Looking back on SA’s first ‘reality’ show
Cast member discusses role in ‘The Volunteers’ 40 years ago
Long before Survivor, Big Brother or The Real Housewives, the concept of a reality show was pioneered right here in the Eastern Cape.
Forty years later one of the participants of The Volunteers, Penny Elliot, spoke about the experience to a combined gathering of the Grahamstown Historical Society and U3A at the Grahamstown Bowling Club in African Street, Makhanda.
Filmed near Salem in the Bushmans River Valley in 1983, the SABC production was screened the following year, and several times on the Discovery Channel in the US.
It was conceived by SABC TV producer Tommy McClelland as a documentary.
Thirteen volunteers who went through a rigorous screening process, were placed on the piece of land with limited resources and limited contact with the outside world, in a closed environment. Their conditions were intended to emulate those of the British settlers who landed in this part of the world in 1820.
Elliot was 23 when she went into the valley. The volunteers were divided into two groups: a family of five, and a group of eight individuals.
Elliot was part of the latter. “The singles got on,” she said. “We recognised people had different skills. We never discussed who was in charge of a particular task: it just evolved.”
Mike Rossiter, who was an architect, had ideas about how to build their living structures.
Elliot, who grew up on a farm, knew about growing food.
“We had a good vegetable
garden,” she recalled.
Botanist Yvette van Wijk took them on a walk through the veld to show them what they could and couldn’t eat.
They learnt how to slaughter animals for meat, and how to manage food that deteriorates
quickly without a refrigerator.
“We learnt to hang the meat high up at night so it could cool.”
It would develop a sort of skin around it.
Making bread and using sour milk (amasi) were among the skills they learned.
Elliot described cutting up a rotten cowhide for trusses for the roof of their living structure.
The film crew would sneak in unannounced to film the participants.
But, Elliot said, their senses had grown acute since being away from the overload of an urban environment.
“We knew they were there because we could smell them,” she said.
Keeping clean was a challenge and for the first few weeks they would become sootblack.
“Then, because we weren’t using harsh soaps, our natural oils returned and we wouldn’t get so dirty,” Elliot recalled.
The group Elliot was in used their kitchen as a gathering point.
“It became the hub of our lives together,” she said.
They had an 1820-era shotgun and used it to shoot ducks, dassies and once –a cormorant.
“Hungry as we were, we couldn’t eat the cormorant,” Elliot said. The psychologist on call and who was monitoring the group had expected the strong-minded volunteers to end the six-month experiment even more extreme.
“But actually, we came out more moderate, and more tolerant.”
Elliot said she was heartbroken to leave the valley at the end of the six months.
“We packed our bags, put them over our shoulders and walked out,” she said.
They walked all the way back to then Grahamstown.
“There were bonds formed there that will never break,” she said.
Elliot spoke about the elephant in the room.
She said she was acutely aware then and now of the irony that the deprivation they had voluntarily chosen for that period was nothing like the conditions that the majority of SA people lived under their entire lives.