by Sylvia Vollenhoven

A Literary Arts Project that publishes a three-volume book set. Together these works form a living archive of our shared trauma, resilience, and aspiration. Personal offerings to the ongoing struggles for land, identity, and cultural sovereignty. The works serve as a mirror to ourselves as a nation. A publishing journey into the very heart of memory, and resistance. It has grown from a conviction that theatre, poetry, journalism, ritual and storytelling are essential tools to restore what colonialism and apartheid has so brutally destroyed.

Book 1: A collection of theatre plays called Quintet: Five Stages of Memory. These have been staged at major theatres abroad and in SA, including The Market, Baxter and Artscape:

• The Keeper of the Kumm: Ancestral Longing & Belonging of a Boesmankind is an autobiographical dance drama that excavates threads of Ancestral knowledge and shows how reclaiming those threads can heal both psychic and communal injury.
• Dance of the La Gumas: Revolution, Rumba & Romance portrays exile as both loss and sustained political labour, where love, music and transnational solidarities sustain the revolutionary lives of Alex and Blanche La Guma.
• Cold Case: Revisiting Dulcie September demands accountability for political murder and keeps an unresolved case alive as a moral imperative.
• In Krotoa Eva van De Kaap we reimagine a silenced 17th‐century life to insist on Indigenous personhood and the continuing moral economy of ceremony and land.
• In My Word: Redesigning Buckingham Palace (aka A Writer’s Last Word) we memorialise the writer, Richard Rive, as witness and interrogate how literature itself resists erasure.

Book 2: The republication of the award-winning creative non-fiction book, The Keeper of the Kumm: Longing & Belonging of A Boesmankind originally published by Tafelberg in 2016 and now out of print. A creative non-fiction novel. A dance drama adaptation of the book that has the same name. This is perhaps the most poetic and spiritual expression of the collection. A work that journeys into the Ancestral longing and belonging of the San and Khoekhoe peoples. It is a voice from the land itself, asking us to listen beyond words, beyond official histories. We know that trauma resides not only in speeches and archives but in the very soil, in the water, in the living landscape. Healing begins with acknowledging that the earth is soaked in blood, that it remembers and refuses to forget, and that ritual and creativity artistry are the acts that awaken or reclaims those buried histories. Winner of the Mbokodo Literary Prize and runner up for several other awards. In the process of republication, we are bringing a foundational text back into circulation. To restore an important piece of our cultural arsenal and also to remind us that Indigenous longings, bloodlines, and stories are essential to decolonising our land and ourselves.

Book 3: A collection of my journalistic features and columns called Never Ending Stories: Dispatches for the Infinite Now record key moments in our history. The collection is curated from the 1980s to the present. These writings are a personal archive and a witness to history in motion. They record moments of uprising, exile, hope, and disillusionment. The columns and stories remind us that resistance persists, often in quiet, unseen acts, in words of defiance, in the unyielding commitment of those who refuse to be erased. These columns are an attempt to keep the voices of those fighting for justice alive, to show that journalism is not merely a record but an act of resistance, an act of memory that defies silence. The columns also show very powerfully the similarity between our never ending fights for justice from one decade to the next. Most of the work in Never Ending Stories was banned by the apartheid government at the time and was published only in foreign publications, mainly the main Scandinavian daily newspaper Expressen as well as in the USA… most notably for Mother Jones and Ms Magazine.
These three tandem publications will be accompanied by an extensive Outreach & Impact Campaign that builds on the previous work of Vollenhoven and Appollis. Focusing on Indigenous Groups, Youth and Women in rural and peri urban areas.

In 2023 when I am researching a story in the library of Stellenbosch University (SU). The chief librarian shows me an old chair in the corner. It seems as if the person who has been sitting on it has just stepped out for a while.

“It used to belong to Verwoerd,” the librarian says half apologetically.

The mundane air of the chair in the busy library that students use every day makes me inexplicably angry. How does such a relic get to sit so smugly and so prominently in this place seeking to become a truly African place of learning? The anger turns to sadness. I’ve never been around a chair that evoked so much emotion.

