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A CONTENDED SPACE: The Theatre Of Gibson MtutuzeliKente

by Robert Mshengu Kavanagh

PART SEVEN

KENTE AND THE „NEW SOUTH AFRICA‟

A lack of a theory of culture in the period of socialist reconstruction after the

revolution can be extremely dangerous – Kavanagh, 1985, xiii

The radicalizing role of drama or any other art in a society is negligible. Change

comes through human action informed by political awareness and exacerbated by

intolerable humiliation, suppression and depression – Joe Slovo, as cited by Lewis

Nkosi in South African Information and Analysis, June, 1968.

Hopefully the previous chapters have given us some idea of the man, Gibson Kente, as an

individual, how he was forged and how the forces around him impacted on his life and work. We

should also have some idea about his plays, his music and his theatre work. We should know too

something of his political and aesthetic opinions and of the ideology and function of his plays.

Between 1990 and 1994 there took place in South Africa a historic process that culminated in a

new democratic constitution and the election of a government of National Unity, headed by the

erstwhile ‘communists’ and ‘terrorists’, the African National Congress and its allies. The nature

of this process is a key factor in appreciating what happened to Kente after 1990 and specifically

after 1994 when the ANC had won the election and now headed a government of national unity.

So, we need to account for why ‘the New Dispensation’ – as many people like to refer to the ‘New

South Africa’ - did not turn out to be what Kente himself hoped it would and what some of us

might have hoped it would. To do this, we need to understand certain relevant aspects of the

social and cultural transformation – and, significantly, lack of transformation - that took place

with the demise of formal apartheid and the kind of society and artistic conditions that prevailed

in the ‘New South Africa’ that emerged.

In Part 7 we try to do this and go on to examine Kente’s various projects during the period and

account for what happened to them and their protagonist in the last phase of his life and work and

why, instead of going out ‘with a bang’, he did so ‘with a whimper’. In the process we shall be

talking as much about the ‘New South Africa’ as we do about Kente himself, for his fate was

bound up with that of his country. We shall also be asking the question: ‚What could we have

done to ensure that our cultural greats from the apartheid era, Kente included, were empowered

to make the kind of contribution to the struggle for a genuinely new South Africa they had it in

them to make?

As a footnote I shall, in true ‚Allo, Allo’ style, ‘say this once and once only’.1 As I researched for

the writing of the chapters in this the final part of this book, I could not help constantly being

struck by the recurring parallels with what I described in my Zimbabwe: Challenging the

Stereotypes. It is deeply, if not tragically, regrettable that the majority of South Africans have

not been able or willing to appreciate how much there is to learn about their own fate in the story

of the Zimbabwean revolution.2

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE:

“SUN CITY IS STILL SUN CITY”

Aspects of social and cultural transformation in the period from 1990 to the death of

Kente

We dare not eat with our naked fingertips, walk in generous groups, speak merrily in booming

voices and laugh our mqombothi laughs. They will scold us if we dare, not with their lips, Lord,

because the laws prevent them from doing so, but with their eyes. They will shout, ‚Stop acting

black!‛ ‚Stop acting black!‛ is what they will shout. And will pause, perplexed, unsure of what

that means, for are we not black, Father? No, not in the malls, Lord. We may not be black in

restaurants, in suburbs and in schools. Oh, how it nauseates them if we fantasise about being

black, truly black - KopanoMatlwa in Coconut pp.31-2.

This is the third chapter on aspects of social and cultural transformation in South Africa.

The first dealt with the pre-Kente era, the second with the apartheid era and the third, this

chapter, with the post–apartheid era up to the death of Kente in 2004. The first described the

tragic process of dispossession and subjugation of the indigenous African majority by a settler

minority from Europe and the establishment of English-speaking political, social and cultural

hegemony in South Africa. The second described the coming to power of the Afrikaner

Nationalists, their implementation of formal apartheid and their struggle to convert their

political clout into social and cultural hegemony. This chapter briefly describes the end of

minority rule and the coming to power of a government voted in by the majority. Curiously, far

from attempting to impose majority hegemony on South Africa, the new government publicly

proclaimed a non-hegemonic stance, leaving economic, social and cultural hegemony in the

1The reference is to the BBC television drama series, AlloAllo, set in a French café during the time of the

German occupation in World War II [1982-92].

hands of the minority.3 By and large, the English-speaking component of that minority was able

to regain its former hegemonic status.

