Throughout our country, and throughout the whole world, the winds of change are blowing strong. Many of our old ideas are being swept away and new ideas are taking their place.
In this article, Albie Sachs — a member of the ANC’s Legal Department, gives his ideas about culture. Some of us may be surprised by the things he says. They are quite different to many of our old ideas about culture and the struggle. In fact, when Comrade Albie first gave these ideas to an ANC meeting in Lusaka recently, there were many raised eyebrows! He wants to challenge us so that we will question our old ideas openly and unselfishly.
The article is long, so we have divided it into two parts. Here is the first part. You will be able to read the second part in the next issue of Learn and Teach.
We have changed Comrade Albie’s words quite a lot to make them easier for us to read. We hope that we have kept the spirit of his thoughts alive.
PART 1
We all know where South Africa is, but we do not yet know what it is. Ours is the lucky generation that will make this discovery — if we open our eyes wide enough. The problem for us is to have enough imagination to see what riches there are in the united South Africa that we have done so much to build.
For many years we have had a political programme for the future — the Freedom Charter. More recently, the ANC released the Constitutional Guidelines which gave us a basic guide to a constitution for a free and equal society. But do we have a similar kind of thinking for art and culture in the new South Africa? Do we really understand the new country and the new people that is struggling to give birth to itself? Or are our minds still trapped in the ghettoes of apartheid?
In order to help us give new energy to our thinking about culture, I want to make a few suggestions which some comrades might find shocking.
‘BANNED!’
The first suggestion I make is that our members should be banned from saying that culture is a weapon of struggle. I suggest a period of, say, five years. I make this suggestion even though I am fully aware that the ANC is totally against censorship and for free speech.
I have been arguing for many years that art is a weapon of struggle. But now it seems to me that this statement doesn’t mean anything and in fact it is wrong and may even be harmful.
In the first place, it makes our art poorer. Instead of getting real criticism, we get solidarity criticism. People do not feel free to criticise the work of our artists because it would be wrong to criticise a weapon of struggle. Therefore our artists are not pushed to improve the quality of their work. We accept that they are politically correct and so we do not criticise their work fully and honestly. The more fists and spears and guns, the better! We limit ourselves so much in our work that we no longer consider what is funny, or strange or really tragic in the world. We pretend that life is clear cut — good and bad, black and white, beautiful and ugly. The only conflict that we show is between the old and the new, as if there is only bad in the past and only good in the future.
THE GOOD AND THE BAD
If one of us wrote a story about Natal, the main person in the story would not be a member of the UDF or COSATU but a member of Inkatha. Yes, Inkatha. He or she would be opposed to change — a reactionary — but at the same time would feel the oppression of apartheid. The person would be thrown this way and that way by the conflict of emotions. When we read the story we would see all the struggles, pain and joy that a person experiences in the struggle for a new South Africa.
But instead, in our poems, in our paintings and in our theatre plays, we line up all the good people on one side and the bad ones on the other side. Sometimes we allow people from the one side to pass to the other. But we never show that there can be bad things in the good people or, even more difficult, good things in the bad people. We can tell who the good people are because they are always handsome and they know how to recite sections of the Freedom Charter or Strategy and Tactics.
A real weapon of struggle is a straightforward thing. A gun is a gun is a gun. There is no question about it. It fires in only one direction. If it fired in lots of different directions it would be useless. But art and culture have a different kind of power. Art and culture can look in many different directions at once to show us things which are hidden, the many different things of life which are not clear cut at all. That is why we cannot say that art is a weapon in the same way that a gun is a weapon.
AND WHAT ABOUT LOVE?
And what about love? We have published so many poems and stories and articles in magazines but you can count those that talk about love on the fingers of one hand. Can it be that when we join the ANC we do not make love any more? When the comrades go to bed, do they discuss the role of the white working class? Surely even the comrades whose work in the struggle means that they do not have the possibility of enjoying a love life now, must remember their past loves and dream of the loves they will have in the future.
What are we fighting for if we are not fighting for the right to enjoy all the fruits of human life — including love, and fun and tenderness and the beauty of the world? The apartheid rulers would really like us to believe that because apartheid is ugly, the whole world must be ugly as well.
ANC members are full of fun and romanticism and dreams. We enjoy and wonder at the beauties of nature and the marvels of human creation.
But if you look at our art and our writing, you would think we are living in the greyest and darkest of all worlds, completely imprisoned by apartheid. The apartheid rulers seem to haunt all our paintings, stories, poems and songs like ghosts. Everything we paint or draw or write contains the oppressors. Nothing is about us and our new way of thinking and our new way of feeling. We do not express the new culture that we are building.
