This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

5th April 2008

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They were, in many ways, two exquisitely South African scenes. In the first, Vusi Mahlasela sang songs of forgiveness and joy and mourning to a multiracial – although predominantly pale – multigenerational audience. A cloudy Table Mountain presided over the occasion. It was the opening event of the Kirstenbosch summer season of outdoor concerts, and it was good. In the second, arch rocker and alternative-Afrikaner icon Karen Zoid and her band jammed with Selaelo Selota, whose acoustic guitar and lyrics fuse jazz with the music of mineworkers on the reef and traditional Pedi songs. The landscape was the same, although the weather was better: bright sunshine and blue skies. It was near the end of the Kirstenbosch season of concerts, but it was still good.

To the careful observer, however, both occasions were also replete with (specifically South African) moments of irony.

Among the repertoire of songs performed by Mahlasela was his celebrated “Silang Mabele” – based on the simple melody and lyrics of a children’s chorus that he and his young pals used to sing at meal times, it carries a deeper resonance because it is deliberately pitched as an anthem against child hunger. The Kirstenbosch crowd, their picnic baskets overflowing, sat sipping champagne and eating strawberries and chatting merrily to each other, for the most part utterly oblivious to the message in Mahlasela’s song. Who could blame them? I would probably have done likewise if I hadn’t learned about the song’s genesis about a week prior to the concert, so I could hardly claim any moral high ground. Yet there was something about the crowd’s reaction (or lack of reaction) that made me feel uncomfortable.

This discomfort, however, could be validly dismissed by another question: why, on a lazy Sunday afternoon, should people at an open-air concert in one of the most beautiful spots in Cape Town pay too much attention to the music? Isn’t it incidental to the overall experience?

At the Zoid/Selota concert, this point of view was echoed in a conversation I overheard between a middle-aged father and his twenty-something daughter. The father was clearly upset that half the people there were talking while the musicians were playing (a phenomenon that was more evident during Selota’s gentle melodies than Zoid’s frenetic performance, which was – albeit equally modulated musically – a stage-stomping, amplifier-testing affair).

“Why the hell don’t they just stay at home?” he asked. “They might as well be listening to a CD if all they want is background music.”

“That’s not the point, Dad!” replied his daughter. “It’s not that kind of concert. It’s relaxed. People can do what they want.”

Intuitively, I was on the father’s side. But, being closer in age to the daughter, I found myself trying to justify my grumpy-old-man attitude. I thought back to the Vusi Mahlasela concert of a few months prior.

The maestro went to some length to introduce and explain a number of the pieces that he performed. These included the deeply personal “River Jordan”, dedicated to Mahlasela’s late mother; “Troubador”, which deals with the reality of post-apartheid crime by recounting the mugging of struggle poet Dennis Brutus; and a cover of Bright Blue’s “Weeping”, with its devastating insights into the nightmarish thinking behind the Verwoerdian vision of segregation. The latter, instantly recognisable, had many people up on their feet, swaying and dancing, thoroughly enjoying themselves. This called to mind the odd effect that “Hope Joanna” used to have at parties – in retrospect, it seems odd that a song about apartheid South Africa was, with its upbeat tempo, such a popular dance hit.

If Eddie Grant’s approach was characterised by optimism, then Mahlasela’s musical aspiration is, wherever possible, to celebrate and affirm. He does not expect his audiences to maintain long faces or beat their breasts in despair at what has happened and what is happening in this country. Nevertheless, he does describe his work as “music that has a conscience” and has admitted to finding it disheartening that overseas audiences are often more inclined to engage with South Africa’s historical realities and current social problems than are local music fans.

One could argue that it’s easier for those in, say, the US or the UK to temporarily immerse themselves in the South African situation while they’re at a gig by a South African artist, because they don’t confront the levels of poverty, disease and crime that we face on a daily basis. In fact, the argument continues, we have the right to a certain amount of escapism; if we pay hard-earned money to be entertained and relieved of our everyday burdens, must we be reminded of how miserable things are for some other people?