Hendrick Verwoerd – an SU alumnus and Prime Minister from 1958 until 1966 – is widely regarded as the ‘architect of apartheid’. Born in the Netherlands he was a leading light in the National Party (NP) that imposed the system of apartheid mercilessly on South Africans from 1948 until the first democratic elections in 1994. Many of the NP cabinet ministers and Prime Ministers were SU alumni.

The colonials and later Verwoerd and his people ensured that the Indigenous people across Southern Africa were almost completely destroyed. The South African government used to issue licenses for people to hunt the San, with the last one being reportedly issued in Namibia in 1936.[1] In the wake of the physical genocide came the intellectual erasure. The final onslaught on our people’s spirituality, culture, identity and nationhood was the National Party’s decision to declare that the descendants of the Khoekhoe, the San and other First Nations people should be classified coloured. An amorphous, catchall race classification that wiped out our languages, our names, thousands of years of history and our claim to the land.

In recent years Khoekhoe and San[2] activists have rejected the coloured label . We have focused on claiming our place in the landscape of Southern Africa’s history. But in the official archives this landscape is particularly barren and problematic. In places of power – boardrooms, cabinet meetings or on winners’ podiums – Khoe-San people are almost completely absent.
Storytelling and the arts have become our main weapons in the fight to reclaim land, culture, identity and memory. SONGS OF THE SOIL is our response to a chorus of Indigenous revivalism that is sweeping the world.

An important aspect of all these stories is the collaboration between meticulous research, intuitive African ways of knowing and embodied memory.

Rational exploration that uses divination to become excavation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_people#cite_note-35
[2] I use these terms knowing that for some they are still contested and that they do not representthe myriad groupings and names by which individuals prefer to be known.

Educational Value

Each play in the Quintet anthology is also an educational tool. Together they provide multidimensional entry points for teaching history, ethics, cultural studies, trauma theory, decolonial practice, performance studies and restorative justice. Classroom-ready features include vivid primary source dramatisations, multilingual texts and ritual sequences for study. These works help students and communities develop critical literacy about archives and memory, understand embodied and intergenerational trauma, and explore culturally grounded methods of healing. Theatre workshops, staged readings and seminar modules drawn from these plays will deepen curricula across secondary and tertiary programmes — in literature, history, social work, law, public health, and Indigenous studies — while equipping practitioners to work respectfully with living traditions.

The Keeper of the Kumm is widely used by tertiary institutions and scholars around the world. It is due to feature in a special issue of the Safundi Journal in a major article by Prof Ruramisai Charumbira of the Dept of History at the University of Western Ontario in the USA. Prof Charumbira writes in Safundui that the Kumm book “offers a new framework for understanding the reclamation of African history, memory, and identity.”

Intergenerational Trauma

In many Indigenous cosmologies, it is believed that the blood of massacred ancestors has soaked into the earth that sustains us. That the land is not inert matter but a living witness, veined with histories of resistance, pain, and resilience. This belief has shaped our understanding of healing and justice. That we cannot separate ourselves from the land we inhabit, nor from the blood that stains it. To heal intergenerational trauma, we must engage ritual, embodied practice, and storytelling. These are acts that connect us to Ancestors and to the earth itself.

All three volumes together form a mosaic. Each one different in form — play, poetry, journalism — but all committed to the same truth. This collection is an acknowledgment that trauma is not just in the past but in the soil we till, in the water we drink, and in the generational wounds that shape our bodies and minds. The plays, the poetry, and the columns are part of a long conversation, one that invites us to listen deeply, to sit with uncomfortable truths, and to find our voice anew.

Songs of the Soil is an argument and an archive: a compendium that affirms the creative labour required to repair what was broken, to name what was hidden, and to keep singing. It is an invitation to listen, to remember and to join the work of reclaiming land, language, bodies and dignity.

All three publications are available free of charge to community organisations (especially the Vision In Africa partners) selected educational institutions, learners and students. Songs of the Soil is supported by the Presidential Employment Stimulus Programme (PESP) via the National Arts Council, an Agency of the South African Government’s Department of Sport, Arts and Culture. For complementary copies email: sylvia@visioninafrica.co.za