The National Arts Festival — still pure gold after 50 brilliant years

The golden anniversary, they say, is symbolic of timeless quality. The National Arts Festival (NAF) — which takes place in Makhanda from 20 to 30 June — will pay homage this year to the past in the present.

The umbrella that will cover this — the most diverse festival in the country — is the theme “Shaping Together”, represented by a nest created by social weaver birds.

These weavers, unlike their relatives that construct single-unit nests, are “extremely gregarious”, which ties in with the festival’s motto: “co-creating a future”.

Huge nests can be seen weighing down trees in the arid southern plains of the country and can be home to a community of about 500 birds.

Gold has brought riches and ruin in South Africa but as a substance it is cosmic, created in outer space, and is even found as a trace element in every living human. We each possess about 0.229mg of gold as a conductor of energy.

Gibson Kente ­rehearsing ‘Sekunjalo’ with the cast in 1987. (Photo: Supplied)

The NAF, the country’s longest-running showcase for the arts, has always served as a barometer for the country’s heart, mind, body and soul. This year, a stunning 200 diverse offerings, including art, dance, comedy, satire, music and theatre, will take you to these four internal corners touched with gold.

The festival takes place during the school holidays and has traditionally been a space for parents and young people to experience a collective cultural feast. Many of the country’s university drama departments also get to display their work.

The festival’s origin in 1974 was an attempt by the 1820 Settlers Foundation to celebrate the English language in South Africa as it competed with the rise of Afrikaans and nine other mother tongues.

‘Strike Up the Banned’ by Pieter-Dirk Uys in 1976. (Photo: Supplied)

The foundation later became known as the Grahamstown Foundation. Grahamstown is now Makhanda, and so the story moves on.

Since its small beginnings, the festival has progressively tested and ex­­panded its ho­ri­­zons during years of political, social and cul­tural re­sistance through arts and culture. That it is still standing is reason for jubilation.

For festival di­­rec­­tor Monica New­­ton, appointed in 2020, ac­knowledging history is necessary, but the festival is also the eternal cycle each year of upcoming and established artists who continue to imagine a future — one way or another.

In 1986, during a state of emergency, the subversive cabaret Molotov Cocktail could not be performed because the entire cast, who were members of the End Conscription Campaign, had been detained by police. A police presence always made itself felt in the 1980s when artists such as Zakes Mda, Athol Fugard, John Kani, Mbongeni Ngema and Pieter-Dirk Uys brought their cultural weapons of resistance to the stage.

The Island with Winston Ntshona (left) and John Kani. (Photo: Supplied)

Master Harold and the Boys in 1983. (Photo: Supplied)

“When you look back, we forget how real and how intense those times were. It feels a bit now like we are back at a moment — a ‘now what?’ moment,” said Newton.

The festival’s website sets out the truly dizzying offers across many genres.

Keenly awaited is Afronauts, a collaboration between Circus Zambia, Barefeet and Wake the Beast in partnership with the Irish embassy in Lusaka.

It is based on the true story of Edward Mukuka, a Zambian schoolteacher in the 1960s who declared himself the country’s “Minister of Space” and founded the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy in an abandoned farmhouse outside Lusaka.

Golden thread

Theatre makers at the NAF who carry the golden thread from past to present include Mandla Mbothwe, Brett Bailey, who made a spectacular debut with IpiZombi in 1990, Smal Ndaba and Phyllis Klotz’s veteran Sibikwa Arts Centre, the award-winning Empatheatre and many other acclaimed performers.

Mbothwe has created a space of remembrance and mourning for the loss of life in the artistic community during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. In Memoriam of Creative Workers pays tribute to those who died and is an immersive, audiovisual and “durational” installation.

Alongside musician Nkosenathi Koela, Bailey brings The Stranger, which explores the significance of myth and “the sacred memory within our lives”.

Dance highlights include Gregory Maqoma’s Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Boléro, inspired by Zakes Mda’s novels Cion and Ways of Dying and by Ravel’s Boléro. It explores the weight of mourning.

The Sibikwa Arts Centre brings 1789, a piece developed by Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil in the early 1970s. It is an immersive satire that explores liberty. The play is co-directed by Sibikwa founders Klotz and Ndaba and is supported by the French Institute of South Africa, the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, the French Institute in Paris, and the City of Paris.

‘1789’ performed by Sibikwa Arts Centre. (Photo: Herman Verwey)

Memories

Playwright Paul Slabolepszy has two plays at the festival this year — The Return of Elvis Du Pisani and Finding Rosetta — and he has brought his work there for almost as long as the festival has existed.

In 1992, when he took Elvis to the Great Hall, the show had an audience of 500 one night when it could only seat 250.

“You could not move back then. Could not find parking, could not find a place to eat. I first went in 1983 when I won what was then the Five Roses Young Artist Award. Before me came Janice Honeyman and Richard E Grant,” recalls Slabolepszy.

In years gone by, some of the country’s greatest satirists and comedians found a spotlight and a following at the shows on the fringe, which was introduced in 1979.

Someone who exploded on to the festival back then was Ian Fraser, an anarchist poet, playwright and stand-up comedian with flaming red hair who lashed audiences with his “offensively rude comic and satirical sketches”. Fraser now lives in the US where he is a successful writer.

Standard Bank National Arts Festival Street Theatre in 1996. (Photo: Supplied)

Economic considerations

Every year since the festival’s inception, audience members and artists have raised the issue of poverty and unemployment in the nearby working-class areas that surround the university town. This is a continuing challenge.

As CEO of the festival, Newton has done much work, including tapping into the Social Employment Fund, to uplift local communities.

“Sure, we have had our problems with water provision and other issues, but there has been a huge amount of community and collective ownership,” she said.

The festival takes up only 11 days of the year. The rest of the time, many work tirelessly to restore and repair what is broken and to plan for the future.

Education and culture drive the economy of this region and Newton praised the work being done in partnership with the fund. As a first-hand witness to the challenges that Makhanda residents experience, she says these interventions have been crucial.

The performance of ‘Amatole’ on the streets of then-Grahamstown (now Makhanda) for the National Arts Festival, Grahamstown, Eastern Cape, South Africa, 20 June 2010. (Photo: Cuepix/Nicola van Rensburg)

In July 2022, the Makhanda-based Awarenet, an e-learning platform for youth, became a recipient of the fund and is now one of 24 partners in the nationwide Catch-up Coalition, which supports “educational recovery” after the Covid pandemic.

Awarenet has also placed about 250 previously unemployed persons in 16 nonprofit organisations working in the university town.

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Five schools have been recruited to train learners in its robotics programme, and it has grown its number of learners and interns.

In 2022, the organisation an­nounced that 21 participants “who are all out-of-school youth” with an interest in technology were recruited to participate in the Taking Technology to Power project.

The participants conducted a survey of all 26 public primary schools in Makhanda that will soon be released “to the media and government stakeholders”. Local libraries are also a focus of the students, who are studying “the duty of libraries to provide ICT to communities”.

Those who have signed up for the Open Lab project have become involved in helping with homework, tutoring and cleaning up rivers and streams, as well as cooking food in relief programmes in the region. Part of the charm of the festival is the cold Eastern Cape winter and anyone visiting is advised to dress for the Arctic. DM