Preparing Ourselves for Freedom: Culture and the ANC Constitutional Guidelines

Abstract

We all know where South Africa is, but we do not yet know what it is. Ours is the privileged generation that will make that discovery, if the apertures in our eyes are wide enough. The problem is whether we have sufficient cultural imagination to grasp the rich texture of the free and united South Africa that we have done so much to bring about; can we say that we have begun to grasp the full dimensions of the new country that is struggling to give birth to itself, or are we still trapped in the multiple ghettos of the apartheid imagination? Are we ready for freedom, or do we prefer to be angry victims?1 The first proposition I make-and I do so fully aware of the fact that we are totally against censorship and for free speech-is that we should ban ourselves from saying that culture is a weapon of struggle. I suggest a period of, say, five years. Allow me, as someone who has for many years been arguing precisely that art should be seen as an instrument of struggle, to explain why suddenly this affirmation seems not only banal and devoid of real content, but actually wrong and potentially harmful. It is not a question of separating art and politics, which no one can do, but of avoiding a shallow and forced relationship between the two. In the first place, repeated incantation of the phrase results in an impoverishment of our art. Instead of getting real criticism, we get solidarity criticism. Our artists are not pushed to improve the quality of their work; it is enough that it be politically correct. The more fists and spears and guns, the better. The range of themes is narrowed down so much that all that is funny or curious or genuinely tragic in the world is extruded. Ambiguity and contradiction are completely shut out, and the only conflict permitted is that between the old and the new, as if there were only bad in the past and only good in the future. If one of us had the imagination of the Russian novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, and wrote And Quiet Flows the Tugela, the central figure would not be a member of UDF (United Democratic Front) or Cosatu (Congress of South African Trade