How do you get your paintings into South Africa's National Gallery if you're white?
Just find yourself a black alter ego
 
 by Jonathan Glancey 
"If you're a black artist and you've got an inkling of talent, you've got a red carpet rolled out in front of you right now."

This is Beezy Bailey talking. Bailey is an energetic and uninhibited South African pop and performance artist. He is cer­tainly no racist. Far from it. He even doubles as Joyce Ntobe, a black township artist whose sculptures, unlike his own paintings, have been collected by the unwitting National Gallery of South Africa, housed in a pristine neo-classical palazzo in the great sculptural shadow of Table Mountain.

Bailey believes, and dares to say, that political correctness, or what he calls "policing creativity", has played an increasingly censorious or discriminatory role in South African art and culture since Nelson Mandela became president in 1994. "We're coming out of an institutionalised racist society," he claims, "and suddenly artists are being selected on their skin colour."

Bailey created Joyce Ntobe to prove just how black-and-white official arts policy is becoming in the "rainbow nation". As the step-grandson of Sir Abe Bailey, the multimillionaire "Randlord" and chum of Cecil Rhodes, Bailey is considered politically unacceptable as an artist in the new South Africa.

"At a National Gallery reception not long ago I was introduced by the director, Marilyn Martin, to some big-shot American patrons," Bailey says. "She pointed to the collection of old masters on the walls, said, 'Beezy's grandfather donated those paintings,' turned her back on me and walked out of the room."

Bailey's artist friends, black, white and coloured (these old labels are still prevalent wherever you go in South Africa) are firmly on his side. Like him they believe that South African society is gloriously, if explosively, complex and that the post-apartheid government is wrong to promote black and tribal art over and above what it calls "Eurocentric" culture. Bailey finds it absurd that the government should be tagging artists with labels -black, white, coloured, ethnic, European -when these very labels have become ragged around the edges and the writing on them blurred. As Bailey argues, black tribespeople aren't sitting around all day wearing leopard skins and sleeping in huts: black businessmen and politicians may well turn up and take part in tribal initiation ceremonies in far-off villages, but they'll drive home in a brand new BMW with a Filofax full of down­town appointments in the glove box. This is a land of cellphones, satellite dishes and the Internet, shared by privileged blacks and whites alike. Bailey's point is that there are no clear-cut boundaries any more, or at least there needn't be if only a government that should know better would stop trying to erect them.

But why should the government know better? Or to put it another way, surely after decades of apartheid, those South Africans who have endured discrimination deserve a fair crack of the whip once firmly gripped in Whitey's hand? Marilyn Martin, while reveling in the richness and diversity of new South African art, certainly thinks so. She made a point of collecting works by black and coloured artists throughout the most brutal years of the old regime. "We still focus on black artists because there have been sins of omission; we have huge historical gaps which we're only just beginning to fill." 

Lionel Mtshali, the minister of arts, science, culture and technology, puts the case for discrimination in favour of black or tribal culture more strongly. "People got spoiled in the past. A lot of government money was spent promoting art forms that have a western background -in other words a limited audience - such as classical ballet, theatre and music. We adopted a white paper last autumn that provides declining levels of funding over three years to these art forms, through South Africa's performing-arts councils. They must find alternative, and innovative, ways of maintaining operations. We're not trying to move away entirely from western art forms; it's a question of spreading the scope of the arts and to capture audiences who were out on a limb and to tap the talent latent in disadvantaged communities."

"Lee Ping Zing" by Beezy Bailey (silkscreen)
Government cuts to western or "Eurocentric" art forms are beginning to hurt. When I went to interview Mathius Basson, playwright and outgoing artistic director at Cape Town's Nico Malan Theatre, he was packing his bags. "Very suddenly we got retrenchment letters closing the drama department down completely, after 34 years. The government's putting its money into a new National Arts Council and one thing it won't be funding is what it calls 'Eurocentric' productions."

Basson, a prominent Afrikaans director, admits that audiences have been falling off "quite radically". The night I sat, bored stiff, through a performance of a daft new lightweight opera, Sacred Bones (something to do with how too, too dreadful white hunters were in the days of pith helmets and floaty dresses and, at the same time, how simply marvelous black tribesman dancing around sacred trees were), the audience, in a plush 1,000-seat air-conditioned theatre, amounted to no more than 150 middle-class whites, clearly well off and possibly even more bored than I was.

Basson is painfully aware of the problem. While he feels he's been "knifed in the back" by the new government, he believes the government is finding it hard to justify spending on the arts at all when it is faced with daunting social problems. What use is a play or an opera, even a good one, when millions of people lack homes, basic healthcare and education? And why should the government be willing to subsidize the work of Afrikaners forever associated with apartheid (despite the role the English played in creating the architecture of apartheid and in ensuring its survival)?

