Litnet

The National Arts Festival in Makhanda. Images supplied.

Recently I had the privilege of once again experiencing the National Arts Festival in Makhanda/Grahamstown. Finding myself temporarily down for the count back in Johannesburg after one too many late nights at the Rat and Parrot, I’m offering you the following six thoughts, gleaned from my journal, as a reflection on my week in the Creative City. 

1. The town remains cursed.

Last year when I wrote a reflection on the National Arts Festival for this website, someone criticised the fact that I used the PC, decolonialsed name Makhanda to describe its host city instead of the more familiar Grahamstown. Really, though, that person had nothing to worry about. Nothing short of Sophiatown-style bulldozing poses a threat to its thoroughly colonial DNA. You could rename it Malemadorp or Frantz Fanonburg; I promise you absolutely nothing would change.

People sometimes joke that there are more donkeys than people in Makhanda/Grahamstown.

"People sometimes joke that there are more donkeys than people in Makhanda." Image supplied

At this year’s Very Big Comedy Show, Rob van Vuuren quipped that the donkeys actually run the town (get it?). But he’s wrong. Ghosts run the town. Ghosts of British settlers, Mfengu soldiers, Khoisan slaves, Xhosa prisoners, Boer trekkers etc etc etc. This is why, even though your phone is telling you it’s no colder than Johannesburg, it feels like Siberia after dark. This is why you invariably develop a chest cold within 48 hours of arriving. The ghosts don’t care at all about the name of the town, but that cough will remind you that you’re only a guest on their turf.

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Take a walk after midnight along High Street and tell me the town belongs to the living and not the dead. No worries, you won’t be attacked. The ghosts have a nice arrangement with the municipal council: the potholes are where they sleep.

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Take a walk after midnight along High Street and tell me the town belongs to the living and not the dead. No worries, you won’t be attacked. The ghosts have a nice arrangement with the municipal council: the potholes are where they sleep.

2. South African creativity is unmatched.

With that said, plenty of living artists made an impact at the National Arts Festival this year. South African creativity continues, against the odds, to deliver world-class cultural gems. I spent only a week at this year’s festival, and some events were sold out (like everything to do with Msaki’s artistic residency), so the following should not be considered an exhaustive list, but I’d be remiss not to mention some of my highlights.

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South African creativity continues, against the odds, to deliver world-class cultural gems.

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The Eastern Cape Showcase went on without a hitch last week, and was spectacular. I wasn’t able to see it last year because of some tragic technical difficulties regarding a delayed load-in and no back-up generator in the Rhodes Great Hall, so it was great to see it all run smoothly. The Showcase theme this year had to do with celebrating indigenous musical instruments, and it was joyful, energetic, and achingly beautiful.

I had the privilege of seeing Sophie Joans and Anthea Thompson bring down the house in Dog rose, a play about navigating adolescence with a neurodivergent mother. The play, which is Joans’s second to debut at the festival, replicates the mix of hilarity and poignance which last year’s breakout festival hit Île (written by Joans and directed by Rob van Vuuren) embodied so effortlessly.

Pieter Odendaal’s Droomwerk emotionally destroyed me. I found myself sitting next to a Cue reviewer (I’m not sure if he was on duty) who said that he struggled to focus on the visuals throughout much of the play because of the tears in his eyes. That made two of us. I had never seen a play which looked so unflinchingly at the enslaved ancestors of many white Afrikaners, and I have seen few which have used sets, lighting and sound so effectively in creating an atmosphere of surreal disorientation.

