Jane Duncan, The Con
The 1980s was a heady time in South Africa’s cultural
history. Apartheid repression was at its height, but so was mass resistance.
The independent label Shifty Records brought together a courageous, outspoken and
rebellious group of artists who captured in their music the despair and hope of
that turbulent period. It is this legacy that is being celebrated in Shifty
September, and rightly so, as the label gave South Africa some of the most
important contemporary local music ever made.
But aspects of this history are also troubling. Many of the
Shifty posters on display in the South African History Archives (Saha)
exhibition at the Alliance Française aligned their events with the United
Democratic Front (UDF) or other organisations sympathetic to Shifty’s politics.
Organisations mentioned include the Johannesburg Democratic Action Group, an
organisation of mainly white UDF activists and sympathisers, the Congress of
South African Writers, the Five Freedoms Forum and the End Conscription
Campaign.
The Shifty-UDF connection was a product of the times. In the
1980s, the UDF eclipsed the black consciousness movement as the dominant
liberation force in South African politics. Many politically conscious artists
lent their support to the UDF to show opposition to apartheid, including those
in the Shifty fold. They also supported the campaign to isolate South Africa,
which played such a crucial role in bringing apartheid to an end. The isolation
campaign included a cultural boycott, preventing foreign artists from visiting
South Africa and stopping South African artists from performing outside the
country.
When the Azanian People’s Organisation (Azapo) campaigned for
a cultural boycott in the 1970s, it was administered as a blanket boycott. No
artists were allowed through, even artists who came from oppressed communities
and who were clearly committed to the liberation of South Africa. But activists
began to recognise that the blanket boycott was self-defeating, as it prevented
art that reflected the real state of life under apartheid from reaching an
international audience. Some began to argue for a selective boycott, where
artists who were aligned to the cause of national liberation would be allowed
to tour unhindered.
I became very familiar with the politics around this decision
as I wrote my honours dissertation on the selective cultural boycott, which led
to me shuttling between the UDF cultural desk, Azapo and many artists and
cultural organisations. It was a difficult period in South Africa’s history to
be doing this, as the fighting that broke out between UDF and Azapo supporters
three years earlier had left bitterness and profound mistrust in its wake.
As the UDF flexed its muscles in the 1980s, it butted heads
with more and more activists who argued for the need to maintain independent
organisations out of respect for the political diversity of their members. Some
UDF-aligned activists enforced their leadership of the liberation movement in
authoritarian, at times violent, ways, especially in the trade union movement.
The Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers Union became a
battleground between UDF supporters who wanted to see the union adopt the
Freedom Charter, and unionists who did not want to see the working class
movement divided along ideological lines. Many of these unionists were branded
“counter-revolutionary” and marginalised, and some were routed violently from
the union movement.
Disagreements between the UDF and Azapo about former US
senator Edward Kennedy’s visit to South Africa raised tensions between the two
organisations, eventually descending into a spiral of bloody conflict in the
mid-1980s. While these conflicts were manipulated by the apartheid state, in
its report, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission laid the blame for “necklace
killings” of Azapo members and political dissidents throughout the Eastern Cape
at the door of the UDF.
Writing in 1987 about the tendency to resolve political
disputes using violence, the New Unity Movement cautioned against liberation
organisations using Stalinist techniques to resolve political differences,
including promoting hatred of other tendencies, using threats and physical
violence.
Yet many white progressives who identified with the ‘Shifty
moment’ ignored these more troubling features of UDF politics (Rian Malan being
the notable exception). After all, their favoured organisation was on the
up-and-up, and other tendencies were fading into insignificance; so why stick
their necks out and take a principled stand against these practices? Perhaps
they had a vested interest in being blind, to adapt a quote from Neville
Alexander.
In 1987, the UDF passed a resolution committing itself to
organising cultural workers and intensifying the cultural boycott, and to
reviving its dormant cultural desk to monitor the boycott. The resolution
stated that South African groups touring overseas would not be affected by the
boycott if they were “… supported by the democratic movement in South Africa”
or if they were “… approved by overseas solidarity groups”.
