By Jacob Mawela in Makhanda.
Photo Credit: Jacob Mawela/Fullview.
2026 Standard Bank Young Artist for Theatre awardee Jason Jacobs rocked this year’s iteration of the National Arts Festival in Makhanda with three varying productions, viz Kraal – a two-part curation comprising a one-man performance at the Rhodes University Theatre and the construction of an indigenous Matjieshuis sourced from the Kamiesberg region of Namaqualand along the Lucas Avenue Footpath below the elevated 1820 Settler Monument – and a film titled Variations on a Theme inside the Monument Building’s Olive Schreiner theatre.
The Matjieshut – a sacred space which provided a non-performative environment intended for rest, reflection and dreaming was opened to the public during open hours betwixt 9am-5pm from June 26 to July 4 in order for the local community and festivalgoers to share experiences within it for the purpose of collective healing.
Karkhams-based University of Cape Town alumnas Jacobs had enlisted the services of an elder named Hendrik T Brandt and a Makhanda resident named Jean Burgess to erect the symbolic dwelling meant to transform the act of spectating into one of restorative participation. The curatorial aspect intended for attendees to keep the ancestral tradition alive for the future.
Variations on a Theme – which Jacobs co-produced with Devon Delmar as part of the Kraal Stories – narrates the travails of an elderly goat farmer from the mountains of Namaqualand named Hettie Farmer.
In the show, viewers witness the octogenarian falling victim to a scam promising long-overdue reparations for her father’s World War II service – with her independence threatened while she waited for money which never came.
Structured as a series of recurring visual ‘variations’, the film transforms repetition into revelation to frame a portrait of waiting, endurance and loss. The film garnered the Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam early this year.
During a Saturday morning tete-a-tete interview with Jacobs in the foyer of Rhodes Theatre regarding his trio of presentations at the festival, the gqirha-in-the-training (traditional healer) broadly spoke about Kraal the theatrical performance as straddling “living in a colonial hangover” and Variations on a Theme as conveying the “need for matriarchs to guide us.”
Kraal, which Jacobs – a Nama-Khoi indigenous descendant – performs mostly in pure Afrikaans throughout and had its debut at Woordfes in Stellenbosch, is a two-part decolonial curation which unravels the tangled vines of inherited trauma and the shadow of the dop system’s colonial legacy.
An immersive journey which breathes life into the ancient wisdom of the theatre-maker’s native
Kamiesberge – the production, which was staged daily in the Rhodes Box of the theatre, was absorbing stagecraft created with the capable inputs of filmmaker Kwei Shun-yu and production manager Cleveland Hopp, the Onthou vi Fredo?, director from Malmesbury.
Another SBYA awardee and fellow Northern Cape native Bronwyn Katz – who works through sculpture and installation to develop a speculative language which draws on land and embodied forms of knowledge – had an exhibition titled Ta a-b kobab ada kāxu-da, ti khoe-du’e! which was on view at the Monument Gallery inside the 1820 Settler Monument building daily throughout the festival.
Her presentation had the retrieval of lost language through material process at its core interpretation. In the display, Katz traces subtle shifts across her own skin – with the intimate cartographies translated into metal scaffolds which hold resonant forms filled with conductive wire circuits.