South Africa comes packaged to please at La Villette music festival.
HAZEL FRIEDMAN reports from Paris
LA VILLETTE is one of those curious cultural monuments that straddle the multiple personalities of Paris. Established during the mid-1980s, it has served as a sort of secular cathedral, injecting a modern multi- cultural spirit into a drab, immigrant neighbourhood. At its centre stands an authentic industrial Gothic facade, erected at the turn of the century — together with the Eiffel Tower — as a self-consciously imperious monument to modernity. It is surrounded by post-modern conservatories of music, science and industry. And scattered between these bookends signifying the old and the new are public sculptures that simultaneously celebrate and mock both
It is here that the new South Africa — or parts thereof — has been making its musical debut in a festival which ends on Sunday. Organised by the South African Embassy in Paris and the French Cultural Institute in Johannesburg, and supported by Unesco and the leftist newspaper Liberation, it features the largest contingent of South African musicians ever to perform in another country. The “musicians of liberty”are led by Hugh Masekela and include the Soul Brothers, Dorothy Masuka, Dolly Rathebe, Miriam Makeba, Johnny Clegg, Bayete, Sankomota and Letta Mbulu.
There is also a constant barrage of video footage on South Africa’s chequered transition to democracy, a film festival featuring classics like Jim Comes to Jo’burg and Mapantsula, performances by the Tumbuka Dance Company, a photographic exhibition displaying images of the 1950s through to the 1990s, as well as a range of South African wine, food and literature.
In short, the new South Africa at La Villette is designed to toast the victory of a brave new post- apartheid world over the evil empire of old. And, ironically, there is something liberating about being in Paris, among 60 of South Africa’s best and brightest — many of whom were recognised in foreign lands before receiving their dues from their home country — and watching them turn the most world-weary of hearts to
Each night, the musos assemble on the stage of the grand hall at La Villette, spotlighting one or two artists per evening. The crowds have sung along to the sounds of Shosholoza and learned a Parisian version of the toyi-toyi. But they shuffled awkwardly when Johannes Kerkorrel — South Africa’s rebel boer rocker — took the stage and sang about doppers, Hilbrow and Eugene Terre’Blanche. It wasn’t Kerkorrel’s fault that he came across as a forlorn kid who didn’t quite fit in — it was just that the audience wanted to hear sounds that reinforce their preconceptions about one of the few countries that still has heroes. They didn’t want to wallow in white angst or post-colonial blues. They wanted the romance without responsibility.
And, in many respects, the organisers have made sure that the spectacle conforms to this expectation by turning it into a cross-cultural encounter of the lopsided and curious kind. As is the case when one country mythologises the culture of another, this spectacle succeeds less in clearing cultural mists than in underscoring the perceptual fog that continues to separate one culture from another.
In their efforts to monumentalise the new South Africa, the organisers have reconstructed its most obvious, trite and kitschily quaint aspects. The interior of La Villete resembles a pavilion at the Rand Show, with “Buy the New South Africa” scrawled all over it. Although the wine and Teljoy TV sets broadcasting South Africa’s sunny skies to a drizzle-drowned Paris might do us proud, the “made in SA” pap, boerie and pickled fish would be put to better use as doorstops.
But the gastronomic discomforts pale in comparison to the ethnic eyesores covering the walls in the form of ochre, yellow and white squiggles that are supposed to simulate rural mural art. This is South Africa as Disneyland, Euro-style, prettily packaged and pret-a-
But simultaneously, some of the cliches have been confounded. Santu Mofokeng’s photographs, for example, communicate unspectacular aspects of township life without succumbing to political stereotype. And then there is Busi Mhlongo, who has stunned the crowds, first into silence, then frenzied applause, with her magificent presence and a voice that needs no electronic enhancement.
And night after night, Vusi Mahlasela has played to a crowd busting at the seams of a reconstructed Mamelodi shebeen. Accompanied by the polished sounds of Jethro Shasha, Kelly Petlana, Jimmy Indi and Duncan Senyatso, he sings in poetry that pierces the soul. Many of his songs are in a language the audience cannot understand, yet they need no translation.
For a while, La Villette could be Ellis Park or even Kippie’s. And South Africa becomes something more than an exotic trinket on display in a Paris pavilion.