BEHIND VAN VUUREN'S FARM

This play was inspired by The Red on the Rainbow written by Vice Monageng Motshabi. It is the result of thoughts and emotions—an unflinching confrontation with racial injustice, a cry against the continuous killing of Black farmworkers, and the silence that follows. Justice remains a ghost, and we are left to question: How long will the blood on the soil be ignored? About the Play: On the boundary of Limpopo, hidden in the vast, peaceful fields whose horizons extend infinitely, stands Van Vieren’s farm,one filled with heritage, full of blood, and filled with horror. It is not a farm in any conventional manner. It is a malevolent playground for the doomed, a hunting ground for men who introduce themselves as farmers but make a living through brutality, mastery, and willful erasure of workers under them. This intense drama unfolds the life of a Black family, a mother, a father, and a son, who live and labor under the shadow of Van Vieren’s farm. Having arrived in search of survival, survival here is a cruel illusion. Here, white hands tightly clutch the land and the law, and hope is a faint whisper lost in the cacophony of oppression. The mother, a strong and sharp,thinking woman, believed in books. She saw books as a path to freedom, but her search for freedom earned her a deadly fate at the hands of oppressors who attempted to muffle her voice. Her demise leaves a broken family: a son clinging to the pieces of her aspirations and a husband broken with grief and madness.