I’m not one to begrudge the members of the upper-middle classes (myself included) their weekend pleasures. Putting in long hours at the office and being successful at work, spending energy on raising children and creating a home – these are admirable pursuits, and don’t merit the facile intellectual put-down, “bourgeois”. Indeed, those who choose to reward themselves by relaxing at a concert or going to a show are doing even better, supporting the arts and stimulating the economy at the same time. But, in countries such as ours, being at a certain level of income and maintaining a certain lifestyle, with certain leisure pursuits, is problematic simply because these are options denied to the great majority of one’s fellow-citizens.

Neo-liberal friends of mine shout me down when I suggest this, telling me about “invisible hands” and the long-term gains that can be achieved across all strata of society through the effective operation of a free market. But I don’t mean that “my” class is problematic in a Marxist sense. I mean, simply, that society at large benefits when people in this demographic (traditionally, in South Africa, whites – although that generalisation is increasingly inaccurate) feel uncomfortable about their position. In short, guilt can be good.

It’s destructive when all it leads to is a vague sense of helplessness. It is useful, however, when it leads to activities and forms of behaviour that contribute, in whatever way, to rectifying the grounds of guilt – not simply the habit of charitable giving, but participation in processes leading to the goal beyond that much-denuded word, “transformation”.

What does all this have to do with going to a music concert, or a theatre show, or an art exhibition? Well, for one thing it challenges us to respond more attentively. There is a common postmodern assumption that meaning resides with the consumer of a work of art rather than the producer of that work, and that this liberates consumers to respond in whatever way they choose, even if this involves indifference or insensitivity.

Roland Barthes’ seminal 1968 declaration of “the death of the author” reclaimed interpretive authority from the literati of writers and critics and gave it back to readers. This was useful at a time when cultural capital still lay in the hands of “the few” and when “the many” were excluded from institutionalised artistic expression. But the “intentional fallacy” (the notion that it is a mistake to base one’s responses to a work of art on the intentions of its creator) can, if misapplied, lead to a rather glib claim that it doesn’t matter what an artist or musician or writer is trying to achieve through his or her work. There are times when a certain form of artistic expression demands an appropriate emotional, intellectual or aesthetic response from the viewer, reader or listener.

So when Vusi Mahlasela sings a song about private suffering, endemic poverty or a pandemic disease, an appropriate response (especially from someone who is not mourning the loss of a parent, who is living comfortably above the breadline or who is not directly affected by HIV/AIDS) is a response informed by generosity of spirit and that, in some way, reflects soberly on the situation being sung about. Likewise, when Selota playfully plucks a traditional melody on his guitar, or when Zoid belts out her witty and scathing lyrics, the least we can do is pay attention – laugh, yes; dance, yes; heck, even take offence; but we’re obliged to respond in some way to their artistic convictions.

A responsibility and a privilege of great artists in any form is to move us to contemplate a particular aspect of our lives and, if necessary, to consider changing it. In turn, the consumer is tasked with remaining open to this possibility – and in South Africa’s bourgeois (for want of a better word) arts and entertainment community, that openness will often be framed by, or at least refracted through, guilt.

This needn’t result in a sadistic attempt to achieve transcendence through self-flagellation. There’s no point in denying that art and opulence have gone hand-in-hand for centuries. Artists need patrons with money to spend. So we don’t have to resort to a myopic hippiedom in which we expect pseudo-bohemian artists to offer nothing more substantial than Just Jinger’s clichéd refrain of “peace, love, more tolerance ...”; even the overt “bling” ideology of hip-hop is more realistic, and perhaps more honest, than that.

Not every artistic experience must be informed by a socio-economic or political awareness. That would just be boring. But, whether we like it or not, as long as there are South African artists producing art (to use Mahlasela’s phrase) “that has a conscience” – and we can be assured that there always will be – consumers of the arts in this country must be willing to exercise their consciences.