Matric Rage takes extreme stance to avoid Covid-19 before party begins

Matric Rage is upon us. Considered a rite of passage, Rage is an annual South African electronic music festival held to coincide with the end of the final matric exam season.

Teenagers from around the country flock to the festival for a week of revelry, exchanging school for dancing shoes and uniforms for swimsuits. If you have attended one, you probably remember room temperature Malibu shots, roaming an Umhlaga high rise at all hours of the night and dreamily watching the sun come up from the beach after your first all-nighter.

Personally, it was my first taste of real unsupervised freedom, not that I did anything with it other than to buy a pastel string bikini I imagined my parents would not have approved of.

It’s a holiday for kids, but it’s more than an end-of-school celebration — it’s a visit to your beckoning adulthood, only better. It’s bank-rolled by your parents and devoid of any of the pesky consequences of real adulthood. In short, it’s awesome.

So while for each attendee it’s a chance to be the star of your own coming-of-age story, last year Rage took centre stage when the 2020 event coincided with the beginning of the third wave of Coronavirus in SA. Of the 2,253 Rage attendees, 848 tested positive for Covid after the event. This led to Rage being maligned as a “superspreader” event.

This year, Rage is once again scheduled to take place before a potential fourth wave expected to hit the country early in December. But experts say the severity of the wave is intangibly linked to whether the country achieves its vaccination targets.

Greg Walsh, CEO of the rage festival group, acknowledged there are concerns about the fourth wave. “It’s a little déjà vu because a year ago there was a very similar setting. In November everyone was living, going out and using entertainment venues and parties were happening, and then a month later we moved quickly from 1,000 cases a day to 20,000, so it’s difficult to understand how the virus works.”

But Rage intends to use its platform to help reform the events industry and drive up the vaccination rate in young people, as well as show that events can take place safely in SA, even with the presence of the virus.

This year, the event will operate a strict “no vaccine no entry” policy, the first of its kind in SA. Operating under the campaign #Jab2Jol, Walsh says: “Our research has shown that young people under 30 are not fearful of Covid-19, nor [do they] feel the need to vaccinate for their own health. So it’s critical that we work together to provide appropriate incentives like music, sport, festivals and nightclubs to drive this agenda.”

Rage’s hope is that this approach will be an opportunity for the events industry to demonstrate that it can add to the country’s vaccination effort. By incentivising festival goers to get vaccinated, they hope to show events can have a positive effect on SA’s most pressing public issue.

As well as the mandated vaccinations, the festival will be operating at 40% capacity, with only 2,000 tickets available. The event is set to comply with all Covid-19 regulations on site according to national guidelines, and will be testing staff and attendees twice: once on day on arrival, and again on the third day, with rapid antigen tests. Walsh reiterates that this is a safe environment for matriculants to enjoy themselves.

“We know that the matrics, regardless of our festival, are going to go out and celebrate as soon as their exams end. We feel a duty of care to have a safe environment to do that. Our festival, with the fully vaccinated requirement, with all the testing, with all the sanitising efforts, with all the high-quality entertainment, we know that is the best environment [in which] to do it,” he said.

• Ballito Rage Festival takes place from November 30 until December 5 2021