The Use of Traditional Cultural Forms in Community Education

Author: Lynn Dalrymple
Date: 1997
Professor, Department of Drama, University of Zululand, South Africa and Director of the Drama in AIDS Project.

To most South Africans, `traditional dance' means the local, folk or indigenous dance forms of Africa, although of course ballet is also a `traditional' dance. The question is whose tradition? A broader sense of `traditional' is `established', and in this paper, as the argument develops, `traditional' takes on this broader connotation.

One of the difficulties of socially contested words such as culture is that they instantly raise suspicion in people's minds. For example, what does a woman with a different heritage know about traditional South African cultural forms?[1] One of the narrower meanings of `culture' is `the arts' and so by `traditional cultural forms' I mean a general body of art forms. Why then did I not entitle this paper `The use of art forms in community education?' I preferred `traditional cultural forms' because it is a broader concept which denotes forms that express a whole way of life, allowing me to include customs and rituals in this discussion. For me, traditions and cultures are not fixed or bound but free-flowing and by their very nature are ductile, flexible and interactive. Apartheid was rooted in fixed notions of culture and heritage, with the tragic consequences that I do not need to rehearse here.

I shall speak about `community education' with special reference to DramAidE. DramAidE is a state-funded sexuality and HIV/AIDS education programme offering information about the transmission and prevention of the spread of HIV/AID and STDs, and providing life skills to cope with the implications of the information (Dalrymple 1994). The emergence of a global AIDS pandemic has aroused a global response. AIDS, as a disease of the late 20th Century, with no cure, has brought the cultural politics of information and education into the foreground.

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