Open letter to Artscape chief executive Marlene Le Roux

DEAR Marlene

- ZUBEIDA JAFFER

It was a delight to be present at the launch of the annual Women’s Humanity Festival on Women’s Day at Artscape this year. Towards the end of the programme, when the two opera singers performed, I was transported into another realm. The voices of Ernestine Nur Stuurman and Danielle Speckman pierced through my heart, strengthening it to patiently persevere to end violence and exploitation in our troubled world. The two, both from Westridge, Mitchells Plain work for Cape Town Opera, something unthinkable 30 years ago.

When you were a young woman, part of charting this course for a unified and equitable South Africa, could you have imagined you would find yourself at the helm of transforming a public facility built and used for whiteness? We were denied entry to that space, then called DF Malan because of the colour of our skins.

There are those in the world who want to take us back to separatist philosophies but on display on Saturday was how we want to be - together, part of every single other human being. As you urged us all to say: “I am because you are. You are, because I am.” Those hundreds of women you and your team had brought together not only from the city but also from the rural enclaves of the West Coast spoke volumes of who should be at the centre of attention.