Following this resolution, the UDF encouraged the
establishment of several artists’ organisations, including the Theatre Alliance
and the South African Musicians Alliance. The buzz of the time was that artists
must “get organised”.
These organisations led the consultations around the shift
from a blanket to a selective cultural boycott, and prominent artists flocked
to join. While some clearly joined because they were genuinely committed to the
UDF’s politics, others appeared to be motivated by more self-interested
reasons, as the UDF was their ticket to international careers that had been
stymied by the blanket boycott.
But some artists felt they best served the struggle by
remaining independent from all liberation organisations. They argued that promoting
a too-close relationship of artists to political formations would come back to
bite artists in the future. The role of artists, they argued, was to make the
best possible art, and propaganda rarely makes good art.
In fact, it is entirely possible for artists to be committed
to the cause of human liberation and yet remain politically independent: when
artists have struck this balance in periods of fundamental social change, truly
great art has emerged. Artists who subjected themselves to political dictates,
no matter how noble, ran the risk of being straitjacketed into politically
correct art forms. Art that did not follow the party line risked being
stigmatised as suspect and even counter-revolutionary.
At the time, poet Don Mattera saw these dangers looming
large. Speaking to the Weekly Mail, he argued, “My personal feeling is that an
artist should not be forced to choose a particular political camp when he
believes that he is serving the whole community. We all support the cultural
boycott, but I think that it has become myopic – it must be made accessible to
popular consent.” Yet many of the Shifty generation endorsed uncritically the
hitching of all things artistic to the UDF and its cultural desk.
Some artists sympathetic to the UDF and the ANC also
recognised the dangers, expressing concern about the lack of appreciation for
art in sections of the ANC. In an interview, filmmaker Angus Gibson told me how
some ANC members were not familiar with the intricacies of filmmaking. They
viewed fiction-filmmaking as a “right-wing activity”, and endorsed
community-based documentary as the only acceptable form of filmmaking.
Azapo, on the other hand, showed greater sensitivity to the
need for artists to remain politically independent. This could be attributed at
least in part to the fact that the black consciousness movement was both a
political and cultural movement.
While the UDF argued that the democratic movement as a whole
should make decisions about who should be allowed in and out of the country, in
reality the democratic movement became reduced to the UDF and the structures it
created. The movement made little effort to support the establishment of a
nonpartisan network to administer the boycott – along the lines of what Mattera
proposed – and sidelined liberation organisations or artists that lay outside
its sphere of influence. This meant the boycott could be used to practise a
form of ideological purging, where artists who supported the UDF were allowed
to travel unhindered while those who didn’t would be stopped, even if they
supported the liberation struggle.
The global Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) played a crucial
role in the isolation campaign against apartheid South Africa, but it also
become notorious for its myopic sectarianism. It played a king-making role,
anointing the ANC as the sole authentic representative of the oppressed, and
refusing to recognise the ideological diversity in the liberation movement (the
exception to this rule being the City Group).
Commenting on these events in the labour magazine Work in
Progress in 1987, William Cobbett argued, “… as support organisations,
solidarity movements derive their legitimacy from other organisations. They
cannot become autonomous bodies deciding strategy and tactics independently …
If the AAM is a solidarity movement for all South Africans fighting apartheid,
then their support must be carried out in a completely nonpartisan manner,
offering concrete help to all strands of the progressive organisations within
the country.”
Playwrights Maishe Maponya and Matsemela Manaka, long
associated with the black consciousness and Pan-Africanist movements
respectively but fiercely protective of their independence from Azapo and the
Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), told me at the time that consultation
effectively amounted to “asking for permission” to go overseas, which they
refused to do.
They never experienced problems with taking plays overseas,
though, but the Afrika Cultural Centre, under the leadership of Benjy Francis,
did. Although the centre was often associated with Pan-Africanism, it was vocal
about its political independence. The British AAM was particularly insistent
about cultural groups consulting the ANC before they toured in the country.
