Oppikoppi
Overview
October 5 – 7, 2017
Northam, South Africa
Details
OppiKoppi is the biggest multiple day music festival held in the Limpopo Province of South Africa, near the mining town of Northam. The first ever band weekend at the OppiKoppi farm took place in May 1994 with Valiant Swart, Koos Kombuis and few hundred people in the small bar. It has since grown substantially, with the addition of many new stages and thousands of people turning up each year. The festival is regarded by some as the primary influence in jump-starting the South African rock music movement in the late 90’s. Thousands of people still flock to the farm to camp out in the bush and enjoy simultaneous performances on 7 stages (and a few roving pieces of craziness).
Although the festival started off focusing mostly on rock music, more genres were soon added and now plays host to roughly 160 sets of international and South African music and entertainment acts of all genres including rock, hip hop, hardcore, punk, ska, folk, blues, drum ‘n bass, big beats, kwaito, jazz, funk, traditional, world music, comedy, metal, indie, house and other genres. OppiKoppi has always been at the forefront of what is happening in the socio-economic and political contexts in South Africa, doing it’s part to change the country and bringing people together in a spontaneous/natural way.
A few facts:
- “OppiKoppi” is a colloquial abbreviation of the Afrikaans phrase “op die koppie”, which literally means “on the hill”.
- In 2008, British media ranked OppiKoppi as the 4th best music festival in the world.
- The festival has grown yearly, with around 2000 attendees in 1995 to around 20 000 in 2016.
- In the past there had been smaller, more intimate gatherings on each Easter weekend in April and New Year’s gatherings. There were also several smaller supremely inelegant weekend events.
- Regardless of the occasion, date and size of each event, they have all had different names and themes associated with them.
- It started with around 2000 in 1995 and grew to around 10 000 in 2005, climbing steadily up to 20k and staying there from 2013 onwards.
- We have rolled bakkies, burnt tents, driven over knees, slept in jails, slept outside jails and turned over several stones to make gigs and festivals work.
Video
Location