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Heal the Hood book of Rhymes, Articles, Poetry, Short Stories

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2 June 2006 No Comment

City of Cape Town Arts and Culture Forum has funded Heal the Hood Project to compile and release a book. It has been decided that the book will focus on rhymes, articles, poetry and short stories of youth in Cape Town. If you are interested in getting your English, Afrikaans or Xhosa rhymes, articles and short stories published into this book, please call Emile or Tanswell from Heal the Hood Project at 021 7060481 or email your written work to emiley@mweb.co.za. We will also include drawings, artwork or pictures relating to the writings you send in. If you wish to post your writings, please send it to RAPSS, P.O.Box 31184, Grassy Park 7888, Cape Town 8000. Read on for more info…

Last year Emile self published and released a book named My Hip Hop is African and Proud. Heal the Hood Project is aware of the difficulty of getting youth from the Cape Flats to read, so we decided to have rhymes in these books and short stories about life on the Cape Flats and experiences of artists from the Cape Flats. We are planning to include a CD of these lyrics, if we are able to raise the funds to make it a reality, so people could follow the lyrics on CD. We are also aware that a great amount of information will not be televised, so youth have to read to truly free their minds and thus also themselves. Cape Town youth need to read more positive stories from their communities to feel a sense of pride in self and their communities. If all we read about ourselves is related to crime and violence, we might start to believe that that is all we can be. While touring schools we realised that young people want to read local stories, but they cant find these in their school or local libraries. On 16th June Youth in South Africa sent a message to the world that they were willing to die for the freedom that we have today. They also said that the revolution would not be televised … so to truly free ourselves we need to start encouraging young South Africans to read. We need more stories written by us for us so that we can be exposed to each other to encourage a sense of pride in ourselves. Learning about each other will break the mental barriers of apartheid that is still in place thanks to us not knowing each other.

Heal the Hood Project just recently sent 5 dancers from the Cape Flats to work in Germany and Austria for the next 7 months. Heal the Hood is currently touring schools and communities to do hip hop workshops that are funded by the British Council.We also have 1500 spraycan art books sponsored by the British Council that we are distributing to schools and libraries. Emile of Black Noise, the founder of Heal the Hood Project, just returned from the USA where possibilities for spreading the project is real good. Heal the Hood will be hosting African Hip Hop Indaba 2006 during August. More about Heal the Hood Project activities can be seen on www.healthehood.org       

Anyone wishing to contribute to making this an ongoing project or wishing to order a copy of the books or assist with distributing it to schools and libraries in their communities, please contact us at 021 7060481 or mail us at emiley@mweb.co.za

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