As a white student at Rhodes University in the 1980s I felt deeply conflicted by the stark contrasts that confronted one at festival time – the all-white bourgeoisie in their fur coats watching Sleeping Beauty – while on the hill someone was being “necklaced” with a burning tyre. We didn’t believe in burning anything, certainly not books or culture, so instead a protest artist gagged himself and wrapped in bandages sat on a plinth in the Monument.
In the year Mandela was released Zebelon Dread would stand on his soap box and tell the bemused festinos that soon they would all be driven into the sea. People clapped and bought his home-made newspaper.
As a producer in the early 1990s, with our protest culture still in tact and at a time when the festival was at its commercial peak – to the point of bursting – some of us considered burning barricades in High Street and taking our anger to the streets. Here we were, the artists, used to bait the hook. We took ALL the financial risks and felt shabbily treated. It was us who brought the crowds to the town, to the shops, the petrol stations, and the food stalls selling everything from kartoffel to kudu wors, while the locals gouged ever more greedily, renting out caravans in their backyards at hotel prices and the halls hiked their already prohibitive hire fees.
I hope now we’re getting over the tendency to blame the festival for the failings of the country. The contrasts in Grahamstown remain as stark as ever. The poverty is appalling, but it’s a reflection of the national scourge of unemployment, AIDS – the economy. These uncomfortable truths are not unique to this town – it’s simply more obviously defined, by the lines of begging ragged children pretending to be statues, their faces masked white with crumbled stone, and the man who for five rand will play a game of chess with you. Together with beautiful craft work – some of it clearly an artistic celebration in its own right – a brisk, seemingly uncontrolled trade in grey goods – thrives on the pavements. The festival does filter money down to the bottom-feeders.
It also creates a small army of casual jobs and much informal employment, but the wealth of the country is here in the cultural ebullience. A jam-packed hall of people cheering a community performer is an enrichment that is hard to calculate.
Along with the change in political climate, has been a meteorological climate change. Among the stubbornly persistent myths about Grahamstown – that it’s a white Eurocentric culture fest – is the myth – fuelled by long sessions of sitting in unheated auditoriums – that Grahamstown is always wet and freezing. Since the turn of the new century the festival experiences blue skies, and long dry hot days (as I write this it is 24 degrees) and it seldom falls below temperatures common to the Highveld nights.
After a long slow thaw the festival is now transforming at a remarkable pace – a genuine melting pot of culture that reflects a restless society. This year black patrons are flocking to the fringe festival loaded with black professional and community theatre groups presenting plays, many such as Nkosi Sikelela i-Africa and Soweto Class of 76 reclaiming the historical past from colonial and apartheid depictions.
More often the plays are about conscientizing the public around contemporary social issues, with titles like Respect, Honour and Love. A glance through the billing for various productions turns up the following snippets: “strives to put across a safe-sex, non-discriminational (sic) message about HIV/AIDS”, “reflects on the importance of education and the danger of child abuse”, “crime is morally and legally unacceptable”, “about rural men leaving their families behind and going to the city of gold…they meet vampires who do nothing but suck the very marrow from their bones”. And so on. These are funding proposal clips that are unlikely to be effective marketing teasers. Ain’t Over is subtitled “Justice is White”, while the production Ha – Mokoena is followed by discussion sessions on rape.
There are some more solid pieces – stories about people’s personal struggles within the broader sweep of society and events, such as the excellent Like Cain and Abel by playwright Thapelo Motloung, about the lack of acceptance of bisexuality in the black community.
With over five hundred shows and a series of smaller festivals within its compass – the Film Festival, Wordfest, Jazzfest (and the Cathedral even has a SpiritFest) – it is without a doubt the national festival for arts. The big international names of the past – Berkoff, Nederlands Dans – no longer come, but there are Javanese puppets, Dutch street theatre, Acty Tang’s solo amaQueer-Kwere and African Bollywood – which among other numbers contains an enthusiastic all-male black troupe dressed as Zulu warriors doing synchronised Indian Bollywood dances – a vivid celebration of our diversity and variety or national funding policy taken to an ultimate absurd conclusion?
Reasons there are, but it is hard to accept that the 31st festival still doesn’t have a single African language play on the main stage, though there are already feature films in Zulu and Xhosa. Certainly the fringe is leading the main festival.
What should also be a concern is the almost total lack of Afrikaans theatre which is historically a vital energy in our cultural landscape. One of the only Afrikaans pieces is about Cape coloured gangsters and has a misleading English title – Angels Everywhere. Kobus Moolman’s Full Circle about disenfranchised poor white Afrikaans fundamentalists is performed in English – this may be perfect symbolism – but it’s a cultural disaster for the taal if Afrikaans theatre practitioners withdraw into their own festival laager in Oudsthoorn and don’t put in at Grahamstown.
Festival Committee Chairman, Mannie Manim, says there is urgent need for more corporate sponsors to take the festival forward and Festival Director, Lynette Marais, says the greatest financial obstacle currently is the exorbitant cost of hiring equipment which could be avoided if they had infrastructural investment.
A paucity of venues in the townships and the lack of funds to do more free street theatre and concerts are future challenges that need addressing.
Sleeping Beauty is back this year, but so are the Eluxolweni Girls and Boys Shelter on Drostdy Lawn putting on a play about life in Rhini township. Marais tells me of emergent groups from a few years ago growing now to professional status. It’s the same kind of pleasure we all share in our country when I pass my old High School grounds and see the playing fields filled with skinny black legs playing soccer on the cricket pitch.