A COP-FREE WORLD
Listen, in contrast, to the music of Hugh Masekela, of Abdullah Ibrahim, of Jonas Gwangwa, of Miriam Makeba. Their music is full of life and human warmth and beauty. Their music tells of a cop-free world. The new and growing spirit of our people sings clearly through them. And yet if you look at our poems or books or paintings or woodcuts, all you can see is darkness.
No one ever told Hugh or Abdullah to write their music in this way or that. No one told them that they must be progressive or committed. No one told them that they must be funny or gay. No one told them to use a strong beat so that their music could be full of hope.
Their music has all these things not because they are following the rules of progressive culture but because their music comes from inside themselves, from their own personalities and their own experiences. It comes from the people’s traditions and from the sounds of everyday life around them. Their music moves us because it tells us something lovely and lively about ourselves. Not because the words are about how to win a strike or how to blow up a petrol dump.
It pushes apartheid away, it climbs above apartheid to a place much higher, a place free of apartheid.
Our writers and painters could do the same kind of thing. They could also break away from the pain and seriousness of apartheid. They could stop trying to follow the rules of anti-apartheid culture that people (including myself, Albie Sachs) have been forcing them to follow for so many years.
Dumile, perhaps the greatest of our painters, was once asked why he did not draw scenes like the one that was taking place in front of him. This was a scene of a long line of men being marched under arrest for not having their passes in order. At that moment, a hearse drove by and the men stood still and raised their hats. “That’s what I want to draw,” he said.
A STYLE OF OUR OWN
The narrow view of culture that we have had for so long has been damaging not only to culture but also to the struggle itself. Culture is not something separate from the struggle. It is not just something we can use from time to time to mobilise and unite the people, or to prove to the world that we are civilised. Culture is us, it is who we are, how we see ourselves and the vision we have of the world. When we make the culture of liberation, we make ourselves, and re-make ourselves.
The culture of liberation is not just a question of the discipline of our organisation and the relationships between the members of the organisation. All organisations have these things. But our movement has developed a style of its own, a way of doing things and of expressing itself, a particular ANC personality.
And this ANC personality is very rich. It includes African tradition, church tradition, revolutionary socialist tradition, liberal tradition, all the languages and ways and styles of all the many communities in our country. We have black consciousness, some red consciousness (some people would call it pink consciousness these days), even green consciousness (long before the Greens existed, we had green in our flag, representing the land).
Now, because our members have been spread all over the world, we also include the cultures of all humanity. Our comrades speak Swahili and Arabic and Spanish and Portuguese arid Russian and Swedish and French and German and Chinese. Not because of Bantu Education, but through ANC Education. We are even learning Japanese.
WE SING WHEN WE STRUGGLE
Our culture, the ANC culture, is not simply a collection of a lot of separate ethnic cultures lined up side by side, or mixed together in certain quantities, like the ingredients of a cake. It has a real and living character of its own. When we sing our anthem, a religious song, with our fists raised up, we are expressing the relationship that we have built together. We sing when we struggle and we struggle when we sing. This is perhaps the greatest cultural achievement that the ANC has made. We have made all South Africans, from very different backgrounds, feel comfortable in our ranks.
This does not mean that all differences and tensions disappear when you join the organisation. We bring with us our own particular way of seeing the world, our jealousies and our fixed ideas.
But the goals and the comradeship of the struggle we have created allow us to deal with these differences. We have had debates about such things as whether to allow non-Africans onto the National Executive Committee, whether there should be corporal punishment at the Solomon Mahlangu College, and whether married women should do high kicks on stage. Today the question of women’s liberation is finally forcing itself into our thoughts and our actions, a very serious and important cultural change.
Culture is at the very centre of our movement. It is not something which we just bring out and put on the stage on ceremonial occasions and fund-raising events, or something which we use to entertain us at our meetings. If it was so, we would have no personality at other times. No, happily this is not the case. Culture is us, a.id we are people, not things waiting to be put into motion from time to time.
You can read the second part of Albie Sach’s paper in the next issue of Learn and Teach. If you would like to share your own thoughts on culture with other Learn and Teach readers, please write to us and we will try to print some of your letters.
NEW WORDS culture — art, music, poetry censorship — control over what people say or write conflict — struggle reactionary — conservative, against change, clinging to the old ways tenderness — gentleness, loving warmth romanticism — ideas of love consciousness — thinking and feeling tensions — disagreements National Executive Committee (NEC) — the highest decision making body in the ANC Solomon Mahlangu College — the ANC school in Tanzania women’s liberation — the struggle of women for freedom from oppression and for equality with men