Buffalo Soldiers, Coming To Africa

South Africa Mon 28-09-2009

Buffalo Soldiers, Coming To Africa
By David Kaiza

The 4th World Summit on Arts and Culture is affirmation once again, that culture is ultimately the most important thing people can possibly posses, from the Jamaican minister who called it the single liberator of her island, to the Singaporean who said the city state after growing inordinately wealthy, was forced to invent a culture.

It was a stirring realisation that wealth means little when people have no identity. The summit, which was taking place in Africa for the first time, acknowledged in ways direct and indirect that the years since George Bush’s War on Terror, have perhaps given us a legacy of new cultural conflicts which will be with us for some time to come.

Participants at the summit

Participants from different parts and cultures at the summit

There were also some reminders that while cultural ambassadors come to such events with all goodwill, differences can still stagger even the most sober.

Jamaica's Minister of Youth, Sports and Culture, Olivia Grange (l) and the Gauteng MEC for Sport, Arts, Culture and Recreation, Ms. Nelisiwe Mbatha-Mtimkulu at the World Summit dinner at the Cradle of Humankind in Maropeng, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Jamaican Minister of Culture, Youth and Sport, Ms. Olivia Grange mesmerized the audience with a multimedia presentation which begun with a playing of Bob Marley’s One Love. There were smiles all around when she walked to the podium and when her speech, made in poetic cadence seemed to have already stolen the audience, Buffalo Soldiers struck up the reggae beats and she ratcheted up the excitement when she synched the lyrics…

…Buffalo soldier, Dreadlocks Rasta
Taken From Africa, Brought to America
Fighting on arrival, Fighting for survival… into her speech.
She must be the most qualified culture minister in the world.

She told her audience about poet Derek Walcott, about Dancehall music, Rastafari and of course Reggae, explaining how through culture, a group of islands once slave plantations, came to influence global culture out of proportion with their size.

Hers was a heart-warming story about the power of arts and culture to bolster and to heal. She kept the best for last and the applause when she said “we have become Usain Bolt”, was for all the hope that Jamaica continues to give the world, as much as for her flawless, brilliant presentation.

“We used the arts and our cultural expressions as a source of liberation and laid the foundation upon which our people were able to restore their dignity and integrity in the face of the brutality unleashed on them by a cruel plantation system,” she said.

At the other extreme, a near-shouting match and a walk-out when Israeli delegates came into contact with Palestinian representatives, was perhaps the lowest moment.

In between these two events, the perennial topics of the arts and culture were dragged out and chewed over again:

Conflict, freedom and democracy, tradition and modernity, development, funding and commerce, and history and meaning are the topics around which discussions about arts and culture continuously swirl. At this summit, they were the frame upon which the debates and presentation revolved.

But no international cultural conference seems complete without participants from the poor world reminding the rich world of their historical oppression. It was a reminder once again, that the events of the past half millennium, in which Western expansionism pressed other societies to extremes of pressures, planted such far-reaching seeds of discord, and of dynamism, that they continue to frame cultural discourse.

Ever since the near disastrous Unesco conferences of the 1970s, a curious power-play has defined such events: the mostly non-paying Third world has held power while the powerful, paying rich world, has been constantly on the defensive, weary of offsetting sensitivities.

Several times, this has result in blatant hijacking of the agenda by the poor.

If we needed to know the capacity of the culture and the arts to both short circuit and electrify, this came with the opening key-note speech by Prof. Njabulo Ndebele, one time president of the Congress of South African Writers:

“Music was music and it was something white students took for granted until the black students came on the dance floor,” he said. “A full-scale revolt came when black students in large numbers would come to the party, allowing them to take over the CD player. Reggae, rap, Congolese beats filled the room. White students watched and vanished. Then white students regrouped.”

What they were involved in, he said, was “Low key culture wars.”

His words brought into sharp focus the conflict that culture can engender, but was also an uneasy reminder that colour history remains a powerful shaper of narrative especially in South Africa. The political, historical context of host countries often influence the flow of such proceedings and in Johannesburg, a spirited dance performance of Apartheid, along with Prof. Ndebele’s speech so set the agenda.

