National Arts Festival: Afropocalypse Now!

Daily Maverick

3 days ago

Robin K Crigler is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and a research Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study. He is currently working on his first books, Inevitable Satirists: Histories of South African Humour, 1910-1965, and a biography of the apartheid-era satirist Casey Motsisi. His chapter on modern South African stand-up comedy appears in Izuu Nwankwọ's collection Stand-Up Comedy in Africa: Humour in Popular Languages and Media (Ibidem Press, 2022).
I think this is the year I officially became a National Arts Festival bittereinder. My first National Arts Festival was in 2016, and when I tell people that, they seem genuinely impressed (not just as an American) that I've stuck with it so long. Outside the Covid years of 2020 and 2021, I've only missed one Fest since – in 2018.
When you tell a fellow NAF veteran this, let's say, over a glühwein at the Long Table, they often wax poetic about how wonderful the festival used to be – back before the pandemic, before there was no water, before the potholes, when the robots on High Street always worked.
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I don't remember a time before the potholes and the water problems, but I get it. The festival has definitely shrunk. What happened to watching comedy at the Drill Hall? The Bowling Club? Jazz at the Dakawa Art Centre? These used to be big venues!
And while I saw my share of well-attended and even sold-out shows, there were also times when you wondered whether all the fuss was worth it.
Take my friends with Spark in the Dark Productions. They decided to do it big this year – crazy big, wildly ambitious, even. They brought 14 shows to the festival – comedy, drama, children's theatre, clowning, you name it. They raised R100,000 through a crowdfunding platform to make it happen, and they took over a whole venue – the Gymnasium – for the duration of the festival. They renamed it the SparkHub and brought a fancy LED sign.
After sinking so much time and treasure into the mission, on the very first evening of the festival, the power went out. Classic Makhanda! It was a localised power outage; it only affected the part of town around the SparkHub.
They scrambled to reschedule. Some shows, with complex lighting designs or original music, got postponed. Others soldiered bravely on with the help of portable load shedding lights. I wasn't yet in Makhanda when all this went down, but hearing about it broke my heart. The power outage continued for 24 hours. How utterly futile to squeeze water from a stone in this God-forsaken town!
And yet.
And yet, 15 minutes before Céline Tshika's Bad African was supposed to go up, with the star not knowing whether she would have to sing all her songs a cappella in the dark, the lights came back. Through the tender mercies of the Makana Local Municipality, they stayed on. But what exactly was it that those lights illuminated?
I loved everything coming out of the SparkHub this Fest (and I am biased, because I love and admire so many of the people involved over there), but I also can't stop thinking about the Market Theatre Lab's production, Afropocalypse.
I don't think I've ever seen physical theatre that thrilled and moved me as much as that piece, which takes place in an over-the-top, post-apocalyptic world. The performers are a ragged troupe of theatre-makers who protect a mysterious computer-looking thing, uGogo, which seems to be the last repository of stories on Earth. When threatened, they hide her under one of the giant canvas bags you see waste-pickers carting around Johannesburg every day in the hot sun.
The tales the actors tell are stories of overconsumption, hunger and destruction – complex metaphors for everything from apartheid to climate change.
But I found it hard to watch the performers without thinking of them as what they were in real life – a group of incredibly inventive and gifted artists who insist upon performing to a world that feels desolate, hostile and in the process of collapse.
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I thought about Makhanda, with its obvious issues, but I also thought about Newtown in central Johannesburg where the physical Market Theatre is located: a place of erstwhile hopes crushed by years of neglect, mismanagement and decay.
I thought of my own country, the US, where relative material wealth has done nothing to slow our retreat inward towards monstrous levels of anger, greed and arrogance. The forces of destruction in Makhanda and Johannesburg are only superficially distinct from the ones ravaging my home.
The hope you can take away from Afropocalypse, if there is any, is that artists will not stop making art, no matter the circumstances. Even if they're missing eyes, legs and teeth. Even if the audiences can only pay them – as they do in the show – by donating their laughter, tears and blood. The storytellers will still be there, somehow, some way.
No, it's important that we keep coming to Makhanda. Traipsing out to 'Frontier Country' with sets and costumes and bottled water and copious supplies of Med-Lemon in tow is not a ritual we can afford to discard.
Makhanda, especially in its current state, is the front line of battle between beauty and the void. Every Afropocalypse, every Raunchy Rendition and every stand-up show is a barricade against the night, a choice that we will not die alone doomscrolling in our bedrooms.
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If we must succumb, we will do it together, shoulder to shoulder – laughing and crying, things that computers cannot yet do for us.
Once you look at it like this, you realise that Makhanda might actually be the centre of the universe, donkey jokes aside. That's the energy I tried to bring as an audience member. It's the energy people like the team behind Spark in the Dark have, and it's certainly the energy the people in Afropocalypse oozed from every pore.
Fuelled by glühwein and Kaiser's kartoffels from the Village Green, the storytellers are trying to save us all. DM