Hugh Masekela, Pact assistant CEO, in The Mark Gevisser
‘Seventh floor!” shouts a voice in campy, elevator-lady pitch as the crowded State Theatre lift bumps to a halt. Its occupants lower their eyes embarrassedly as a grim Pretoria cultural apparatchik pushes his way forward and the voice continues, “ladies underwear and apparel!”
As the lift closes, the newly-appointed Assistant Chief Executive Officer of the Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal says, “Laugh, guys! Anyone who doesn’t laugh will report immediately to me in my office on the eleventh floor!”
Earlier, as we bound down to Strijdom Square for a photo-shoot, I watched with delighted amazement as Hugh Masekela transformed our own Nuremburg Parade Ground into a laughing circus through the mere force of his personality. No one ever lingers on the marbled expanses over which JG Strijdom’s monolitihic head looms; no one would ever dare. But around Masekela a crowd of onlookers gathers and, within moments, there is a one-man show. “Masekela? I’m not Masekela! I’m Lucky Dube. I shaved this morning!” All around, laughter swells, shattering Strijdom’s serene vacuity.
Would he like to see the statue removed? “No fuckin’ way, man! When I come here with my grandchildren and they say, ‘Who’s that guy?’ I’ll tell them that it’s Strijdom and what a bastard he was. If he wasn’t there to remind us we’d just forget about him. If we knock everything down, we’re gonna forget and our children won’t know shit!”
Back in the building he leads me through the underbelly of official South African culture. “Where are we going?” I ask.
“To Goebbels’ secret palace!” he responds, and touches his access card to the monitor on a security door with a click of a heel and a Nazi salute.
A merry prankster has been let loose in the pompous corridors of the State Theatre. The wardrobe-queens are aflutter, the Brunhilde at security is trying her own attempt at a theatrical wisecrack, and even the tea lady is finding it hard to suppress a smile. Masekela’s laughter is neither simple nor reassuring; it is edgy and even derisive at times, empathetic but not gentle; Rabelaisian in that it is lewd and subversive in equal measure. It could bring a building down, yea even the monolith of apartheid culture that is the State Theatre, by the sheer force of its reverberation.
But Masekela insists that he is no buffoon. “Don’t get me wrong. I know what I’m doing. I’m nobody’s fool. I just like people to rela-a-a-x. To have fun, man. It’s easier to deal with people that way.” In Masekela’s transatlantically inflected world, people earn “bread” and “vibe” is the measure of quality. At times I feel I’m in the Village, circa 1965.
Masekela riffs and raves in a way more appropriate to ‘Round Midnight at Kippies than the State Theatre interiors that pass for High Culture. At times, too, it is tinged with showbiz hype: “I’m gonna take Strijdom Square and fill it with dancers from the north. I’m gonna have choirs coming out of every fucking balcony. We’re gonna bring theatre. We’re gonna bring cripples. We’re gonna bring kids. We’re gonna take theatre and satellite it out into the townships. We’re gonna produce a lot of shows …”
Pin him down to specifics and you’ll get: a collaboration with Pieter-Dirk Uys in which “black and Afrikaner families can come together and laugh at each other”; a Rebecca Malope concert; a Rainbow Festival of Tolerance next year, in which, Masekela proposes, a ten-block radius around the theatre will be transformed into an international festival that will culminate with an event at the Voortrekker Monument amphitheatre.
“But is that politically correct?” asked Bra Hugh’s Main Man, CEO Louis Bezuidenhout.
“Hey,” Hugh responds, “the amphitheatre is the best motherfuckin venue in the land, and we gonna use it,
Hughie and Louis are tight — “I’m loose with him, man, we laugh together” — and therein lies the surreal drama of the appointment of Hugh Masekela, the man with the golden trumpet, to the post of change-manager at Pact (Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal). He came in, he says, after being approached by “friends of Louis, who said he was very worried about the future of this place [because] there are elements who’d like to see everything from the past destroyed …”
The thing about Louis, however, is that he and his Pact board have long had the reputation, under Bezuidenhout, for being aloof, arrogant and recalcitrant. In fact, Bezuidenhout has resigned after a scrap with the Ministry of Arts and Culture over budgets, and is staying on, temporarily, at the request of both Minister Ben Ngubane and Masekela.
Basically, Pact is fighting tooth and claw the recommendations of the Arts and Culture Task Group (Actag), which suggest that all the performing arts councils cease to be producers and become, instead, funding agencies that disburse state money for the arts in all provinces. This would mean that the State Theatre would become the property of Gauteng, and Pact’s companies (Ballet, Drama and Opera) would be unbundled, becoming independent entities that would have to compete with everyone else for resources and space at the complex.
