Rainbow Nation Peace Ritual
The day after F W De Klerk's landmark announcement that the African National Congress (ANC) and other political organisations would be unbanned and Nelson Mandela would be released from prison, a small group of Capetonians took to the streets in an act of guerrilla street theatre. The Rainbow Nation Peace Ritual as it eventually came to be known, was actually planned some ten days before the announcement by the Rainbow People's Party and the ritual, march, celebration or carnival, call it what you will, involved children as well as innocent bystanders who were taken by surprise.
It lasted only for a couple of hours, beginning at the Old Townhouse in Greenmarket Square, Cape Town, proceeded down Shortmarket Street and ended up in St George's Mall.
While the ideal of a new tribe of rainbow people was always a part of South African counter-culture, it was only after Archbishop Desmond Tutu officially "named" the Rainbow Nation, that the phrase became accepted across the board. However the fact remains, that on February 3, 1990, a cross-cultural mix of hippies, street kids, Rastas and artists, a veritable "band of modern merry pranksters" danced through the streets of Cape Town and invoked the goddess of peace and spirits of abundance to awaken and greet a new age of freedom.
What is also significant about this event, is the willing participation of a banner painted by Beezy Bailey, joined by the anarchist Nat Tardrew, filmographer Nodi Murphy, ecologist and artist Karen Rolfes, performance artist Rehane Abrahams, publisher David Robert Lewis, musician Philip Nangle, an art teacher called "Johno" along with an assortment of characters that appear on a piece of documentary footage shot by Craig Mathews of Doxa Productions.
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Famous quotes containing the words rainbow, nation, peace and/or ritual:
“One doesn’t look at a rainbow any longer that lasts a quarter of an hour.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“We live in a highly industrialized society and every member of the Black nation must be as academically and technologically developed as possible. To wage a revolution, we need competent teachers, doctors, nurses, electronics experts, chemists, biologists, physicists, political scientists, and so on and so forth. Black women sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it.”
—Frances Beale, African American feminist and civil rights activist. The Black Woman, ch. 14 (1970)
“... geometry became a symbol for human relations, except that it was better, because in geometry things never go bad. If certain things occur, if certain lines meet, an angle is born. You cannot fail. It’s not going to fail; it is eternal. I found in rules of mathematics a peace and a trust that I could not place in human beings. This sublimation was total and remained total. Thus, I’m able to avoid or manipulate or process pain.”
—Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911)
“Romance reading and writing might be seen ... as a collectively elaborated female ritual through which women explore the consequences of their common social condition as the appendages of men and attempt to imagine a more perfect state where all the needs they so intensely feel and accept as given would be adequately addressed.”
—Janice A. Radway (b. 1949)