Mthethwa minister of meh, vanilla — inaction and patriotic pandering
When Nathi Mthethwa was appointed as SA’s minister of arts and culture in 2014, the arts sector let out a collective groan. Here was a man associated with Marikana and Nkandla, a Zuma acolyte who appeared to have been “demoted” to the job from the police ministry because he didn’t defend Msholozi with adequate guile.
Things got off to a bad start when Mthethwa used a presser at the National Arts Festival to lecture artists about being too critical of the government, suggesting ominously that he didn’t think freedom of expression was always important, and encouraging everyone to adopt a parochial pseudopatriotism that would paper over the postapartheid cracks. I have referred to that speech a few times in this column, because it encapsulates precisely what one doesn’t want in an arts minister.
For five years Mthethwa has been a vanilla presence, a kind of ministerial meh, presiding over a department that is desperately in need of fixing — and doing precious little to fix it. He has continued with the blandishments about arts and social cohesion, when what he really means is that artists should all be mild propagandists for the ANC. He has failed to intervene when large sums of money have disappeared under his watch through misspending or corruption. He has been, you might say, offensively inoffensive.
So it came as no surprise to learn of his remarks at the inaugural SA Film Summit in Johannesburg. It was perhaps to be expected that the department of arts & culture, which hosted the summit, invoked the banal language of “nation-building” in its promotion of the event. But Mthethwa took it further, affirming that filmmakers should be presenting the “singular” story of “forging this path of building a nation” after 1994 to local and global audiences.
Perhaps he meant “singular” as in “unique ”— thus falling into the trap of SA exceptionalism, where many have gone before him. But I fear the minister was informing his audience that his department believes there is really only one big story to be told: a curiously revisionist success story in which there is no place for fracture or dissent.
Sharing platitudes about overcoming barriers to participation in the film industry (he skirted the issue of race and focused on “young people, women and people with disabilities”), Mthethwa at least acknowledged some of the country’s socioeconomic fault lines. Yet he doesn’t seem to want the struggles of marginalised groups, or anything that might be seen as controversial or discomfiting, to be portrayed on screen.
Where was the minister when Inxeba (The Wound) was facing effective banning and censorship? He was silent when public threats were made to the filmmakers, though he was happy to accept the plaudits when it looked like the film might be nominated for an Oscar.
And what, moreover, can the minister tell us about the outcome of a forensic investigation into moneywasting at the National Film and Video Foundation? Surely that is also undermining access to the industry and preventing films from being made? Here Mthethwa is schtum.
He will talk at any given opportunity, however, about Brics — and so it proved at the film summit. Mthethwa is
confident that these are the markets to target for SA films and that they offer exemplary
national models for film production and distribution. Oh, and Nigeria. And Rwanda, he added, veering off script. Studies have been done, he said. But Nollywood is the key competitor; Nigerians are to blame for most things, xenophobic politicians know, and this includes the fact that we are no longer “Africa’s largest audiovisual media market”.
But back to Brics, where the Big Four “know exactly what is their national interest: You go to China,” notes Mthethwa, and “you’ll get it.”
I haven’t been to China, but I do know that artistic freedom is not high on the list of state priorities. Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil is hardly a conducive environment. And as for India — there’s more than the Bollywood cliché, including space for filmmakers who don’t simply endorse the crude Hindu nationalism touted by the Narendra Modi government. Ask Vishal Bhardwaj or Hansal Mehta or Nagraj Manjule.
We don’t need “nationbuilding” films. We need nation-challenging, nation-changing films.
WHERE WAS THE MINISTER WHEN ‘INXEBA’ WAS FACING CENSORSHIP? HE WAS SILENT WHEN PUBLIC THREATS WERE MADE