In Cape Town, new coffee shops and restaurants open (or close) every week, so it’s easy to brush off the announcement of another one as insignificant. However, you might want to take notice of the latest addition to Long Street’s coffee scene.
Brownies&downieS – opening at 2 Long Street on Monday, 8 February – is a coffee shop and training centre for people with intellectual disabilities, and a vessel to create change and acceptance in South Africa.
Cape Argus‘s Iman Latief spoke to the people behind this incredible and much needed concept, which was started in the Netherlands, to find out more.
Read the article and see photos:
The founders, Teun Horck, a chef, and Thijs Swinkels, who worked at a special-needs school, set up the first restaurant in 2010 in Vegjel, Holland.
They wanted to employ more people with disabilities in the hospitality sector. They have since opened about 30 stores in the Netherlands.
Dutch social worker Wendy Vermeulen said when she moved to South Africa she could see that there was even less awareness or support for the mentally disabled community than in her home country.“In the Netherlands it’s more common to employ disabled people than it is here. The mentally disabled in particular have very little voice in South Africa,” she said.
Vermeulen, the daughter of a chef, decided to open a Cape Town branch of the Brownies and Downies restaurant. She has been preparing to open it for almost a year.
For more about disability issues in South Africa consult Disability and Social Change – A South African Agenda, published by HSRC Press:
Disability and Social Change – A South African Agenda edited by Brian Watermeyer, Leslie Swartz, Theresa Lorenzo, Margie Schneider, Mark Priestley
Book homepage
EAN: 9780796921376
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This powerful volume represents the broadest engagement with disability issues in South Africa yet. Themes include theoretical approaches to and representations of disability, governmental and civil society responses to disability, aspects of education as these pertain to the oppression / liberation of disabled people, social security for disabled people, the complex politics permeating service provision relationships, and consideration of disability in relation to human spaces – physical, economic and philosophical.
Noteworthy is the inclusivity of its nearly fifty contributors, many of whom write both as disabled South Africans and as educators, parents, linguists, psychologists, human rights activists, entrepreneurs, mental health practitioners, academics, and NGO and government officials. Equally stimulating is the range of writing styles, including interviews, a provocatively stark contrasting of voices in a chapter on Psychiatric Disability and Social Change, various well crafted articles on theoretical issues and the autobiographical style of many of the contributions.
Firmly located within the social model of disability, this collection will resonate powerfully with contemporary thinking and research in the disability field and will set the benchmark for cutting-edge debates in a transforming South Africa.