In terms of social cultural space, the crumbling of formal apartheid resulted in the

mainstream weathering the efforts of the Afrikaner and the black majority to contend or reduce

its dominance and in its re-asserting its domain in the ‘New South Africa’ in quite unrivalled

style.

The following are, in my opinion, the main factors that characterised that process: the

balance of power at the time of the CODESA negotiations; the ideology of the African National

Congress; South Africa’s status as ‘colony of a special type’; the concept of the National

Democratic Revolution; the dominance of the African National Congress in the negotiations; the

economic, social and cultural hegemony of English-speaking capital; reconciliation; and social

consciousness.

It rapidly became apparent during the negotiations that the only agreement possible was

going to be one which reflected the power relations at the time. This resulted in a constitution

which, while facilitating the coming to power of a majority government, in effect entrenched the

rights of the white minority – through the so-called ‘sunset clauses’. It is true that with a two

thirds majority it is possible for the ANC to make constitutional changes. The ANC did not do

so. The reasons for this are no doubt complex but they include the fact that at the first

democratic election in 1994 the ANC failed to gain a two thirds majority. Even if they had, their

position was extremely tenuous and any effort at that time to rescind, restrict or modify

minority rights might conceivably have led to their overthrow by forces loyal to the apartheid

regime. At the next election in 1999 the ANC did get a two thirds majority but it declined to

take advantage of the opportunity to review and amend the constitution.

The ANC has never beena political party. It is a movement. Significantly from its

inception it has been a multiracial movement. A movement generally unites people of

numerous backgrounds, classes and ideologies around a shared agenda. For the ANC, the

shared agenda was opposition to apartheid and support for ideals as expressed in the Freedom

Charter. But, unlike the Africanist and Black Consciousness organisations, it embraced all South

Africans who supported the agenda and the ideals. The ANC saw the struggle against

apartheid as the struggle of all South Africans who opposed it, an inclusive ideal expressed in

the Freedom Charter’s ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it’. This may account for the

ANC’s relative ideological impoverishment, its non-hegemonic stance, its lack of interest in

social cultural transformation and its general philistinism and naivety when it comes to the

media and the arts – a problem that is often associated with fronts and movements as their

membership includes people of different races, classes, ideologies and cultures. In the case of

the ANC, the front – or Congress Alliance as it was called – included the South African

Communist Party [SACP] and the Congress of South African Trade Unions [COSATU]. In other

3‚We must exercise true leadership by being non-hegemonic‛, Albie Sachs, in de Kok, p.28. Albie Sachs is

a longtime ANC polemicist and intellectual, served on the Constitutional Committee in the CODESA

negotiations, in 1994 appointed a Judge of the Constitutional Court. See also ANC Government White

Paper, where hegemony is associated with subjugation: ‚The collision of cultures does not necessarily

lead to subjugation and hegemony‛ – White Paper on Arts, Culture and Heritage, 4.6.96. For the rest, the

position is, as it were, proclaimed by omission. The various official documents on ANC and government

arts and cultural policy are quite detailed but there is no mention of government adopting any kind of

hegemonic policy.

words, it was a front that united Marxists, trade-unionists, petit-bourgeois nationalists and the

masses.4

Since the European invasion the fundamental antagonism has been that of ‘the black

majority and the white minority’, as expressed in the concept of ‘colonialism of a special type’

cited below. This the ANC, like the PAC and the BCM, accepted. However, the ANC’s

programme did not foresee as its goal a state in which the power of the white minority is

broken and the black majority reverses the white minority’s historic gains at the expense of the

colonised majority - by, for instance, taking back the land and seizing the commanding heights

of the economy. The rights of the white minority were in a sense guaranteed by the Freedom

Charter in so far as they were included in the concept of ‘those that live in it’. The ANC’s goal

therefore seemed to be restricted to opening up to the previously disadvantaged and excluded

majority the opportunity to enjoy the same rights as those enjoyed by the previous benefactors

of apartheid. These rights included freedom from poverty, access to improved amenities and ‘a

better quality of life’ in general. Though there was some lip service paid to the non-material

aspects of social transformation, it was vague and unconvincing and I think it can be

confidently said that ANC’s ideology never developed a meaningful social cultural dimension,

where the word ‘cultural’ is being used in its broadest sense.