But maybe my best memory of the kind of everyday excellence you encounter at the National Arts Festival was my conversation with the stand-up comedian Thato Mabelane on my last night in town. I had already seen her one-woman show, Third-generation coconut, and it was very good, but during the show she let slip – almost a throwaway line – that in 2015 she had rowed from Spain to Barbados for charity. A group of us asked her some follow-up questions about it, and – especially in the wake of the recent Ocean Gate situation – each reply seemed more extraordinary and unhinged than the last. It took her 43 days; they went without a support boat. Her team of eight rowed for 24 hours a day in two-hour on-and-off shifts. At one point their boat capsized due to a rogue wave. Pure insanity! Imagine doing all that – something more exciting and terrifying than 99,9% of people ever do in their lives – and then starting a completely unrelated (but also successful!) career in stand-up comedy. These are the kinds of people you meet at the Fest, and you can find yourself sitting with them, even drinking Amstel lager with them, at 11 pm in the Monument, on any given day. Addicting.

3. The Fest is not what it used to be.

I heard many conversations last week about how the festival was quiet, was shrinking, or was otherwise depressing. A lot of these people, no doubt, last experienced the NAF before the pandemic. I know for a fact that there were a lot more people at the 2023 festival than in 2022. At the same time, it’s true that there were markedly fewer venues this year. When it rained for a couple of days during the early part of last week, after the weekend visitors had gone home, things did seem a little dire.

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[T]he National Arts Festival deserves to be funded lavishly as one of the nation’s engines of optimism."

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That said, the mood in South Africa as a whole is pretty pessimistic. It would be unusual if that pessimism didn’t seep into discussions of the Fest. We should not tolerate the shrinking of this festival, or come to see it as inevitable. While a lot of it is up to the caprice of top-dollar sponsors like Standard Bank and the Eastern Cape government, the National Arts Festival deserves to be funded lavishly as one of the nation’s engines of optimism. Like Cyril Ramaphosa’s infamous bullet train proposal in one of his early SONAs, the festival should be bold enough to raise eyebrows. In a dysfunctional, crumbling municipality like Makhanda, the desire to invest in the creation of beauty is a radical, reckless thing. Festival organisers need to embrace that recklessness. It’s the only way it’s ever going to get back to what it was.

On a more practical note, I think an important and underappreciated reason for the festival’s perceived smallness is the lack of a physical programme. An enormous amount is lost when people have to navigate a painfully slow website or an app to learn what’s going on. In the days of the paper programme it never felt like you had an excuse to be bored, because even if it was hard to find something you liked, its very thickness testified to how much you could be enjoying. It was an especially convenient way to learn about ancillary events like art exhibitions that you might not have planned to visit, but might check out given a spare hour between shows. The website makes it much harder to find things you’re not already looking for. Surely we can do better than this.

4. People are not in a political mood.

It’s interesting to me that as South Africa lurches from crisis to crisis and potentially monumental elections loom next year, the mood at this year’s festival was so strikingly apolitical. This was certainly evident in the stand-up comedy offerings. When I started attending stand-up shows at the festival in 2017, politics was very much the order of the day. Back then comedians could take their pick of Zuma, Zille or Malema impressions, and audiences would eat it up. Not so this year. 

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It’s interesting to me that as South Africa lurches from crisis to crisis and potentially monumental elections loom next year, the mood at this year’s festival was so strikingly apolitical. 

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A few comedy shows focused explicitly on self-care. Ambrose Uren’s African-ish, which heads to the Edinburgh Fringe in August, pitches the benefits of veganism, cannabis and an off-grid caravan lifestyle. Mojak Lehoko’s In my own head pushes back against mental health stigma and argues that we should all be in therapy – especially men like Lehoko who grew up in townships. Rob van Vuuren’s Gold Ovation Award-winning Namaste Bae brilliantly lampoons the manipulative faux therapy-speak of Instagram wellness scammers. Significantly, all these wonderful shows tackle our response to challenges, rather than interrogate the challenges themselves. 

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A few comedy shows focused explicitly on self-care.