When Francis and the Azanian National Theatre toured the
production Burning Embers – a play that strongly condemned apartheid – in 1986,
they were told repeatedly they could not hand out promotional pamphlets or
secure venues without “ANC approval”. As Francis told me at the time, the AAM’s
reaction to them was “petty and ill-informed”, and “an affront to the fact of
our struggle”. He concluded that the AAM “cannot live our cultural history for
us”.
This reduction of the liberation movement to the UDF became
clear at the Culture for Another South Africa (Casa) conference in Amsterdam in
1987, which was organised by the ANC and the Dutch AAM. Its purpose was to
discuss the state of arts and culture in South Africa, and the effectiveness of
the isolation campaign.
One of the Dutch organisers admitted at the time that the
conference “excluded groups … like Inkatha and the black consciousness
movement”, equating the former, then an apartheid surrogate, with the latter, a
legitimate part of the liberation movement. At an ANC press conference during
the festival, an ANC official stated that “no cultural exchange would be
possible in future without the approval of the mass national democratic
structures within South Africa – namely the UDF and its affiliates”.
One of the writers who was excluded from Casa was Es’kia
Mphahlele, himself a controversial figure for having returned from exile in the
1970s. Speaking about the organisers’ sectarian approach, he told me in an
interview that “… it displeased me thoroughly, and I was angry because this is
not the kind of thing we want to do if we want to create a certain front, a
broad united front, even if it is not an institutionalised organisation but a
broad front where people feel that no matter what the political affiliation
they have, they can say what they want. I was thoroughly displeased with it. It
was divisive and it made people feel they are irrelevant.”
My UDF cultural desk interviewee, who requested anonymity at
the time, was also not very impressed, and criticised the external organisers’
sectarianism, for which they as the desk were heavily criticised. He was a true
democrat who recognised the importance of building unity in the liberation
movement and not being narrow. But all too often this sentiment was not carried
over into organisational practice.
In spite of the Casa slight, Mphahlele took a long-term view
of the blight of sectarianism. He argued, “I would be prepared to say, let us
go through this painful process of separate streams, with the foresightedness
to know that ahead of us there is bound to be a national culture, and even
though we cannot predict what it will be like, it will be there”.
In 1990, the ANC’s Albie Sachs picked up on these themes
again in his seminal paper ‘Preparing Ourselves for Freedom’. He argued that
ANC members should be banned from saying that culture is a weapon of the
struggle, as this attitude had impoverished art.
Instead, Sachs argued, the revolutionary duty of an artist is
to “write better poems and make better films and compose better music, and let
us get the voluntary adherence of the people to our banner”. Denying artists
the creative space to explore human existence fully, he felt, could lead to a
new South Africa that was democratic on the surface of things, but spiritually
dead.
Today, 25 years later, artists enjoy strong constitutional
guarantees of freedom of expression. South Africa’s democratic centre remains
very much intact. But, nevertheless, there are also signs that Sachs’ plea for
artistic independence has fallen on deaf ears in some parts of the ANC and the
state. The Film and Publications Board’s attempts to censor Brett Murray’s
painting The Spear and Jahmil Qubeka’s film Of Good Report suggests a creeping
cultural conservatism that is hostile to artistic freedom. Thankfully, the
board has an excellent appeals tribunal.
Murray appears to identify closely with Shifty’s legacy of
artistic courageousness, as he made some sculptured lights for auction during
Shifty September. The funds raised will be used to cover the costs of
musicians’ travel to the Shifty Music Heritage Festival.
While official attempts to censor The Spear had no place in a
democracy, the exhibition the painting formed part of, Hail to the Thief II,
was not without its problems. In fact, it overflowed with stereotypes about the
ANC as a corrupt organisation chasing the money at the expense of its own
members and the poor generally.
Hail to the Thief II was an exhibition made by a clearly very
angry artist. Murray and others who came through the ‘Shifty moment’ lament the
fact that the ANC has degenerated, that the ANC of today is not the ANC of old.
But those who make this argument lack a sense of history in that they built up
the ANC into something it was not.
