The Market Theatre in Newtown, Johannesburg (Photo: Bobbyshabangu, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Ismail Mahomed (director, UKZN Centre for Creative Arts) wrote on Facebook on 8 February 2025:
Donald Trump’s executive order to halt economic support to South Africa is essentially about political vindictiveness and aggressive bullying because of South Africa’s claim to place on the world stage. It is a far cry from the days when South Africa was a rotten pariah that deserved to be isolated by the global community in order to fast-track the end of apartheid.
All sectors in South Africa that have been dependent on US funding will most likely focus this week on how they repivot their organisations to cope with the huge cutbacks in US economic aid. For the arts and culture sector, Trump’s executive order might leave a small dent, but it is nothing that a good amount of panel-beating between South African and US institutions/organisations that hold shared values cannot navigate. It might leave US cultural organisations yearning for the liberties that South Africans enjoy in Section 16 of our Constitution — the freedom of expression and the freedom of creativity.
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For the arts and culture sector, Trump’s executive order might leave a small dent, but it is nothing that a good amount of panel-beating between South African and US institutions/organisations that hold shared values cannot navigate.
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Unlike the seventies and eighties, when US cultural programming, particularly jazz, dance and theatre, was supported through various US cultural diplomacy initiatives at South African arts festivals and theatres, the last decade or more has almost seen a decline in US cultural presence at South African arts festivals and theatres. This was largely due to cutbacks in embassy funds, and also because of shifting priorities in the Department of State’s cultural diplomacy objectives. Any existing exchanges were largely through organisation-to-organisation or people-to-people relations. This kind of relationship is often the bedrock of more effective, more engaging and more sustainable public diplomacy between nations than what arises from state-led initiatives.
One of the US embassy’s more iconic and visible means of cultural support over the last decade has been the Black History Month programming during February. The Market Theatre in Johannesburg has seen several Black History Month productions, such as Jeff Stetson’s The meeting, Ntozake Shange’s For colored girls and Dominique Morisseau’s Paradise blue, among several others funded by the US embassy in South Africa. The audiences for these productions have, in most cases, been young, economically rising and opinionated black men and women; they have either been in leadership positions where their public voices matter, or they have been the next generation of leaders, trendsetters and thought influencers. They are the ones the embassy needed in order to win friends for the US’s public diplomacy agenda. A cutting down on Black History Month programmes in South Africa will have nothing to do with Trump’s executive order to punish South Africa. It will have a lot more to do with his myopic view of cutting down on support for Black History Month programming worldwide and in the US.
One of the more significant US organisations that have led several dynamic international cultural exchange programmes in which South Africans have participated is the prestigious Kennedy Centre. Trump’s most recent tirade that he is going to dump board members, including the chairman of the prestigious Kennedy Centre, and install himself as the chairperson of the board, is something that the global cultural community will view as an aggressive form of both censorship and political control of the arts – a vicious injury to the respected Kennedy Centre. With Trump determined to head the institution and to install his acolytes on the Centre’s board, it is really Americans who will become so much poorer and more deprived of experiencing engaging, critical, international cultural dialogue through the arts.
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What an idiotic way to lose friends who could be your best form of soft power!
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One of the US State Department’s most significant programmes that have supported and grown cultural leadership in South Africa is the International Visitor Leadership Programme, which has allowed emerging arts leaders to be exposed to and to learn from impressive projects in the US. This programme is definitely going to be hard hit, but again, cutting it down will have little to do with Trump’s isolationist executive order against South Africa. Instead, it will have far more to do with the views of his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, that international cultural exchange across the globe is an expense on the budget rather than an investment in public diplomacy. What an idiotic way to lose friends who could be your best form of soft power!
There are several other cultural exchange programmes administered by the US embassy in South Africa that are bound to be affected or cut back even further. For an arts sector in South Africa that has already been witnessing a cutback in US programmes for over a decade, this is hardly going to be a severe blow. What is far more important is that the people-to-people and organisation-to-organisation initiatives that have been driven without US government funding are bound to grow deeper and stronger because of shared values, shared histories and a shared concern that artistic and cultural freedoms are going to be far more under threat in the US than they are in South Africa.
Also read:
South Africa – and the world at large – will feel the impact of Trump’s climate change denial