Biography
Weaam Williams is a writer, multiple award-winning filmmaker, performance artist, and spiritual explorer, a multi-disciplinary artist who works with poetry, music, and film. She studied drama at the University of Cape Town and with the Cape Town Theatre Lab, mentored by Roysten Stoffels. She has a passion for performance as a poet, hip-hop MC, and in the live-art theatre space. Her documentary work has been broadcast in 28 countries and spans the Khoe Trilogy, District Six Rising from the Dust, Two Hues, and most recently The Rise — a portrait of Bo-Kaap through the pandemic years. Her maternal family hails from District Six and her paternal family from the Bo-Kaap, giving her not just cultural interest but lived inheritance in the stories she tells. As an International Emmy juror and award-winning filmmaker, she carries international creative standing into work that is always, at its root, deeply local and deeply personal.
Artist statement
The Miedoura is the headdress Cape Malay women wear. My mother wore one. Her mother wore one, and Gadija made them. Not just wore them, actually constructed and wove them with pure gold thread, which almost no one in South Africa did. She learned this delicate craft in Mecca in the 1920s, from Indonesian women living in Saudi Arabia. She was a young lady, around twenty years old. It was at the Kaaba where she swore she'd keep the craft secret for her whole life, and she did. Upon her return back to District Six, she stopped off to visit the Queen of England at the time, and was apparently the only person in Cape Town who knew how to weave the sacred cloth. Other women pinned them, wore them to weddings, Mouloeds (the prophet's birthday celebrations), and on return from Hadj; however, weaving and creating them was a rare craft. The Miedoura is an heirloom in many families, treasured and handed down from one generation to the next.
For the latest iteration of the work. I've included the legacy of my great-great grandfather, Imam Shadley Awaldien, Gadija's father, the Imam at the Auwal Mosque in Bo-Kaap. The first mosque in South Africa, built in 1794. It's the ground Cape Muslim identity grew from and houses South Africa's oldest hand written Quran, transcribed from memory by Tuan Guru, among the first freedom fighters from the Malay Archipelago held captive on Robben Island by the Dutch.
This work embodies a feminine historical narrative which has not been documented or academically recorded. It is the story of my great-grandmother. I have oral accounts from family elders, as well as inherited a collection of heirloom Miedouras, woven by Hadji Gadija.
