South Africa: Apartheid to Art

It's been a decade since the abolition of apartheid but Jonathan Oliver asks: how has this changed Africa's biggest arts festival?

In the whole of South Africa, there is nowhere more English than Grahamstown. With its quaint Victorian villas, teashops and Goodbye Mister Chips boarding schools, it could almost be confused with a prosperous town in Wiltshire.

Yet look again and Grahamstown is unmistakably African. In the shadow of the gothic Anglican cathedral, traders sell bone bangles, wooden giraffes and brightly coloured rugs.
A rastafarian does a brisk trade hawking Bob Marley-themed accessories, while a fat Boer farmer sells biltong – the dried meat snack beloved of Afrikaners.

Each year, for ten days in July, this sleepy Eastern Cape town plays host to what is grandly styled as Africa’s largest arts event. The Grahamstown National Arts Festival was founded in the mid 1970s at the zenith of the apartheid regime as the white supremacists’ riposte to the Edinburgh festival.

Back then, Shakespeare, second-rate opera and Afrikaner folk dancing headed the programme. The hated pass laws meant that black people were not even able to visit the festival town without special permission.

I had come to Grahamstown to see how the festival had changed in the decade since the first free elections.

The short answer is: rather a lot. What must have been a grey event for a white audience has been transformed into a vivid, noisy and exciting spectacle worthy of Nelson Mandela’s Rainbow Nation.

The first show I visited, for example, would have been unimaginable in the old days. A 92-year-old blind woman by the name of Nokhabhathi Gana was helped to the stage.

Nokhabhathi played an instrument fashioned from a hollow gourd with a stick attached and a single string hung between the two. She made a percussive sound by beating the gourd and sang over the top in a surprisingly robust alto. This was the ancient music of the Xhosa – the people who dominated the Cape before white settlers arrived. Even though few understood the words, her singing had a haunting quality that left most of the audience a little moist in the eye. The organiser, a female official from the Eastern Cape government, later explained: “We’ve been going out to villages to record people like Nokhabhathi. She is possibly the last person alive who knows how to play this instrument.”

Under apartheid, indigenous music was ignored: now it is being given its rightful place alongside the Western musical canon. During festival time the town becomes a magnet for the country’s avant garde artists.

The most controversial exhibition was a series of photos depicting the initiation rites of teenagers from the Eastern Cape. The participants are forced to undergo circumcision before being cast out into the bush to fend for themselves for several weeks. Each year, several dozen initiates die. One disturbing photo showed an anguished boy bleeding from the crotch. The traditionalists were arguing that important taboos had been breached, while the artist defended his right to free expression.

The sell-out hit for the English-speaking WASPs was satirical sketch show Green Mamba. Among the skits was a spoof ‘crime forecast’ in the style of a weather report: “There’ll be a wave of car-jackings sweeping south from Johannesburg.” The audience of fearful middle-class whites, who have forced a self-imposed imprisonment on themselves in their suburban, high-walled mansions, giggled knowingly.

The new black middle class was in evidence everywhere. Snappily dressed African families cruised the high street in their Land Cruisers; black media studies students – a product of the new affirmative action programmes – were swigging pints in the Rat & Parrot, talking loudly about their favourite Samuel L Jackson films.

But not everyone can afford to buy a ticket for the new South African journey. Walk east for barely a mile and colonial houses give way to the breeze-block shacks of Nombulelo – the impoverished black township that shadows ‘white’ Grahamstown. The festival organisers attempted to bring the tourist rand to Nombulelo, but a scheme to encourage visitors to stay in township B&Bs was a failure. The disappointed hosts were threatening to take legal action to recover the costs of home improvements they’d made for the guests who never came.

The irony is that festival-goers were happy to pay 30 rand to see a 90-minute drama about township life but when it comes to visiting the real thing – forget it.

Grahamstown is a microcosm of the new South Africa. The life of a whole nation is compressed into just a few streets. It sums up all that has been achieved – and all that has yet to be done.