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PINEAPPLES AND PRIMA DONNAS
The Grahamstown Festival
by Laurianne Claase
Once, the
dusty African air hereabouts rang with war cries and musket fire. These days,
in July at any rate, you're more likely to hear a chorus of
"DAAHLINGS!"
Today,
Grahamstown's place on the map is
assured by two things: Rhodes University and the Standard Bank National
Festival of the Arts held every year in July. Little-known Grahamstown is a
fitting setting for what started out as a celebration of South Africa's English
heritage only to become Africa's largest Arts Festival. This is an event with a
capital 'E'. Only the Edinburgh Festival is bigger. Upon
arrival, the visitor could be in any 19th century English university town.
Victorian houses, Gothic cathedrals, settler cottages and old English pubs help
stage-manage the illusion. The erstwhile 1820 Settlers Monument squats in
monolithic sandstone above the city, much like Edinburgh Castle. There are
other similarities between this African festival city and its more famous
European cousin. Edinburgh's past is mirrored in its twisted cobbled streets;
the unlikely stairs that erupt from innocent street corners and the arches and
statues that adorn preserved Victorian tenements. Replace the cobbles with streets wide enough to turn an ox-wagon
and you've got Grahamstown.
Pineapples
and prima donnas may seem a strange brew but for ten heady days in July the
rustle of books and tussle of harvest is upstaged by greasepaint and sequins.
Here, upon this historical battleground, Europe and Africa collide, in a jarring, jostling, jamboree of Africa's
past and present.Here, too, the future is being forged. Don't expect to get
much sleep. The
Festival began in 1974 with sixty-four items including Shakespeare's King Lear,
the ballet, Romeo and Juliet, the opera, Cosi Fan Tutti and the prophetically
entitled settler play, “Take Root or Die.” Indigenous contributions ran to art
work from "coloured" schools in the Eastern Cape, Bushman, Okavango
and Ovambo handicrafts from Windhoek State Museum and the Royal Lesotho
Tapestry Weavers. The foreword to the
first programme trumpeted, "You have come to celebrate the opening of a
Monument designed to perpetuate our many-sided heritage." In light of the government of the day, this
was an ambitious undertaking. The
Cutting Edge multi-media exhibition at last year's Festival was a forceful
reminder of the repression of the past. Copies of the Government Gazette of those years list cultural bans on
material as subversive as Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall"
album and Chris de Burgh's "Spanish Train"; the musical
"Hair" in its entirety and even the "Best of Bill Cosby." However,
throughout those years the Festival attempted to remain true, to a greater or
lesser extent, to its founding mission statement and somehow the soapboxes were
tolerated. Pieter Dirk Uys, South Africa's foremost satirist and unofficial
"first lady" has been performing on the Festival since its earliest
days. He remembers, "In the past the Festival always had
free speech but it was risky."
Twenty-five
years on and a new-look country later, the Festival is not only a South African
event but an international celebration of the arts - a veritable
"supermarket of culture." 1999 saw over four hundred events showcased on both the Main Festival
and Fringe circuit with close on fifteen hundred performances taking place over
the twelve days of festivities. The new
South Africa paraded its colours in productions like a South African
Siddhartha, a stirring masala of Zulu, Xhosa and classical Indian dance with a
dash of classical ballet. Continental Africa strutted its stuff with Ivory
Coast puppet theatre, the Pan African Orchestra from Ghana and Ugandan New
World Music. Street traders from Zimbabwe and Malawi and Tanzanian herbalists
solicited business on the streets. International contributions ranged from a Sami throat singer from
Lapland to Czech experimental theatre, the Netherlands Dance Company, French
circus theatre and Andelusian flamenco. Like the
cosmopolitan content of the shows, the audiences too have become more
colourful. Vignettes of the new South
Africa are everywhere. Neatly uniformed high school kids, black and white, share an ice cream. A white woman
walks by, black child draped over her shoulder. A barefoot street urchin rediscovers African rhythm on white
hippie drums.