Outside of the direct focus on the poor world, Western presentation tended to be a reverse restating of the same theme – as though it were the West’s role to create room for others, to restructure itself so others may fit.

Jamaican Minister for Youth, Sports and Culture, Olivia Grange (l) and the Gauteng MEC for Sport, Arts, Culture and Recreation, Ms. Nelisiwe Mbatha-Mtimkulu at the World Summit dinner at the Cradle of Humankind in Maropeng, [Photo: Caroline Kaminju]

If this is the publicly stated policy, the speech by the Frank Panucci, Australian Director of Community Partnerships about colour relations in his country illustrated that practice often lags behind.

Discussions about funding for the arts, once again, were about the ways in which the rich world was going to pay for the poor world’s fledgling cultural scene.

The Director of Johannesburg Arts and Culture and Heritage, Steven Sack said part of the measurement for hosting the summit in Africa would be the extent to which African issues were raised and considered.

To this extent, Africa formed a considerable part of the agenda.

Looking at it casually, the restating of old culture conference themes might seem retrogressive. But the more you listened, the more you saw that it is the world that seems to be sliding into a kind of past, even when it seems to have overcome so much.

The summit’s thematic statement that we live in a “world which is increasingly divided by ‘cultural’ rather than political ideology, where feelings of being threatened by ‘other’”, was echoed in nearly all the speeches.

It was a reminder that while the hopes that came with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the freeing of Nelson Mandela and the spread of democratization lightened the burden of oppression for millions, division and oppression could well come from other sources, non-state and had to deal with.

George Bush’s so-called War on Terror, and its infamous invocation of the clash of civilization, seems to have ignited new culture wars, which brought a certain level of urgency to the summit.

One of the most touching presentations was from Mr. Thirunalan Sasitharan, founder of the Singaporean Theatre Training and Research Program, whose description of his country as a “word” across the map, a geographical area rather than country, lost beneath the Malaysian peninsular, and of his own background as neither Indian nor Singaporean yet all of it, resonated heavily across the room.

A city state founded purely for commercial purposes, a literal stepping stone from the age of European sea-faring, that in the latter-half of the 20th century saw itself growing inordinately rich, Singapore found it was the poorest of states because it lacked cultural capital.

“We gave up the idea that culture has to be authentic, that it has to be original,” Sasitharan said, making what was surely one of the saddest statements of the summit.

The Director of Johannesburg Arts and Culture and Heritage, Mr. Steven Sack (left) addressing the summit. [Photo: Maggie Otieno]

It was a personal example of how urgent the meeting of cultures is, a meeting which paradoxically also becomes an erasure of culture.

Through the theatre training program he founded, Sasitharan said, they set about not just integrating into Singapore’s multi-ethnic the diverse Asian cultural expressions, but also inventing ways of being for the city state.

Director of the Kenyan GoDown Arts Centre, Joy Mboya detailed how African artists still find it difficult getting around the world, not just because it is hard to afford, but because they often don’t fit the visa criteria.

Her speech was a hopeful one too, giving back ground to the growth of the arts in the Eastern African region, where, like much of Africa, increasing political freedoms have given growth room for the arts and where the revival of the East African community was perhaps the single most important factor in reviving the arts across the region.

For South Africa, and for Johannesburg, increasingly the destination for summit provides a neat precursor to the FIFA soccer World Cup 2010 – the summit is another triumph, a story, if any is needed, of the role art has played in uniting peoples

“Artists have done it since the 1960s,” Steven Sacks told AfricanColours. “From the earliest plays, Miriam Makeba, through the ‘70s – artists themselves have worked to address the social inequalities.”

The tagline maybe Africa hosting the event, but it is South Africa, with its preparedness that wins, as Program Director, Mike van Graan said candidly, “hosting the Summit in Africa was and is, an act of optimism – but often, its those of us south of Limpopo who stand to benefit the most.”

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