By ‘colonialism of a special type’ what is meant is that South Africa, the colonial state

established in 1910 by the Act of Union, was different from the usual colonial set-up. Generally

the colonial or metropolitan power that rules a colony is situated elsewhere. For example, the

colonial power in the case of Southern Rhodesia was Britain and of Mozambique Portugal.

Colonialism in South Africa was ‘of a special type’ because the colonial power was, unlike

Britain and Portugal, situated within the colony itself i.e. the white government of pre-1994

South Africa. The concept of ‘colonialism of a special type’ was adopted by ‘the South African

Liberation Movement, the ANC and its allies’, who, in the words of an ANC discussion

document compiled in 1987:

…characterise the South African social formation as a system of `internal colonialism` or

`colonialism of a special type`. What is special or different about the colonial system as it

obtains in South Africa is that there is no spatial separation between the colonising power

[the white minority state] and the colonised black people. But in every respect, the

features of classic colonialism are the hallmark of the relations that obtain between the

black majority and white minority. The special features of South Africa’s internal

colonialism are also compounded by the fact that the white South African state,

parliament and government are juridically independent of any metropolitan country and

have a sovereignty legally vested in them by various Acts of the British government and

state – ‘Apartheid South Africa: Colonialism of a Special Type’, ANC Discussion

Document, 24.3.87.

No agreement was going to get rid of the colonizing power. It was here to stay. Not only

was it here to stay but it was here to stay with all its privileges and possessions intact. Even if it

had been ANC policy to contest this, at the time of the negotiations the ANC did not have the

power to force it to give up its spoils of conquest and exploitation.

This is where the National Democratic Revolution [NDR] comes in. The exact origin of

the term seems to be unknown. It is possible that it was a home-grown term. It has been

4One should also note that even within some nationalist parties the same situation may pertain as

nationalism characteristically brings together quite different classes in the interests of one of them.

discussed in ANC and SACP literature for many years.5 The concept is based in the

appreciation, which Lenin gave expression to in his report on the national and colonial question

at the Second Congress of the Communist International of 1919 [Lenin, 1920], namely that there

is an intervening stage between a capitalist or colonial capitalist pre-revolutionary state and

socialism. The NDR is the road map whereby a revolutionary socialist party widens the

democratic process in a system which is still capitalist, with a view to transforming it and

paving the way for socialism.

According to those who took these concepts seriously in the African National Congress

or rather the Tripartite or Congress Alliance, the achievement of national democracy in South

Africa, ushered in by the new constitution and the democratic elections of 1994, must have been

seen as the beginning of this process. At the negotiations that led to this development, it was the

alliance that called the shots. Other majority organisations that had played extremely influential

roles in bringing to pass the events that were unfolding at the time either handed over to the

ANC, refused to involve themselves in the process or pulled out as a result of differences in

ideology and policy, most notable of these being the United Democratic Front [UDF], the Black

Consciousness Movement, the Azanian People’s Organisation [AZAPO] and the Pan Africanist

Congress [PAC]. Though the leaders and rank and file of the United Democratic Front [UDF],

which had mobilised broad-based resistance in South Africa and been a key player in the

bringing about change, did participate at CODESA, it was the ANC’s external leadership and

those who had been released from apartheid prisons, Nelson Mandela, in particular, who had

the deciding say.

The final factors, namely the policy of reconciliation and the level of political

consciousness in the country, put the stamp on proceedings.Unlike in Germany after the

downfall of the National Socialists, the demise of settler colonial regimes in Africa did not result

in the prosecution of those responsible for crimes committed during the colonial era. In both

Zimbabwe and South Africa the key word was ‘Reconciliation’. In South Africa a Truth and

Reconciliation Commission was set up and those apartheid criminals who publicly confessed

their crimes and expressed remorse were pardoned. At his inauguration, the first black

President, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela said:

We have triumphed in the effort to implant hope in the breasts of the millions of our people. We

enter into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans, both black and

white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right

to human dignity - a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.

