The day after F W De Klerk

Frederik Willem de Klerk

Frederik Willem de Klerk , often known as F. W. de Klerk, is the former seventh and last State President of apartheid-era South Africa, serving from September 1989 to May 1994...

's landmark announcement that the African National Congress

African National Congress

The African National Congress is South Africa's governing Africanist political party, supported by its tripartite alliance with the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party , since the establishment of non-racial democracy in April 1994. It defines itself as a...

 (ANC) and other political organisations would be unbanned and Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela served as President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999, and was the first South African president to be elected in a fully representative democratic election. Before his presidency, Mandela was an anti-apartheid activist, and the leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing...

 would be released from prison, a small group of Capetonians

Cape Town

Cape Town is the second-most populous city in South Africa, and the provincial capital and primate city of the Western Cape. As the seat of the National Parliament, it is also the legislative capital of the country. It forms part of the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality...

 took to the streets in an act of guerrilla street theatre. The Rainbow Nation Peace Ritual as it eventually came to be known, was actually planned some ten days before the announcement by the Rainbow People's Party and the ritual, march, celebration or carnival, call it what you will, involved children as well as innocent bystanders who were taken by surprise.

It lasted only for a couple of hours, beginning at the Old Townhouse in Greenmarket Square

Greenmarket Square

Greenmarket Square is a historical square in the centre of old Cape Town, South Africa.The square was built in 1696, when a burgher watch house was erected here. In 1761, the watch house was demolished and the Old Town House built in the site...

, Cape Town

Cape Town

Cape Town is the second-most populous city in South Africa, and the provincial capital and primate city of the Western Cape. As the seat of the National Parliament, it is also the legislative capital of the country. It forms part of the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality...

, proceeded down Shortmarket Street and ended up in St George's Mall.

While the ideal of a new tribe of rainbow

Rainbow

A rainbow is an optical and meteorological phenomenon that causes a spectrum of light to appear in the sky when the Sun shines on to droplets of moisture in the Earth's atmosphere. It takes the form of a multicoloured arc...

 people was always a part of South African counter-culture, it was only after Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Desmond Tutu

Desmond Mpilo Tutu is a South African activist and retired Anglican bishop who rose to worldwide fame during the 1980s as an opponent of apartheid...

 officially "named" the Rainbow Nation

Rainbow Nation

Rainbow Nation is a term coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to describe post-apartheid South Africa, after South Africa's first fully democratic election in 1994....

, that the phrase became accepted across the board. However the fact remains, that on February 3, 1990, a cross-cultural mix of hippies, street kids, Rasta

Rastafari movement

The Rastafari movement or Rasta is a new religious movement that arose in the 1930s in Jamaica, which at the time was a country with a predominantly Christian culture where 98% of the people were the black descendants of slaves. Its adherents worship Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia , as God...

s and artists, a veritable "band of modern merry pranksters

Merry Pranksters

The Merry Pranksters were a group of people who formed around American author Ken Kesey in 1964 and sometimes lived communally at his homes in California and Oregon...

" danced through the streets of Cape Town and invoked the goddess of peace and spirits of abundance to awaken and greet a new age of freedom.

What is also significant about this event, is the willing participation of a banner painted by Beezy Bailey

Beezy Bailey

Beezy Bailey is a South African artist who works in several media, including painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking and ceramics....

, joined by the anarchist Nat Tardrew, filmographer Nodi Murphy, ecologist and artist Karen Rolfes, performance artist Rehane Abrahams

Rehane Abrahams

Rehane Abrahams is a performance artist from Cape Town, South Africa. She has performed several works, from Shakespeare to contemporary productions in South Africa and in the America. She was a recipient of the FNB Vita Award for Best Actress in 2001. She is a co-founder of The Mothertongue...

, publisher David Robert Lewis, musician Philip Nangle, an art teacher called "Johno" along with an assortment of characters that appear on a piece of documentary footage shot by Craig Mathews of Doxa

Doxa

Doxa is a Greek word meaning common belief or popular opinion, from which are derived the modern terms of orthodoxy and heterodoxy.Used by the Greek rhetoricians as a tool for the formation of argument by using common opinions, the doxa was often manipulated by sophists to persuade the people,...

Productions.