Camissa Museum NPC seeks to work in solidarity partnerships with community-based organisations with cultural heritage and community education and service at its core. These are some of the organisations with whom we engage.

 

We believe that it is important for community action initiatives are networked with each other and that cultural heritage and restorative memory is used to empower communities and shape call for restorative justice.

 

 

The Cape Cultural Collective (CCC) is a non-racial, non-sexist inter-generational cultural movement promoting social activism and reflecting on history & memory. CCC is engaged in a range of projects including the highly successful Rosa Choir and the cultural development of community groups and it holds monthly cultural programmes and facilitate cultural performances for a range of organisations.

CCC is dedicated to the promotion and development of an inter-generational cultural, performance and learning space; development of a creative space where participants can project /their ideas, creativity, identity and share these with others; develop an environment that is critical and supportive of debate; work towards material outcomes that support community projects; promote social and cultural activism; focus on both historical and contemporary issues; promote different art and creative forms. Ncebakazi Fezeka Mnukwana of the Cape Cultural Collective is on the Camissa Museum NPC Board.

 

 

In 2009 a group of talented young musicians and performers who had come to an awareness about this hidden history of Afrikaans and wanted to learn more and share what they had learnt with young people on the Cape Flats, decided to put on a multi-media show called "Afrikaaps".

It took the unique form of a multi-media protest-theatre production promoting an understanding of Afrikaaps as a legitimate Cape Afrikaans dialect that was directly rooted in the black originators of the language. It was an act of restorative justice and reclamation born out of an exercise in restorative memory. Janine van Rooy Overmeyer was one of those pioneering performers and is now on the Board of Camissa Museum NPC.

 

 

The Trilingual Dictionary of Kaaps (TDK) is a descriptive corpus project that will develop the first dictionary of Kaaps.

It defines Kaaps as one of the languages in Southern Africa created in the 1500s. It is today an important linguistic resource for its speakers found in the Western Cape and beyond. But it also one of the most marginalized languages in the history of our country. On 30th September 2021 Camissa Museum NPC and the Trilingual Dictionary of Kaaps, led by Professor Quentin Williams and Shaquile Southgate, at the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR) University of the Western Cape, pledged to partner together.

 

 

The Tshisimani Centre for Activist Education draws its name ‘Tshisimani’ from a word in the TshiVenda language meaning fountain, spring or ‘at the water source’. This captures the driving inspiration for the Centre, which is to nourish, replenish and sustain the power and capacity of activist movements, organisations and networks engaged in grassroots struggle to build a just society in South Africa and internationally.

Formed in early 2016, the Tshisimani Centre provides structured and reflective learning programmes for social justice activists to complement their experience in fundamentally addressing, and finding solutions to, the injustices faced daily by the poor, marginalised and disenfranchised. Zelda Holtzman, Executive Director of Tshisimani, is on the Board of Camissa Museum NPC.

 

 

The Bonteheuwel Development Forum (BDF), is a community-based NGO.

It consists of street and block committees that are tackling bread and butter issues of our community in the areas of safety, poverty, health, youth, women, food security, education, shelter, and the built environment. Henriette Thandi Abrahams of the BDF is on the Board of Camissa Museum NPC.

 

 

 

Documentary portraits from an anthropological perspective.

'Vêrlander, the Orphans of the VOC' (2015-2017). Vêrlander is about the impact of the VOC on the sense of identity of indigenous groups in Southern Africa, Indonesia and Australia, four centuries later. Vêrlander has been shown in the Westfries Museum, Western Australian Museum, National Museum Bloemfontein, Castle of Good Hope (Cape Town), and Jakarta CIPTA Niaga, Vestingmuseum Naarden.