Mandela’s speech set the tone for the most extraordinary spirit of romanticism,

Utopianism and, one can only say, philanthropy,6 which engulfed the ‘New South Africa’ and

seemed to drug people’s memories and sweep them off their feet. This was understandable

when one considers the long, dark and tragic years that preceded it. Who would not, after

crawling through a dark and dangerous tunnel for an unbearable period of time, laugh and

jump with joy when emerging into the sunlight? It must have seemed like a dream. Mandela

was certainly dreaming, when he said the words cited above – just as his predecessor, Martin

5 For example [and also another indication of the ANC’s eschewal of hegemony]: ‚The strategic objective

of the NDR is the creation of a united, non-racial, non-sexist and democratic society. The affirmation of

our Africanness as a nation has nothing to do with the domination of one culture or language by another

_ it is a recognition of a geographic reality and the awakening of a consciousness which colonialism

suppressed‛ - 50th National Conference: Strategy and Tactics, 22.12.97. 6 For an appreciation of the full irony of the use of the word in this context, a good read is Robert

Tressell’s classic novel, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists.

Luther King, was in his 1963 speech, ‘I have a dream’. However, as Lenin informed the

revolutionary sailor, Rybakov, in N. Pogodin’s play, Kremlin Chimes, dreams must be based in

hard work and reality.

The readiness with which many South Africans allowed themselves to be seduced by the

spirit of reconciliation and the belief that the past would just go away if one did one’s best not

to think about it, was an indication of a general lack of political consciousness in the country –

not to mention among the leadership. During the apartheid period, the vast majority of the

people of South Africa had for many years been kept in ignorance of a great deal of important

and relevant knowledge and theory through banning, censorship, isolation, ostracism and

boycotts. Africa, north of the Zambezi, its history, struggles and achievements, for instance, was

largely a closed book. The relevant theory and experiences of other countries in the world –

Cuba, China, Vietnam, India, South America, the Soviet Union - and alternative political, social

and cultural trends in North America and Europe - were also largely unknown or seen through

distorted lenses. Exposure to some of the theories and experiences of other countries might have

sounded a note of caution. They might have helped South Africans to appreciate that Mandela’s

dream, though noble, was a vision to be worked for – and the road to the realisation of that

vision might be just as hard as the one they had already trod. Those whose experience in exile

might have filled the gap, either were not given the chance, simply forgot in the heady

atmosphere of the times or relished the opportunity for plunder. It is astonishing how many of

us who used to sound the slogan, ‘A luta continua’, forgot so soon that it meant ‘the struggle

continues’ – not that the struggle is over when we take over parliament.

To sum up then, post-1994 South Africa emerged from and was shaped by negotiations

and a constitutional process in which the ANC was the prime non-government negotiator.

Other influential organisations – PAC, BCM, AZAPO, UDF - either did not participate,

withdrew or gave way to Nelson Mandela and his team. However, despite the fact that the

government had been forced to negotiate, Mandela and the ANC did not have the power to

impose their will. The ANC itself, though it recognised that the fundamental contradiction was

between the oppressed black majority and the oppressive white minority, committed itself to a

multi-racial and inclusive solution. Having achieved the collapse of formal apartheid and what

they believed to be a democratic constitution and political power as a democratically elected

government, they then had to govern a country in which the former colonial power still resided

in the country while retaining its control of the economy, its property rights and its social and

cultural hegemony intact. Thus, just as apartheid society was considered to be ‘colonialism of a

special type’, the country the ANC now governed must surely be considered to be ‘neo-

colonialism of a special type’. All known apartheid criminals had to do to be left alone with

their loot and their former lives was to confess and say sorry. For the rest, the fellow-travellers,

those who had never opposed apartheid and had, on the contrary, profited from it, retained

their profit along with their racist mindset. For them it was business as usual. And all this, the

ANC government had to manage in a society where political consciousness was, to say the least,

underdeveloped.

