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Editor’s Note May 2007
This month we talk of festivals as the country has seen a number of them being staged. The Harare International Festival
of the Arts is running under the theme its show time. Only last week, the City of Queens and Kings was host to the Umthwakazi Arts Festival.
I happen to see festivals as a celebration of the milestones that we would have traveled in the arts. The arts are
an important component of our culture and they play a pivotal role in the revival of culture. It is therefore unfortunate
that some festivals in the country are dying or have died because of various constraints. Only in December 2006, the Ibumba
festival organized by Siyaya Arts was cancelled because of financial and other constraints.
The death of festivals is indeed tragic at a time where there should be room for more festivals in the country so
that artists get to expose their talent and also meet useful contacts. This is particularly important at a time such as this
when there is a need for the cultural industries to grow. There has been a huge debate on the inferiority of Zimbabwean products
against foreign content and festivals are rightly placed to improve Zimbabwean cultural content. This is because festivals
provide a platform for skills sharing and provide an opportunity of ascertaining how other people are producing their artistic
products.
There have been valiant efforts to conduct festivals and HIFA has made huge strides in coming up with a good festival
and they happen to be among the top 10 best festivals in the world. I am of the opinion that we need more festivals and that
cultural groups in the country should come together and host festivals. A collective effort will help and history has proved
that if peoples unite they can defeat a common enemy. This would be a noble effort and after all, festivals are about coming
together to celebrate and this is achieved by bringing different skills into the fore.
Festivals are an innovative way of attracting foreign currency as they are capable of bringing in foreign artists.
Some festivals become attractions in themselves and bring in foreigners as they would have become tourist attractions in themselves.
It is therefore imperative that initiatives such as the culture fund should support festivals. I therefore urge artists to
apply for funding and host more festivals.
If you happen to be planning a festival, please note, a good festival should see itself bringing in a number of cultural
groups into the festival and should look beyond our borders. This is necessary so as to facilitate, skills sharing. Having
a central venue always helps to create a festival atmosphere.
A festival should change the face of the city and indeed the whole country as a whole. This is important so that
it can contribute to the local economy.
So let us host festivals and change the face of the country.
On this page is Editors Notes of April,May and June 2006
From The Editor - APRIL 2006
The 27th
of March was declared by the UNESCO as World Theatre Day. In that spirit we are dedicating our site to the coverage of theatre
stories for the whole of this month. Interest in theatre has been waning over the years and standards in the craft have been
falling too.
Originally from
the western world and a Greek pastime, theatre has been with us in the city of kings ever since the elitist BADS (Bulawayo
African Drama Society) used to put up one or two shows a year at Mpopoma Hall before Independence.
However it reached dizzy heights and became accessible to a wider audience when Cont Mhlanga and his Amakhosi burst into the
scene in the early years of the country’s independence. Cont Mhlanga was the first person to create an actors monthly
salary pay slip in 1984 in the history of theater in Zimbabwe and Rhodesia
In the 1990s Amakhosi
was a near cult and it had inspired an upsurge of a lot of groups prominent among them, the Mike Sobinko led Nostalgic Actors
and Singers Association (NASA), which survives today as Siyaya under the leadership of Simon Mambazo. At that time, NASA will
always be remembered for showing a lot of creativity and promise.
But all that is
a faint echo in the past today. Siyaya is globe trotting, selling our culture to nations far and yonder; but at home the audiences
remain wondering if at all there is theatre.
If we are talking
about drama, where the word is the chief medium, we are ashamed. In the last years we have seen Raisedon Baya fight a lone
battle. Save for the few times that Thoko Zulu, Lewis Phiri and Christopher Mlalazi have appeared to disappear.
Dance has taken
center stage, but for all the frivolous reasons. Its ubiquity has left it open to prostitution by a lot of young people frustrated
by the high levels of unemployment into turning into pseudo-artists. Everyone can dance, and as much as every young girl and
boy feel they are the future of hip hop everyone thinks he or she is a dance artist. The availability of South African arts
on DVD and VHS tapes has increased this. But are they the future of the theatre?
This
month if you link to our theatre page you will find news and interviews with notable theatre practitioners and the common
man in the streets and in homes revolving around theatre. We talk to policy makers, we talk to artists themselves, we talk
to the audiences. We will not only leave it at the stage of espousing what the problems are but will move on to find out what
the solutions to the state of theatre in the country could be. If anything, we will also advocate for those changes.
