Porterville Women Share Their Heritage Through Food

Aletta Hendricks and her daughter Nicole were among a few people who presented their heritage through different forms at the Purple Mountain Arts Residency Heritage Festival in Porterville on Wednesday.

“My heritage is represented in the food I grew up with,” said Aletta Hendricks, as she shared the story of her life with the food she made at the Heritage Festival in Porterville on Wednesday.

The event was hosted by The Purple Mountain Arts Residency, a non-profit organisation.

The lunch made by Aletta Hendricks and her daughter Nicole was among dozens of traditional heritage exhibitions during the festival.

Hendricks shared anecdotes of her life as a daughter of farm workers on a farm just outside Porterville. Growing up poor, essentials like milk were a luxury saved for a sweet treat on Sundays, she said.

Each dish made by Aletta Hendricks and her daughter told a different story of her upbringing as a daughter of farm workers in Porterville.

Hendricks served several courses, each one conveying a different tale, to about 25 guests. She served fond favourites like “moerkoffie” and rusks, as well as sourdough bread with snoek and grape jam. Hendricks recalls how her mother would get grapes from the farm where she worked.

Another dish served was “waterblommetjiebredie” — an Afrikaans word for stew made from edible pond weed. “We used to get the plant from the farm dam on Saturdays and eat it on Sundays,” said Hendricks.

She also served butter bean curry on maize rice and ended with a buttermilk pudding and custard. She explained that as a young girl, her mother would put the milk out to make it sour to make the pudding.

The dishes included “waterblommetjiebredie”, a stew made from edible pond weed.

Her daughter, Nicole Hendricks, said that the festival gave them an “opportunity to share how [her mother] grew up”. “Seeing how she grew up means so much to me,” she said.

She added that it gave them a platform to express their own identity. “Coloured people have a wide variety of heritage,” she said.

Carl Collison, co-founder of the arts residency, said Porterville is “a microcosm … in that there is still a large race and class divide. That’s why we have the Heritage Day festival. It’s to foster dialogue, to get people into the same room, and to get people under the same roof, and eat, proverbially, from the same pot”.

Other events for festive goers included poetry reading, a photography competition, stargazing with an astronomer, a photo exhibition, and a film screening, among others.

Other events included a photo exhibition by Beauty Buthelezi, who photographed indigenous people in Papua Guinea during her three-year stay with villagers.

Collison explained that the Purple Mountain Arts Residency aims to give queer creatives in Africa opportunities to showcase their talents. They also do community-based projects. The group hopes to host more festivals on Youth Day and Human Rights Day next year.

“For us to have free events is central to the ethos of Purple Mountain Arts Residency. Having a barrier to access because of your class, your race, or your financial ability is something we reject … We don’t want anybody to be excluded,” said Collison.

The event was sponsored by the Western Cape Government and the Goethe Institut.

The event was hosted by Carl Collison and Aldo Brincat from the non-profit organisation, the Purple Mountain Arts Residency.

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