The Heritage Hydra

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.