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:
“She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Under the dominion of an idea, which possesses the minds of multitudes, as civil freedom, or the religious sentiment, the power of persons are no longer subjects of calculation. A nation of men unanimously bent on freedom, or conquest, can easily confound the arithmetic of statists, and achieve extravagant actions, out of all proportion to their means; as, the Greeks, the Saracens, the Swiss, the Americans, and the French have done.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Accordingly, death is a harbor of peace for the just, but is believed a shipwreck for the wicked.”
—Ambrose (c. 333–397)
“Cinema is the culmination of the obsessive, mechanistic male drive in western culture. The movie projector is an Apollonian straightshooter, demonstrating the link between aggression and art. Every pictorial framing is a ritual limitation, a barred precinct.”
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