We hope these
articles will provoke debate and in the course of that debate arts policy makers will be listening. We are past arrogance,
the time is gone and 2010 with the soccer extravaganza in South Africa
is fast approaching. What shall we show the world? Definitely not the kind of banal work that has come to characterize our
theatre of late. It has lost imagination and doesn’t hold the audiences. The
artist has to aspire for creativity and imagination and the desire to invent new ways of telling the story to effect.
When they come
here they would like to see where the artist works and the nature of his/her working method. They will not be interested in
the unoriginal cotton imisisi and cotton amabhetshu that we always rush to show them, but art.
Thank you. Keep in touch on amakhosi@amakhosi.org
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Editor’s Note- MAY 2006
Zimbabwean Artists Should
Unite To Lobby Government
WORLD Theatre Day is behind us now, and we still mourn the fact that is in our eyes: Arts, not theatre alone, are dying,
and it seems artist are helpless. As newspaper columnist, playwright and director, Raisedon Baya, notes we are past the quarter
mark into the year but we are yet to hear of a new play in the theatre circles (The
Sunday News, 23 April 2006).
However there is no situation that is final, if anything, change is the only constant in any society. As Cont Mhlanga,
the founder and special projects director of Amakhosi, puts it succinctly, there is no film or TV industry to talk about in
Zimbabwe, what we have are few brave individuals trying to put together an industry (see May 2006 Trends Magazine Issue).
In concurrence with Mhlanga, we note that the challenges that face the arts sector today are more than what is happening
this day. They are issues of the future in that what is happening today will pass but the future will always stare at us.
Artists in the entire country should unite to lobby the government, not only for funding but also to help come up with
a regulatory framework that will see arts grow into a recognizable profession.
Understandably artists would want funding but not regulation; but that is the source of all the problems. Artists have
to be accountable, and besides funding is not the major problem facing arts today. If at all one will imagine the money that
has been poured into arts by the donor community in the past five years, the question will always remain that funding is not
much of a problem. The question of human resources is at the heart of arts dilemma today. Accountability and discipline is
at the heart of success and this can only be achieved on the backbone of ethics, which rules and regulations can instill.
We cannot have a situation were artists continue to operate as isolated dissidents who are law unto themselves. Having artists
to be people who make their own rules, live by their own rules and break their own rules is letting them eat their cake and
still have it. Which, as the English will tell you, is impossible.
The government in 2002 came up with the Access To Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA), which is aimed
at the media industry mostly journalists. This raised a lot of outcry; but the fact still remained that there was need for
regulation in order to build the media sector into an industry.
We are not saying the government should come up with a draconian regulation that impedes free artistic expression,
but we are saying it must come up with a regulation that recognises the importance of funding artists and their work. At the
same time artists should return this gesture by being accountable and deliver quality original Zimbabwean productions. They
will be using tax payers’ money in the first place and therefore have to be accountable to the public. Is this not a
fair deal? The government and artists should come into a fair agreement that it will fund artists and it will also discipline
them if they disregard the contract they have with the public.
The mistake with the AIPPA is that the journalists were caught fast asleep and the government had to do what it could
do. Who will expect a government( a Zimbabwean one for that matter) to write a law that gives the media what it wants? Artists
should not make that mistake. They should be found to be pro-active. Like the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) they
should advocate for a document that they are carrying. I doubt if at all the government will close the door at them.
Whether that has happened anywhere else in the world is immaterial at this point.
Unity is the starting point and the dialogue and deliberations should follow culminating in a blue print for the
development of the arts industry. But more importantly, in line with the human resources, arts should attract the most intelligent
young minds that graduate from schools, colleges and varsities every year. It must harness the 85% literacy rate that this
country boosts of. The means of building an arts industry are not exhaustive but this should be one of the last frontiers
in building an arts industry in this country.
The local daily, The Chronicle, sometime reported an outcry by local artists Edith Katiji and Lwazi Tshabangu
who were saying most celebrated artists in the country hail from Bulawayo yet the “industry”
in the city is still backward compared to say Harare. The
challenge lies squarely with artists and arts administrators (if at all they exist) in Bulawayo
to take the sector to another level.
The point is that the arts sector should not be ashamed to start afresh and reconsider some issues pertaining
to their craft and the future of the sector. They must take heed of Mary Lou Cook’s assertion that, “Creativity
is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun (Mary Lou Cook,
www.creativityforlife.com)”. That is what an artist does and that is his or her life and artists in our part of the country, especially Bulawayo
artists should be prepared to start again and invent, experiment, grow, take risks, break rules, make mistakes and have fun
as they build a solid arts industry.
