Ts'eliso Monaheng, Africa is a Country
“You’ve got a car? It’s less than two hours from here” says a
Rasta woman I’ve known for a total of ten minutes. In that time, she’s managed
to convince me to travel with her to a town nearby (or was it me trying to
convince her?) on a hunt for medicinal herbs.
The ganja in these here parts is strong. Mango, I’m told, is
this season’s flavour. It can be found in Port Alfred, the town in question.
I didn’t have a car in any case and had to forego the offer,
unfortunately.
I’d landed here, in Fingo township, after being fetched from
Grahamstown’s city centre by Xolile Madinda (or X), one of the main organizers
of the Fingo Festival – an annual, independently-run series of events founded
in 2011.
After a brief back-and-forth over text messages, X and myself
agreed to meet in front of the Pick ‘n Pay off of Africa Street. It’s
mind-morning during Winter; the air is crisp and fresh, and nippy in that
special Easter Cape kind of way which leaves you with the perpetual feeling
that you’re a clothing layer too short to be warm. X emerges from behind me and
is every bit the nineties hip-hop renaissance man with his hooded jacket and
Timbaland boots, plus a gray-coloured beanie wrestled onto his head to drive
the whole idea home.
He’s also well-versed in the history of Grahamstown–a story
of displacement, deceit, and, ultimately, ownership–of land, of an entire
nation’s memory.
We spend the next twenty minutes shop-hopping, hunting for
mats on which the b-boys will flex during the breakdancing battle later. We
then leave the hungover, fest-frenzied streets of Grahamstown to cross the
invisible line into Fingo, the township five minutes’ drive away.
Fingo Festival was established as an intervention during the
Grahamstown National Arts Festival. The aim was to make art accessible to the
Fingo township and its surrounds through a seven-day programme which has grown
to include activities such as children’s workshops, open-ended dialogues, and
musical performances.
“There’s a lot of cry that the [Grahamstown Arts Festival] is
for the elite, that the art is expensive, and all these questions. So, as
artists we figured out [that] there’s a deeper question that is not being
addressed right here,” says X.
This deeper question, he figures, is that we as black people
aren’t taught to prioritise art from an early age. To redress this, X and his
partners decided to demonstrate that art has value beyond being an extra-mural
activity.
“It’s a job for other people,” he says.
It was imperative for them as artists to set a standard so
that people of Fingo and neighbouring townships understand that “during the
festival, it’s not just them getting a job to clean the street. It’s for them
to go and enjoy the arts – go and watch a drama performance, go and watch a
music performance.”
fingo_day1-031
We stop at the traffic lights where Dr Jacob Zuma Drive and
Albert Street intersect, indicating to the right. A mural painted in red
against a white backdrop lies to my left hand side; across from it is the open
area paved in orange brick where the b-boy battles and live performances are
held every the afternoon for the festival’s duration.
When we arrive at the community centre, a Rhodes University
drama student is animatedly reading to a group of children gathered in one of
the rooms. The workshops are hosted in the library at one end of the building.
In session is someone from UCT’s Computer Science Department, who has developed
an App to help bedroom producers determine the quality of their recording. It’s
production 101 as heads listen intently and share their expertise on topics
ranging from recording techniques, to treating a room for vocal recording.
The morning chill has started to wane, but there’s still a
biting undercurrent which even the b-boys who’ve just arrived outside are keen
to fight off. They stretch, they jump, and they clown around and take pictures
for Instagram.
I, on the other hand, develop this strong urge for medicinal
herbs, which leads to me being introduced to the Rasta referenced above.
Fingo Festival is not without its own set of problems.
According to X, they’re running on practically no funding this year. The little
they received went towards hiring the sound, feeding the children, buying paint
for the wall, and buying mats for the b-boys (we eventually got two when we
found them).
It would seem that while people in positions of power have
been vocal in their support of Fingo Fest, lending muscle to ensure that it
continues to exist doesn’t come as easy as the praises they’re so quick to dish
out.
“We don’t want to be treated as special, but we want people
to [take note] that after 20 years of democracy, these young men and women
started something in their own community to reflect that there is change in the
society we are living in,” says X
“It doesn’t have to be money. It can be making things
happen,” he tells me. “The difficulties are there, but they could be solved if
we also put ourselves out there, like now.”
It ultimately ends up sounding like a wishy-washy dream: a
bunch of hippie-leaning bohemian intellectuals with deep socio-political
grounding, a love for the freedom that comes with embracing art and letting it
flourish, and a preference for more alternative forms of learning. It seems
foolish, doesn’t it? A grassroots festival. Hosted in the outskirts of a
frontier town. Over a seven-day period!
But without grassroots initiatives such as Fingo and its ilk,
people in the community have no other means of accessing at least some of
what’s on offer at the more polished, high-end, two-week festival just twenty
minutes’ walk away.
And sure enough on the Monday following fest, the street
poles had newspaper headlines praising the “record attendance numbers” at the
Grahamstown Arts Festival. The numbers, and not the art, were the main concern.
We can argue until daybreak about the representation of
black, mostly working-class people in spaces like the Arts Festival; about the
festival’s steady movement away from townships such as Joza; about the Village
Green’s policies (which have been deemed exclusionary to the immediate
community countless times, yet nothing seems to be done about it).
Instead of talk, it’d help if initiatives like Fingo were
championed more by the mainstream.
I may have missed a few great showcases at the festival
itself: Tumi Mogorosi, Kyle Shepherd, Msaki, and countless other musicians who
dedicated themselves to a gruelling schedule of shows; the numerous actors who
fought hangovers to give repeated performances which oftentimes cast them in
emotionally-demanding roles; the film directors who availed themselves for QnAs
after screenings; the seemingly-enriching discussions at Think Fest (X himself
gave a talk).
But as the sun hovered on the horizon on Saturday, the last
day of the festival, and people sang along to a reggae band’s rally that
“Better must come…”, I knew that no other gathering could, at that very moment
in time, top the feeling of euphoria which overcame me.
