The main festival will be held 25 – 28 April and will include Freedom Day on the 27th and a Youth Day Concert on the 28th. “In this way Freedom Day will be linked to our core message of One City, Many Cultures,” said Ryland Fisher, the former Cape Times editor who has been the chairperson of the festival since its inception in 1999.
The festival used to be held in March and was originally planned for the Easter weekend next year. The Cape Town Festival will still host the popular Human Rights Day event in the Company's Gardens on Friday 21 March.
The Cape Town Festival has three components: a series of 10 community festivals, a youth festival and the main festival.
The Community Festivals are scheduled to start a month later than planned and will run from 9 February to 16 April over every weekend excluding Easter. The Youth Festival starts on Monday 21 April and will continue until Friday 25 April, which means that it will be directly linked to the Main Festival.
Some of the highlights of next year's festival will be the Unity March on Saturday 26 April, the Street Festival which will be moved from Long Street to Adderley Street and the baking of the world's biggest koe(k)sister on Sunday 27 April.
“The festival should appeal to the needs of people from diverse backgrounds and provide skills and training education in line with the cultural industries vision in South Africa. It will also promote the vision of One City Many Cultures, which is a more tolerant, diverse and intergrated city,” said Fisher.
Premier Ebrahim Rasool commented that the Cape Town Festival has his unequivocal support as its objectives of building social cohesion and advancing non-racial unity form the basis of the city's vision of creating a Home for All. “The plans to bring greater focus to the festival are exciting and we are confident it will lead to further consolidation of the festival as a key event on the Cape Town cultural calendar,” concludes Premier Rasool.
Mayor Helen Zille also gave her support to the festival, encouraging Capetonians to come out in their numbers to support the events as well as the country's rising stars and more well-established acts. She further says, “Together with the Minstrel Carnivals, the Switching on of Festive Lights, the New Years' eve street parties and other major celebrations, the Cape Town festival has helped to secure Cape Town's reputation as the party capital of South Africa.”
Professor Henry "Jatti" Bredenkamp CEO of Iziko Museums supports Mayor Zille's encouragement to locals to support the event. “Surely, all South Africans, and especially those who have made the Cape of Good Hope and/or Cape of Storms their home, should support passionately in their own right and in the spirit of our nation's new motto – !ke e: //xarra /ke (people who are different joining together) – the re-imagined Cape Town Festival next year when we commemorate the first slave revolt in Cape Town and South Africa.”