Editor’s Note- JUNE 2006
GOVERNMENT’S ASSAULT ON
CULTURE INDUSTRIES
They came
for the journalist, I did not complain because I was not a journalist, and the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy
Act (AIPPA) had nothing to do with me. They have come for the artists, and again I will keep silent because I am not an artist,
and the statutory instrument number 87 of 2006 has nothing to do with the food I feed my babies.
This sums up the mentality
pervasive in this country today. Hardly, do we wonder what will happen tomorrow when they come for us and there will be no
one to stand for us because they would be all gone.
We are appalled
by government’s assault on culture industries. However we are more appalled by the silence and the fear that some of
our countrymen seem to be putting up with this assault. There is no reason to be silent because an assault on cultural workers
is an assault on culture. In the Martin Luther sense, tomorrow, we will not remember what the government of Robert Mugabe
did wrong, but we will remember that Zimbabweans said nothing when it all happed. The Sunday News of 21 May 2006, in
a lead story for its Sunday Leisure reported that the new law has sent shivers among promoters. That is an article that most
of us ignored because we thought it concerned music promoters only. This is the indifference that has paralyzed this country.
What is happening in the neighbour’s home is none of my business.
The government’s
duty is to defend the freedom of expression of its citizens, not to abrogate it. In Evelyn Beatrice Hall’s selfless
words the government should be noble enough to admit that, "I disapprove of what
you say, but I will defend to death your right to say it". In the same wavelength, “In a free state, toungues too should be free” (Erasmus in The Education of Christian
Prince). This is the role of the government; to defend the constitution of this country in its entiriety, without being
selective. And to defend it to its fulness. The starting point is the freedom of expression.
In a preface to Animal Farm, George Orwell, the exciting writer of Nineteen Eighty Four notes that,
"If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." We understand that the
government hates that its shortcomings be revealed to it. But should it destroy the mirror or fix the pimples on its face?
It is our belief that it is the role of the artists and all other opinion leaders, like journalists, to help government come
to terms with its shortcomings and in a sense try to redeem them. In a country releeling under the inflation of 1034%, an
unemployment rate of 80%, where the black markert has literary stolen the thunder from licenced dealers; something must be
wrong. An artist who is silent in the face of such problems is also part of the problems. He or she should renounce the title
artist, and call himself something else. This is not all about political commitment and being subversive, but the crisis has
touched on ordinary lives, the day to day life of the people. It is issues that people talk about daily in ETs, bars, churches,
schools, colleges, homes, everywhere including in fuel and food queues.
It takes more than the fear of the prison to practice freedom of expression. It means sacrifices. If artists also
keep quiet and try to hide what is burning inside them, then they are also a threat to freedom of expression. Fireband mass
communication writer, Noam Chomsky, in Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992) notes that some of
the leaders that history has cast in black characters, Hitler’s propaganda minister, Geobbels and Stalin were in favour
of views they liked. To Chomsky, “If you're in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely
for views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech.”
In the same vein the US Supreme Court’s Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in United States v. Schwimmer
(1929) noted that, “The principle of free thought is not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the
thought we hate.”
If our government will persecute everyone who says what is contrary to what it espouses as the truth,
then it is not in favour of free speech and this belittles section 20 in our constitution.
We need that section in the constitution so that it defends the right of those with different views from ours, from the government
and from others. Highlighting the importance of the first amendment in the US
constitution, Lyle Stuart in his introduction to The Turner Diaries, sums it up this way: “No one needs a First
Amendment to write about how cute newborn babies are or to publish a recipe for stawberry shortcake. Nobody needs a First
Amendment for innocuous or popular points of view. That's point one. Point two is that the majority-you and I-must always
protect the right of a minority-even a minority of one-to express the most outrageous and offensive ideas. Only then is total
freedom of expression guaranteed.”
As artists we ask from the government that it fully guarantees us freedom of expression as enshrined in Section 20
of the constitution. We thank all the living heroes and veterans of the liberation struggle. We accept that land is one of
the reasons why this country went to war, but submit that segreagation and lack of liberties is the main reason why sons and
daughters of this country sacrificed their lives.
Like last month, we would like to appeal to artists to unite and come together aginst the worst possible scenario
as a result of this legislation. The challenge is for the artists to come together and respond to this legislation.
To us Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo (the great bull!) and all the heores and sheroes of this country are sleeping at the heroes
Acre because this freedom, the freedom to fully express themselves in which ever way, is
what they fought for. Without freedom of expression all freedoms are null and void. Without freedom to say what we think and
feel and see, other freedoms are impossible.
