When Olivia Rodrigo announced Daisy Chain Fields last week, an all-women festival in California with the proceeds going to women’s and girls’ charities, it got us thinking about home. Not whether we could copy it. Whether Cape Town has its own version waiting to happen.
The honest answer is that the artists have never been the problem. This city has more than enough women making music worth a headline. What it has never quite assembled is the thing around them: the curator, the money, and the will to build something that comes back every year instead of arriving once for Women’s Month and disappearing.
The numbers don’t flatter anyone
Look at why that’s hard and you land on the numbers. A March 2021 SAMRO survey found that only 18% of its members were women, so the shortage starts long before anyone sits down to plan a poster. Concerts SA’s 2024 research into people working in local live music is bleaker still: 62% disagreed that men and women in the same role get equal representation, 68% felt unsafe travelling to and from work late at night, and 63% said inappropriate behaviour was common. Only 36% worked anywhere with a harassment code in place. One person in the study called the whole thing “an unregulated space.” A women-centred festival walks straight into all of it, from the thin crew pipeline to the back-of-house culture.
The lineups tell the same story. The project Book More Women makes it visual, taking a real festival poster and greying out every act that isn’t a woman or women-fronted, until what’s left looks almost empty. Their 2025 count put women at 21.6% of major US multi-genre lineups. Closer to the music many of these festivals actually book, female:pressure, which tracks gender in electronic music, clocked Cape Town Electronic Music Festival at 9.2% women in 2020 and Origin at 3.2%. Bazique has been climbing, 15.6% in 2020 up to 22.7% by 2023, though that’s still a fair distance from balance.
But turn those numbers over and they stop sounding like a warning. A women-centred Cape Town festival wouldn’t be crowding a busy field or solving a problem someone already solved. It would stand out precisely because the ordinary festival baseline is still so lopsided. The gap is the opportunity.
The pieces are already here
The precedents already exist, too. They’re just up the road. Shekhinah’s Rosefest, intentionally curated with an all-female performing lineup, has run four editions out of Joburg and returns in 2026. Galpalooza Fest is spreading across ten venues in a single day this year. The Tribute to Women music festival, a cornerstone of the Malibongwe Arts Festival, has built a social-impact foundation around its model. What none of them is yet is a Cape Town flagship that comes back annually. That one’s ours to close.
The city can physically hold it, at almost any size. Start small and intimate in a room like The Homecoming Centre in District Six, around 300 people. Step up to the Baxter’s Main Theatre at roughly 700, or The Old Biscuit Mill once you’re past a thousand. When the thing has proven it works, an outdoor site like The Ostrich can take it to five or ten thousand. There’s no need to gamble on a stadium for a first edition. The smart move is a controlled pilot with a recognised female curator and real safety and backstage standards written in from the start rather than bolted on later. Cape Town already shows up for music it believes in. CTIJF pulled over 25,000 people this year.
It’s hard not to picture a shape. Maybe a marquee curator with a proof-of-concept, the way Shekhinah already has one in Rosefest. A bill that crosses generations and genres, where a Thandiswa Mazwai or an Ami Faku might share a weekend with younger pop, amapiano and dance acts. A few development slots filled by open call, so it makes opportunities rather than only rewarding artists who already have them. Whatever the final shape, the creative call is one for women and queer artists to make, not ours, and not the promoters’ and sponsors’ who’d back it.
A base already starting to form
The barriers deserve naming plainly, not whispering. Sponsor confidence runs cautious in a smaller premium market. Exchange rates bite the moment you fly in talent. Promoters lean on the formulas that already pay. And the duty of care sits higher than for any standard festival, which means safer transport, secure back-of-house and a visible code of conduct all cost money before a single ticket sells. None of that is unique to a women-centred event. It just gets felt more sharply.
But difficult has never meant impossible, and there are already signs of where the push might come from. At AHCOM‘s launch last month, at Guga S’Thebe Arts and Culture Centre in Langa, the jazz-soul singer-songwriter giuliette price, a founding member of the group, stepped up before the day’s agenda began to tell the room she’s starting a committee, backed by AHCOM, to fight against inequality facing women and queer musicians in our city, and invited like-minded individuals to join. That’s not a festival in itself, but it’s the kind of organised base a festival like this grows out of: a group with a mandate and a community behind it, built to last past a single date on the calendar.
So the real question was never whether Cape Town could pull this off. It plainly could. The talent is here, the rooms are here at every size, and the audience keeps showing up for music that means something. The reason there isn’t one yet isn’t a shortage of women ready to make it happen; it’s a scene that hasn’t collectively decided to back one. That part is on all of us: the promoters, the venues, the sponsors, the publications, the audiences who turn up.
The creative direction belongs to the women and queer artists already doing the work, to lead if and when and however they choose. The job for the rest of us is to make sure that when they do, the doors, the budgets and the backing are open. So who picks it up? If last month at Guga S’Thebe is any sign, the answer’s already in the room. The rest of the scene just needs to show up behind it.
Cover image: Elizabeth Donnel
