For a man with a portfolio as large and diverse as the new minister of arts and culture lunches on a remarkably spartan side-plate of fruit.
As he quarters the rosy apples before him, Pallo Jordan contemplates his priorities three months into his appointment. ‘The most important aspect … where I want to see us really make an impact, is the community arts projects,” he says.
Jordan has just returned from opening the Guga S’Thebe art and cultural centre in Langa where he declined the fried chicken, but yielded to buying a candle-holder and accepted a gift of a menhora (Jewish candelabrum) forged by Siphiwo Speelman in the centre’s metalwork studio.
Established in 1926, Langa is the oldest African township in South Africa and only a few kilometres from Lincoln Estate, Athlone, a predominantly coloured area, where Jordan lived with his family before they were forced to flee South Africa in 1961.
Jordan’s parents were politically active. His father, Archibald Campbell Jordan, was a novelist, linguist and academic who began his career as a lecturer at Fort Hare University and became the first African member of staff at the University of Cape Town in 1946. Jordan joined the African National Congress in 1960 and worked in various research, media and information positions in London, Lusaka and Maputo. He has been a member of its powerful national executive committee since 1985.
Former president Nelson Mandela appointed him as minister of posts and telecommunication in 1994. He later removed Jordan from the post before reappointing him a few months later as minister of environmental affairs and tourism.
When Thabo Mbeki became president in 1999, Jordan was not given a Cabinet post. However, he continued to serve the ANC in Parliament as a back-bencher and then as chairperson of the foreign affairs committee.
At the end of his visit to Guga S’Thebe, Jordan recognised that the centre was providing opportunities for ‘young people to realise their dreams”.
‘All power to you,” said the minister. ‘We’re going to make sure your efforts are not in vain.”
‘Art centres have the potential to be job creation projects, which stimulate economic activity and put money in people’s pockets. I want to see these projects have a big impact, expand and begin including training in the fine arts.”
Ten years into democracy, economic issues remain a challenge, so another of Jordan’s priorities is to help the performing arts become significant contributors to wealth creation.’In London they’ve estimated that, second to the financial services, the cultural industries is a very strong sector in the economy. I’d like to see the South African performing arts having the same sort of impact,” says Jordan. One way of boosting capacity is through ‘some sort of legal intervention” to give performing artists greater security.
‘Most of them die poor even after they’ve made other people millions and made millions of other people happy. We’re going to try to evolve a standard contract that will afford greater security than in the past,” Jordan says.
His department is also exploring ways of securing benefits such as health insurance for artists. ‘Once we have those things taken care of, it means most artists won’t be living hand-to-mouth and people can devote their time to what they do best,” he says.
Improved training and ‘democratising performance spaces” will also help. ‘In all our cities the living, throbbing communities are not in the posh parts of town where many of the performing spaces are. They are out there, where there are very few places to perform,” says Jordan.
Other aspects of Jordan’s portfolio include heritage, which draws a significant portion of his department’s budget. Heritage aspects include museums and monuments and eat up almost two-thirds of the department’s budget but Jordan says this is unavoidable.
‘We have no option but to maintain them,” Jordan says, ‘[but] they need to transform to be more representative. It’s a question of how people are depicted, the way exhibitions are presented, the information that gets conveyed and transformation of the personnel working in those institutions.”
Cultural agreements, like those concluded with India and the United Kingdom, could ease the burden.
Both agreements will enable budding curators to get training abroad next year.
Beyond the museums, public spaces also need attention.
‘If you came from Mars and you went on the evidence of what is there in these public spaces, you’d come away with the impression that whites were the original inhabitants and Africans were the immigrants,” Jordan says.
He acknowledges: ‘Of course we have statues of Nelson Mandela in Sandton, Albert Luthuli in Stanger and Steve Biko in East London [among others].”
But these post-1994 symbols are not enough because, being all of the 20th century, they play into the denial and the myth of the empty land.
‘The Afrikaans Taal museum in Paarl, for instance, still has it that the African people came from the north and the whites came from the sea,” Jordan notes. ‘That whole area of rectifying the falsification of history is one that needs serious attention.”
Some inroads have been made. There is the Saartjie Bartman burial site and a Khoi Khoi route is also being developed.
‘That will take in remnants of the Khoi settlement in Namaqualand, the Northern Cape and the Transkei. Here, in the Western Cape, we’ll have to do some serious research to identify sites,” says Jordan.
At the Slave Lodge in Cape Town’s city centre near Parliament, archaeologists have found dungeons that are being excavated and historians are tracing the history of slavery.
‘There were a number of acts of rebellion by slaves in the Westen Cape, which are not talked about,” Jordan says. ‘Just retelling those stories would be important, as well as trying to locate the actual sites of these rebellion and memorialising the people who fought in them.”
Individuals who played key roles in less obvious areas — such as religion — should also be commemorated, Jordan believes. He cites the Reverend John Knox Bokwe, a significant figure in the history of Christianity in South Africa, and Tiyo Soga, the first ordained minister, as examples.
Jordan’s goal is for an arts and culture landscape that ‘is truly reflective of South Africa now and where there aren’t too many distortions”.
‘There are amazing stories to tell about South Africa — stories of amazing courage and amazing cowardice, about integrity and betrayal. These are the things that great works of art, drama are made of.
‘But we are not getting them, we are not being told them or only being told orally among small groups of people. Let’s get them out there. Let’s tell them and sell them to the world,” Jordan urges.
He was particularly impressed with two plays that he saw at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown this year, which told very South African stories. The one was about the rape of Baby Tshepang. The other was Nguni: A Love Story .
There isn’t enough theatre like this happening because South Africans still haven’t broken out of the regime of censorship, Jordan believes.
Another problem area, he identifies, is the publishing industry.
‘One of the big problems is that in African languages, publishing was done for the school market. The dime-store novel — pulp fiction — in an African language, doesn’t exist.
‘If people are not receiving information in their mother tongue or reading for leisure, how are we going to nurture a culture of reading?
‘I get the sense that we need some sort of empowerment programme in the publishing industry … An empowerment programme should get more black people into publishing and stimulate works being published in African languages,” Jordan says.
His department will also look at stimulating the production and creation of new African language works in film and theatre.
Referring to the current Zulu movie, Yesterday, Jordan asserts: ‘There is no reason why there shouldn’t be more like that. Distribution [beyond Southern Africa] shouldn’t be a problem. We regularly get French movies here with English subtitles, which shows that language isn’t an insurmountable problem.
‘There is a lot of potential for theatre, opera and dance based on stories that come from South Africa.
‘We have a rich orature from African languages and we can draw on African tales.”