National Arts Festival will mirror the nation’s soul over 10 days of music, theatre and so much more

The cover of the 2015 festival programme, underscoring the National Arts Festival’s commitment to artistic freedom in the year ‘satire’ was declared the festival’s featured artist.

By Keith Bain

20 Jun 2024

Makhanda’s National Arts Festival isn’t merely a showcase for South Africa’s talent, it also serves as a mirror of the nation’s soul.

One year, in the early 2000s, the comedically zef duo Corné and Twakkie staged a protest at the National Arts Festival (NAF) against Tony Lankester, who for 12 years was in charge of the country’s biggest and longest-running arts festival. The plucky tricksters were on a zany crusade for change.

“We marched into Lankester’s office,” says Rob van Vuuren, aka Twakkie, a cringe-worthy hyper-South African character possessed of a massive snor (moustache) and raging mullet whose presence had become intricately entwined with the festival.

Comedian and actor Rob van Vuuren as his alter ego, Twakkie. (Photo: Mark Wessels)

“We handed him a polony, which I think was supposed to be a threat, and we gave him a list of demands. Things like ‘less Shakespeare’ and ‘more Knight Rider on TV’.”

The point? Pure ridiculousness, for one.

But their absurd tirade also represented something fundamental to the very spirit of the festival: that it is a place where artists can be heard, no matter what their beef (or polony) is. This value placed on creative freedom has been fundamental to the NAF since its inception in 1974 when it became a battleground for cultural inclusivity; a home to creative expression that eschewed the racial divides and censorship of the bigoted apartheid regime.

Ismail Mahomed, who brought his first show to the Fringe in about 1984, says the magic of the festival was that it seemed to exist outside the parameters of government control at a time of “tremendous state censorship”.

“Audiences could enjoy the arts unfettered by state control. It was politicised, and it was powerful, it had an edge…

“Work you couldn’t stage anywhere else in the country was shown in Grahamstown, even at the height of the 1980s State of Emergency.”

Much of that edgy magic was lost during the Rainbow Nation honeymoon period of the 1990s.

“It was a period of atrocious theatre when many artists seemed to have nothing to say,” says Mahomed. “Everything was so nice and rosy; every second show a Romeo and Juliet featuring one black and one white lover. Audiences grew bored and that reflected as a decline in the post-1994 NAF.”

South African theatre’s rebirth began in about 1998, with what Mahomed calls “a different kind of liberation politics”. Work that challenged society was re-emerging. “Not necessarily protest theatre in the old way, but theatre with a political edge dealing with gender and LGBTQI+ and other identity issues.”

In 2006, Roy Sargeant directed the attention-grabbing, gay, coming-out play The Boy Who Fell From the Roof and visual artist Churchill Madikida exhibited his deeply personal Like Father Like Son? – an examination of what happens to sons who grow up without their fathers.

The arts – and the NAF – were helping to fuel a deeper discourse.

Although gender and identity had emerged as hot topics, Mahomed, who served the NAF as its artistic director from 2008 to 2016, says there was another wave of blandness during the early 2000s, this time linked to an oversupply of funding for any work dealing with HIV/Aids.

“We saw some of the most horrible HIV productions, often loaded with inaccuracies. And audiences got bored.”

National Arts Festival 2012. Mies Julie - Adaption & Direction - Yael Farber. Cast -Mies Julie - Hilda Cronje, John, Bongile Mantsai, Christine, Thoko Ntshinga. Bongile Mantsai and Hilda Cronje in ‘Mies Julie’, Yaël Farber’s 2012 play inspired by August Strindberg’s realist masterpiece. (Photo: Supplied)

The vapidness of many of these works was to some extent thrown into stark relief by the arrival at the festival in 2009 of Mike van Graan’s seminal Iago’s Last Dance, a trio of sketches that resoundingly expressed the depth of anger and despair at how the HIV/Aids epidemic was handled in this country.

Van Graan’s brutal and unsettling production not only reflected our government’s ineptitude in the face of a health crisis but was also a furious reminder of the NAF’s purpose as a mirror of the nation’s soul.

And, although artists came to the festival to show us who we were, the NAF was simultaneously steering the future of the arts by nurturing our brightest creative talent.

“It was the festival that moulded me into the artist I am today,” says theatre-maker and 2006 Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner Sylvaine Strike.

“The NAF was an extraordinary platform to test work and also sell one’s work; even get invited to perform elsewhere.”

Strike’s breakthrough at the NAF came in 2002 with Baobabs Don’t Grow Here, a show she directed about a Romany couple who flee from Europe to Africa, their odyssey conjuring themes of displacement, persecution and exile in the context of encounters with alien cultures. Aside from garnering plenty of local awards, it travelled widely overseas and picked up a coveted Total Theatre Award at the Edinburgh Festival.

The early 2000s were marked by the internationalisation of local theatre and contemporary fine art, in large part a result of deliberate efforts to make the NAF a kind of cultural marketplace where foreign producers came to see our country’s finest work and possibly take it abroad.

