It must be something in the stars. Show business is going through incredible upheavals. Michael Jackson dragged into a Los Angeles police station in chains; leading Bolshoi ballerina Anastasiya Volochkova fighting through the Russian courts to be reinstated after being dropped from the starry line-up of one of the world’s leading dance companies because, according to the management, she was just too big to be lifted by the effete clowns who pass for leading men in the world’s ballet companies these days.
Jackson, through his lawyers, bit back by denying rumours that he had, yet again, been caught with his pants down in the presence of a gullible juvenile at his ‘Neverland” fantasy ranch outside LA.
Volochkova, in St Petersburg, bit back by saying that her trials were all part of a new, Russian Mafia-style attack on artistic integrity in the post-Cold War dispensation (well that’s my spin on it, anyway). She had earlier yelled into the microphones of the gathered press that she was being dumped not because she was fat, but because the new, corporate-driven aparatchiks of the post-Soviet version of the bolshy Bolshois just didn’t like her face. In a word, they thought she was damned ugly.
Now this is all very strange. When she appeared on television news to defend her position she didn’t look ugly at all. In fact she has very interesting, slanting Slavic eyes and holds her head up high like a proper ballerina. It was hard for the average punter like myself to decide what was wrong with her.
It became clear, though, that her problems originated with complaints from those girlish boy dancers who went weeping to management with claims that she was out of their league. Her response was to say to the press, ‘Look, one of those namby-pambies claims that he broke his knee while trying to lift me. But as far as I am concerned, he is still alive. So what’s the problem?”
Tough cookie fighting her corner. This would never have happened under Stalin, of course. The namby-pamby boy would have been taken out and shot, to be replaced by an Olympic weightlifter. The prestige of the Bolshoi would never have been allowed to be undermined by such silliness.
Closer to home, we mourn the death of one of our rare filmic icons. Lionel Ngakane passed away after a short, dramatic battle with general system failure. He had had a long and colourful life, most of it dedicated to living high on the hog, as they say. And part of living high on the hog was to play the Disadvantaged-Negro card and go around the world bemoaning the fact that the apart-heid government would never allow him to do what he was best at, which, he said, was being a filmmaker.
Well, Uncle Lionel had been a big buddy of my father’s. They got into and out of a lot of colourful scrapes together in the old days. My mother knew him too, and, possibly because of those noisy escapades in Johannesburg and London with her husband, always regarded him in an arm’s-length sort of way.
This didn’t change the fact that we loved and appreciated Uncle Lionel.
He was part of the furniture. He will always remain central to some of my early memories, and popped up at significant moments all through my life — including being present at the informal, non-denominational baptism ceremony we threw for our first daughter in London, where the guests got rapidly sozzled on the punch-drunk punch that I threw together in the red plastic bathtub that was supposed to be used for washing the baby. The mother never forgave me, but the baby did.
But the point of the story is that Uncle Lionel was there, and never stopped reminding me, or the baby in question as she grew to maturity, that he had shared that significant moment.
Dust to dust. Ashes to ashes. It is hard to separate Uncle Lionel Ngakane from our recent past. Uncle Lionel was part of the wallpaper for a whole generation of us, just like Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela and Sophiatown and dodging pass raids. And shebeens and alfresco gatherings of amaZiona and getting locked up in Number Four. And urban legends like ‘Mr Drum”, also known as Henry Nxumalo, reckless gentleman on the beat.
And Can Themba and Casey Motsisi (although he is from a later generation) and Clemens Kadali’s ICU and Dorkay House and all of the rest of the ways black people tried to make some kind of order out of the imposed chaos of their lives.
Curious that this should all be happening at a time when a youngish black South African director called Zola Maseko is making a valiant attempt to recreate this vital period on celluloid, with hopes of a major release in cinemas across the civilised world in 2004. The curious and debatable part of this process is how low-key it all is. And there are obvious and disturbing reasons for this.
There are many things that need to be said, and re-said, about the Drum/Rivonia generation. The key question is how you say them.
I applaud the fact that young persons of a creative bent are tackling this extraordinary material. What is disturbing is that, once again, they are using the tools of American world domination (let’s not beat about the bush) to get there.
If there is any message to be gleaned from the lives of both Nelson Mandela (who we still have the privilege of having in our midst) and Lionel Ngakane and many others who have left us, it is that the struggle was, more than anything, about being allowed to speak with our own voice.
It is a supreme irony that Maseko’s film leans so heavily on American filmwriters, producers, directors of photography and even actors in the leading roles, to put this across.
What rings out, again and again, is the nagging question: Is it always necessary to sup with the devil to be able to say your piece, put your point of view, try and create a profile with your stamp on it in a hostile world?
Mina, personally, I doubt it. But generally, that seems to be the way things go.
Hamba kahle, Uncle Lionel. At least you are out of all this chaos. But the beat goes on.