I wish people would stop talking about white and black,” National Arts Festival director Lynette Marais is quoted as saying in the Sunday Times, ‘and just talk about a South African festival.”
She says she believes the famous festival, 25 years old this year and reputed to be the second biggest of its kind in the world (after Edinburgh), is a true reflection of South Africa. She also says (somewhat more darkly, and seemingly through clenched teeth) that ‘people can take ownership of the festival if they want to – or not …” With the subtext that also implies a suggestion of ‘let them go ahead and try”.
It’s a kind of metaphor for where the country is at. Everything has changed, and yet everything remains the same.
Grahamstown reminds me of that joke I heard in an English pub. A black man goes to God to complain that the famously reactionary Reverend Ian Paisley has refused to allow him into his Belfast church. ‘You think you’ve got problems?” the Big Man retorts. ‘I’ve been trying to get in there for the past 25 years.”
Grahamstown, without the festival, is reputed to have been born with the arrival of the 1820 settlers. Yet the natives have been trying to reclaim Grahamstown since at least 1819, which is when the left-handed prophet and ‘wardoctor” Makana staged what should have been an easy and decisive assault on the small garrison town.
In one of those famous and unexplainable colonial setbacks, Makana’s force of 10 000 men was defeated by a handful of British soldiers, abetted by God, a passing military patrol and an English woman with a sack of ammunition, cunningly disguised as a baby, cradled in her arms. The courteous Xhosa braves let the woman pass unmolested through their lines, and she was able to restock the garrison’s rifles and turn their fortunes around.
The hill from which Makana began his fatal descent on to Grahamstown was mockingly named ‘Makana’s Kop” by the settlers. It is on this hill that the hideously ugly 1820 Settlers National Monument building, headquarters of the festival, is situated. A couple of years ago a mysterious fire all but destroyed the inside of this building, but this was never pinned down to sabotage by irate Africanists in ‘One Settler, One Bullet” or ‘Makana-for-President” T-shirts. It was just one of those things. The building was restored, to rule over another year of festivities.
As Makana discovered, there is a kind of curse hanging over Grahamstown. Like Arthur Miller’s Salem in The Crucible, an almost tangible sense of evil hovers silently round its quaint church spires.
Mysterious fires spring up every year. This year, before the festival began, another historic building in the high street was gutted, apparently after a gang of street children broke in and set fire to some newspapers in an attempt to keep themselves warm.
As we drove into the town on the first festival weekend, there was a pall of smoke in the air. Bush fires had been raging for weeks, and continued to do so through the weekend. Uncontrollable flames as high as skyscrapers cut off some of the approaches to Grahamstown. The landscape as far as the eye could see was smouldering and blackened, like a horror story out of Dante’s Inferno.
At the centre of it all, Grahamstown stood unscathed and reassuringly English. Hippy families pad barefoot around this town all through the year, festival or no festival. Large white ladies with buns in their hair and sensible shoes on their feet, comfortingly wrapped in home-knitted brown jerseys and calf-length, marmalade-jar dresses, speak to each other in smiling whispers in the pretty tea-shoppes. Is there an undercurrent of white magic running here?
It seems extraordinary, in this mystically charged location, in this country that has such dramatic stories running all through its living history, that there should be so little substantial drama evident on the festival stages. All the drama, as in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, happens off-stage – in the streets the revellers trudge around, and in the smouldering debates and counter-recriminations about cultural ownership that always raise their heads at the annual festival.
Brett Bailey’s Third World Bunfight is one of the few local troupes to bring some sense of our weird reality to the stage. His storytelling urchins are a bizarre mirror of the gangs of street kids singing cheekily for their supper in the streets of the festival town, and up on the hill outside the Monument building – Makana’s heirs.
But the street kids do not own the country, and they do not own the festival. They are their own wry comment on the whole thing. I heard one group singing a tasteless but tuneful song about a ‘baas and a bobbejaan”. None of the festival-goers gave a damn what they were singing about. Some threw a coin or two into the begging cup. All went out of their way to avoid eye contact.
Liza Key’s film about the dysfunctional assassin Dmitri Tsafendas is bound to be another pertinent piece of art – by the nature of its subject matter alone. But where are the dramas that explore the hybrid interior landscape that is South Africa, the only country that could have made a Tsafendas, or indeed his victim Hendrik Verwoerd, possible?
South Africa appears to be overwhelmed by its own experience, to the extent that reality dumbfounds the power of imagination. Either that, or we are full of lazy artists.
The whole world regards South Africa with awe because of the extraordinary journey of the last decade. Extraordinary individuals have made extraordinary sacrifices and, by remaining human, have given a transcendent interpretation to the meaning of humanity.
This is the stuff of drama – complex and heroic individuals pitting their wits against a vast canvas of hostility, and still prevailing. We have heroes and villains. We have laughter and music behind prison walls, we have domestic murder and public foolishness. We have heartbreaking stories about love and betrayal. We have fertile ground for a local Nightmare On Elm Street right here behind the civilised façade of the quiet streets of Grahamstown. And yet we have very little good drama, either on stage or on screen, to show for all of this.
On the Friday afternoon, a hot-air balloon adorned with the colours of Standard Bank, the festival’s main sponsor, was hanging in the air, along with the haze from the bush fires. It was a jaunty sight.
On Saturday morning, we heard a strange, flatulent sound booming loudly from the hill behind the little house we had rented (at extortionate festival-time rates) for the weekend. I reassured my startled brood that this was merely the sound of the giant gas burners sending hot air into the balloon’s envelope so that it could become airborne for the new festival day. We went outside to have a look.
The gas blasting was beginning to sound a little desperate. The balloon hovered just off the ground, almost at the level of the line of trees that crested the hill. Then it began to slowly sink back to earth. No amount of gas pressure would make it budge. Slowly, the proud blue envelope crumpled and sank out of view.
We drove up the hill later on to see if we could see what had become of the balloon. It turned out that the aborted launch site was in the grounds of the Fort England Mental Hospital, a grim Victorian institution, Nevertheless, we signed ourselves in at the gate, pretending to be eminent mental doctors from overseas, and went to find the balloon. There was no sign of it. A metaphor for the financial future of the embattled festival?
The problem with any big festival is that you have to have the right kind of regimented mind to make full use of it. You have to book well in advance for the big events, and be organised enough to show up on time at a variety of venues hidden all over an already obscure town. Chance encounters with great art, after all that preparation, are a bonus. Doing the festival at all is its own kind of art form.
My favourite chance encounter was King Ubu, a big, colourful film from the Czech Republic. Adapted from Alfred Jarry’s outrageously anarchistic Ubu plays, the film managed to be scrupulously true to the letter and the spirit of the French original, yet translated magnificently into the landscape of Eastern Europe.
It was a timeless period piece, yet spoke articulately to today’s issues. It was simultaneously Ubu, Macbeth, and the rise and fall of Nicolae Ceausescu. It was art, not just because it was well made, richly acted, and exquisitely filmed, but because it was true to life while not being slavishly lifelike.
It was also a reminder that nations that live through war, trauma, dismemberment and ethnic cleansing do not necessarily have to forget how to make art.