In fact, as far as Basson is concerned, the only way Afrikaans art forms can survive will be through an appeal to what he calls "negative elements". "For example," he says, "I'll have to go and speak to Afrikaner businessmen and say: 'Listen, the language is going to die, our culture is going to die, you have to help.' But this means marginalizing Afrikaans culture even more than it's already being marginalized; we're being pushed, even forcing ourselves into a ghetto."

" The arts in South Africa, now opening up to the world, have been in a ghetto for decades. Under the old regime art was supervised and censored by government inspectors, while self-righteous bigwigs in Europe and the US imposed a cultural boycott on the country as well. This was intended, somehow, to pressure the governments of Vorster, Botha and De Klerk to end apartheid. Its main effect, however, was to isolate South African artists from what was happening in the rest of the world and, in the words of the brilliant satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys, "to do the government's work for them, thank you very much."

The truth was more complicated. Pushed into a corner, South African artists, whether painters or playwrights, began to find a new language of their own. Protest art thrived and nowhere more so than at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. Today the theatre, housed in the former Indian fruit and vegetable market (a magnificent prefab structure -shipped from England in 1915), has been rewarded with a decent level of funding. And it plays, as I discovered, to packed audiences, running its own buses to the townships to bring as many people to see shows as possible. These new productions are as much about formerly oppressed majorities letting off steam and celebrating their own cultures as they are about the attempt to discover new forms of fusion in the arts.

Clearly, though, it's as difficult for audiences outside South Africa to relate to what's happening inside as it is for artists to find their feet now the old baffles have been fought and won. The playwright Paul Slabolepsy, a veteran of protest theatre, feels that well-meaning foreigners - those audiences who thought they did their bit against apartheid by refusing to buy Cape apples while wearing De Beers diamonds in their rings - haven't really wanted South Africa to change. It's as if the old certainties of apartheid, disconcerting though they were, were almost comforting.

"There's a big role for theatre right now," says Slabolepsy. "Theatre goes back to storytelling around the fire; it's a communal thing - cathartic even - and that's why it still makes sense. What we have to do, as with all the arts, is to find new stories and tell them with new voices. We used to go out into the Cape Flats and tell animated stories to some of the poorest people in this country from the roof of a Combi. The kids would appear from huts and corners and tell us how they thought the story should go, so everyone got involved. You see what I mean? It's too easy to talk about theatre as a 'Eurocentric' art form; it's much more deep-rooted than that, and it's not as if we 'Europeans' don't understand that."

Slabolepsy is one of a number of playwrights who witnesses his old protest plays still being played outside South Africa, as if apartheid and political outrage was still the only story worth telling. And foreign audiences expect deadly seriousness from South Africa, as if no South African artist is permitted a sense of humour. When Slabolepsy's play District Six was performed in Edinburgh, he recalls some of the critics being scathing. "They said, how can you make a comedy about this tragic story, about a part of Cape Town that was ripped down and its population pushed out on to the Flats? But the whole point was that the play, although we didn't make a big thing about this, was performed by the very coloured people who had been up­rooted. They fought for their livelihood through what you might call an escape of spirit, or a sense of humour; and among all those politically correct critics, this humour was mistaken as making light of a struggle."

The arts are struggling to find a vital new role in South Africa, and one that will attract funding as well as audiences. Faced with a legacy of social problems, Mandela's government must spend extensively and intelligently on housing, health and education. These are obvious priorities. Yet the spirit of a nation is expressed in its arts and culture and these need nurturing, too. The government, perhaps inevitably, feels it should support the arts and culture of those who have been oppressed. And yet because South African society and culture are changing rapidly, it makes little sense to prop up art forms that express worlds -whether tribal, lingual or national - that are already vanishing. South Africa's galleries and museums may well feel the need to document the country's diverse art forms and crafts, but if they try to freeze them a heritage culture will emerge that can only hold the country back. Playwrights such as Slabolepsy see the way forward in terms of cultural fusion, with fresh explorations of languages and new expressions of music and other art forms.

This is not simply a pious sentiment or vain hope; it is happening, despite the government's politically correct arts policy and the even more politically correct views of outsiders who want either to live in a permanent replay of the apartheid era or else to celebrate black and tribal cultures at the expense of white culture. With these attitudes still in place, Mandela's rainbow nation will be little more than a romantic dream.

But change is evident at every turn. Drama companies are playing with a diffusion of languages; groups such as the popular Soweto String Quartet bring together Beethoven and the beat of the drum; playwrights and painters are searching for new stories to tell or represent now that apartheid is officially dead. It's a confusing, if vibrant, picture and one that can no longer be painted in crude brushstrokes of black and white.