The Rain of a Weeping River (2022)

Reborn from the cold fronts of the ocean that cloak Table Mountain with clouds, is the promise of a rain. This cloudburst becomes the streams and rivers that voyage across contested lands, disputed indigeneity and troubled pasts that continue to haunt the present.

Under the city currently known as Cape Town, is a story of a peoples, who like the streams of water that make up Camissa River(s) have become mythologised and buried underground by British and Dutch colonial rule. Absent figures are marked with staffs that are the rivers, the streams that voyage across lands of the Zambezi, Shashe-Limpopo, Umgeni, Vaal, Kai !Gariep, Kei, Keiskamma, Cumissa (Fish) down to the Camissa River which still flows in channels under the City of Cape Town.

On December 2022 on behalf the First Nation People, Kai Biá Hennie Van Wyk reiterates, “South Africa within the immediate period has not relinquished its oppressive character and nature that has been prevalent over the last 370 years in orchestrated campaigns, focused on destroying and annihilating the natural order of customary law practiced for centuries prior to the advent of discovery, by our indigenous aboriginal peoples who excelled in developing in complete harmony with all of creation.”

The Rain of a Weeping River is an ode to the sweet water that was meant to cleanse, heal and nourish. It is also for its custodians who once protected it and continue to try preserve indigenous knowledge that continues to flow through their descendant’s consciousness.