Does conservatism lurk at the heart of the Klein Karoo festival?Lauren Shantall was there
‘Wat gaan die Afrik aner aan sy beeld doen? [What is the Afrikaner going to do about his image?]” a poster campaign asked provocatively at this year’s Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunsfees (KKNK) in Oudtshoorn. “Hy gaan hom lees [He’ll read it]” was the answer wittily provided by official sponsor Nasionale Pers, one of SA’s most powerful media groups and for years the stronghold of Afrikaner nationalism.
This celebratory reversal of what currently amounts to a legitimacy crisis for Afrikanerdom is symptomatic of Naspers’s attempt to retain its traditional readership under political transformation, and it also echoes the position of the KKNK organisers. At a media conference, festival director Pieter Fourie declared that he was not prepared to make any apologies for this year’s festival, the fourth of its kind, being unashamedly Afrikaans.
In fact, a more apt title for the festival would have been the Klein Karoo Afrikaans Festival. Its flimsy claims to any kind of national identity are supported neither by the artists – who were overwhelmingly white and Afrikaans-speaking, and the audiences, who were, as in other years, also overwhelmingly white and Afrikaans-speaking.
The emptiness of the officially proclaimed attempts to be inclusive is reflected not in the token presence of black Afrikaans artists and performers but in the audiences the festival attracts.
Above all, the fees serves as an indelicate reminder of an incomplete, and unresolved transformation from pre- to post-apartheid South Africa. Much of the festivity seems to rest on wallpapering over the past – just as the Naspers posters temporarily festoon the walls of the Feather Capital. Nowhere was this more evident than at Tracey Rose’s perfomance piece entitled unravel(led), part of the group exhibition Dark Continent, which included artists Kendell Geers, Willem Boshoff and Santu Mofokeng.
Rose’s attempt to unravel 25 crocheted doilies – some given to her by her grandmother, others made by women in a coloured community outside Oudtshoorn – and wind the threads around a police monument of an officer and his dog in the town’s main road was halted when she was surrounded by several officers demanding that she cease work. Finally, one of the officers cut the doilie threads with a knife.
For Rose the physical act of unravelling constituted a laying open of the past, making visible those events and those race groups previously oppressed under apartheid, and yet still glaringly absent from the festival. Yet her intentions and the nuances of the piece were lost on the visibly threatened Oudtshoorn police, who dismissed the performance as “an embarrassment” tarnishing their public image and demanded that she leave. Fortunately what little progress the artist did make, and the incident itself, was captured on video.
The distance between the officers and Rose accentuates, in an extreme manner, the host of underlying tensions characterising the festival. Tensions between what is known as its “boerebraai factor” – a conservative “Broederbond” exclusivism (it turned beer cans into ideological weapons at last year’s Kaktus op die Vlaktes concert, and hurled them at Miriam Makeba) and between “verligte” or “alternatiewe” Afrikaners, who distance themselves from the “verkrampte” old guard.
That for some festival-goers it is really more of a boere-bazaar than an arts festival there is no doubt, despite the hopes and intentions of the organisers. It is the same festival, after all, where traditional stoepstories and roesterkoek vie with Koos Kombuis for cult status. Where Breyten Breytenbach’s first play, Boklied, plays to packed audiences whilst Worsie Visser packs them in at Kaktus.
Ironically much of the furore surrounding Breytenbach’s first theatrical foray has little to do with a densely poetic script and surreal stage settings that have left audiences bewildered and mesmerised. It has more to do with the fact that conservative audience members have reacted with shock to the on-stage nudity (one character gets a feather up the bum) and carefully choreographed sex scenes.
That the tension lies with the historically constituted meaning of Afrikaans and Afrikanerdom there is no doubt. That Afrikaans as a language and its contribution to South African culture should be celebrated there is no doubt. Especially because Afrikaans is not used solely by white South Africans.
But whether or not the KKNK can transform the image of Afrikaans, and whether or not it deserves the description of an inclusive “nasionale” arts event, remains to be seen.