The power of the arts

WHOEVER said art changes people and people change the world was absolutely right, and there is abundant evidence to support it. The story of two South Africans and the power of their art to transform come to mind immediately, not least because the death last weekend of Athol Fugard has led to an avalanche of tributes.

First, the stellar Miriam Makeba, who performed in Trinidad when I was a child. My mother came home from her show excited about the transcendental musical experience she had had and about the story of apartheid in South Africa, of which we were till then unaware. Amazingly, Makeba was married to the equally beautiful Trinidadian Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) who was also a mystery to us. Makeba was an exile from her country and she spoke a language that required a click that non-speakers could seldom produce. She toured the world using her music to inform people and garner support for oppressed black South Africans.

My mother taught me the spelling and meaning of “apartheid,” and I never forgot, that she tapped out the rhythm of the songs; they too remain with me. We learned nothing about the travails of apartheid South Africa or Nelson Mandela at school, but that one vicarious artistic experience had been a multifaceted education and marked the early shaping of my political conscience.

In Britain, which had strong connections with the South African state, the wrongs or rights of how they managed their affairs was not of much concern to the general public, mainly because they had no way of knowing either in the early 1960s. But by the mid-late '60s, the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) had gathered steam and demanded that the British government, the main supplier of arms to South Africa, boycott the regime.

It became a very public affair when the white minority government in neighbouring Southern Rhodesia unilaterally declared independence from Britain and the AAM joined its anti-apartheid struggle with the cause of the disenfranchised black majority in what was to become Zimbabwe. At that time, too, student rebellion was sweeping across the world and the AAM attracted new support from young people. The free Nelson Mandela campaign in London started in earnest then. He had been arrested and jailed in 1962 and at the famous Rivonia Trials had received a life sentence.

Then in 1973, Athol Fugard burst onto the international stage. A white playwright, novelist, actor and director, he is widely regarded as South Africa's greatest playwright. In the 1980s Time magazine acclaimed him as "the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world."

According to Wikipedia, he had published more than 30 plays by the time he died. In his lifetime Fugard moved the anti-apartheid struggle to centre stage, literally, and won over many, many more hearts and minds through his art than through politics and controversial economic sanctions.

To see his drama, full of superb acting, humour, irony, and music, while exposing the barbarity of his own country, put that gross offence on the political, cultural and artistic map. Sizwe Banzi is Dead, considered the outstanding theatre production of the 1970s, took London by storm. The avant-garde Royal Court Theatre where it opened in 1973 to rave reviews was booked out for the entire duration of the run, then it moved to New York for an equally successful run. It was written with the also much admired black South African actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona and had debuted in Cape Town a year earlier.

I remember the lines of people entering the theatre, the anticipation and sense of having experienced something extraordinary that uplifted the spirit and let everyone float out of the theatre on a high. The play revealed the dehumanisation of black South Africans in their own land, their lives governed by a pass book and laws that limited their very existence. Yet, the oppressed came to realise that they owned themselves and claimed their identities and their dignity.

Fugard used drama subtly to protest forcefully against his government and against what he believed to be morally wrong. His plays used sympathetic characters and portrayed everyday situations to make audiences think about their own society. He won audiences over everywhere. Many reruns and new plays and successes followed over the years and consolidated the message that helped achieve opprobrium and myriad boycotts against South Africa and eventually precipitate the downfall of the regime.

The South African government always knew how powerful the mixed-racial artistic presentations of Fugard, Kani and Ntshona were and they were regularly harassed. But the human spirit can defeat attempts to break it. Lest we forget, books and writing kept imprisoned Mandela sane. He secretly began writing what would become his bestselling first book Long Walk to Freedom. In 1994, the same year he became president of South Africa, he published it.