The Politics of South Africa's National Arts Festival: Small Engagements in the Bigger Campaign

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Periodical article

Title:	The Politics of South Africa's National Arts Festival: Small Engagements in the Bigger Campaign
Author:	Grundy, Kenneth W.
Year:	1994
Periodical:	African Affairs: The Journal of the Royal African Society
Volume:	93
Issue:	372
Period:	July
Pages:	387-409
Language:	English
Geographic term:	South Africa
Subjects:	festivals arts Politics and Government Architecture and the Arts
External link:	https://www.jstor.org/stable/723369
Abstract:	The annual National Arts Festival (NAF) in South Africa, established in Grahamstown in 1966, has blossomed into a gigantic, multidimensional enterprise. Today it comprises eleven days of theatre, music, film, cabaret, dance, mime, arts and craft exhibitions and shows and a 'winter school' of lectures and readings. In the 1980s, progressive artists sought to widen the content of the festival's offerings beyond Eurocentric forms and eventually to gain a voice and possibly control of the festival's direction and management. This paper examines attempts by the progressive arts community to transform the NAF. It describes compromises and changes in the festival worked out in the confrontations of the late 1980s and the more cooperative style that followed the February 1990 release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of antiapartheid groups. It shows that no formal resolution of differences has been worked out, but that, for the moment at least, a modus vivendi has been established between the festival and progressive artists. Notes, ref.