INDONI FESTIVAL

My culture your culture one nation

By Themba Nkabinde

In the spirit of South African Heritage Month, the Indoni Cultural Festival hosted in Durban culminates in the annual Cultural Miss SA pageant.

It aims to promote the diversity in African art including dramatic, musical, textile design and poetic art in home languages. The festival comprises of the Cultural Parade, the Cultural Exhibition and the Cultural Beauty Pageant. Indoni Cultural Festival  promotes a tool for educating people on culture and promoting cultural pride in young people.This is also a moral regeneration programme targeting young boys and girls, using culture, identity and indigenous knowledge to bring about behavioural change. The celebration seeks to enlighten the youth and the world at large on the richness of each of the cultures in South Africa.

Twelve finalists from nine provinces participating in the Indoni Miss Cultural South Africa have been unveiled in Durban at the Indoni Cultural Festival. The theme for 2016 is “My Heritage, My Pride”.

As a celebration of culture and identity, the Indoni Miss Cultural South Africa was launched in 2011. Its aim is to groom young girls in to being successful individuals in future.

The term ‘Indoni’ is derived from an African Nguni word that refers to a special species of the Blackberry fruit family. Because it often grows in tropical areas around water beds, it has been pseudo-named the ‘waterberry’. On a metaphorical level clans of Nguni origins used the idiom 'Indoni yamanzi' translated as 'A water berry' to describe the extraordinary beauty of a young woman in relation to the sweet blackberry fruit.

More specifically, each province in which a specific culture is demographically represented showcases a celebration where several young women and boys compete in demonstrating special knowledge and a potential to represent their culture exceptionally well. The winner then moves on to national competitions where they represent their culture and accompanied by other cultural dancers/maidens, participate in a theatre production.

The overall qualification of the Indoni Miss Cultural SA participant will be graduation from a culture school. In each and every identified culture, there will be culture schools directed by a pool of culture resource persons unit over the school holidays, i.e. Culture Camps.

Young girls and boys will go through several workshops in which they will be taught more about the spirit of Ubuntu, Indigenous Knowledge and crafts. Most importantly, they will then be taught how they can use the gained skills to emancipate and share it with other young people, hence they will be role models to the youth.