Phansi Museum’s calendar: marking time through stories

IT is a calendar that does more than count days.

- ANNIE DORASAMY

It counts voices.Each month reflects a story that began in a different language, crossed borders through careful translation, found its way to thread and is now featured in the Phansi Museum’s calendar.

The 2026 edition, The Voices of Women, draws from a remarkable body of work gathered over more than a decade by renowned artist and sculptor Andries Botha and his team.

Nearly 3,000 stitched testimonies, either spoken or written by women across the province, form a vast archive, of which the calendar offers a tantalising glimpse. These fragments of lived experience will soon hang in some 2,000 offices, museums and schools, many of them in rural areas, doing what calendars rarely do: asking you to pause.

The stories originate in the project Amazwi Abesifazane - The Voices of Women ~ an initiative Botha launched after attending the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. Sitting in those rooms, he noticed something others may have overlooked.

“Most of the people appearing were women,” he recalls. “They were there because the men were scattered: for social, cultural and political reasons, while the women stayed at home. They witnessed everything.”

What struck him even more was how history is usually told. “All the stories about our existence are always told by men,” he says. “I wanted to hear what women had to say.”