PERCY MABANDU | Lifting the curtain on the Khoi

For generations, a quiet crisis has played out in the dustbowl of Namaqualand and the Karoo. A struggle defined by the indigenous Nama and Khoi communities waging a lonely battle against generational trauma, crushing unemployment and addiction. But this year, the veil over their silent suffering is set to be pierced by award-winning indigenous theatre-maker Jason Jacobs, armed with compelling community-centred art and activism.

Jacobs, recently named the 2026 Standard Bank Young Artist for Theatre, was all the rage at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda this year. His one-man theatre show, KRAAL, was performed to much acclaim. His film Carissa (2024) was selected for the Orizzonti section at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, while Variations On A Theme (2026) won the top Tiger Award at the 2026 International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Amid this marked success, Jacobs has opted to resist the customary migration to big cities like Cape Town or Joburg in the name of personal progress. He lives and works in Kharkams, a small, poor settlement nestled 25km to the south of Kamieskroon on the N7 in Namaqualand. The back of beyond.

As the dust settled on his headline performances at the National Arts Festival, Jacobs took time to reflect on the role of his work as an artist in finding healing and empowerment for the people of Namaqualand and the surrounds.

Jacobs says the centrality of the Nama and people of Khoi descent to his work is “the natural and necessary next step in a lifelong commitment to restoration work”. He insists that his work “is not a personal showcase. It stands on the shoulders of the herders, farmers, matjieshuis builders and the everyday community members of Kharkams and Namaqualand. My work is a call to action to restore the pride, dignity and self-worth of the indigenous peoples from and in Namaqualand.”

My people and their stories are inherent in everything I do, even as I also tell other stories from places like the winelands, where my paternal lineage is from

—  Jason Jacobs, award-winning indigenous theatre-maker

Jacobs was born and raised in Kharkams before his family moved to Vredendal. Though he still feels a kinship with the people of Vredendal North, he recently returned to live in Kharkams. This has been both an activist’s move and a search for deeper personal meaning.

“My people and their stories are inherent in everything I do, even as I also tell other stories from places like the winelands, where my paternal lineage is from. Remaining in the communities I come from, and form part of, allows me to stay true to the land and act as a faithful steward of my people’s joy, pain, herstories and futures,” he says.

The pursuit of personal development often leads to a brain and talent drain from small villages and communities in remote regions of the country. Places like Kharkams are no exception. To help stem the tide, Jacobs uses his platform as an artist and researcher to create opportunities that will incentivise young talented people to stay, dream and see possibilities for the future in Kharkams.

“For instance, thanks to the National Film and Video Foundation, we have successfully employed many local people from the Kamiesberg directly [to make our films]; and through funds like the Nasionale Afrikaanse Teater-Inisiatief, BASA [Business and Arts South Africa] and the National Arts Council, we use literature and theatre-making to enable change in a big way.”

Though funding makes the struggle easier, the fight for economic empowerment through the creative industry is not easy, says Jacobs. “It requires a lot of people to steer the ship.” However, working with the community and holding each other accountable to change for good makes the mission worthwhile.

Jacobs and his art activist colleagues wrestle with a deep structural problem of addiction in the Northern Cape. A problem that is faced by many other communities in South Africa. However, substance abuse for the Nama and Cape Coloured communities has a unique history of being institutionalised as a campaign by wine farm owners using addiction to demobilise people across multiple generations.

By translating these dreams into a fictionalised narrative for healing, I confront the inherited damage that functions like an unwanted heirloom

Jacobs makes the point that “the dop system, which is often only discussed as a problem of the winelands and Western Cape, is a colonial hangover” that has been a terrible reality in Namaqualand and the larger Northern Cape. So, he creatively looks at how it continues to “ravage the nuclear family [with] intergenerational scars dating back to the 1600s”.

One way Jacobs confronts this horrible history is through his play, KRAAL. “It was born from ancestral visitations in my dreams explicitly guiding me to write about the past and imagine new futures in performance as ceremony,” he says, adding that he is a traditional healer in training and employs his gift as a healer to aid his efforts as an artist.

“By translating these dreams into a fictionalised narrative for healing, I confront the inherited damage that functions like an unwanted heirloom. It is a vulnerable process, but it serves as an artistic and literary exorcism, using storytelling as transgenerational therapy to find the magical, sacred core” that goes far beyond mere tools of production.

Jacobs collaborated with actors from Kharkams to reimagine his dreams as archival material by creating short films, which were then used as audio-visual projections in the final theatre production. In the end, they created a work that is at once communal in scope and personal in reach.

This approach is mirrored in his film, Variations on a Theme. The film tracks the lives of a family dealing with the difficulties of an ageing grandmother whose children wrestle with leaving her alone in the village while looking to build their own families elsewhere; a process dogged by persistent memories and crime.

Variations on a Theme has brought the village together. After it was recently shown at International Film Festival Rotterdam and Joburg Film Festival, Jacobs and his colleagues organised a three-day screening festival in Kharkams and Kamiesberg to give the towns’ people an opportunity to see themselves on screen. It was a moment of great “joy and pride” for the community.

Beyond the little economic injection that the film made possible, the most sacred win of this journey was in the “pride in the faces of the people”. It may be a small win, but along with the Standard Bank Young Artist for Theatre award, Jacobs says, it “reinforces my responsibility to use theatre not just for performance, but as a bridge for collective well-being and a mirror for those struggling with the scars of the past”.

• Mabandu is an art historian and writer based in Tshwane