| Music mines its own business |
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(There`s a goldmine under my stoep) Cape Town's township suburbs are a goldmine of skills and opportunities, but to effectively mine them in a city as divided as Cape Town - and create broad economic empowerment - you have to unpick the division created by apartheid. The Sunday Afternoon Spends are part of the unpicking process. Spends co-producer Iain Harris writes. Those apartheid engineers were geniuses, and nowhere was their skill more deftly implemented than in Cape Town. It was established by the Dutch colonisers as the last outpost, and to this day it remains the last outpost: the slowest city to see political change, the slowest in creating social cohesion. To undo what Verwoerd's team created requires even greater skill in social engineering. Creation is more difficult than destruction, as humanity constantly reminds us, but it is not only possible, it is inevitable. The Sunday Afternoon Spends were created three years ago by Joe Mthimka. Joe is from Gugs, a soccer coach, a music collector, a music promoter. For the longest time Joe has been Mr Jazz in Gugs. Everybody, from Ghetto Maffin's MC Suga living around the corner on NY101, to Mavo the singer from Khayelitsha's Maverick, Pule in Tamboerskloof and Helen the human rights lawyer in the city centre, knows Joe. He conceived of the Spends as a means of paying tribute to our musical past. Back in the 60s, musicians from all parts of the city would gather at Ikwezi in Gugs on Sundays, to jam, to talk, to share. Abdullah Ibrahim calls it a `wachtung', this is what people would do in Senegal. Just come together and talk. Talk about life, talk about dreams. It's what the exiles would do in America, Ibrahim, Masekela and those gents would gather in New York and hold wachtungs. It was a form of therapy. The same thing was happening back here meanwhile. Back then, they called them spends. "They would be breaking a zillion laws to be there," tells Joe. "Like this guy Darryl Andrews, the guitar playing professor at UCT, he used to walk from the station to Ikwezi. In Gugs man! You needed all sorts of permission to be in the township if you weren't from the township. But they used to do it. They would all come here." So on the one hand the gigs celebrate our collective heritage, celebrate our collective dreams and our triumph over adversity. But on the other hand they are a means of connecting people that otherwise wouldn't normally connect. Music Mining business opportunities Which is the point of the Spends. We are trying as producers to create a platform that uses music to bring people together. And in doing so forging relationships across the city's divides. The music is actually the sideshow - they key is people coming together and finding commonality, connecting, sharing breaking down prejudice. For example, an Italian who runs a business incubator in Rome was at the first gig, so was a Langa entrepreneur with a vision for a chain of e-spazas in Langa, Gugs and Khayelitsha and a Woodstock entrepreneur thinking in the digital realm. The three met, the idea came up, and now the gents are exploring the possibility together. That is the point - and the success - of events like this. Music, expression as a means of mining business opportunities. Politics, economics, culture - the holy trinity has to be that, a trinity. What happens though is that culture works in isolation, expression is seen as a luxury, rather than a necessity. In fact, it is the starting point, and the impetus for creating economic growth. Look at the Pan-African festival of music in Brazzaville, Congo, FESPAM, its debut marked the end of civil war, united Brazza in a way that was never before possible and has since its inception contributed greatly to the economy of the city. The Coffee Beans Route in Kalkfontein is another example, a music tour of a small township on the margins of the city that uses expression as its starting point and every week creates proper income for ten people, and has succeeded in creating a bridge between Kalkfontein, the city centre and other parts of the world. The project has received donations of digital cameras, sporting equipment and skills, and, as it grows, stimulates the economy of the area and is the impetus for a breadth of opportunity outside of tourism. Cape Town's townships constitute more than half the population of the city. It is full of people with skills that need to be linked to the formal economy. It is full of ideas that can be turned into money. It is, in short, a goldmine, that over the over the next decade will be revealed as such. And the Sunday Afternoon Spends, and further such projects centering around expression, are the miners in a new economic age. Originally published in the Mail and Guardian |
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