Bullish South African spirit defined the years leading towards 2010’s celebratory Fifa World Cup and the arts certainly enjoyed the ride. The festival, taking advantage of the influx of soccer tourists, staged a bumper 15-day edition that included Aubrey Sekhabi’s compelling three-and-a-half-hour tour de force, Rivonia Trial, a dramatic account of the most important court case in our country’s history.

In 2011, playwright Greg Latter’s Death of a Colonialist skipped ahead a few decades to take on contemporary themes of emigration (“defections” by white folks), fierce patriotism and a yearning for racial harmony encapsulated by two lines of dialogue spoken by the main character: “It’s a dangerous thing to hate the place you call home,” he says. “We all have shares in the country.”

national arts festival Nat Ramabulana (left) and Atandwa Kani in Athol Fugard’s ‘The Island’, directed by John Kani for the 2013 festival. (Photo: Supplied)

Meanwhile, at a time when Jacob Zuma’s despotic tendencies and his involvement in State Capture were cementing themselves as key social narratives, the ruling party demonstrated increasingly paranoid suspicion of the arts, exemplified by 2012’s censorship fiasco involving Brett Murray’s depiction of Zuma with exposed genitals in a satirical painting.

In 2013, NAF Artistic Committee chairperson Jay Pather labelled the festival “a call to realism”, recoiling at the detrimental impact of diminishing arts funding. That year, several works proposed and accepted by the festival simply never reached completion, a tragic consequence of burgeoning socioeconomic ills.

Nevertheless, in 2014, artists representing 45 countries participated in the festival, luring some 100,000 visitors to about 600 events on the Main and Fringe programmes. Almost 1,800 performances were on offer, up considerably from 1974’s 60-odd items seen by a few hundred people.

It was also the year that Sekhabi, another Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner, presented Marikana – the Musical, evidence that theatre practitioners were wholeheartedly engaging in contemporary political commentary and protest.

In 2015, in the context of a burgeoning global public debate over the limits of creative freedom, the NAF’s “Featured Artist” wasn’t an artist at all, but a genre: satire. It was a way of expressing solidarity with creative risk-takers, standing up to artistic censure and supporting the nation’s “satirists, cartoonists, commentators and court jesters”. Even a Corné and Twakkie parody protest deserves a place.

Although the festival stood for freedom, Makhanda itself – as host city and event partner – was becoming a sad reflection of the country’s greater crisis: infrastructural decline, government apathy and dwindling budgets.

In 2016, Lankester took umbrage with Makhanda’s municipality in an open letter to the local newspaper. Published immediately after the festival’s 42nd iteration, he noted that “people and money flowed through the city” but “water didn’t”.

“If we do nothing,” Lankester wrote, “we will have a festival that has decayed and shrivelled to a shadow of its present self. If it exists at all.”

Lankester called out political “apathy and paralysis” and asked: “How have we allowed our infrastructure … to deteriorate so much, so quickly and so dramatically?”

It was a reflection of something happening across the country, as though Makhanda were a mirror held up to our nation. Complacency had become the festival’s existential crisis.

“Unless the decline in infrastructure is halted and turned around,” he wrote, “it is entirely feasible that the festival will not be in Grahamstown in 10 years.”

Life-sized puppets take part in the parade at the National Arts Festival, Grahamstown, 12 July 2014. The annual street parade marks the close of the festival. (Photo: CUEPIX / Michelle Cunliffe)

national arts festival Dancing during 2014’s street parade. (Photo: Supplied)

The show nevertheless did go on and continued until Covid scuppered the 2020 festival, which somewhat miraculously “pivoted” to an online experience under CEO Monica Newton.

When the live event returned in 2022, Lankester’s worst predictions about infrastructural collapse were on full display.

“Covid in many ways pushed the knife into the NAF’s back,” says Mahomed. “That it came back to life in a city whose infrastructure is collapsing is incredibly problematic. Our lives have changed, the economy has changed, disposable incomes have changed.

“Fifteen years ago, it was much easier for people to pack up and travel to a destination festival. Even crime is a factor. Because people are less willing to leave their homes in the way they once did.”

“I don’t run a festival and I’m fucking glad I don’t,” says Van Vuuren, who this year will perform at the NAF for the 30th back-to-back year.

“What a thankless job! Just imagine the logistics involved in this political climate where arts are overlooked and underfunded, and dwindling audiences are our economic reality.”

national arts festial Endless variety at 2017’s festival. (Photo: Supplied)

The cover of the 2015 festival programme, underscoring the National Arts Festival’s commitment to artistic freedom in the year ‘satire’ was declared the festival’s featured artist.

Van Vuuren believes, though, that it’s a legacy event worthy of “massive sponsorship” because a national festival is crucial to our nation’s spiritual well-being.

“It makes a difference in people’s lives, and it’s a smorgasbord of our best talent across genres and mediums, all concentrated in one place, so it’s a melting pot for radical change. That’s something worth keeping alive.”

The festival this year runs from 20 to 30 June. DM

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