This is a challenge to the whole nation to think seriously about independence and its meaning. This editorial has
drawn a lot from scholars and writers because we should accept that our democracy is still young and therefore learn from
other nations and people.
As artists we waould like to let the governmemnt be aware that all freedoms have a price. In the end in Robert H.
Jacksopn’s words, “The price of freedom, or of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up
with a good deal of rubbish.” And that rubbish depends on where you stand. For recycling companies, rubbish is wealth!
As artists we are ready for the highest price of this freedom. To us it is more than politics. As cultural workers in this
country of so many tribes, we come from different cultural settings, and this therefore means putting up with other views
that we may find to be a threat to the one that we are advancing or have been brought up in. In essence, this means putting
up with views that we may disagree with: to live and let live, and that way live again.
We would like to challenge other artists to look at this as a challenge and an opportunity for unity among artists. As
we said it last month, artists should come together and lobby government for the funding of arts and cultural products. They
can only do that if they are united and come together as a union that meets regularly and discusses issues that affect their
craft. The union will also serve as a self-regulatory body as artists will come up with a code of conduct for artists. Government
laws can only be useful if they are promulgated in the wider context of artists’ input. What the artists must bear in
mind is that whatever happens to the cultural sector, the blame will be equally on them and the entire Zimbabwean community;
that seems not to care about its heritage. It will seem the artists are just milking a cow that they don’t care about. And the entire Zimbabwean community has embraced an attitude where it says as long
as I am not involved then its none of my business.
They came for the journalist,
I did not complain because I was not a journalist, and the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA) had
nothing to do with me. They have come for the artists, and again I will keep silent because I am not an artist, and the statutory
instrument number 87 of 2006 has nothing to do with the food I feed my babies.
We don’t
have to say this tomorrow simply because as Zimbabweans we have regretted a lot!
Editor’s Note- November 2006
At last things are once more starting to happen at Amakhosi
after a long painful silence. For the past three months hundreds of our regular visitors to the site either emailed us or
phoned us to find out why the site had frozen? Well we gave them a simple honest answer that nothing worth writing home about
was happening at Amakhosi. All activities had come to a stand still because of the hard economic and business environment
in Zimbabwe and the politics of marginalization
of the region in which Amakhosi operates from. Law and Order and State Security unfounded suspicions of the existence of Amakhosi
and its work in arts and culture is not helping the situation either.
All our programmes have come to a stand still because
of lack of funding to the arts and culture sector in the country. This is a country where all other sectors of the economy
enjoy substantial public funding and support except the arts and culture sector as if the rest of the country’s economy
exists in a vacuum of core and social values. Our flagship junior free performing arts training program for kids below the
ages of 16 has been suspended. Think of it, this program is the reason why Amakhosi exists. Our senior performing arts training
program at the Academy has been cut to two days a week and has lost most of its instructors because of lack of funding. Both
theater and television production had stopped. Music recording was no more. Live music concerts at TSC Center, the Amakhosi venue, were suspended.
How ever in the past weeks things started to happen
as we held on searching for alternatives. We can now tell you that the television production Amakorokoza has now got sponsorship
for 52 weeks. This means it will now be on air for the next coming year. The Bulawayo
based beer company Ingwebu has just confirmed a year long partnership deal after
their first initial 17 weeks which saw the production returning on ZTV screens on the 24th of October after it
went off air in July because of lack of funding. Television production is now a hive of activity.
On the theater front Raisedon Baya is back at the
theater rehearsing his new play while Cont Mhlanga has teamed up with Mbongeni Ngema of South Africa to produce a musical about King Mzilikazi. Styx Mhlanga and the first
year student Mandla Khabo are sourcing for eight new theater scripts to run a season of new theater plays from Zimbabwe next year. They already have three scripts in the
box and hope to have all of them by January 2007. On the music front Sanditainment run from the TSC Center by BB and Sandra
Ndebele is finally taking of with presenting live music at the center with a successful Bulawayo Queens of Music concert last
month and will have a rerun of the same this November. They have lined up many other concerts. Thembi Ngwabi the female bassist
of Amakhosikazi is in the studio recording her album at the Center and rehearsing her one woman play written by Ian Beddows
for California next year.
Yes times are hard in Zimbabwe but they will only make us harder. As you may note, there will be so much
happenings to update you on here on the site every month! Yebo kambe Umkhulu lo Msebenzi.
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