The ANC has always been, at its core, a multiclass reformist
organisation that could bring South Africa to the point of dismantling
apartheid – which it did so admirably under appalling conditions – but couldn’t
offer a meaningful programme to eliminate poverty and inequality beyond that
point. Multiclass organisations the world over run the risk of being taken over
by predatory authoritarian elements once they assume power as they are driven
by their own internal contradictions to put a lid on dissent from within and
without. The ANC is no exception to this rule, although it still remains on the
democratic end of the scale.
Hail to the Thief II included tropes that bordered on racism.
Whatever one thinks of the ANC and its recent history, it cannot be reduced to
the caricatures that Murray put on display: a male gorilla humping a female
one, ostensibly representing the party’s relationship to the people; or a party
that has used its proud history of struggle to demand Chivas, BMWs and bribes.
The ANC remains so much more than that, even President Jacob Zuma’s ANC.
Now that the ANC’s internal contradictions have emerged more
starkly, its former hagiographers are dumbstruck, unable to comprehend what
they are seeing. So they slide into cynicism: hail to the thief! But even angry
artists are entitled to their overstatements; nothing is gained from censoring
their art.
It is possible South Africa would not be enjoying the rights
and freedoms it does today – including freedom of speech – if brave and
committed members of the ANC had not struggled to bring the current society
about. But Stalinism is part of the ANC’s political traditions too: a tradition
it internalised through its alliance with the South African Communist Party and
its doctrinaire, one-size-fits-all approach to national liberation struggles
elsewhere.
Evidence of an authoritarian streak in the ANC’s politics and
a lack of respect for political diversity has been there for decades, for those
who cared to look. But so many of the Shifty generation preferred not to.
So many of that generation, who promoted one organisation as
the sole and authentic representative of the oppressed, failed to defend the
principle of political diversity and embraced uncritically a highly utilitarian
view of art and its relationship to politics. In the process, they laid the
basis for what exists today: a ruling party whose leaders believe they can and
should rule till Jesus comes. This history
provides a salutary lesson in the dangers of political expedience. It is often
said that hindsight is an exact science, but foresight is not as difficult as
it is made out to be, as the most accurate predictions involve an element of
science too.
It could have been anticipated that, as social polarisation
sharpened, genuine democrats in the ANC would lose ground to the securocrats.
It is these very securocrats who now have full access to the coercive
apparatuses of the state.
After two decades of ANC hegemony, political diversity is
increasing. But as new political formations come into being, democracy is being
tested, and in some cases found wanting. When the Economic Freedom Fighters
(EFF) disrupted Parliament recently, demanding answers from Zuma about when he
was going to pay back the money for upgrades to his Nkandla residence, the
security cluster, led by the military, moved with lightning speed to enforce
parliamentary points of order.
But when whistle-blowers and political critics have been
killed in circumstances that bear all the hallmarks of political assassinations
– as was the case with three National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa
shop stewards recently – the security cluster responds with glacial slowness,
if it responds at all.
Shifty September should make us pause and reflect on
uncomfortable truths about South Africa’s cultural transition. Twenty years
into democracy, whites still wield inordinately high levels of symbolic capital
relative to their numbers. While the freedom to create is available to all
South Africans, the opportunities to have one’s creative work heard or seen
still remain distributed unevenly across society.
Can this be why, in the same month that the legacy of Shifty
Records has been celebrated so enthusiastically, one of South Africa’s most
important poets, Mafika Gwala, died in relative obscurity? Media coverage of
Shifty September has been extensive, but articles about Gwala’s death took a
week to surface, and even then there were only a smattering.
The national culture Mphahlele so yearned for has yet to come
into being. This lack of transformation damages the cause of artistic freedom.
The problem gives official censors more moral weight, as they can argue that
the artists they are trying to censor are reactionary throwbacks from South
Africa’s past and their works are ‘not in our culture’.
Happily, history is not on the side of censors. In their 1987
article on the lessons of Stalinism, the New Unity Movement argued Stalin had
no sense of history: he had only a sense of himself. As a result, it took three
short years after his death for his legacy to be disgraced forever.
The movement drew this lesson from Stalin’s history: “That
which today seems all-powerful will not necessarily remain so forever. Only
those actions which intrinsically advance the cause of our struggle, and
therefore that of humankind, will be kindly judged by the future generation.
