Es'kia Mphahlele Heritage Foundation

Invitation:
The University of South Africa cordially invites you to: The 7th Es'kia Mphahlele Annual Memorial Lecture 2016
Theme :The African Writer As A Prophet and Social Critic in Contemporary Times.
Presenter : Dr Mamphela Ramphele.
Facilitator : Dr Somadoda Fikeni.
Panel discussants : Prof Harry Nengwekhulu, Prof Lesiba Teffo, Ms Ottilia Maunganidze.
Date : 2016.09.30 Friday
Time : 17:30 for 18:00 till 10pm
Venue: The Ranch Hotel
Dress code : Traditional or Formal.
RSVP : Mrs Bessie Molokomme
Tel :015 290 3445 or
Email: [email protected]

OUR COCKTAIL OF RICH THEMES

[A Talk by Mosibudi Mangena at the 3rd Annual Polokwane Literary Fair, 11 September, 2014]

South Africa ought to be a paradise for the arts in all their forms and manifestations. I say “ought to” because it is not evident that we are aware of our blessings and more importantly, that we are consciously harnessing the tailwinds offered by our environment to fly the arts aircraft to our advantage.

We are a melting pot of colours and cultures from Africa, Europe and Asia, as well as all major religions of the world. To further enrich the brew, the African majority comes in several ethnic groups with their own languages, dialects, dances and other cultural expressions. It is a rich diversity that defied the brutal attempts by the European component of our population to destroy, or at least dilute it, using religion, the gun, political and economic domination of everyone else.

Throw into this mix, a society that is trying to discover itself after centuries of colonialism and racist oppression - a society in transition. It seems, by current evidence, that we are a society that has dressed itself up in lofty ideals as contained in the constitution of the land, but fails miserably to live by its dictates.

Our pledges to observe the equality, dignity and human rights of all are negated by the unspeakable abuses and cruelty we perpetrate against one another, especially against women and children. The rapes and murders of women and children have become so frequent that they have lost the power to shock.

Behold the disjuncture between the promise and optimism of freedom twenty years ago and the growing abject poverty, inequality and unemployment that have come to characterize our society. To add complexity to an already attractive kaleidoscope of colour for the arts, we have rampant corruption and the parading of wealth by the few before the eyes of the struggling majority.
That immediately brings to mind Thomas Mapfumo’s wailings in his song “Corruption”, about the same malady in his beloved Zimbabwe, with its catchy refrain: “something for something; nothing for nothing.”

These constitute a rich soup of topics, themes, plots, ideas and notions for our writers, poets, dramatists, musicians, painters and sculptors to thrive. It is like a huge elephant right in front of us, waiting to be eaten by those in our midst with an artistic streak, each at his or her own vantage point picking an ear, a tail, a hoof or a trunk as his or her point of concentration.

They can enjoy it without consultation with one another or team work, each using his or her own talents, perceptions, fancy or imagination to tell a story. The totality of their work would tell us who we are, because the arts are a mirror through which society sees itself.

With their generally accepted licence to do, express themselves, or even offend those in authority in a manner ordinary mortals cannot do, artists can prick our consciences and point us in the right direction. That they sometimes get into trouble, as Thomas Mapfumo and others did, including some in our country, is part of the territory.
In addition to contributing to the cultural and spiritual wellbeing of a society, the arts do add to the economic wealth of a country.

The Cape Town International Jazz Festival; other jazz festivals that take place at different times and localities in our country; the Grahamstown Arts Festival and others of its kind; the various book fairs; the export of dramas, such as Generations to other parts of our continent; the success of some of our music artists across the world, give us an idea of the economic spin-offs that the arts are capable of.

Elsewhere in the world, the Hollywoods, Nollywoods and Bollywoods show how big the arts might be in the economic space, and this is only one form thereof. In their wake, the arts provide subsistence to others in the managerial, logistics, distribution and retail spaces.

For a society with an elephant to consume, our appetite in the last twenty years has been woeful indeed. The root cause of our poor appetite is our love for other people’s things and our tendency to look askance at that which belongs to us.

The passionate love our women have for Brazilian, Pakistani and Indian hair illustrates the point. It does not matter what diseases the owners of the hair might have suffered from, or whether they are alive or not, or under what circumstances the hair was harvested, they just want that hair.
For as long as the hair is straight and does not belong to us, they want it. I would bet you my last cent that you will not find a Brazilian woman or an Indian one with African hair on her head.
If this is an attack at all, it is not on African women, but on a mentality evinced by all of us, which state of mind confronts you everywhere you go in this country and in almost every sphere of our lives.

