The Maitisong Festival has been celebrated in Gaborone since 1987. Stephen Gray caught up on its 14th year
Ending this week on April 1 is this year’s 10-day Maitisong Festival in Gaborone, since 1987 the huge event of theatre and other performing arts on Botswana’s cultural calendar.
The line-up includes 180 (mostly local) performers appearing on the indoor main programme. There are also non-stop, 9am-to- 9pm outside entertainments in two of the city’s townships, Old Naledi and Bontleng. A truck takes interactive shows on routes into the hinterland. And there is Kutlwano Masote from the defunct South African National Symphony Orchestra explaining and playing the cello. The grand final festival concert with immense choirs features dream diva Sibongile Khumalo to crown it all.
Which all makes a change from the donkey derby and Aids funerals. Nor could I catch anything like all the events. The Little Theatre, a room in the fine National Museum in town, runs parallel timeslots with small-scale plays mostly in English and seTswana, at the rate of a new one per night. I missed U Theatre’s Enigma, about World War IIveterans having to adjust to the modernising world (“Not my son, he is not gay … I mean, I want to carry my grandchildren …”).
Then I did it again, not selecting what the lucky few rated the pick of the season: The Passage of Okava Theatre from Mmabatho, a two-hander previously called Who Is Afraid of Apartheid? This is about the only too harsh experience of a South African driven into exile in hospitable Gabs. But that is the festival experience, win some, lose some.
According to the festival’s staunch founder-director, David Slater, that is where the Maitisong venture really started – with the exiled South African group of the Medu Arts with Wally Serote in the 1970s, with the Botswana International Society of Music and with Mambo Arts, all come and gone. Previously makeshift South African plays like the agitprop Woza, Albert! had toured. But there had never been theatre of the lights-and-lipstick sort in Botswana.
Still, in the entire country there is only one fully equipped theatre venue. Neither in an entertainment complex nor on the university campus, it is attached to the extraordinary Maru-a-Pula High School. And you should just see their marimba band hotting up for after-show entertainment in their leafy courtyard, and then the recorder orchestra.
There drama and performance groups of Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe have mixed and matched for years, with some guest items from the Grahamstown Festival in South Africa (Paul Slabolepszy, Pieter-Dirk Uys).
But basically, as Slater points out, at the Maitisong Festival it is always the Botswana angle he pushes. I thought it poorly publicised in South Africa, but as for years it had had to flourish in spite of South Africa, the power of their neighbour’s theatre is not stressed.
Maitisong just does its own thinking, with its own rapt success. The word “maitisong” means coming together in the evening, making culture, after all. Slater began with 12 acts and a budget of 5E000 pula; now the budget is up to 350E000 pula. And Slater and his year-round festival offices are funded by the school too, as part of the outreach programme.
Nor did I wish to miss the production of the University of Botswana’s dynamic and versatile UBE 423 class for the festival, engineered by stalwart David Kerr of the English department. So the entire cast of no fewer than 30 women and nine men came in on a Saturday afternoon and just performed it for me like that – without their follow spots and in the local badminton court. But genial Botswana makes do, cordially so.
Their play called The Ghosts Return was a gut-twisting one, based on the students’ own research. In effect, it is a reconstruction of the June 1985 killing spree performed by then state president Botha’s security forces on the very exile community which kicked off this festival. The hunting down, among others, of Thami Mnyele, blown up by assailants unknown as he escaped his poor shelter, his stack of wonderful paintings shot to ribbons, was deeply shocking. Even more so was the play’s revelation that those same students compiling a documentary account of the raid would have their footage wiped. Too compromising to be seen on Botswana TV.
Rather less mature was the mime play called A Beef for Buffalo created by Nicholas Ellenbogen with a fine and vigorous troupe from far Ngamiland to open the official programme. His Theatre for Africa succeeded in reducing some talented humans into playing the parts of big, stupid buffaloes ousted in favour of big, stupid beef cattle. All this purports to be tapping the indigenously fabular, but when the satirical touch is missing can look awfully amateur and even demeaning. But there were some extraordinary moments: a fence enclosing a snorting poor monster, a cringing dog coming to lick it up.
Then this Nick was up to his old tricks again, astounding this theatre critic, who it must be said was cringing anonymously in the stalls – by hitting him on the head with the bouquet he had just been awarded. Presumably he was dreading bad publicity in the Mail & Guardian. My humble opinion remains that a resounding final number would have had more impact.
Another evening in Gaborone, recently cut off by floods, still balmy. At the crowded- out, buzzing, big venue is the flowing cash bar, the braaiEscent coming from Cresta Lodge’s festival caf, the – what is the live free show this time? – ah, the Encore Orchestra. Lady Ruth Khama, chief patron, grandly arrives once more with her season ticket.
Courtesy of the French Foreign Ministry it is now the turn of Massidi Adiatou’s group from Cte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Burkina Faso. Their first win was at the Luanda dance competition in 1994, and clearly they have been on a winning streak ever since. Remember the name of this astounding company of seven dancing, prancing men and a woman: “N’Soleh”.
Their style they describe as contemporary “African renaissance”, but a gymmed-up, hunky skill-fest is more like it. After such daring body displays, the audience was pleased indeed, wanted more and more and more. Nor was I the only one still panting from bravos in the parking lot.
Contact the Maitisong Festival office at (09267) 37-1809