I WROTE THIS IN A LETTER TO A FRIEND ABROAD A WHILE AGO:..African governments post-colonial somehow increasingly evolve into self-serving juggernauts, ballooning bureaucracies that stray far away from the needs of the very people who have installed them in the leadership of their lives. South Africa has perhaps the best cultural policies in Africa, it is the implementation that has seen rather parasitic oligarchies everywhere burgeoning. Here in this province where I have chosen to work national policies are simply ignored and flouted with impunity, so that institutions end up being turned into conduits for siphoning and embezzling. This is the general situation in Africa and maybe the bulk of the former colonies. Nothing seems to work. Now as an artist you find yourself at the crossroads, join them or perish. The levels of illiteracy remain high, so that as a writer it is almost impossible to survive. The book buying public stands at two percent of the population, the majority inevitably white. Of course the white reader will not support a writer who raises the uncomfortable questions of past injustices and the impact on the current situation. It is the duty of the writer to reflect as much as possible the truth of his situation. We are almost at that point where we are being arm-twisted into over-reconciling. The perceived radical writer or artist is systematically isolated in the campaign to somehow sanitize the arts. The truth that emanates from our age-old languages and cultures is completely ignored. The situation in the so-called new SA is not just about AIDS, graft, crime, joblessness and wide-scale poverty; it is also about the threat to indigenous cultures and their variants. As artists in this situation we are perhaps the most productive individuals in society; we produce our sculptures and paintings whether there is food or not, whether we get paid or not – inspired of course by greater forces than personal aggrandisement. Such is the situation here that musicians go without gigs because club owners feel deejays are much more affordable – the quality and value of art to greater human survival is sacrificed at the altar of profit. As societies in different parts of the world we need each other, only a consolidated human experience can ascertain the survival of humanity as a species. We need you in the better endowed societies, as affirmation for our sacrifices as artists and sustainers of our very work. It is in the nature of the new elites to wish for our simple evaporation from the four corners of this world, for we are stark reminders of the humanity they have lost. What we need here with outside societies and our counterparts in those societies is people-to-people contact and exchanges unmediated by the self-serving....
Posted on: Sun, 16 Nov 2014 08:20:57 +0000
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