Imagine you were from somewhere else in the world and you were blindfolded and deposited in any South African bookshop, you would not conclude that the majority in our population are African and that they speak nine different languages. The books, magazines and newspapers that invite your attention are almost all in English and most are from foreign lands.

If you were from Mars and you were to be dumped into a hotel room in South Africa and you scroll through our television channels, you would not conclude that the majority among our citizens are black and speak different languages.

Apart from news bulletins and an occasional drama, most of the material on television, especially dramas and films, are from elsewhere in the world. Again it does not seem to matter to us whether it is trash or not, as long as it is from elsewhere, we would lap it up.

It is the same mindset that would allow us to insult ourselves by declaring, in our own country, a week or month during which we would play more of our music on our radio stations. You will not encounter such a thing anywhere else in the world – the Japanese or Americans or British would not insult themselves like that. They are simply not wired to insult themselves in that fashion. It is just common sense that their own music would dominate the airwaves; they don’t even have to discuss it. They just know it.

To the extent that African hair has disappeared from the heads of our women, our music struggles to be heard on our airways and we have almost no books on the shelves of our bookshops and libraries, so would the arts struggle to flourish in our country. And thus the contribution of the arts to our economic endeavours would be puny.

That’s the more regrettable because the arts do not only contribute to the economic endeavours of a society in direct and physical ways, but also play a critical role towards shaping the cultural and spiritual milieu within which every society functions. The arts could be part of the invisible clue that binds a society together, ensuring that we are not just a collection of individuals occupying a certain geographic space, but people that do feel they belong together.

In other words, the arts could play an important role in determining whether we are a nation or not. That could in turn determine the way we play sport, observe national days, protect our country against external threats and participate in our economic life. Paradoxically, the arts might also play a role in curing some of the ills and fault lines that make South Africa such a paradise for the arts.

In addition to rewiring our heads so that we may better appreciate the richness of our environment for the arts, and whet our appetite for the elephant right in front of us, we may need to attend to a few structural things which we inherited from our inglorious past.

One of these relates to the ownership of the publishing, management and distribution of everything in the world of the arts. Whether you talk about the publishing of books, music and their distribution, the ownership and management of venues, there is an unhealthy pattern that tends to disadvantage large sections of our population.

The arts would not flourish under such circumstances. It might be necessary for the public sector to play a much bigger role in this space, especially the building, ownership and management of facilities that are crucial for the advancement of the arts.

Secondly, there is a need to tackle the language structural barrier that prevents the vast majority of our citizens from fully participating in the arts, either as artists or as consumers of the arts. Considering the generally accepted notion that most of us dream in our mother tongue and that language is the carrier of our mores, values, cultures and traditions, the marginalization of most South African languages is a tragedy for the arts.

In addition to the measures that the state might take to promote and protect our languages, the various ethnic groups, without resorting to any form of ethnic chauvinism, need to be proactive in this regard. Failure to do this would only be at the detriment of the arts. And our country would be the poorer for it.

Yes, in the last twenty years of democracy, we have nibbled a bit of the elephant in front of us, but we are still to eat it seriously. We have the potential to be a world-class Mecca for the arts. But it seems we still have to recognize the potential we have.

Mosibudi Mangena

CLOSING REMARKS AT THE MISTRA NATION FORMATION AND SOCIAL COHESION REPORT PRESENTATION ON 14/08/2014, NELSON MANDELA CENTRE OF MEMORY, JHB.

