Daily Despatch 09-Oct-08Artist Hillary Graham came to the tiny Karoo town of Aberdeen to paint, but may well end up putting the town on the tourist map.
The former head of Fort Hare University’s fine arts department is on the cusp of sealing a deal to get funding for a basket of proposals, from renovating the town’s swimming pool and nature reserve to starting a ceramics sculpture project for more than 30 women. There is also a proposal to start a heritage archive.
“I came here to paint because that’s what I am but I got drawn into things”, said Graham, who is also secretary of the local ANC branch. “If you see the poverty in the place, you have no choice.”
Graham said he had been hawking his ideas around since 2005 and it was not until Mbulelo Sogoni, then the MEC for Economic Development and Environmental Affairs and now the Eastern Cape’s premier, came to town last year, that he found an audience.
Now the Eastern Cape Development Corporation and the Economic Development and Environmental Affairs Department are keen to fund the projects and the next step is for various legal entities to be registered.
The projects include fixing up the town’s Fonteinbos Nature Reserve, which has fallen victim to vandals and poachers, and the old municipal swimming pool.
To save the pool, Graham personally bid and secured its lease and helped establish a women’s co-operative of four to oversee its renovation and maintenance.
He also has Swimming South Africa in Port Elizabeth interested in assisting with lifesaving and swimming training.
“The water was filthy with garbage. And then there were steel spikes and pieces of masonry beneath the water. I told the municipality that someone was going to die there as the kids dive bomb the pool”, Graham said.
For the ceramics sculpture project, the fine arts department of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth is keen to send post-graduate students up to Aberdeen to do training, said Graham, who is determined to steer clear of the regular tourist trap. “I’d like the women to come back to the landscape, not this mumbo jumbo primitive stuff like mugs with giraffes on them,” he said .
It’s the heritage archive project that really gets him fired up as he dreams of getting the long-neglected history of Aberdeen’s townships documented.
“Hopefully we’ll be able to get university students involved .”
He believes that going beyond the white colonial history will release people from its burden. “We will be able to look bravely at colonial history,” he said. “It won’t be a rock we carry around with us.”
Article By: Gill Moodie (Copyright Daily Despatch)