As Amsterdam teemed with South African artists attending the Culture in Another South Africa (Casa) conference this week, the African National Congress used the platform to reiterate its position on the cultural boycott: it is being refined, not relaxed.
At a press conference on Wednesday, an ANC official also made it clear that no cultural exchange would be possible in future without “approval from the mass national democratic structures within South Africa” — namely the UDF and its affiliates.
Casa, jointly organised by the ANC, the Casa Foundation and the Anti-Apartheid Movement of the Netherlands, flew the colours of the ANC. It was attended by some of the outlawed organisation’s top officials, including Thabo Mbeki, Barbara Masekela and Alfred Nzo.
The conference’s value in bringing altemative South African culture into the world and allowing exiles and people from home to meet and mix ideas could not be overestimated.
But it has also highlighted the difficulties inherent in the cultural boycott and caused problems with the selection criteria that were used to bring people across to Amsterdam Said one of the organisers, Joost Divendal, *there were several criteria used. They included quality as an artist, areas of artistic endeavour (music, theatre, photography, literature etc.) and a connection to or sympathy for the democratic mass movement.
It excluded groups, Divendal said, like Inkatha and black consciousness oriented artists, while organisational difficulties resulted in a sparseness of representatives from around South Africa, including the Western and Eastern Cape.
But the selection criteria also gave room to several distortions. Within South Africa few appeared to know what was going on during preparations and selections for Casa attendance and “sympathies” with the broad democratic movement seemed not always to be good enough These factors cast some doubt on an ANC cultural department official claim that all the delegates were elected democratically from UDF affiliates around the country.
As to the festival itself, most of the culture displayed has had liberal airings in South Africa. Almost all the plays have been shown at The Market Theatre in Johannesburg. This includes Percy Mtwa’s Bopha, Junction Avenue’s Sophiatown and Mbongeni Ngema, Percy Mtwa and Barney Simon’s Woza Albert!
The music was noticeable for its exclusion of artists like Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Some of South Africa’s best — inside and outside – were just not present. Said Divendal, “Masekela was invited, but did not come”. Makeba’s name, he said, had not come up at all, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo were not invited as they had very recently done an extensive tour in Holland with a lot of exposure.
The ANC’s own group, Amandla, while better than many local offerings, was caught in a musical time warp of Fifties and Sixties township sounds, indicating the toll of decades of exile and cultural isolation.
For many Dutch residents (those few who were interested — there has been little coverage of Casa in the Press) there was an erroneous belief that the art was “smuggled” out. The Photographic exhibition bills itself as “smuggling out censored images” – which is only partly true. In addition, several of the films had been seen in Johannesburg at the Weekly Mail’s film festival.
An evening of readings of poetry and prose at the famous Sixties “drug club” Paradiso, was marked by several hours of embarrassing poetry before the advertised big names like Breyten Breytenbach and Nadine Gordimer appeared. Among the long tracts of poetry were offerings by Patrick Fitzgerald and Marius Schoon both ANC activists, and songs by an ex-South African, Barry Gilder.
Breytenbach’s appearance did not please everyone, but, as one organiser put it, could not be avoided at a cultural event of such stature. Several other notable contributors to “another’s culture”, like Ray Phiri, Sipho Sepamla and Es’kia Mphahlele, seem to have been avoided.
The media section, consisting of a “colloquium” of selected South African journalists, was followed by an ANC policy statement on the media that left the waters as murky as ever. However an ANC representative did say he would have preferred some more diversity of thought in the meeting, and suggested that one or two Afrikaans journalists might have been included.
The policy statement left the impression among several journalists that the ANC itself had more respect for dissent and criticism than some of its more sympathetic journalists at home. During the media conference, an award was given to detained New Nation editor, Zwelakhe Sisulu, and it was announced that attempts are to be made to internationalise a “Hands-off the media” campaign. —Weekly Mail Reporters, Amsterdam