But what about the ANC itself? How did it regard this situation? How did the ANC see

the practical tasks entailed in the dream as enunciated by Mandela in his Inaugural Address

and what plans did they have to achieve them? When it came to social transformation, apart

from the economic and material targets, which it seemed to have been very focussed on, was

there any agenda for the social cultural transformation of the country they governed? It is

important to stress that we are not talking here exclusively of culture in the sense of literature

and the arts and crafts. In the post-apartheid debate in the early years, there was a gap between

transformation in its material manifestations and the arts and culture – both of which were to a

lesser or greater extent discussed. Social cultural transformation however was rarely discussed.

Social culture was still determined by the colonial minority and this was not significantly

challenged. But, even in the area of the arts and culture, assimilation of the majority into the

minority mainstream has been far more characteristic of what has taken place than

transformation. This is a distressing abdication as the shaping of the culture and ethos of a new

society depends to a great deal on culture in the narrower sense – intellectual life, literature,

media, the arts and crafts etc.

There are five key Government or ANC documents which give a clue as to how the party

and the government viewed social and cultural transformation. They are the ANC’s 1969 and

1997 Strategy and Tactics, the 1994 Draft National Cultural Policy, the 1996 White Paper on

Arts, Culture and Heritage and a recent [2012] Policy Discussion Document on Social

Transformation.

Widely touted as the ANC’s most conspicuous achievement is a liberal democratic

constitution which, in their view, set the legal framework for a society in which the human

rights of all were respected, people were free and diversity guaranteed – in short, the realisation

of the Mandela dream. It was as if someone believed that all government needed to do was put

the laws in place, ensure they were respected, assist everyone to access their benefits and the

dream would come true all by itself - now. As mentioned above, the ANC eschewed hegemony

and instead saw the role of government as a facilitating one. The mainstream was thus destined

to remain the mainstream.

But what about this constitution and the freedoms and rights it so liberally guaranteed?

It is difficult to understand how a constitution that has not been taken to the people can

be truly democratic. Surely to be so there ought to have been a national constitutional

consultation process followed by a referendum? Besides, South Africa was a country in which

the basic injustices and inequalities had not yet been addressed. The trailblazer of African

liberation, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, stated the obvious when at the 5th Pan African

Congress he spoke of ‘economic democracy as being the only real democracy’. Can there really

be democracy without equality?

Owing to its colonial history and in particular the nature of the apartheid state, white

South Africa was formed by the noxious agency of racism, segregation, discrimination,

dispossession, exploitation, oppression and inequality. Its dominant norms, values and social

structures were those of a colonial minority which had enjoyed years of cruel and unfair

privilege, domination, wealth and selfish possession – quite opposite to the experience of those

of the people it oppressed. It was the hegemonic culture. This is the society the ANC had to deal

with in 1994. Surely what was needed was a constitution for transformation. Surely what was

needed for democracy was a struggle to ensure a just and equal society.

Put another way, let us compare the new South Africa to Sol Kerzner’s insalubrious Sun

City. Before ‘democracy’, blacks could only work there. All democracy really did in 1994 was to

open the doors of Sun City to those black South Africans who have the means to enjoy its

facilities. Sun City is still Sun City – with all its former values or lack of them. To the vast

majority of South Africans, South Africa is still very much ‘Dark City’. And Gibson Kente, along

with a number of others who had lit up the lives of that majority in the midst of apartheid’s

darkest night, found ‘freedom’ brought little more light to them than it had to the people.

In effect, then, what was achieved in 1994 was not the dismantlement of apartheid –

apartheid was not simply a legislative and formal imposition of racial discrimination. The laws

went but the values, norms, economy, culture and power relations of apartheid and the colonial

state remained – and the new democratic government had made it clear that it would not assert

an alternative hegemony! What Steve Biko had rejected all those many years ago had taken

place. In I Write What I Like he wrote: ‚Does this mean that I am against integration? If by

integration you understand a breakthrough into white society by blacks, an assimilation and

acceptance of blacks into an already established set of norms and code of behaviour set up by

and maintained by whites, then YES I am against it [integration]‛ – p.24. In effect, Biko would

have called what happened in South Africa between 1990 and 2004 not ‘integration’ but

‘assimilation’.

Biko’s words can be related to a statement I made in Chapter 8 concerning the power that

binds a people and makes them strong – ‘the kind of power with which sovereignty and

integrity in the form of religion and culture bind a people together’ [p.]. The colonizers targeted

the religion and the culture of the colonised in order to break their power. They did not succeed.

