Floats to Vensters: A brief history

by Emma Olivier

The annual welcoming of new comers to Stellenbosch University (SU) culminates in Vensters, a highly anticipated event and a chance for newcomers to get to know each other and celebrate a new chapter in their lives. This welcoming tradition has come a long way and seen a few changes before becoming the event as we know it to be today.

Vensters, is an annual event where newcomers showcase dances paired with an acting performance that they learned during welcoming week and takes place at the Welgevallen sports ground. The show can be traced back to the activities done during Jool. This was a week of community-building activities, during which students ruled the roads with Vensters performances, trolley races and a float parade. Pieter Kloppers, director of SU’s Centre for Student Life and Learning, tells the story of how Jool and Vensters have progressed and transformed with the latter starting in the 1950’s where students decorated their residences’ windows – hence the Afrikaans name Vensters. In the 70’s, Vensters became a kind of open-air show which was part of Carnival – where the SU residences would partner up to decorate a backdrop in their residence’s front yard. The backdrop and performance would align with the year’s chosen theme. There the residence teams would perform for street viewers, who would walk on to the next residence after each performance. Audience members would “tour” through the streets to see each show. Linda Laskey, SU alumna whose first year was in 2019, describes how spectators would receive a map to follow the shows. Students performed on rotation, starting their show over for each new wave of viewers. She says, “Victoria Street was closed off, I remember – there were no cars. There were food stalls where you could buy burgers, for example, and cotton candy. […T]here was also a stall that did henna.”

Students built floats by wrapping chicken wire around a frame on the back of a truck to create a 3D-form. The newcomers would cut out tiny plastic squares and pinch them into a floral shape to then fill the holes in the wire with the “flowers”. Kloppers says that in the beginning of this tradition, real flowers – often helichrysum flowers – were used, but it was later decided that it would be better for the environment to let the flowers grow instead. During the parade, streets would be closed off for other vehicles and the result was an array of large, colourful floats moving through the town. Alida Groenewald, SU alumna whose first year at SU was in 1968, recalls, “You could participate in [marching along with] majorettes, if you were chosen, otherwise you would walk around [in the parade] collecting.” The parade was a fundraiser, and students would collect donations from viewers in the streets.

Besides Vensters and float parades, trolley races and sales of the Akkerjol magazine also took place in the streets during Jool. Due to Jool taking place once classes had begun, the trolley race was removed from the schedule in the early 2000s to allow more time for academic priorities. Kloppers describes how Jool became progressively more competitive among residences. He says, “It put a huge burden not just on the newcomers, but also on the student leaders. On the one hand they had to deliver a welcoming programme to do with academics, but on the other hand there was a lot of pressure to win.” The parade usually took place on the morning after Vensters, which would end at 23:00. After Vensters, students would work throughout the night to finish their floats. Kloppers states that the intense expectations that came with the Jool activities became too much, and that the tradition of the parade ended in order to favour academic balance. Collecting
donations in the overly crowded street also became quite dangerous. The last float parade took place in 2011.

Vensters was one tradition from the various Jool activities that survived to this day. Kloppers explains that the competitive nature of the show caused the performances to become more expensive for each residence every year. Every year,
the residences would spend more to make their shows more impressive. The expense, as well as the safety risk posed by
the massive crowds in the street (Kloppers adds that there were crowds of up to 20 000 people watching the performances), led to the Vensters performance on a single stage seen today at Welgevallen.

“The one place where Stellenbosch students learn to work together in large teams is Vensters.” says Kloppers. “And if you want the country to progress, you need to manage large teams. So above all, that is a skill learnt at Vensters.”