Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Creation of such work may help the “artists” to feel better; looking at it may help its audience to feel better. “The end product is not so important as the process,” Sue Williamson explained, but even the process she vaunts may be dubious. There is a difference between giving everyone the free voice that is the cornerstone of democracy and trying to make everyone speak in a “free” voice whether they are so inclined or not. Sue Williamson said earnestly, “Of course all South Africans are particularly pleased with themselves at the moment for having pulled off something that the world had thought was impossible, just when they’d been written off. But our race has denied that other race, and so every one of those people is important; everything they have to say is worth saying, and we must listen to all of it.” There is no such thing as an adequate response to apartheid, and the urge to white penance is admirable. But the suggestion that everyone is an artist—that every voice must be heard—is in the end a denial of individuality, not a celebration of diversity.

Affirming that everyone is of equal importance, legally and morally, is one thing; saying that everyone has something to say of equal importance is cacophony; you cannot hear a thousand voices at once and understand what anyone is saying. You have to make choices. I saw Helen Suzman, the human rights activist twice nominated for the Nobel Prize, the week after the decision was made that the New South Africa would have eleven official languages. “I can’t bear to think what will be lost in the translation,” Suzman said to me. The urgency of acknowledging diversity should not upstage the imperative for some kind of unity in a national government.

The Politics of It

The ANC’s Department of Arts and Culture believes that art should serve the state, that the struggle is not over, that artists must help to establish the new paradise of South Africa. Chairman Mao advanced the same policy when he launched the Cultural Revolution. The non-party-affiliated National Arts Initiative (NAI), set up by artists and writers, believes that art should be publicly funded and that artists should be free to make art that is true to their experience. President John F. Kennedy advanced the same policy when he set up the National Endowment for the Arts. The writer Mtutuzeli Matshoba commented with some dismay, “While the NAI purports to represent the interests of ‘art and cultural practitioners,’ the ANC’s main objective is the cultural liberation of the disenfranchised people of South Africa. The ANC perceives cultural liberation not as an end in itself, but as an aspect of national liberation.” Many object to such a mechanistic, propagandistic vision of art, which leaves no place for free expression. Mike van Graan, head of the NAI, complained, “Those of us who fought alongside the ANC against apartheid thought that now at last we would have the peace to create, to sing, to laugh, to criticize, to celebrate our visions unhindered. We were wrong.” Later, he confessed to me, “We have literally been instructed to do work about the ANC but that makes no reference to ANC corruption because that gives ammunition to the nationalists.”

Everywhere you go in South Africa, someone is forming a new committee. Whatever it is, its name is an acronym. At the launch of the NAI, which I attended in Durban, voting rights had been awarded to the AWA, AEA, ADDSA, APSA, ICA, NSA, PAWE, SAMES, and SAMRO, while provisional voting rights only were the lot of the ATKV, COSAW, FAWO, and PEAP. God help you if you go to an arts function in South Africa and don’t know what all these things stand for. The endless speeches at an ANC arts dinner I attended in a Johannesburg hotel were incomprehensible, even though they were in English, because they included such a dizzying, tedious array of such subgroups. This rage for committees is an unfortunate legacy of the ANC. At dinner with Penny Siopis and Colin Richards, deeply committed white liberals, I commented on the problem. Richards put his hands to his head, saying, “Those committees! Throughout the apartheid period we went to meetings of those committees—mind-numbing, endless meetings, thousands and thousands and thousands of them, hour upon hour upon hour. That was the only way we could show our support. It was a big part of what we could do against apartheid, but, my God, when I think of the number of tedious hours that went that way, it makes me weep.”