The people survived and were strong enough to throw off the chains of colonial rule – because

they did not lose their cultural and spiritual cohesion. Biko was referring to something like this

and warning of the dangers inherent in risking the loss of that power after Liberation.

The burning question in South Africa is: ‚Is neo-colonialism in the ‘New South Africa’

achieving what colonialism itself failed to do? Is it in the process of destroying what the British

and the Boers failed to destroy, namely the cultural and spiritual cohesion of the majority?‛

Given the failure to challenge the social and cultural hegemony inherited from the

apartheid years, one would not expect the role of literature, the arts and media to be a matter of

any concern. As it was, the main concerns of the ANC and the government in this regard seem

to have been, as with the constitution, that the lack of balance in opportunities, access and

education needs to be addressed, that artists must be free to express themselves and diversity

among South Africans encouraged and celebrated. Again there was nothing about challenging

the established artistic and aesthetic norms of the hegemonic culture.

Celebrating diversity in a situation where the minority’s diversity is hegemonic and

mainstream while the diversity of others is underdeveloped and marginal, is not greatly

removed from apartheid’s insistence on separate but equal. Yes, we all have different cultures

and they should all be freely expressed but some people’s cultures already occupy the

commanding heights and others are lost in poverty and obscurity. Unless this is addressed, the

result is assimilation.

The ANC’s lack of interest in playing a dynamic transformative role in literature, media

and the arts was by no means unexpected. Like other liberation movements in the region, the

ANC made play of the importance of culture in the struggle but seemed to lose all real interest

in it once they had their hands on political power. The fate of the ANC’s Cultural Ensemble,

Amandla, was an eloquent but depressing illustration of this. Joe Slovo, Albie Sachs and Pallo

Jordan all expressed, in different ways, ideas regarding the essential role of culture in shaping

and transforming society which were hardly reassuring.7 The ANC and Department of Arts and

Culture’s various papers on the arts show no understanding of culture’s social importance. It is

therefore unlikely that the arts and culture, as key shapers of consciousness, value systems,

lifestyle and social and ideological orientation, were given much attention at the negotiating

table and in the thoughts of the representatives of the majority in the negotiating process

between 1991 and 1994.

So what did all this mean for those in theatre – and Kente in particular?

7Slovo, see quotation above; Sachs, see bibliography; Jordan – a personal experience of mine at CASA

where I challenged him on his assertion that the arts in Africa were performed at night or in the post-

harvest season when the real work was over.

The coming of democracy saw the end of formal apartheid – and with it of course the last

vestiges of the monopoly, referred to earlier, that black arts entrepreneurs had enjoyed and had

increasingly lost. It was as if the clock had been turned back to the early 1950s and then given a

sharp twist. The window of opportunity that apartheid had ironically opened up for them in the

1960’s slammed shut. As I wrote in Chapter 6:

Government legislation to ban multiracial activities and events had opened up an opportunity for

black entrepreneurs. In effect the legislation ended – for a time - white domination of black music,

dance and theatre. At the same time as it closed the door to white involvement, it closed the door

to black hopes for success in the white towns and by corollary overseas. And, while it closed

doors, it also opened at least one. Government apartheid legislation opened the door to limited

black entrepreneurship in black areas.

It was this opportunity that Kente and other black arts entrepreneurs were able to exploit

in the period up to 1976. But after that things changed. By 1994 the black arts entrepreneur of

old had seen his position drastically undermined. For a start, whereas before, owing to

segregation, the black urban and rural areas, which were their ‘turf’ and provided their

audiences, had presented a sort of black mainstream in which the black arts entrepreneur could

prosper, the collapse of formal apartheid now rendered these same areas distinctly backwater.

With the scrapping of the Group Areas Act, suddenly, those with the money could move away

from them into the previously white suburbs. Many of those who did not have the money could

nevertheless find a home rent-free in the abandoned apartments in central Johannesburg as

squatters or the nearby suburbs which had housed the white working class and the

armeblankedom [poor whites]. Not only did many people abandon their erstwhile ghetto, white

capital was now free to move in. Soweto was no longer ‘Bantu Gebiede’ but a massive market

which had at last been opened up to minority capital and was just waiting to be tapped and

transformed in the image of white South Africa. Oppenheimer’s dream had at last came true!

