultural work.

There is still a leasehold system in South African agriculture, reminiscent of the days of serfdom/bondage. The landowner "leases" a portion of land to the farming families, from which they can feed themselves and build their homes. In this form of share cropping they must then work for their landlord in the fields. In the farm schools there are hardly any trained teachers, and when the puppeteer team appears, it is like a festival for the whole village community, everyone learning from it.

As the puppeteers cannot get into many schools, holiday and weekend courses are available, in which both kindergarten teachers and male and female schoolteachers can take part. Here they discover which materials are suitable for making things and how one can "magic" puppets and scenery from freely available "rubbish" such as polystyrene packaging, from wood, old paper, remainders of material or cans, using a knife, scissors, paintbrush, paint and above all skill. Then the plays are studied, and there are no limits set for individual fantasies. There are three large conceptual frameworks, puppets for learning, puppets for health education and puppets against power. This last theme is being developed with the assistance of a clinical psychologist and is intended to be performed with the small and big hooligans or vandals in the schools. It is still in the experimental stage.

Grahamstown was formed in 1812 as a border post of the British crown. In 1820 with the arrival of the first British settlers, the local Xhosa population were forced further and further back from their ancestral land. Several uprisings were bloodily put down. Grahamstown is today a town of well kept buildings from this British colonial period. In just one hour one can drive to the beautiful sandy beaches of the Indian Ocean, which one can still often use all alone.

The annual cultural festival started in 1974. Then it was initiated to glorify the memorial for the 1820 British settlers which overlooks the town and was intended to keep alive the myth of colonial supremacy. The Standard Bank of South Africa financed the festival of theatre art in the British mould. However, the weighty structure has never become a place of pilgrimage like the Boer memorial for the Great Trek of 1838. Only the Cultural Festival idea has endured. After the end of Apartheid, the festival lost its conservative character and drew in the experimental happy multi-cultural scene, and above all many black groups. In 1997 there was again a colourful festival in July, with a few hundred performances for 40.000 visitors from throughout the country and abroad.

(Translated from the original Report in German by Edelgard Nkobi, Member of our twin organisation, Community H.E.A.R.T. e.V., Essen.)