Bite your ministerial lip and help others to say their piece
Nathi Mthethwa has a chance at redemption with arts portfolio, writes Mike van Graan
IF ours were a more established democracy — like some of those in Latin America or parts of Europe — it is likely that Nathi Mthethwa would no longer be in the cabinet.
On his watch as the minister of police, his forces massacred 34 striking miners, killed more protestors than during the tenure of any other post-1994 police minister and presided over the deaths of numerous persons in detention.
Ordinarily, he would have been fired by a president for whom it would have been politically (if not morally) intolerable to maintain such a minister. Or he would have fallen on his own sword in accordance with democratic tradition and resigned because of his failure to uphold his ministerial oath to defend the country’s constitution.
But South Africa is still a society in transition. On the one hand, we boast democratic institutions premised on one set of cultural values and ideas, but on the other, they allow leaders to emerge who exercise a more feudal culture of power and patronage.
Thus is it possible for loyalty to be rewarded and power to be exercised through appointments to cabinet positions.
Many in the arts and culture sector perpetuate this patronage model by welcoming Mthethwa with fawning enthusiasm or selfcensoring silence.
They do so for fear of alienating the minister who is now in a position to dispense patronage in the form of positions, funds and travel opportunities.
In the process, the struggle for the democratisation of arts and culture funding, policy and practice continues in the spaces between genuflection and patronage.
Mthethwa is not the first minister to have metaphorical blood on his hands. Marthinus van Schalkwyk headed the National Party with its brutal history and yet, by all accounts, did a decent job in environmental affairs and tourism.
Nor is Mthethwa the first minister to lack an intimate knowledge of the sector for which he is now responsible. By his own admission, Trevor Manuel did not know much about finance on his appointment, yet, despite their initial skepticism, the country’s elites ultimately applauded him as a fine minister.
One of Manuel’s legacies is the National Development Plan, which the Zuma administration has adopted as our country’s foreseeable development trajectory. A major weakness of the NDP, though, is its lack of recognition of the cultural dimension of development.
This does not refer to the instrumental appropriation of the creative industries for economic growth and job creation as advocated in the previous minister’s revised white paper on arts and culture of 2013.
Rather, it is about the transversal nature of culture (values, ideas, belief systems and so on) that impacts — often adversely — on the best-laid development plans.
There is an international campaign to integrate culture into the Sustainable Development Goals, a new UN-directed global development agenda to succeed the Millennium Development Goals that expire in 2015.
Against this backdrop, as well as the importance attached to the NDP and the role that culture often plays in conflicts that impact adversely on development, the Arts and Culture Ministry requires a political leadership that can act credibly in international forums.
It also needs a leadership that can argue persuasively about the transversal importance of culture in addressing our own development challenges. Whether we have this in Mthethwa is moot, but his first statements as minister have not been particularly visionary or encouraging.
In an interview with The Times, Mthethwa mentioned that he would like to establish a “heroes acre” to memorialise our liberation strug- gle. One motivation for this is that countries all over the world have similar monuments to “characterise the soul of that country”.
But we already have Freedom Park on Salvokop in Pretoria with its Garden of Remembrance — built at a cost of more than R1-billion and
The minister should have a figurine of Andries Tatane on his desk to remind him of the right to freedom of expression
with the largest annual museum budget — that plays exactly this role.
We also honour heroes of the struggle against apartheid with the names of streets in which protestors are gunned down as they continue to agitate for the promised land of 1994. Government buildings memorialise those who led the struggle to do away with poverty. Yet, inside those very buildings, thousands of civil servants engage in corrupt activities that steal from the poor and contradict the values of past heroes whose names their buildings bear.
Statues of Nelson Mandela proliferate across the country, probably among the best symbols of the “soul of our country”. But in parliament and at the Union Buildings, where Mandela’s statues cast their daily shadow, the values and ideals he represented are contradicted, such as in the expenditure on and stubborn defence of Nkandla.
Hundreds of thousands of RDP houses — blandly designed and many poorly constructed — are monuments to the ongoing betrayal of the dignity of the majority of our citizens.
AIDS-related graves serve as grim monuments to many women, children and men who were promised a better life but cursed with a shorter one.
Human Rights Day is an annual monument to the Sharpeville atroc- ity to remind us never to repeat it, and yet our new minister of arts and culture was the political incumbent responsible for the Marikana massacre of less than two years ago.
What, then, is the point of more monuments to celebrate the noble struggle against apartheid and its leaders if the contemporary South African experience, with its rising inequality, daily exposure of corruption and killings of protestors, contradicts so much of what that struggle was about?
We do not need any more vanity projects. Rather, what the minister needs is for Rehad Desai’s documentary about Marikana, Miners Shot Down, to be looped in his office to remind him that “social cohesion” is not only about the country’s rainbow elites.
It is also for the masses of poor people who were promised that “the doors of learning and culture shall be open”, whether they have disposable income or not.
Before building new monuments, the minister should have a figurine of Andries Tatane on his desk to remind him of the right to freedom of expression guaranteed in our constitution.
He should hang on his wall art work by Zanele Muholi — whose photographs of black women in loving embrace caused a previous arts minister, Lulu Xingwana, to storm out of her exhibition.
These would remind him that his own cultural values or beliefs have nothing to do with his job to promote and defend the right of others to affirm theirs.
After his role in the security cluster defending Nkandla, Mthethwa should have paintings by Brett Murray and Ayanda Mabula exposing the genitals of politicians as metaphors for the rape of the public purse.
This would remind him that whatever his personal tastes or opinions about “derogatory art”, it is neither his role nor his right to suppress, punish or marginalise artistic expression.
In his previous role, Mthethwa was unable to rein in his charges, resulting in major contradictions of the constitution. In his current role, the minister would contravene the constitution if he attempted to rein in creative practitioners.
If it were possible for the arts and culture portfolio to offer Mthethwa any chance of redemption for what transpired on his watch as minister of police, it would require a massive shift in his consciousness — and a willingness to challenge his political principals and colleagues even to the point of alienation. I won’t be holding my breath. Van Graan is a playwright and executive director of the African Arts Institute