Speak to a
local artist, however about the changes time and a new dispensation has wrought
on the Festival and you'll get a different perspective. Lennox Faba is a man
who grew up in the townships of Grahamstown and now sits on the Festival Board
as an elected representative of the
Grahamstown Central Forum for Arts and Culture. A choreographer of Xhosa
traditional dance, among other things, his "Isizweni" recently won a
Gold award at the national Eisteddefod. The
conditions in which he works are unthinkable to a western artist. He staggers
his rehearsals in order to fit his dancers into the 2 to 3 metre rehearsal
space which is all he has in which to work. Transport is also a problem from the carefully planned, far-flung
townships to theatre venues in town. Often, he has to cadge lifts from obliging
policemen, themselves also short of vehicles. While he
agrees that up until now the Festival has had little direct benefit for the
local community and that it doesn't yet reach into the townships, he is upbeat
about the progress being made. "Before 1994", he says, "there
was no awareness of the Festival in Rini but it started generating interest
with the advent of popular musicians like Bayete and Rebecca Molope." Now there
is Dakawa, a business training ground and showcase for local artists; the
Studio where the best of local stage-talent is spotlighted and the Playhouse
Theatre's free stage where township residents flock to watch traditional
dancers in warrior skins pound out rhythms to make a white suburban madam
blush. Faba
asserts, "The Festival has to have all the colours of the rainbow and the
will is here, the commitment to make it more colourful and representative. I've
never had a white friend before. Now,
I'm beginning to have lots of white friends. The festival could become a
unifying force in South Africa. Politicians have failed to unite the people but
the Arts have done it." "But,
we need to make the Festival everyday. I have a vision of Rini in three years time where each and every citizen
will be holding the Arts. It is our
duty - the people who live here - to make sure the streets are buzzing." And for
those two weeks in July, buzz they do. Tens of
thousands of visitors descend every year and the whole town is pressed into
service. School and church halls, university residences and even car showrooms
are used as venues for the art, music, drama, cabaret, films, lectures and
workshops which vie for the limelight. Fly-by-night bistros spring up in
schools, sandwich dens huddle under the Drostdy Arch, coffee shops bloom down
side alleys and cafes spill onto the street. Over on
the Village Green, Woodstock lives on in the thousand stalls of the Craft Fair.
This is tie-dye territory. Rain sticks and rain gods, fetishes and flares,
buskers, bohemians and beggars abound. Manicured matrons are eclipsed by their
teenage daughters in flowing tresses and face paint. The Rastafarians in their
dreads and burlap are not keen to be photographed. Three township teenagers,
however, pose in front of some well-wheeled festival-goer's prodigious
Mercedes. Proceedings are called to a
halt as one reaches for his sunglasses and applies the finishing touch before
the flash goes off.
As for the
future, in the words of sedition's (and the new South Africa's) chief proponent
Pieter Dirk Uys, "If we don't fall off the bus with a speed wobble, in
five years time we'll be the most amazing country in the world." The same might be said of the Festival. The Standard Bank National Festival of the Arts is on from the 30 June to the 8 July 2000. For information on more Southern African destinations and activities go to http://www.easyafrica.com/features Images by Laurianne Claase ©
Laurianne Claase 1999-2000 |
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The
historic South African town of Grahamstown was founded as a British fort in
1820 during the fierce frontier wars with the Xhosa tribes in what is now the
Eastern Cape. In that year, twenty-four ships from England left for Algoa Bay,
their passengers lured by promises of free passage and prime agricultural
land. Upon arrival, however, they
learned that the Zuurveld wasn't called the Sour Land for nothing. Moreover,
they discovered they were to be a buffer between the warlike black tribes and
the newly entrenched European colony. The new arrivals duly swelled the colonial
population until gold and diamonds were discovered inland and the town's
improving fortunes proved to be a flash in someone else's pan.
Known as
the City of Saints for its many churches, the High Street is dominated by the
Cathedral of St Michael and St George. The spire is the largest structure for
miles around; its only rival, the giant pineapple in nearby Bathurst which
leaves any sightseer in no doubt as to the principal farming crop in these
parts. Prickly pears come a close second.
He waged a
second war, in those early years, against Eurocentricity. "We were hippies, mavericks.
The Festival was an arena to
irritate." The Festival's
twenty-fifth birthday last year marked a coming of age of his own. His five productions in the thousand-seater
main auditorium were all sold out. "The edges move to the centre and a new fringe forms," he
comments, unmoved by mainstream success. 
Yet at the
camera obscura museum, we meet the local guide. The winding wooden stairs of the viewing turret has done little
to reduce his comfortable shape in the last twelve years. According to him,
"Nothing's changed in twenty-five years." Up in the turret, watching
real-life/ real-time reflections in a white convex bowl - High Street below and
the townships on the outskirts - as
people were doing in just this spot, a hundred years ago, I can believe
him. Time, in Grahamstown, wouldn't
dream of running the lights.
Posters
decorate every available space; they daub trees, walls and even the pavement
underfoot. One house has put up its own
posters pleading a case for its newly-painted walls. Miraculously, a week into the Festival and it survives
unscathed. But not for long. By the next morning, the virgin canvas has
been deflowered - the nocturnal ravisher, a spray-can artist known only as
DOOG. Seditious creativity has long
been the Festival's speciality.