Pilane Bubu and the work of remembering through folklore
There is something quietly radical about the way Pilane Bubu speaks about building worlds. Not stages. Not events. Worlds. What emerges in our conversation is not simply the story of a festival but the anatomy of a living archive, one that breathes through people, memory and the stubborn insistence that culture must be held, not consumed.
The Folklore Festival, which is entering its fifth year as a formal gathering and sixth as a broader community platform, did not begin as a grand institutional vision. It began, as many necessary things do, in the quiet unrest of an artist asking herself whether music alone could carry the weight of inheritance.
This year’s Fringe programme, under the theme KinFolk, sharpens that intention.
It spans six cities, with Cape Town (25 March), Pretoria (2 April) and Polokwane (9 April) being the final cities. The roadshow brings together daytime industry dialogues and evening performances, creating a dual space of learning and expression
Bubu’s album, Folklore Chapter One, was the seed. But the soil was something deeper: a recognition that South Africa’s cultural memory, its folktales, oral histories and indigenous knowledge systems could not be adequately archived through a single discipline.
“Music wasn’t enough of a technology or a portal for me to archive or to share, to preserve what I think is sitting with different cultures in South Africa,” she says. “Not just with music but in all disciplines of art.”
Music, she realised, was a portal. But not the whole house.
And so the house had to be built.
What the Folklore Festival has become is an ecosystem that stretches across disciplines.
Literature, film, performance and scholarship, gathering artists who are all, in their own ways, engaged in the act of remembering. Not nostalgically but urgently. Not as preservation for preservation’s sake but as a means of reconstituting identity in a country negotiating the afterlives of its past.
Listening to Bubu trace the journey, one is struck by how deliberately the festival resists spectacle as its primary currency.
Yes, there are concerts. Yes, there are performances. But what sits at the heart of it is dialogue, often slow, sometimes uncomfortable, always necessary. Intergenerational dialogue, in particular, has become one of the festival’s most defining features. It wasn’t always this way.
In its early years, the festival risked being pulled into the familiar orbit of programming: music here, talks there, audiences moving between them as consumers rather than participants. But something shifted when themes were introduced.
In 2024, under the banner of We The Folk, the festival turned its gaze toward 30 years of democracy, asking artists across generations to sit with the question of freedom not as an abstract ideal but as a lived, contested experience.
“We had to frame the conversation for the young and old so that they know what it is they need to be talking about,” Bubu explains.
“In the beginning, we left it open so people could understand the idea of folklore. Now the themes allow us to go deeper.”
This is where the festival began to find its deeper voice.
Writers like Gcina Mhlophe shared space with emerging authors. Veteran musicians and cultural workers found themselves in conversation with younger artists who are mapping their place in the industry. Women across generations spoke candidly about presence, erasure and endurance.
These were not panel discussions in the conventional sense. They were encounters, sometimes tender and charged, where the distance between “then” and “now” could be measured not in years but in understanding.
“We’re going beyond just entertainment,” she says. “We’re moving into something educational, creating space for dialogue outside the concert itself.”
Bubu speaks about the moments with a kind of grounded clarity. There is no romanticising of intergenerational exchange here. It is work. It requires framing, intention and perhaps most importantly, patience.
The first years, she admits, were about allowing people to even grasp what “folklore” might mean in a contemporary South African context. The work of education is ongoing.
But something profound is happening.
In cities like Durban and Gqeberha, the festival has begun to decentralise its presence, resisting the gravitational pull of Johannesburg and Cape Town as the sole cultural capitals.
The decision is not logistical but philosophical. To decentralise is to acknowledge that culture does not emanate from a single centre. It lives in regions, in languages, in communities that are too often treated as peripheral.
“Initially it was like: How do we build a pipeline to Joburg? I don’t even want to use that language anymore,” Bubu reflects.
“It’s about building thriving ecosystems in those regions so that Joburg is not so saturated.”
And when the festival arrives in these spaces, it does not simply present; it listens.
There are moments Bubu recalls that feel almost sacred: an elder sharing a deeply personal story alongside younger artists encountering such narratives in this way for the first time; a seasoned industry figure opening up about pathways and failures without the usual gatekeeping; musicians bridging indigenous soundscapes with contemporary experimentation.
These are not just highlights. They are acts of repair.
Because what sits beneath the festival’s work is an understanding that something was interrupted.
“Parents and elders were so busy fighting for our liberation that the intergenerational dialogue didn’t fully happen,” she says.
“The sharing stalled. Preservation was hindered. Documentation was destroyed.”
The violence of apartheid did not only dispossess land. It disrupted continuity. It fractured the transmission of knowledge between generations. In the rupture, something was lost, not entirely but enough to require deliberate recovery.
“There’s so much to recover, so much to reclaim, so much to reposition,” Bubu continues. “To see ourselves again in our stories, not just for the sake of it but for archiving.”
This is why the Folklore Festival cannot be reduced to an arts event. It is a response.
It is also, crucially, artist-led.
Bubu speaks candidly about the gaps she has experienced in her own career — the lack of access to information, the financial missteps that come with navigating an opaque industry, the subtle but significant ways in which young artists are excluded from networks that determine opportunity.
“It’s taken me 15 years to decode these ways of working within the industry,” she says. “There’s not enough information sharing and there’s a lot of money loss that can happen if you don’t understand how things work.”
So the festival becomes a bridge.
“I wanted to connect the people who hold the knowledge with the people who need it the most,” she explains, “so we can empower young artists”.
Between formal and informal learning. Between the visible industry and the invisible labour that sustains it. It is as much about equipping artists with tools — how to navigate applications, how to build relationships — as it is about nurturing the softer, often overlooked aspects of artistic life.
“You’ll apply for a festival 20 times and keep getting ‘we regret’ letters,” she says. “But we don’t realise the value of proximity. There are conversations happening in rooms we’re not in.”
There is a quiet defiance in the approach. In a digital age that promises accessibility but often delivers isolation, Bubu insists on the value of being present. Of understanding that opportunity is relational.
Then there are the young artists.
When asked what she feels watching them find their voices through the festival, Bubu does not default to sentimentality. Her first response is almost startling in its honesty.
“My first emotion is that there’s so much work to be done,” she says. “But I see potential. I see how we can help.”
It is the response of someone who sees possibility not as a finished product but as a beginning.
“I’ve seen global stages and they have no idea there are people out there waiting for them,” she adds. “We want to build that bridge.”