South Africa, Day 3 by David Whetstone

The children are in class but some of the staff and governors come to greet us and escort us to the site of the amphitheatre which will have a wooden roof and banked seating comprising metal cages filled with stones.

Teacher Lulu Pinda, who has visited the North East as part of the Swallows Partnership, tells us the theatre is going to make a big difference.

The local community has been involved in the project that will give young people who have never seen a play not only the chance to see one but to perform in one.
We are assured the building will be ready this year although the wrong sized stones were delivered and they are waiting for new ones.

As we depart, with the children waving furtively at the windows, we all sign the school visitor book, delivered by a girl in immaculate uniform. Painted on a gable end of one of the simple classroom buildings is the school motto: "Arise and shine."

Next is a visit to the grave and former home of Steve Biko, the founder of the Black Consciousness movement who died after being beaten in police custody in 1977, aged 30. Biko, a thorn in the side of the apartheid regime, had been banned in 1973 from travelling or writing or speaking publicly.

It didn't stop him doing so. As at the Mandela Museum, Biko's words are emblazoned on the walls of his tiny but immaculately kept home in Kingwilliamstown, now a place of pilgrimage. "It is better to die for an idea that will live than to live for an idea that will die," he said with grim prescience.

Also on a wall is the front page of the Daily Dispatch, the regional morning newspaper, whose editor Donald Woods splashed on "BIKO DIES IN DETENTION" and added: "We salute a hero of the nation."

Woods and his family had to flee South Africa as a result. He and Biko are the subject of the Richard Attenborough film Cry Freedom.

In East London I pop into the Daily Dispatch with Mark Lloyd, of Swallows, to meet Dawn Barkhuizen, deputy editor. We tell her something of the Swallows Partnership and the cultural developments on Tyneside. She has a fine art degree but says culture has always been regarded as a bit highbrow on the paper. It doesn't appear to have been considered as an agent of change.

Still, she's interested in the North East/Eastern Cape connections and invites me to submit a feature on it when I return to the UK. Myself and Mark Lloyd, of Swallows, leave feeling elated. In terms of publicising achievements so far, this seems a positive step.
Incidentally, all visitors to the Daily Dispatch have their photographs taken before entry and a sign warns that no weapons must go beyond this point. There are many similar reminders that violence has not been eradicated from a country still finding its democratic feet.

We then visit the local theatre, the Guild, a 1950s creation whose manager has the world weary demeanour of one who has fought many battles to keep afloat. Funding is tight to non-existent and theatre-going is largely a white pastime, as you would expect. For more than 40 years black people weren't allowed to attend.

The Swallows Partnership is eager to support any initiative to create more adventurous programming. Mark Lloyd arranges for The Journey, the new play by Simphiwe Vikilahle, to be performed in the Guild's sister Arts Theatre, a cabaret-style venue.

With its corrugated tin roof over the stage, it sends actor Val McLane down memory Lane. As a founder of Newcastle's Live Theatre, she can remember similar facilities back home on Tyneside some 25 years ago.