By

Mosibudi Mangena

May I, right at the outset, observe that this report might rank amongst the most important Mistra would ever produce. This because all the others, whether they deal with our football or the role of platinum group metals or any other interesting subject, are only meaningful pursuits provided we have a functioning country and a peaceful, stable and cohesive society. I suppose if we were where Somalia or Libya or Iraq is today, we would be preoccupied with more frightening issues than what we are dealing with now. The fact that we are engaged in what we are doing today, suggests that we do in fact still have political stability. And that is a big positive.
In the South African political and social milieu, issues of the national question, nation formation and social cohesion are contentious and difficult, due, in no small measure, to our inglorious past. It is not that there are any reasonable people or groups in South Africa that would dispute the need for nation formation and social cohesion; it is more about the different starting points and vantage positions that give us headaches.
This report navigates these issues with great skill and depth, and one hopes that the report will generate debates and conversations that would take us forward in a purposeful and deliberate manner. In particular, it must contribute towards the taking of measures that change what people see, hear, feel and perceive in their everyday living, for it is not only what is in a policy, in a paper, in a book on the shelf that determines these issues, but what the people, in their daily lives, feel. Those among us who understand what is in a policy, in a document or a book, like this report, and have the power, must act in such a way that others in society can see and feel differently. When all is said and done, it is the citizens of South Africa, as a whole, who will determine whether we do form a nation or not; whether we are cohesive or not, and whether that happy situation will endure or not.
But what do we see in South Africa as we just go about the business of living our daily lives? We see townships, informal settlements and villages in which only black people live; we see suburbs in which white people and blacks with money stay. Do these different “peoples” feel they belong together? Is there any sense of solidarity among them? Do we expect any form of social cohesion among them? Don’t these different “peoples” see themselves as us and them? What is more, are we not negating the interests of social cohesion by continuing with the racial human settlements spatial patterns of the past? As we sit here today, can we see in the near future, racially desegregated townships and villages? The laws enforcing such segregation are long gone, but do we have any inkling that the segregation would ever disappear?
We see black people in taxis, buses and trains; we see whites mainly in cars as a mode of their transport. But of course there are also some blacks in cars, but the point is that the taxi, the bus and the train are more associated with black transportation. We see mainly white people at airports and in the airplanes. In fact, on flights and at airports in South Africa, just as is the case in some elite shopping malls, you might think that whites are the majority in the population of South Africa.
We see at sporting events such as soccer, rugby, cricket and others, as well as the composition of the teams at club, provincial and national levels, the resemblance of the same patterns. There are oddities here and there which we could wish were rather the norm.
We see mostly blacks at the observance of national days, with the few whites being those that are strongly affiliated to political parties. The most recent of these was Women’s Day on Saturday last week where the pattern was exactly as expected. One would have thought that the issues attending Women’s Day touch the lives of all women equally.
This report suggests that perhaps the manner, style and form that the observance of national days take, might need to be relooked. That’s indeed a worthwhile suggestion, considering the potential of national days to contribute towards nation formation and social cohesion.
It appears in the last twenty years of democracy, we have failed to use the educational infrastructure and school children to promote social cohesion, and particularly the utilization of school children in this regard. If the form of observance was relooked, depolarized in such a manner that most are comfortable; i.e. not in the form of rallies at stadia addressed by political parties, then we might have made some progress in this regard.
Twenty years of interaction by school children in an integrated fashion could not only have oriented a lot of children and young adults, but through them we could have touched a lot of adults as well.
If that was to be coupled with the now mooted intention to have all school children learning an African language, we would enhance mutual interaction and understanding among the heirs of our future and improve chances of a much more cohesive society. This is assuming that all other things are taken care of, such as the quality of public education to afford all our children a fair shot at a meaningful future.
We see black people, as workers or as communities toyi-toying and burning or destroying things every day, which suggest that there is no sense of ownership of the country and its assets. We frequently hear them denouncing white monopoly capital as their enemy and the architect of their problems. The protests are such a common occurrence that they have become a common feature of our news bulletins.
One of the fundamental factors responsible for what we see and hear, is the deep and glaring economic inequalities, which, to make matters worse, take racial lines and bring into memory, the oppression of the past. Apart from a few blacks who have seen their economic fortunes rise in the democratic era, we have not, as a country, done too well in this regard. The stubborn levels of poverty are worrying. The report engages with this aspect of our lives quite seriously.

Despite the unsatisfactory picture that produces what we see and hear, there is an unmistakable aspiration on our part, at different levels, to move towards better social cohesion. The state has produced several policy positions in this regard and introduced some programmes. In their eagerness to foster a sense of unity and togetherness, some in our midst have even promoted the notion of us being a rainbow nation, unfortunate as such a characterization might be. Apart from the rainbow being ephemeral and transient, its colours never merge. Does that suggest that we will remain separate colours for eternity?
There is no doubt that the state, as one of the most powerful forces in our lives, should take the lead in our endeavours to form a nation and foster social cohesion. This report can make a contribution in that regard, first at the level of debates, and then at the level of pointing the way on what needs to be done. That means that ways must be found to insert in our national discourse at state level, at universities and other such suitable forums, the contents of this report.
But for the state to provide this leadership, it must have the respect of the citizens. The situation where elements of the state are seen to be corrupt or imploding, as is the case with NPA presently, does not help.

Mosibudi Mangena
14/08/2014