My big sister's monthly column in The Mercury - a morning newspaper here in Durban! So proud of her....
Illa
Thompson
Column
74
September 2014
It
is national Heritage Day on Wednesday 24 - a day which Wiki (our universal
oracle of all information) tells us that “South
Africans across the spectrum are encouraged to celebrate their culture and the
diversity of their beliefs and traditions, in the wider context of a nation
that belongs to all its people.”
20 years into our democracy, this noble concept has become something
of a multi-layered mine-field of political and philosophical complexity,
because Heritage is not a one-size-fits all kind of notion: it is a Hydra of
Greek mythological proportions.
By definition, Heritage is “the full range of our inherited traditions,
monuments, objects, and culture. It is the range of our contemporary
activities, and the meanings, and behaviours that we draw from them”. But in
South Africa, this gets complicated – because we have a disjointed,
multifaceted sense of “our”.
An interesting example of this is Cape Town theatre-maker, Brett
Bailey’s “Exhibit B” which opens
this week at the Barbican Centre in London, after having caused a fuss at the
Edinburgh Arts Festival last month.
Bailey is a phenomenal, prolific, fearless and evolved playwright,
designer, director and installation-artist whose visually-articulate work often
interrogates the dynamics of the post-colonial world and considers how history prescribes
the present.
His “Exhibit B” is
informed by and is a parody of the grotesque “Human Zoos” of Victorian Europe.
Billed by Le Soir in Brussels as “terrible and
magnificent,” the installation is part performance and part museum exhibition comprising
13 tableaux designed as “curiosity cabinets” featuring black actors with
colonial-era artefacts, and, more disturbingly, contemporary settings. The
intention is for these living sculptures to shatter the viewer’s complacency and
to offer a harrowing visual reminder of the appalling history of global
colonialism, slavery and racial hatred.
Activists
in London, ahead of the opening at the Barbarian, have been vehemently protesting
and calling for the exhibition to be banned. A petition has been circulating which
so far has 18 000 signatures.
UK activist, Sara Myers criticised the work “for
the lack of respect it gave to the ancestral children of the enslaved and
dehumanised.”
In
response, Bailey is quoted in an on-line media interview: “In Exhibit B, I intended to make people aware of
systems of racism, objectification and dehumanisation that have legitimised
brutal policies of plunder, control, exclusion and extermination; systems that
are still in place today. I’m sorry that because of sensationalistic media
reports and social media hysteria, many have been alienated from the work
without having seen it,”
In
a media statement, he explains: “I stand for a global society that is rich in a
plurality of voices. I stand against any action that calls for the censoring of
creative work or the silencing of divergent views, except those where hatred is
the intention”.
“The
intention of Exhibit B is never
hatred, never fear, never prejudice. It is love, respect and outrage.”
“Do any of us really want to live in a society in
which expression is suppressed, banned, silenced, denied a platform? If my work
is shut down today, whose will be closed down tomorrow?”
Having
so recently experienced a similar situation around the furore of displaying Brett Murray’s The Spear at the Goodman Gallery, we watch with interest as Exhibit B is scheduled to open at the
Barbican tomorrow (23 September) – appropriately a day ahead of Heritage Day in
South Africa.
As a counterpoint to the animated international
debate around Exhibit B, my focus
shifts to one of the many heritage events on our local September calendar - the
annual Umkhosi woMhlanga, or Reed
Dance. This is a fascinating study of tradition meeting tourism; of history
being revived and affirmed in contemporary culture; of politics meeting custom.
An age-old ritual was dormant for generations and revitalised
by King Goodwill Zwelithini in 1984. This year in excess of 30 000 Zulu
maidens celebrated 30 years of the ceremony’s revived existence by processing
to the royal palace, bare-breasted, carrying symbolic long reeds. I suspect
nothing quite like this exists event anywhere else in the world.
In the small print of the extensive media coverage
which the Reed Dance received last week, was the announcement that R300 million
would be invested to build a village in eNyokeni to offer “safe accommodation
for the girls overnight.”
The national department
of Arts and Culture who are funding this project announced in May: "We are
looking at these cultural pressings not only for a reed dance but also to
invest into the local economy, because people will be attracted towards eNyokeni,"
says Department spokesperson Mogomotsi Magodini. He adds "There will be
better infrastructure; there will be better tourism attraction and so
forth."
This is when one’s response to Heritage gets
complicated: R300 million of Arts and Culture funding to be invested into a
cultural village to support the Reed Dance in eNyokeni; and R300 million of city money on the Umkhumbane
Freedom Park cultural centre and tomb for Queen Thomozile Jezangani KaNdwandwe
Zulu, the mother of King Goodwill
Zwelithini, in Cato Manor. That’s R600 million of civic funds being invested
into two heritage sites.
For
us to meaningfully journey towards an authentic national heritage which truly celebrates “our” inherited traditions; more of our shared legacies and customs
should find their way into the consciousness, plans and budgets of the City and
Department of Arts and Culture.
Celebrate
Durban – traditionally the city’s far reaching annual September heritage
season allowing 60 or so of the city’s emerging and micro-eventors to create
their own community heritage-themed events and projects, didn’t happen again
this year. No formal reason was given: lack of funding perhaps, or possibly
insufficient administrative infrastructure.
I for one really miss this joyous, far-reaching, inclusive festival, and
find that those heritage events which did take place this year as stand-alone
projects, lacked identity and cohesion.
To
many, Wednesday’s public holiday is a day to invite friends and neighbours for
a braai.
A
day full of stormy complexities about legacy, birthright, tradition and custom,
has become relegated to a day of lighting a fire and cooking meat.
How
incongruous. How funny. How tragic.
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