Our country’s cultural tourism should not be confined to Zulu villages, Indian bazaars or colourful Klopse.  Our tribe of Afrikaners – especially those on the platteland – deliver little pockets of peculiarities on a regular basis.   This is a culture that has an idiom all of its own, forged in the crucible of the Anglo-Boer War and the Great Trek, built around a rib-sticking braai-based cuisine.  It has its own music and film industry and has elevated hospitality to an art form. My favourite manifestation of this culture is found in the agricultural show, now transmogrified into annual small-town festivals celebrating everything from wine and windmills to potatoes and poetry. The next one – put it in your diary – is the Excelsior Festival from February 25-27. The venue is the town of Excelsior, 100km east of Bloemfontein.  It calls itself the ‘Gateway to Clarens’.  This is quite tongue-in-cheek, as the road to the art mecca of Clarens goes nowhere near Excelsior.  But for those who can’t afford the rarefied prices of Clarens, Excelsior provides an entry-level for the art lover. The life of the town is based around a coffee-shop, an art gallery, and an indefatigable lady called Rina Els.  The spiritual core of the town belongs to a cleric-turned-artist called Father Frans Claerhout, who used to turn out naïve drawings of angels and donkeys and small children in a very recognisable style.  He used his art to create an industry for unemployed women, making drawings that were then printed on to T-shirts, posters, calendars and the like.  This industry is based in Excelsior and his close friend Rina Els has carried on his legacy. Rina is one of those tireless Afrikaans women who talks in a rapid-fire series of one-liners and jokes, holds down three jobs, has a vast extended family who regularly pop in for Sunday lunch, and runs the town single-handedly almost as an afterthought.  She reminds me irresistibly of a souped-up Liewe Heksie. “We’re a small town,” she says.  ‘There are only three streets – two going up and one coming down.  The Excelsior Festival is a way to put this small town on the map.  This is now our fifth year and people are starting to find out about us.  Every year more people come and the festival becomes more popular.” Rina runs a pink palace of a coffee shop called Praatkos.  The shop is named after a book (or maybe the book was named after the shop).  Praatkos, literally translated as ‘talk-food’, encapsulates the Afrikaner ideal of getting together and having long and entertaining chats over good wholesome food.  The book – the brainchild of Claerhout – is a collection of dessert recipes, poems, paintings and homespun philosophy. Rina also runs the Pallecan Gallery, an exhibition space for some astonishingly talented local artists.  “People wonder about the name,” she says, “and think it has something to do with a bird.  Not at all.  It’s Palle Can – ‘pals can’ – and shows what you can achieve when friends work together. ” Rina’s great pal, Sonia, is her committee partner, or what Rina calls a ‘Common Tee’. And then Rina also runs the Excelsior Festival.  It would be a daunting task for anyone else but she takes it cheerfully in her stride as she rattles off a bewildering number of activities. “The theme of the Fees is “Vat Vyf met ‘n Vrolike Lyf!” which is untranslatable but can perhaps be rendered as merely an exhortation to relax and have a good time.   “It’s a type of koeksister-fees,” says Rina, referring to the famous Afrikaans syrupy sweet.  “We’re making gigantic five-fingered hands as the theme.  There’s a soccer tournament, a horse-back parade, singers, a chilli-wors competition” (to see who can eat the hottest chilli sausage) “food stalls, theatre performances, a jukskei tournament, lots of art on sale, a family-get-together of the famous Loos family, an exhibition of the huge quilt that was created by descendants of people who died in the concentration camps of the Boer War, book launches, processions, lots of games for the children and prize-giving to the winners of the soccer.” The singers and performers are a number of famous Afrikaans artists who have a huge following on the platteland and form the basis of that thriving and expanding Afrikaans film and music industry. Growing up in the Northern Cape, I used to go to many of these shows and the memories are fond:  the smell of sawdust and candy-floss; the loud music and distorted announcements over the tannoy, the afternoons fading into warm still evenings while the moth-orbited lights come on for the night activities, the taste of hotdogs with too much tomato sauce and fudge melted in the heat. Rina told me that she would give me a copy of her Praatkos if I could get to the Fees and collect it personally.  Rina, I have already yoked up the oxen, and I am on my way! Read more about the Excelsior Festival at www.claerhout.biz