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A festival should be a praise song for a city, its people and its leaders. It should elevate a city politically, culturally and ecomonically. Can the Cape Town Festival be anything more than just another nursery rhyme? By Iain Harris In 1999 the One City Many Cultures festival debuted with grand excitement. The city had been waiting a long time. The people were ready. The musicians and dancers, actors and sculptors, painters and poets, activists and businesspeople were fired up. The Cape Times gave itself over completely as the medium of the festival. And Ryland Fisher's vision of a festival that reconnected a divided city was a dazzling success. It was a Movement in Cape Town. And it marked the beginning of a city aspiring to be itself, no longer content with living in the shadow of the famous mountain and pretending to be from somewhere else. But a city can only be as united as its governance. And Cape Town City's administration since the post-festival 1999 elections has been an unfortunate joke. It's been so bad that for years you haven't been able to see the political faces for the rotten eggs on them. Kortbroek, ou Sorry Marais, Smokkel… if the gents at the top can't set the model, what is the city going to follow? And so with internal conflict bringing the city administration to a standstill, the One City Many Cultures initiative quickly found itself in a corner. It was re-branded the Cape Town Festival. The city administration wanted to plug its own political agenda but wasn't quite sure what that agenda was. So they simply meddled. They cut the budget. The festival had to fight to get it. Each subsequent year the festival was left with a begging bowl, waiting until the very last possible moment for the city elders to half-fill it. It was a waiting game that stripped the festival of dignity. How could its leaders succeed when the core funding would be confirmed so late it was impossible to mobilise and market a decent scale of festival? And how, in the context of such faithlesness, to woo the corporate world, whose cash was so desperately needed? Until you have the city money, business would say, what guarentees are there that there will be any festival at all? In these conditions how can you possibly create a festival that can have social impact? In spite of having to work from such dirty trenches, the people who held it together since Ryland Fisher have shown the kind of commitment to the city that is missing from the city elders. It's a great tribute to beautiful people like Zayd Minty, Shamila Rahim, Carl Johnson, Beryl Eichenberger, Candice (surname check), and the fine men at Making Music Productions, Chris de Vries and Steve Gordon, that the festival has survived to this point. None of them have been adequately rewarded for their contribution to the city's development, but they've achieved admirably in the face of terrific adversity. BUSINESS, POLITICS AND CAKE One two skip a few ninety nine a hundred. And so we reach the 5th edition of the Cape Town Festival (the year 2001 was skipped largely due to the nonsense sketched above), and we welcome a whole new leadership team and a new spin on an old vision. How will this one be any different? The difference is not so much in the vision of the festival. The goals remain much the same: to create platforms for local expression and talent, to create short term employment, to unite a city in diversity, and to use the arts to inspire the people with hope. Ultimately, to elevate a city. What's really different this year is that for the first time since its debut, the festival is being run like a business - by a businessman. His name is Yusuf Ganef, and he's an impressive character. At first it seemed a little suspicious. Why did the board bring in a Joburg based Capetonion as CEO, someone obviously disconnected from Cape Town moves? The answer is that the festival needs someone to present a business face to the corporate world. Someone who can bridge the arts and business worlds. With his experience producing the Loerie awards, his work with major sponsors, and his big clever Nokia Communicator, he brings the sort of aesthetic, strategic thinking and engineroom fire that the corporate world identifies with - and that the festival has been missing. These qualities will, we all hope, allow the festival to make giant leaps forward. Ganef's role is is about bringing the sum of the city's parts together: creating partnerships, packaging, managing and building the brand, and enjoying every minute of it. Leaving the cultural producers to produce the culture. It's a separation of the festival's business and arts departments that could go a long way to allowing us, as Ganef puts it (without the pomp and arrogance of the famous French aunty that oringally coined the phrase), to have our cake and eat it. TWO STEP GOVERNMENT GOOSE STEP The business end might be in the bag with Ganef, but the meeting of business and arts is not the whole truth. A festival needs a reason to exist, and the Cape Town Festival remains a festival without a clear function. We can talk grandly of creating platforms to unleash local talent, of job creation and making Cape Town the cultural hub of the continent. But what exactly are we celebrating here? The great Pan-African festivals are linked to celebrations of independence, to national identity and socio-economic elevation on all fronts. The Cape Town festival seems a little displaced in time and space. It's not enough just to say a city needs a festival. The truth is, a festival needs a city. There was a crowning moment at the 2001 Fespam festival in Congo-Brazzaville (Fespam is the Pan-African Festival of Art and Spectacle that takes place every two years). On the closing night, President Sassou `n Guesso got up on stage and danced with the delightful Madame de la Culture. It happened spontaneously, and it revealed a humanity that was both moving and enlightning. The president may relish in terrific displays of power with tanks and helicopters and snipers conspicuously observing his every move. But this simple gesture broke through the pretence of power to reveal a human - and compassionate - profile. Fespam had the support not only of the City of Brazza, it had the buy-in of the nation. And therein lay its tremendous success. The city, the nation, the leaders, the businesses, the people -the festival had the absolute support of the city. Its difficult to imagine our city elders using the Cape Town festival for anything more than photo opportunities. And this is the greatest hole in the festival: the lack of participation by all political structures, and hence the lack of a unified political and social vision. To extract and adapt Shaka's principles, a festival should be a praise song for the city, its people and its leaders. The leaders should be at the helm of the festival, leading the way - not trying to derail it. Until we have our own leaders up there, dancing, participating, advocating the festival, we have an incomplete trilogy. We have the culture and the economics - but without the political realm, who is there to lead the people? THE TRILOGY `Cape Town Festival' needs to become a verb. It needs to suggest advancement, progress, action. The people need to know why there's a festival. They need a reason to celebrate. At present it is an event that sneaks up on the public by surprise and disappears once more into obscurity. It is transient. Perhaps irrelevant. It can be the significant Pan-African event Ganef foresees and become a landmark not only for Cape Town but for the country. For our society to elevate itself, politics, economics and culture need to converge. As Fespam, Masa, Ziff - and to some extent the North Sea Jazz Festival Cape Town - illustrate, culture is central to the creation of stability and wealth. And this can only be achieved in Cape Town when the city structures, the corporate world and the arts are working in partnership toward a common goal. 2004 is the Movement in Cape Town. A collective consciousness mobilising itself in elevation of the city. This story originally appeared in Rootz Magazine. |
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