Spring is Rebellious

I get an invitation from the House of Culture in Stockholm, to speak at the conference they’re having, and they’re opening an exhibition of artworks from Southern Africa; four Mozambican artists, four Angolan artists, four Zimbabwean artists, and four South African artists. And will I give the keynote address at the beginning? They mentioned something like forty-five minutes. Closer to the time I get a letter with the facts, and they say the program is getting quite full, and would you mind if your presentation is thirty minutes? Then later they say they have some wonderful speakers, could I speak for fifteen minutes? I think by the time I'm there, I'm down to five or seven minutes, and I'm feeling a little bit pissed off, because you're preparing for something and living with it, and going through your mind all the time, and planning to say this and that and the other, and if they'd said from the beginning five minutes, I would have said, fantastic, buy my airfare, I'll travel comfortably, and I'll be there. We attend the exhibition, and there’s a big crowd, mainly people from community art centers all over Sweden, and that's why so many of them are speaking. They've been invited, and they must be given their five minutes, and they've all walked past Mozambican artwork, Angolan artwork, South African artwork, Zimbabwean artwork, smiles on their faces, they all come to the platform, and they say, 'Art is a weapon of struggle. Art is an instrument of culture to bring about social change.’ And now I've got combined elements of pissed-offness, and of anger. One, that I've been my time has been reduced so much. Two, they say nothing. All, they're saying is nothing. So, I think, okay, I'm down to five minutes. I'm going to give it to you. And my first statement is, ‘We don't want your solidarity,’ and there's dead silence in the room. ‘We don't want your solidarity. We want real engagement with the art. We don't want solidarity criticism. If you like the art, say so. If you don't like the art, say so. If you don't understand, ask the artists.’ And that was a real, coming from my heart now. It is shallow and patronising. They just moved past and say, ‘Oh how lovely. How nice. How lovely. How nice. Art is a weapon and struggle. We've got to support our brothers and sisters in southern Africa fighting for freedom.’ Okay, of course we want that, but the way you give it is to engage seriously with the artwork and think about it and respond to what the artists are trying to do.

And then my second is that I'm a kind of pacifist, but I love hand grenades from time to time, and my second hand grenade was saying, ‘We must stop saying art is a weapon of struggle.’ Now I'd been saying that for ten years and supporting the idea of artists working together and being part of the struggle, and not seeing themselves as outside of the struggle, getting on with creating their beautiful worlds and their own beautiful minds for other beautiful people that they must engage with the real struggle, real people, and the art must engage with that. And we need artists in the struggle. And I was only too happy when the Department of Arts and Culture was set up under Barbara Masekela to make it something organised, not just an occasional thing to happen now and then with an occasional concert and so on. So I say that I'm totally against censorship, but for five years we must be banned from saying art is a weapon of struggle. Art is much richer, and more important than that, and can contribute more to the struggle if it's deeper and more penetrating, and deal with the contradictions; something of that kind. So, Barbara comes up to me afterwards and she says ‘Albie that was so exciting. We're having a conference on culture in Zimbabwe later in the year, you must be there to say it’. And I say that it's so hard for me to travel, I'm exhausted, and it takes a lot out of me, but I'll write a paper.

I had such fun writing that paper, and it all came from having lived in Mozambique for eleven years; being involved and engaged with artists in Mozambique, their dilemmas, their problems, the approach of Mozambicans and they wouldn't get by with some simple slogan. They had to deal with the realities of putting on a concert, having a show, painting something, and it was a vitality and an energy and diversity of views which gave me courage to speak out on cultural issues. Also, when you've lost an arm and you survived, you don't care what happens. Let them call me bourgeois, haha. I just don't care. I don't care at all. I'm going to say it, I'm going to put it out there, and I'm going to have fun, and I'm going to be a provocateur in chief, we all know where South Africa is. Do we know what South Africa is, and the theme of Preparing Ourselves for Freedom? Are we prepared for freedom? We are not. We’re prepared for fighting, we’re prepared for challenge, we’re prepared to tear down apartheid, we’re prepared to have a new constitutional order in South Africa, but are we prepared for freedom in our minds, in our heads? Can we engage, or will we be trapped in the ghettos of our minds, created by apartheid? 'Will the enemy be camping in our heads?' is a phrase I picked up from somewhere, dominating us so that everything we write is against the enemy, and not enough is about ourselves and our own misery, hopes, excitements, contradictions. Will we stop?

Then I discovered that it actually had produced a marvellous response. Now it's 4 February, we're going back to South Africa, and she realises that this paper can do a huge amount of good, because it's representing the ANC as people who think, who debate, who're interested in language, who have feelings of emotion and passion and a sense of humour, so different from what had been projected as blood-thirsty terrorists coming back, or as the way the counter-information did.

And now, is it right that we should stop saying 'art is a weapon of struggle,' and that's coming from inside the struggle. It's not that I dance outside the conservative liberal people and outside saying art mustn't have anything to do with politics, because politics will always paint art. So, she sends it to the Mail & Guardian, they publish extracts, and now there's a huge debate in South Africa. Papers are written on the Albie Sachs paper, and mostly critical from one point of view or the other. And Ingrid de Kok and Karen Press, both poets, they get together, and they decide to collect the papers and publish them in a book titled Spring is Rebellious, and when I read them for the first time, I must say, I was rather disappointed by the huge disconnect between English literature and what I'm saying and doing. They're in another world of ideas, following ideas, pursuing ideas, and ideas about ideas, and language about language, and just kind of not getting it. And then some would be predictably and understandably hard line saying, ‘It's okay for Albie, who are the artists here? It's Hugh Masekela, and it's Mariam Makeba and it's Abdullah Ibrahim, and they’re famous. They're making it.’ But the theme I was projecting with them wasn't the theme of their success, it was the theme of the huge amount they were doing for liberation, singing about love, drama, loss, people, personalities, the music that they're playing was music to create a different energy. It was very powerful, very South African and very for the people, and it wasn't based on slogans, and neither musical slogans, in terms of musical formations, nor word slogans. And Miriam’s singing was such an overt, strong expression of South African personality through the voice of an African woman who's got a wonderful means of projection and wonderful crowd connection. And that's the point I'm getting at. It's something that they created, a genre that drew on musical forms from throughout the world, but very South African in origin, very African in terms of sound and modulation, but using the trumpet and using the piano and using other instruments and the voice to project something a kind of new amalgam, a new fusion, a new South Africanity that's powerful, and that's the point that I'm making, and that's what we needed in our literature, in our poetry. The musicians were ahead of us. I'd said often before our jazz musicians wrote our constitution in music before we always wrote it in words. And that's the kind of theme that I'm trying to get at.