THE report of the Arts and Culture Task Group (Actag) released this week raises, among many other questions, the issue of representation. The cultural organisations which exist in our society, almost without exception, still bear the imprint of the apartheid era. On one hand we have bodies like the Federasie vir Afrikaner Kultuur and the Afrikaanse Taal en Kultuur Vereeniging which in terms of actual membership remain the largest functioning organisations in the country and whose identity is rooted in the history of Afrikaner Nationalism. Along with them we have bodies like the associations that came into being and enjoyed some more or less official status in the apartheid era.
And we have bodies like the performing arts councils and various discipline-based guilds, societies and associations which came into being and enjoyed a more or less official status in the apartheid era.
Then we have a range of discipline-based organisations like the Film and Allied Workers’ Organisation and the Performing Arts Workers’ Equity which, though mostly officially non-aligned, came into being under the auspices of the African National Congress. Their basic purpose was to use culture within the broader parameters of the political struggle — and to administer the cultural boycott. Many of these organisations still play policeman today, taking it on themselves to vet the right of visiting performers or other cultural workers to operate inside the country. By what right they do this is mysterious: none actually represent anything like the majority of people active in their respective fields; none, officially at least, have been mandated in this way by the government.
In the Gauteng province, groupings of such formerly NGO- funded and mainly resistance-orientated organisations are already being propped up with public money. Last year, crisis funding was made available by provincial government. And this year an Interim Arts Council is in the process of being convened for the purpose of distributing available funding to continue to prop them up.
On one level, it makes sense. The organisations in question do, though sometimes more on paper than in reality, sponsor training and development programmes. Nevertheless, while umbrella bodies like the National Arts Coalition have transcended political sectarianism, the history of our discipline-based cultural organisations is that they represent political interests within the various disciplines rather than those disciplines themselves.
Their goals, functions and identities need to be rethought. Though diversity of interest is something to be encouraged, it should not be encouraged along the old apartheid divisions.
Cultural organisations across the board should be reconstituting themselves in ways that reflect our new society, that do not polarise themselves with “people’s culture” on one hand and “high art” on the other. The government needs to stop acting as though its old comrades and allies represented the entire cultural constituency. This just brings the partiality of political interest in through the back door.