The violence distinguished by its xenophobic character that spread like a bushfire through communities in May last year is now out of the public eye, but the wounds inflicted have not healed and the core issues fester unaddressed. While our politicians wrangle around an upcoming election and a corrupt Department of Home Affairs continues to mismanage immigration, there are ominous threats of it happening again. The country’s self-image is permanently fissured and the tarnish on its international aura lingers. This year Infecting the City, Spier’s annual performing arts festival, will facilitate how ordinary Capetonians, at least intellectually, think about this traumatic aftermath.
Criminal violence against foreigners has been on-going for many years. Sometimes the State itself sets the example. A few months before the mob riots, the police conducted a brutal midnight raid on the Methodist Church’s refugee centre in central Johannesburg without a warrant. Foreigners were pepper sprayed and beaten even though they did not resist arrest. Numerous civil society organisations condemned the abuse and detentions especially those of children and pregnant mothers.
Yet, the government’s ranks are full of people once exiled. The grassroots are ideologically Africanist. Many of today’s citizens were under apartheid labelled ‘illegals’, and have first-hand experience of dehumanising bureaucracy and arbitrary deportation.
Was the May violence a reinvention of similar divisions and dynamics in our recent past, such as existed between squatters, township and hostel dwellers, between fresh rural migrants and those who already held temporary permits, coloured and black, ‘witdoeke’ and ‘comrades’, shack lords and rival landlords? In May 1986, the community of old Crossroads, an icon of resistance to apartheid supported by such organisations as the Black Sash, went on the rampage against the surrounding squatter communities, methodically killing, burning and displacing over 70 000 people in a matter of weeks. In 2008 there were no signs of a third force, only the shameful omissions and political intriguing between the DA held city and ANC controlled province.
What are the lines we draw between self-preservation and empathy? What defines community? How do governments think about their people: as IDPs, aliens, voters or as individuals? How do we make sense of such gross betrayal and tragedy in our midst?
The festival’s artistic curator, Brett Bailey, has taken “Home Affairs” as the theme this year. He emphasises that most events are free, site-specific, in public spaces and, although pushing aesthetic and artistic boundaries, accessible.
Infecting the City kicks off with three site-specific works – Exile, Amakwerekwere and Limbo – the fruits of collaboration by performers, theatre directors, filmmakers, choreographers and fine artists from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Netherlands, United Kingdom and France.
Sam Pearce, who holds a PhD in Human Diversity Studies and was intimately involved in the crisis, co-ordinated a course for the visiting artists, which included having them ‘arrested’ and thrown into the back of a police van. They saw conditions for themselves – queuing at the Nyanga Home Affairs office from 5am, visiting the Soetwater and Blue Waters Refugee Camps. Each group was accompanied throughout by ‘guides’ from Congo Brazzaville, DRC and Zimbabwe, all members of the Joint Refugee Leadership Committee. In Masiphumelele township, the only community to publicly apologise to its foreign residents, the documentary Baraka was screened for locals for the first time. It centres on Abdi Sirej, an amicable Ethiopian shopkeeper, who was shot dead last November. A local pastor facilitated a lively discussion between the artists, local matriarchs, youths and refugee leaders.
The festival officially opens with a spectacular noon show at Riebeeck Square by three renowned French aerial performers from Retouramont, suspended from a crane in a sculptural trapezium of rope.
The German avant-garde theatre group, Rimini-Protokoll, in collaboration with the Callcenter Descon in India, make their South African debut with an intercontinental phone play, Call Cutta (currently also running as part of Urban Scenographies at the Drill Hall in Johannesburg).
In Fleet of Art, 12 artists will transform the backs of pick-up trucks into ‘invisible’ performance installations. The bakkies will roam the streets of the CBD displaying their “poignant and idiosyncratic loads”.
Another unusual event is Talking Heads, where members of the public have the opportunity to sit and talk to 4 out of 60 experts, randomly selected by ticket draw. This year’s participants include architects, politicians, Jungian psychologists, writers and agents provocateurs.
Other productions include Erf [81] Cultural Collective’s An Historical, taking audiences on a quirky, reinvented tour of The Castle. Magnet Theatre presents Ingcwaba Lendoda Lise Cankwe Ndlela (The Grave of the Man is Next to the Road), featuring Faniswa Yisa directed by Mandla Mbothwe. It sings the plight of South Africa’s migrants, “the physical, emotional, spiritual and intellectual dislocation of young black South Africans whose origins lie a long way down the N2 in the Eastern Cape”. In Eyton Road, Australian-South African Talya Chalef meditates on her grandparents’ flight through the concentration camps of the Holocaust to her own experience of shifting cities.
The site specific nature of the works also draws inspiration from the ghosts of yesteryear and invites Capetonians to discover their city. The artists were intrigued to discover that the Camissa River still runs from Table Mountain to the sea and fish swim in it right under our feet beneath the asphalt. Hippopotami snorted in a vlei now covered by Church Square, and Thibault Square was once the Roggebaai fishing harbour.
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