I have a little bone to pick with the person that convinced our leaders that the only way we can celebrate and commemorate significant days is through song and dance and a few speeches that hardly get listened to. Freedom is on my mind as I write this. The concept of a Freedom Day, to be specific. The awkwardness with which we celebrate this day.
The manner in which we seem to tiptoe around the fact that what we call Freedom Day is, in essence, centred on the end of the apartheid regime and not so much the attaining of freedom itself. Let me leave the politics of it to the political analysts and focus on the things I know. Art. The art of celebration, the culture of celebration and the often missed opportunity to create new art with each celebratory milestone.
We seriously need to up our celebrations game. The whole full-stadium-gathering-with- speeches-and-music pony has been prancing for two decades and is, frankly, looking and sounding tired.
It’s baffling, really, that this nation that boasts an extra-long list of internationally acclaimed artistry has not figured out a way to incorporate the full range of our artistic expression spectrum into how we observe days of national importance.
At this rate we’re in some “been to one, you’ve been to them all” trap. We’re stuck in a worn-out speech and song formula that says we don’t know how to curate our celebrations. Or perhaps we do not even see that curating these significant events is necessary.
I have always maintained that we are terrible record keepers and even worse storytellers. Year after year, we miss a beautiful opportunity to tell the story of our nation’s painful journey to freedom.
This is something we could get right if we understood that our national days cannot be celebrated or commemorated in isolation from the full story of our painful past. We need to acknowledge that we got to Freedom Day because important events like August 9,1956 in Pretoria, June 16, 1976 in Soweto and March 21, 1960 in Sharpeville happened.
We ought to tell not just the prominent stories in our history book but also bring attention to the many little stories of unsung and forgotten heroes who helped us attain this freedom we now celebrate every year in April.
I remember the excitement with which I looked forward to the 20th anniversary celebrations of our democracy. I allowed my imagination to go everywhere possible. I pictured all manner of artistic celebration being activated for this prize moment.
Special gallery installations, radio dramas across all public and community stations, freedom fashion projects, children’s competitions, books, animation, choral projects I get tired just thinking of it all even after the fact.
I was dreaming all this up naively because, silly me, I really believed that someone in a high office understood that the nation-building project is an ongoing one.
That the social cohesion that eludes us so cannot be achieved without the multipurpose tool that is art. We have, unfortunately, trivialised the arts and have continued to belittle its importance in shaping us as a nation. So when it is time for us to use art as a balm to heal us, or a bridge to help us find each other, we resort only to a predicable line up of music and speeches without much thought of what else could have been employed in acknowledging the national significance of such events.
Art is the most diverse application we can rely on when it’s time to tell important stories. It affords us the options to evoke laughter, tears and deep reflection while at the same time giving us space to archive what we value as a people. Why, then, have we been leaning on the lazy option?
The year 2016 was a truly special one, where we found ourselves celebrating three big historically significant milestones.
Again, like we did in 2014 when we failed to come up with a grand celebration programme for the freedom project, we let the year pass without giving South Africa anything to remember.
It was the year we celebrated 20 years of our constitution, 40 years of the youth uprisings of 1976, and 60 years of the landmark Women’s March to the apartheid seat of government in Pretoria. Twenty, 40, 60 sounds like a dream to curate. Imagine the possibilities.
If I were a lecturer at an art institute, I would have looked for ways to incorporate that into the year’s training programme. Picture the murals and sculptures that young artists across the country would have come up with. Imagine the songs from all our music schools. Perhaps the drama schools could have given us great scripts for film and stage.
The literary world would have gifted us new books on all three events. And television content makers would have been battling to choose which of the many stories to churn out in recognition of the many heroes involved.
There is a North Sotho saying that goes “Nkabe ke ngwan’a morago”, which speaks to the regret that we find ourselves in when hindsight can’t be of much help when the moment is long past.
The 24-year-old mistake has been to think that art is only necessary for recreational purposes. We as artists have allowed ourselves to be used as parade puppies in spaces created to make us begging praise-singers. We have forgotten the power of our art and keep on giving up our freedom to shake things up with our craft. We have also never bothered with the national story project away from the national days. We have failed to weave the South African journey to democracy into the regular daily content we create.
We should not be shocked or disappointed when the youth switch off from whatever attempts we make to get them interested even in Youth Day events. In a time when being cool seems to be the fashionable way, we have failed dismally to make art the driver of the national identity and values project. We have failed to encourage and inspire young artists to be more like Miriam Makeba, Gibson Kente and Hugh Masekela.
This generation of artists understood that art was not something to be separated from the national journey. Where today is the national theatre project that will deliver a new Sarafina and Bopha? How do we suppose we are going to find a way to bring the country to celebrate these days together without having them look like “blacks only” events?
We need to start curating our programme for the national calendar instead of dealing with these days like events where all we worry about are regular items like venue, accreditation, entertainment and catering.
I want to see young artists competing to produce the best portrait of Albertina Sisulu. Or young music scholars producing albums dedicated to the class of 1976. Schools could submit essay competitions on what freedom means to young ones and compile these into special publications.
And while we are at it, it’d be lovely, too, if young film-makers got sent out to document the neglected chapters of the June 16 story. Perhaps broadcasters need to come to the party with relevant content around national days beyond newsroom programming. Our celebrations are predictable, dry and lacking in imagination.
I know I’ll be back with the same lament on Youth Day, Women’s Day and Heritage Day. We will watch Sarafina again on June 16 and lament the fact that we have still not created a film on those historic Soweto uprisings.
We will also watch a special broadcast on television that will focus on political party messages and bore many of us until we change channels. Advertisers will come up with a few cringe-worthy online campaigns. Isidingo will add one line to its script about Workers Day in their May 1 episode and for that, SABC3 will pat itself on the back. Then come next year, we will start again where we left off this year. Buses. Stadiums. Speeches. A line-up of lucky musicians.
* Masebe is an award-winning actor, a creator and producer of film and television content.