By Nadine Gordimer
"Everyone shall have the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, and to enjoy the arts." - Article 27, Universal Declaration of Human Rights
This decree of access to the creation and enjoyment of the arts as an essential part of human development was not recognized in South Africa during the Apartheid regime or the colonialist regimes that preceded it. Even before the institutionalized racism of Apartheid, racial discrimination kept blacks barred from libraries, theaters, cinemas, drama, art and music schools, and public cultural events. This was the negative heritage South Africa received along with the victory of freedom from white minority rule when the first non-racial government, led by the African National Congress (ANC), was voted into power in 1994.
We have had exactly five years, after virtually several centuries, to create the laws, the social circumstances and the institutions which are dedicated to follow the decree of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and establish for all our people the human right to create, to participate in, to develop their faculties through the arts.
Given the time-frame, do not expect that I am about to relate miracles. But I am about to present extraordinary progress, and even, I believe, an expansion of the decree's scope which may have relevance for other post-colonial developing countries.
Some preliminary background is necessary if one is to do justice to those artists and writers, playwrights, actors and musicians who kept an underground flame of creativity alive even during the worst years of Apartheid, affirming that under oppression there was the fire of the imagination alongside the determination of the liberation movements. Books were banned, paintings on exhibition were seized by the police, songs were forbidden to be aired on radio and television. Writers, in particular, were silenced---some under bans of publishing anything at all. Yet the creators continued to create, to risk the hazards of publication and performance. And although barred from radio and television, the opportunities were difficult and restricted mainly to within person-to-person reach of the urban population, the life-affirmative defiance of the arts against censorship did filter to the wider population.
So we did have a resource peculiarly our own---a guerrilla innovation of the arts, so to speak---to start from in our responsibility towards establishing the arts as an essential part of the African Renaissance. Some of us were concerned that what we had expected to be a Ministry of Culture in the government of non-racial unity turned out to be a Ministry of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology. We feared that the arts and culture, although named first alphabetically, might come off last in terms of attention and funds given to Science and Technology. Technology in particular seemed a formidable rival, with the importance of its development for South Africa's entry to globalization of trade and finance. But although funding of arts projects by the Ministry has in most cases been far less than expected---and in what countries have arts ever received subvention preference over Defense budgets, let alone trade and commerce!---the Ministry has done much to expand cultural opportunities into areas that previously lacked this almost entirely.
The correction of vast imbalance between conventional cultural opportunities in the cities, specifically the areas where whites live, and such opportunities where blacks, people of mixed race, and those of Indian origin live, has been and is the first priority. The accepted agents of culture are literature, theater, music, dance, film, and in the visual arts, painting and sculpture, with the addendum of photography. The inherited situation was as follows:
Literature
In the huge black dormitory townships there were virtually no municipal libraries, only the few shelves of charity-donated books in a community center; and in schools only the prescribed books required for the syllabus each, year, each copy often to be shared by two or three students. On the outskirts of small towns in areas designated for blacks and others in that spectrum of color---anyone who was not white---and in the rural areas which then held almost half the country's total population, there were no libraries of any kind. Literature as a basis of culture can be said to have been non-existent for the majority of South Africans.
Theater
Playwrights and actors were cut off from interchange with the outside world's developments by boycotts and sanctions that were vitally necessary to isolate the Apartheid regime, and contributed to its downfall. While this had to be endured, theater asserted itself as an expression of the arts where blacks and progressive whites worked together in defiance of Apartheid, producing a contemporary indigenous genre of drama in the true Brechtian sense of people dramatizing their own lives. But there were few venues beyond certain strictly limited ones in the cities, where the people could see these striking plays epitomizing their own situation.
Cinema
Admission strictly for whites only, with a few blacks-only cinemas in black townships. Towards the final years of Apartheid, the whites-only restriction was relaxed in the cities, as a mark of metropolitan sophistication rather than a cultural right.
Music
Restrictions on formal venues operated all through the Apartheid regime, while at outdoor pop festivals it proved more than the discriminatory laws could manage to deny the essential element of black exponents. The whites wanted that music! Classical concerts did not reach beyond the whites-only concert halls of the main cities; and in opera the singers were all white, although outstandingly fine voices could be heard in church choirs popular in every black township.
As for dance, there were two recognitions of its place. One was classical ballet and modern dance: that was culture. The other was the many dance forms in which Africans conceptualize and enact symbolically the universal events of human existence; birth and death, sorrow, joy and conflict: that was primitive carousing.