And, in Pact’s arsenal, Masekela has become number one cannon. No wonder there is much consternation in the always-turbulent world of cultural politics. There are strong rumours that the ministry itself disapproves, even though it is saying nothing at the moment.
“Forgive me for being cynical,” says one major player, “but why did Pact have to go and appoint Masekela now, just weeks before a new board, charged with restructuring the council, is to be put into place? Masekela might well change the face of Pact. He might well bring wonderful concerts into the State Theatre. But under him, the monolith will have stronger cause to remain intact. What we have been doing, for years, is trying to decentralise it, to make its resources accessible to all in a transparent and fair manner.”
Characteristically, Masekela is nonplussed by all this. He — like Bezuidenhout — thinks the Actag proposals are “unrealistic”, and says: “I’m 56 years old. I was offered a plum job. Why do I need permission to take it? Didn’t I vote to be able to take the job I want?”
Politics aside, it remains to be seen whether Masekela has the wherewithal to run an institution like Pact. He has shown himself, in the past, to be an excellent organiser, but he does not reveal himself to be interested in, or moved by, the kind of serious or innovative art an institution like Pact would be expected to produce — in fact, he dismisses the very differentiation between “serious art” and “popular entertainment” as a Western construction.
Masekela’s passion is, in his own words, “to introduce South Africa to South Africa. There is no music industry in this country any more. No venues, no recording industry, nothing. We have to create an infrastructure for recreation and entertainment, a thing that was crushed during apartheid because the natives of this country weren’t meant to have a good time. They were meant to go to work, and come back, and rest for the next fucking day’s work.”
The story of his return from exile is instructive: “I came back on a Wednesday, waiting for the weekend. I expected all the noise of the weekend to fill the air. The Pedi drums. The wedding bands practising. The music that is part of life in the townships I grew up in. And all I heard was silence.” This is the perpetual riff of Masekela’s conversation: “We are the one country in the world that neither hears itself nor sees itself. If you land in Johannesburg you could be in Milwaukee or Vienna.” And the crescendo: “There is no country that is as dead recreationally and entertainment-wise as South Africa. For the infrastructure we have, we must be the dullest fucking country in the world!”
Contrast this with the South Africa Masekela left in 1960, the Kofifi world that made him, and one understands immediately his romantic nostalgia, his desire to turn the State Theatre into “a pilot place to create certain things that are lost, things that we all need in the future. The place of renaissance.”
My colleague, Meshack Mabogoane, notes that musically, Masekela is “not an innovator, he is a conservative. His genius is that he took South African traditional forms and put his own voice to them, thereby immortalising them. But unlike someone like Miles Davis, who found a way to bring fusion back into jazz, Masekela has reacted to contemporary muscial styles like bubblegum by hearkening back to the past.”
When he returned to South Africa, “he realised that the social world that had brought about his generation of music had been destroyed.” This, says Mabogoane, has made him into a romantic; “a musical expression of alienation exiles feel to South Africa”. Perhaps, indeed, Masekela has carved for himself the niche of South Africa’s primary cultural emcee because he is, since his return from exile, undergoing a paradoxically dry time in terms of his own creative development.
Masekela’s move to arts management is, he insists, neither permanent nor full-time. He will still play live; he will still record. “Hugh’s Place” is currently being erected on Rockey Street and a new album, written and produced by Cedric Samson, is expected out next month. Is all of this good for the State Theatre? And will the State Theatre be good for Masekela’s trumpet? Unless he is able to acheive a drastic new relationship between the theatre and the people of Pretoria in the next few months, my tendency would be to agree with the sceptics: I can’t really see how it will change the allocation of cultural resources in this country if, instead of having five operas a year, we have three operas, one Caiphus-and-Letta concert, and a street fair — all still produced by one performing arts council that continues to devour the lion’s share of arts funding.
But then again, is it such a bad thing if Masekela wishes to introduce us to one another; if his objectives revolve around entertaining South Africans? For as long as I live I will remember his “Sekunjalo” concert of 1991; his immense generosity as he played backup for a host of guests far less illustrious than himself; the illusion of a casual, easy-going event that was always meticulously controlled, from the wings, by a tubby, mischievous little man in rumpled clothing, who seemed to gain so much pleasure by the mere fact that he was bringing so weirdly diverse a group of performers together.
Masekela wishes to reconstruct a world, perhaps mythical, where people interact through culture. He wants to build a Sophiatown around Strijdom Square. Perms are probably flopping all over Waterkloof at the mere thought of it.
‘I’m not Masekela! I’m Lucky Dube. I shaved this