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There was a great moment in Amagrootman, an extremely funny play by Solly Malaka, where Jozi, an aging hostel dweller, diverts the tone of the piece away from raunchy sex comedy into solidly political turf. He admonishes his friends for neglecting the fact that the banks own almost everything in South Africa, from the houses people live in to the cars they drive. Pre-1994 power dynamics, he says, have not been disrupted. After a pregnant silence – maybe the only time since the beginning of the show when the audience isn’t doubled over with laughter – one of his friends pipes up, saying something like, “Yes, but what about your penis?” Laughter erupts again, and the sexually dysfunctional Jozi is deflated in more ways than one. I loved that moment. In it, the weight of Jozi’s speech is inverted and revealed for what it is: a distraction from what really matters, which is Jozi’s inability to get it up ahead of a visit from his girlfriend. 

Over the past five years politics in South Africa has gone from a punchline to something almost unbroachable if not actually taboo – not so much because people are bitterly divided (like they are in my own home, the United States), but because of a collective loss of faith in its ability to change things for the better. Even the inimitable Chester Missing kept it pretty light during his Very Big Comedy show set – he made one joke about Helen Zille’s tweets (ancient history at this point) and one joke about Phala Phala. Why bother? As Amagrootman argues, it’s easier to fix a penis than a country.

5. If not here, where?

There was one piece at this year’s festival that did aim to deliver cutting social (if not political) satire: The agents, written and performed by Kyla Davis, Lisa Derryn and Roberto Pombo, and directed by the venerable Toni Morkel. 

The agents is a devastating send-up of the South African real estate industry, particularly in relation to white professional homebuyers. In it, the grotesquely sleazy team of Brenda, Linda and Venter take us full circle from flogging the gentrified fever dream known as The Lofts (somewhere in Woodstock or Maboneng) to The Village – further away from the riff-raff, more heavily fortified – to The Estate – a copy of Steyn City, fully self-contained and spectacularly ostentatious. Like colonialism itself, the cruel yet exuberant capitalism that sweeps away thousands of homeless to build The Lofts comes back to bite our upwardly mobile buyers at every turn, as deteriorating security inevitably leads to greater isolation, fear, and eventually escape behind an even taller fence. 

It’s a familiar cycle, and something which impacts far more than the housing market. 

There’s no such thing as normal life in a society which continues to treat its poorest with such malice. According to The agents, those with resources and luxuries will never be able to feel truly safe. 

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What makes the National Arts Festival so beautiful is the way in which it pushes back against this most proudly South African pathology: the urge to hide in the next safest enclave.

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What makes the National Arts Festival so beautiful is the way in which it pushes back against this most proudly South African pathology: the urge to hide in the next safest enclave. At the festival we walk the streets together, eat communally at places like The Long Table, and break out of our cultural and socio-economic bubbles. No, it’s not a utopia, and yes, Makhanda can be hard to love sometimes. Still, it’s a powerful symbol of the country South Africa could be if its leaders were to make space for it to bloom. Ever since its founding in 1974, amid the depths of apartheid, the National Arts Festival has served that purpose. If we lose that, there’s nowhere else to run. If not here, where?

6. We can do better.

This is all to say that like all proud festivalgoers I will complain like hell when I’m in Makhanda – what else is there to do? But if the NAF is sinking, I’m prepared to go down with the ship. I can’t afford to do anything less. 

Like I said, I come from the United States, which has no tradition of affordable, high-quality fringe festivals like the NAF, Woordfees, KKNK or otherwise. Experiencing the NAF in 2016 inspired me to pursue a PhD in South African cultural history; it literally altered the whole course of my life. 

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South Africans may be holding their breath ahead of elections next year, but the Fest must not be allowed to join the elephants’ graveyard of public institutions in terminal decline.

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Ultimately, I would just hope that NAF organisers and sponsors recognise how crucial this event is – not only to the perpetually beleaguered performing arts industry in South Africa, but to the national project as a whole. South Africans may be holding their breath ahead of elections next year, but the Fest must not be allowed to join the elephants’ graveyard of public institutions in terminal decline. Next year it must go big. In the words of its own marketing slogan: “It will change you.”

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