Mary Corrigall, arts journalist and Books Editor at the "Sunday Indy", kindly published an abridged extract from my new book AT LARGE: REVIEWING THE ARTS IN SOUTH AFRICA in anticipation of the official launch this week. Here is the full version - adapted from the introduction to the book.


For some years now, arts-loving South Africans have bemoaned the reduced column space allocated to arts reviews in the country’s newspapers or their online equivalents, the limited experience and knowledge base of journalists commissioned to produce arts-related stories, and a decline in the quality of arts writers’ prose (indeed, of general editing standards). This has, according to received wisdom, been accompanied by the marginalisation – or even, as both cause and effect of apparent public indifference, the parochialism – of ‘niche’ magazines, journals and websites catering to arts-oriented readerships.

 

We have (if the nationwide epidemic of rape is anything to go by) the most pathological gender relations. We have the most violent (unpoliced, unprosecuted or unimprisoned) criminals. We have the most corrupt (or inept, or indifferent) government. The most abominable wealthy-poverty gap, the most vexed legacy of racial conflict.

These are the maudlin declarations one is lured into making when the vicissitudes of life in South Africa become overwhelming. Whatever “normal” may be – and we assume there must be normality in other countries, other continents – it seems fair to claim that our collective birthright is to carry, as the title of Neil Coppen’s latest play has it, “Abnormal Loads”: loads of guilt, fear, anger, prejudice, material privation, physical suffering.