Now that the lights have been turned off and the circus has left town, it’s time to take a stone-cold sober look at the 1997 Standard Bank 1997 Standard Bank National Arts Festival. What went down in G’town …
Gwen Ansell
AFRICAN music started to look like hot property at the Grahamstown Festival – but who, exactly, owns it? There was a rash of mouth-bows at Grahamstown this year. Pop bands, jazz bands, Malagasy music in The Water Carriers and the magnificent Ngqoko Cultural Group were all sawing and buzzing away; their collective sussuration an announcement that in some form or other African music had (albeit a few 100 years late) arrived. Ngqoko, leg-rings clashing, were there scrumming for canaps shoulder- to-shoulder with the penguin-suit brigade at the opening night artists’ reception.
That’s certainly progress for a festival in a town that “worships England”. Limited progress: the festival’s African music slot is now established – but for only two nights, on the always less-well attended first weekend, and not in one of the major theatres. Nevertheless, all those uncomfortable questions about cultural ownership and authenticity now come harshly upfront.
Take the Ngqoko Group. While overtone singing from Outer Mongolia became world music high fashion outside South Africa, their delicate, intricate musical tradition was cherished only by the grandmothers, and later by dedicated academics like Andrew Tracey and David Dargie. The only available recordings were academic tapes accompanied by scholarly notes and sold in tiny numbers to other scholars. And it was the musicologists who mediated between Thembu music and the outside world.
Now they have been “discovered” by popular music, and signed to an international record label. A different form of mediation will occur. A different set of strictures – governed by the commercial music market, rather than by academia – will come to affect their music. Place it in a theatre, as Grahamstown did, and already the performance has to be more formalised; has to take microphones into account; is carved into chunks for applause. What will happen when the music itself changes?
But African music can move so far as to be unrecognisable: a parody of itself. Some audience members felt uncomfortable moving directly from the Pops/Ngoko show to Tu Nokwe’s late-nighter at PJs, that also spread across a stage a modern band and three colourfully-dressed dancers. Songs in the show ranged from Nokwe’s engaging self- penned material (which touches on village themes) to pop-schlock like Don’t Worry, Be Happy. And whereas the stately ladies of Ngqoko were musicians, Nokwe’s dancers were chorus, despite the traditional roots of many of their moves. The contrast was disturbing.
And yet, can anything the makers of music choose to do to their own music not be authentic? It’s a debate already current in Francophone Africa, but one that’s hardly started yet here. But now that African music has become hot property, the danger is that the first two will have the debate while the music-makers, like the sad, red-painted, papier-mch Xhosa lady in the Albany Museum, wait in the ante-room.