In the visual arts, a small number of extremely talented black painters and sculptors somehow emerged during the decades when these forms of creativity were practiced and exhibited as the prerogative of white vision. These black artists were encouraged by a small number of white artists in the bonds that prevail between those who create, no matter what law and custom decree. Picasso's borrowings from the African vision in art were not, however, generally taken as any sign that an African aesthetic, an African sense of image and form---the shapes of life---existed at home in South Africa.
Under the new Constitution, all legal restrictions of Apartheid were struck away, but to redress all these deprivations in the life of the majority of South Africa's people is the immense task South Africa has faced since 1994.
During the first two years of the Ministry of Art, Culture, Science and Technology, authorities responsible for Arts and Culture were established in the nine provinces of South Africa. An Arts and Cultural Task Group (ACTAG) was appointed to research and propose new arts and culture policies for the country. While this research for an overall vision and plan was in progress, diverse cultural initiatives were already taking place: the Community Theater Development Trust, with the aim of fostering community theater nationally, and the Arts and Culture Trust, with President Mandela as patron, dedicated to funding art, literature and craft projects, are examples now flourishing. The first opera with a black singer in the leading role was staged, and the first Johannesburg Biennale was held, with 60 countries participating on the theme "Decolorizing Our Minds." UNESCO, with South Africa as its new member, held in South Africa the World Commission on Culture and Development for Africa. The newly formed Independent Broadcasting Authority, replacing Apartheid-owned and directed broadcasting, announced the enforcement on all radio stations to include 50 percent of locally recorded music in their programs.
Our country affirmed African identity with the other cultures of our continent, staging a cultural festival with participation from Burundi, Egypt, Mozambique and Cameroon, and responded to international South-South as well as conventional South-North cultural links, with the visit of South African artists to participate at the Havana Biennale in Cuba. Interaction with world culture was also advanced by the opening of the French Foundation and the Goethe Institute, both of which actively promote African Culture along with their own.
A conference of the arts and culture community met to debate the ACTAG report, marking a vigorous participation of the public in the formation of government policies. The final report---White Paper---culminating out of on-the-ground experiences in the cultural transformation stirring in our country was adopted by the government in 1996. The document's introductory premise, "Understanding Ourselves," establishes the importance of the arts and culture in bringing about this self-knowledge within society; such understanding is a foundation for development, a Renaissance without which the provision of material advancement cannot succeed in achieving a truly human society.
"Renaissance," since the period in history when the term was coined, has always implicitly emphasized this regenerative power of the arts. The document presents itself as "a fledgling democratic cultural policy with a mission to realize the full potential of arts, culture and heritage...located within the reality of existing budgets." It also declares a hard-headed approach, supporting "the arts, culture and heritage by valuing diversity and promoting economic activity," seeing "the linguistic diversity of our country as a resource in empowering all South Africans fully to participate in the country's social, political and economic life...the equitable development of our experiences, heritages and symbols."
These last three categories of culture prompt me to take up what I mentioned in my opening remark---the innovative expansion of Article 27's scope in its definition of cultural life. *Our experiences, heritages and symbols*: there is a discourse among creative people in intellectual circles in South Africa, that the concept of "intellectual," intellectual activity, to which these categories belong and which we have adopted unquestioningly from the West, is inadequate for the post-colonial manifestations of attributes of the intellect in our country.
My fellow writer, Mongane Wally Serote, Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, is one who questions the Eurocentric definitions of "intellectual."
He has introduced to his Department and himself conducted what he terms an "audit" of indigenous intellect: in research among rural communities he has recorded the processes that have led to indigenous knowledge being applied to the environment by the people---mental processes that involve analysis of material circumstances, forethought in devising methods of utilizing them, visualization of possible results, all of which demand the faculties of the creative mind---in fact, processes of the intellect. What has patronizingly been dubbed "primitive instinct" is a judgement of those who measure intellectual powers in response to entirely different circumstances, and so are ignorant of the existence of like powers beyond those circumstances. Serote posits that the recognition of the intellect as a broad concept among our people is our cultural reality in South Africa. There is a challenge to engage with this intellect, that lies not buried in some chapter of anthropology but is "the knowledge of skills and culture...tempered by experiences of many generations over many centuries." Shakespeare speaks of "the forms of things unknown" that can be discovered by literature; the knowledge gleaned by a wider recognition of intellectual activity derived from "things unknown" to the West can be utilized both in the arts and as part of the advancement of technology, for agriculture, industry, and medicine. This month an independent pharmaceutical group is developing the use of plants, long known for their properties by rural people, for the cure of Malaria---a disease which pandemically now resists many products of Western pharmacology. What Emmanuel Kant called the "outer experience" and the "inner experience" can come together in a wider recognition of intellect in culture.