The old ‘townships’ were thus not only rendered ‘backwater’. They were also more and more

integrated into the dominant colonial culture.

But while this opportunity was rapidly slipping away from the black entrepreneur in the

years after 1976 and they began to face more and more hardships, white South African

performing arts, film and television were making enormous strides. By the time black

entrepreneurs were free to compete, they faced an all-powerful white establishment and

hegemonic domination on a completely different scale from what they had experienced in the

1960s.

Thus, to sum up, instead of ‘Freedom’ in 1994 removing the disadvantages the black arts

entrepreneur had faced and ushering in a world of new opportunities, it wiped out what

advantages he had had and forced him to compete on a very unlevel playing field with the old

bête noir - now greatly advanced and entrenched - the white directors, producers and

entrepreneurs whose control it had been possible to escape in the 1960s and from whose

clutches apartheid legislation had provided protection.

The black arts entrepreneur’s problem, while having devastating consequences for him,

was simply a small part of the much bigger problem that confronted and still confronts the

majority as a whole in the ‘New South Africa’ in every sphere of economic and social life except

politics and government – and nowhere more crushingly than in the arts and culture.

When the National Party was voted into power in 1948, its apartheid policies were,

among other things, designed to foil the political and economic hegemony of English-speaking

capital in the nation at large and in particular in education, culture and the arts. The 1994

dispensation removed – almost at a stroke – the restrictions the apartheid regime had placed in

the way of English-speaking capitalist hegemony and instead paved the way for an exponential

increase. In a sense it was English-speaking capital that was the real beneficiary of ‘democracy’

in South Africa post-1994. I say, English-speaking because, although Afrikaans-speaking capital

enjoyed the same economic advantages, it was the hegemony of English-speaking capitalist

ideology and culture that prevailed.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY African National Congress, Apartheid South Africa: Colonialism of a Special Type, ANC Discussion

Document [24.3.87], downloaded from http://www.anc.org.za/show. php?id=4518

African National Congress, ‘Strategy and Tactics of the ANC 1969’[ANC Historical Documents Archive],

downloaded from https://www.marxists.org/subject/ africa/anc/1969/strategy-tactics.htm

African National Congress, ‘50th National Conference: Strategy and Tactics - as amended by conference’,

Policy Document [22.12.1997], downloaded from http://www.anc.org.za/ show.php?id=2424

African National Congress, ‘Building a National Democratic Society’, 52nd National Conference: Adopted

Strategy and Tactics, Policy Document [2007], downloaded from

http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=2535

African National Congress, ‘Social Transformation’, Policy Discussion Document [March, 2012],

downloaded from

African National Congress, ‘Unity in Action towards Socio-Economic Freedom: Strategy and Tactics of

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ROBERT MSHENGU KAVANAGH

Robert Mshengu Kavanagh is a fourth generation South African of Scottish descent. He was

born in Durban and educated in Natal. He graduated from the universities of Cape Town and

Oxford and holds a Ph.D. from Leeds. He lived and worked in Ethiopia but spent the last thirty

years of his life in Zimbabwe. He co-founded Theatre Arts departments at the Universities of

Addis Ababa and Zimbabwe, the theatre companies Workshop ’71 in South Africa and

Zambuko/Izibuko in Zimbabwe, the Zimbabwe Association of Theatre for Children and Young

People [ZATCYP/ASSITEJ] and the Zimbabwean children’s arts education organisation,

CHIPAWO. His other publications include: The Making of a Servant, poems translated from

Xhosa withZ.S.Qangule, SouthAfrican People’s Plays, edited for Heineman African Writers Series,

Theatre and Cultural Struggle in South Africa [ZED Books], Ngoma: Approaches to Arts Education in

Southern Africa, edited for Zimbabwe Academy of Arts Education, Zimbabwe: Challenging the

Stereotypes [Themba Books] and Evesdrop: The Tales of Adam Kok[Mshengu Publications]. He is

fluent in Zulu and has aworking knowledge of Afrikaans, Amharic, French, Italian, Shona,

Sotho and Xhosa. Website: www.mclaren-robert.net Author’s page: https://www.amazon.com/author/robertkavanagh