Tania Raised Us is a film about people who earn their bread “skarrelling” – which roughly translates as scavenging – for scrap meal using their horses and carts.
Keeping horses in the backyard and using them to collect scrap are common practices on the Cape flats, yet up to now there have been no documentary about Cape Town’s extraordinary urban horse culture.
Meet the Ely family and the people of Oleander Street, Kreefgat, Bonteheuwel. Ganief Ely and his father keep nine horses. Most of them are stabled in the backyard. Each morning they are led through their modest council house to the street where they are washed, brushed and readied for the day’s work. Mr. Ely senior learnt about horses from his father. Now he has retired and his twenty-one year old son Ganief has taken over. Ganief, various family members and young people from the neighbourhood take the horses out each day to search for scrap to sell at the nearby scrap metal merchants.
What kind of life is it, living with all those horses in the back yard of a house in on the Flats? Work is scarce, but there is pride in Ganief’s assertion that none of their family has ever worked in a factory or for a boss – they owe their life and livelihood to horses – and one horse in particular, Tania.
This is the story of an extraordinary part of life on the flats that has not previously been looked at – other than for news inserts on cruelty to animals. Yet the relationship between the owners, their drivers and the Cart Horse Protection Society is about much more than animal rights. It is about an entire horse culture, and the relationships it sustains.
Director Jack Lewis first became fascinated with the subject back in the 1980s when he was teaching at the University of the Western Cape. He often saw young kids driving horses and carts in the early morning traffic on Modderdam Road and realised that there must be a story in this. It took a while for an opportunity to emerge to make this movie. When Commissioning Editor for SABC 2 Elize Viljoen offered the opportunity, it was a chance to realise an idea that had been rolling around in his head since the 1980s!
Director: Jack Lewis
Producer: Jack Lewis & Lucilla Blankenberg