Let me turn in conclusion to literature, through which there stems a majority of cultural opportunities. Writers must have readers; to be readers, people must have the opportunity to become literate. Writers must have access to readers; readers must have access to books. These factors determine the existence of a reading culture.
South Africa has a population of 43.6 million, of whom 23.41 million are urban citizens and 20.19 are rural people---still close to half the population. Thirteen percent of the total are whites. Discrimination in educational funding and facilitation between that provided for whites and that provided for blacks during Apartheid has resulted in illiteracy calculated at 29 percent in adults (i.e., people over the age of 15). Fourteen million South Africans, nationwide, have not completed school education. There are large numbers of semi-literates---people who can read a headline but not a story or a poem. Since 1994, government and community organizations have launched programs, particularly in adult education, to address this immeasurable handicap under which our population lived so long. Many more such programs are needed; if overseas governments and organizations recognize the ability to read as an inalienable human right, this is an area of cultural development they might help to fund. The same applies to libraries. Once people can read, where shall they find the books? Remarkably, progress has been made: about a hundred new libraries have been established, many in rural areas. But these are still far too few.
What literature is being provided for people in their own languages? Where there is literacy, there is cross-literacy among black readers, so that works in the main African language groups of our bountiful nine would be widely understood, but little literature is available in these languages. The other two of our official eleven languages are English and Afrikaans, both European derivatives. There is a challenge to South African publishers to encourage writers of fiction, poetry and non-fiction in the main African language groups by publishing these works and combining new initiatives of distribution to make this effective. There is a challenge to the government to provide substantial subvention for this literature.
Contemporary South African literature is written with overwhelming predominance in English, whether by black or white writers. No one should suggest that black writers, who have masterfully appropriated this language as one of their own, should abandon it. But there are potential writers who would best use their creative imagination in the languages in which they are accustomed to express their deepest emotions and convictions.
In general, in the five years since the Renaissance of our country began, there has not been a spectacular flowering of creative writing, fiction and poetry. It is in drama, that closely allied use of words, that blooming has been achieved, re-imagining our past, expressing the joys and frustrations of our era of transition, trying out the styles of our freedom. There has been little poetry, compared with what came up from underground during oppression. There have been a few novels and story collections that disprove the prediction, "What will you have left to write about now Apartheid is over?," revealing that there is more to write about than ever. Life did not end with Apartheid, it is only the beginning. These works are strongly expressive of the present, while informed with the depth of our past and the questioning of our future.
"Understanding ourselves" as the basis for that future places a great responsibility on the development of the arts in culture. Imaginative writers are not journalists, with a deadline of tomorrow's paper to meet in surface perceptions of the changing society around them. But imaginative writers do have a deadline of responsibility in literature as development in the spectrum of the arts. It takes time---five years is short---for the creative imagination to transform what has happened, what is happening, in South Africa---"the form of things unknown"---into works that will illuminate and free the sensibilities of our people. But the deadline is there: the Renaissance of Africa demands it. When the shock of recognition of the changes in lives and circumstances is absorbed, I expect and hope for a surge in the emergence of new writers, and in the works of established ones, reaching a wider readership.
President Thabo Mbeki quotes the Irish poet W.B. Yeats, the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, and even cites Coleridge's old bore, the Ancient Mariner, when commenting on the tendency of too much talk and too little action as the outcome of international conferences on human development. So we have a President who is widely cultured and a great reader; that should be a signpost that culture is on the right path to become a highway in South Africa, extending through our continent to the North, East and West.
- Novelist and non-fiction writer Nadine Gordimer has been one of South Africa's most eloquent, impassioned voices in the struggle against apartheid and the search for the soul of the new, post-colonial South Africa. She is also one of the most honored living writers, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature. Her novel, Burger's Daughter (1979), which sets a daughter's relationship with her father against the Soweto uprising, was banned by South African authorities. An activist intellectual, she insists, nonetheless, on the autonomy of the writer's perspective, "the last true judgment."
(Editor's Note: This essay, a MediaChannel exclusive, was originally prepared as a speech for "Recontres Franco-Sud-Africaines," a conference held on October 27, 1999 at the Assemblee Nationale in Paris, France.)
