R120k street festival to launch Grahamstown’s bicentenary

A street festival in Church Square with food and craft stalls, speakers, exhibitions, live entertainment and a parade of sports teams dressed in their team colours will launch Grahamstown's 200th anniversary commemorative year in just over two weeks.

The event, on Saturday, 28 January, will draw on this month's theme for the year-long observations, which is sport and recreation. Councillor Julia Wells who is heading the city's 200 years project, said the municipality's bicentenary observations would focus on encouraging locals to share their stories, thus developing a shared timeline, and contributing to a year of varying activities.

"The whole point of the project is to get people talking, how they have changed and evolved," Wells said, explaining that the National Arts Festival office would partner with the municipality in managing the event. The sports teams for the parade will include those of both educational institutions and local leagues.

According to a report written in November and presented to a council meeting early in December, the proposed budget for the launch event is R120 000 and the total proposed budget for the project is R420 000

. "We have a history of black rugby players. There is no other place where it is more powerful," Wells said. She briefly spoke about a man who came into the country in the 1860s to introduce the sport to St Andrew's boys here in Grahamstown. "Since there were not enough schoolboys to play, he taught it to the gardeners," Wells said.

"The gardeners apparently loved it more. "Lets have our own breaking down of barriers through sport," she said. Wells said that the main funding of the 200 years project would go to community groups who have been called on to propose activities such as events, and the gathering of information, or exhibitions. "We will set up a website to absorb all the history," she said.