Medu Art Ensemble. Staffrider. Music Action for People’s Power (Mapp). Raakwys. The Congress of South African Writers (Cosaw), Community Arts Project (CAP). Voëlvry. The Jazz Den. Action Workshop. Sarmcol workers’ action. Jazzart. If most of these terms are familiar to you, then you must be at least in your late 20s and have hung around the Cape cultural scene in the Eighties.
There has been a recent fashionable recycle of Eighties style and culture that does more than just hark back to the disco-dance era with its shoulder pads and amazing hairstyles. For many, underlying the Zeitgeist was an aggressive Reaganite-Thatcherite materialism. The culmination of the Cold War sublimated a lot of the flower-child talk of the Sixties.
But for millions of South Africans the Eighties will rekindle memories more akin to those that Europeans have of the Sixties. It was a time of repression, state harassment and ideological manipulation through education, religion and the media.
Yet, driven by the profound groundswell of discontent after the 1976 youth uprisings, the Eighties saw the outbreak of the most vibrant civil action and resistance against apartheid in this country’s history. Embracing a voluntary spirit, people from many social sectors organised themselves into community-based and non-governmental organisations.
From within these, activists devised important political, economic and cultural programmes to counter the apartheid regime. Popular front politics were rejuvenated with the founding in Cape Town of the United Democratic Front in 1983 that brought many disparate groups under a single umbrella. This was also a period of flourishing protest art that stimulated new creativity across disciplines.
“Political struggle is an unavoidable part of life in South Africa and it must therefore infuse our art and culture.” This statement paraphrased the theme of the seminal Culture and Resistance Festival at Gaborone, Botswana, in 1982, attended by more than 5 000 South African “cultural workers”. The event heralded the impact of the new cultural guerillas.
Cape Town soon took its cue and became a pulsating hub of cultural activism on all fronts. Students, youth, church and women’s groups were going to CAP at all hours to learn to silk screen and produce poster art. Underground presses were flourishing all over. There was hardly any mass political event not followed by a gumba, where you could skank to reggae, jazz, ska, rock or mbaqanga.
Concerts and cultural evenings were held at almost every civic venue in general defiance of everything that was apartheid. The theatre of Brecht was revived and popular among young people in Manenberg, workers’ collectives of the Congress of South African Trade Unions were producing plays, the Alternatiewe Afrikaans Movement was born and the Oaklands Band (later known as Raakwys) were dragging cymbal, bass drum and guitar through tear gas across the Cape Flats singing “Free Nelson Mandela” and “Workers of the world unite”.
Alternative newspapers such as South and writers’ forums such as Cosaw were productive and there was as much vigorous debate about the ideological relationship between art and politics as about most other weighty national questions.
It’s 20 years later and a range of heritage, arts and media organisations from Cape Town, including Blac, the District Six museum, the Robben Island museum, Bush Radio, the Project on Public Pasts and CAP have partnered to present Liberating Zones, a series of programmes that examines this fascinating and formative period in contemporary South African cultural history.
For Zaid Minty of Blac, Liberating Zones is about the synergies between the many arts and cultural establishments as well as individuals in Cape Town who evolved from this period. “It seems an appropriate time to start documenting this important period and begin to reflect on it,” he says.
“The District Six museum itself is a fraternal organisation steeped in the 1980s,” says Valmont Layne of project partner D6. “The cultural interventions and agendas of Eighties organisations such as Mapp and other civic groups are the forebearers of D6 projects today and many of our trustees are former activists from various left organisations that existed then.”
Furthermore, there has been significant discussion and information sharing among these partner organisations about innovative public education programming, documentation, archiving and new ways of presenting knowledge. This opens up exciting possibilities for the exploration of a period in South African history known for its marginal, unfashionable counterculture and its unique legacy of spontaneous social voluntarism.
The details
November 11: Video screening of the Gaborone Culture and Resistance Festival and conference at the Robben Island museum gateway, V&A Waterfront. From 5.30pm.
November 12 to 17: Lunchtime video screenings and poetry readings from the period at the Robben Island museum gateway, V&A Waterfront.
From November 18: Bush Radio 89.5FM presents a six-part series by Trevor Oosterwyk (political correspondent at The Argus and a founding member of the United Democratic Front) called Rendezvous with History: Excavating the Eighties. Mondays at 8pm and Thursdays at 9pm.
November 27: A talk focusing on archiving and the Eighties. Screening of The Writing’s on the Wall. At District Six museum at 6pm.
December 9: Attend a gumba (a term used to describe parties in the Eighties) at CAP, 106 Chapel Street, District Six. From 6.30pm.
Througout the season the Robben Island museum gateway hosts a multimedia exhibition dealing with a post-apartheid representation of the Eighties. Info: www.blac.co.za or Tel: 083 530 1912.