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8 December 2005

Yesterday, 7 December, I was among a group of government Ministers who attended the opening ceremony of the Maropeng Visitors facilities near the Sterkfontein Caves. Maropeng will open to the public tomorrow, 9 December. This state-of-the-art information centre is located at the Cradle Humankind, one of South Africa's World Heritage Sites. Palaeontologists have come to believe that it was there that a group of creatures, who are our common human ancestors, evolved from among the higher primates. From the time they emerged our common human ancestors began their long walk into the future.

They fell many times during that long walk, but each time they fell, they picked themselves up, and continued. Their numbers grew as they progressed, until they became so numerous that they inhabited every part of the world. As they multiplied they had become more diverse and evolved into a vast family of many hues, colours, hair textures, heights and weights. But, because of their common ancestry they displayed the same abilities and shared common ways of doing things. Every human society uses the experience of its older members as the foundation on which to build.

Since the birth of the human race our ability to pass on our knowledge of the world, our experience in life and our achievements to our off-spring has enabled the human family not only to survive but to prosper. Observation was probably the first means by which we instructed our young. But as our offspring's powers of comprehension improve, human beings educate and socialise their young through speech. The faculty of speech, found only among humans, is extremely versatile. We use it to command, to comfort, to instruct, to express affection, to express anger, to communicate fear, to convey anxiety, to express joy as well as sorrow. Constant communication and the exchange of experience have given us an incomparable competitive edge over other species.

The human family is unique in its ability and desire to externalise itself through acts of creation reflecting its experience, its environment, its own life as a species and its imagination. The human sings, dances, sculpts, carves, paints, recites poetry, tells stories and records its memories because nature endowed it with certain unique abilities. The human is obsessively curious, always posing the question: why? By consistently posing that question, the human animal arrived at a second, and perhaps more significant one: why not? The search for the answer to that second question stirred humans to change and constantly transform their environment, and by so doing to make and re-make themselves. Artistic creation is an important dimension of that search and of our urge to create a better world.

The earliest attempts to render the words, thoughts, ideas and feelings of a human as writing were executed on African soil, along the Nile River valley. The invention of writing was probably the most profound Cultural Revolution experienced by humankind. Mastery of the art of writing was extremely empowering. Its consequences have shaped and reshaped our universe in ways that no one could have anticipated. From then on communication among humans was freed from the need for personal contact. It became possible to communicate directly and to receive accurate communication from some-one who was not there in person.

Through the written word humanity is able to commune with the present, the past and the future. Liberated from the constraints of time and space, the thoughts, opinions, emotions, beliefs, values and experiences of people acquired infinite mobility, even immortality. Africans have recorded their thoughts and emotions in verse, rock art, sculpture and writing for centuries. The act of recording made them eminently transferable from one place to another, from one time to another, from one environment to another, from one people to another. Reading and writing are the cornerstones of literacy. Those who can read and write thus became the custodians of cultural heritage.

Among the amaRharabe clans, living in the western borderlands of the early 19th century Xhosa kingdoms, there emerged a religious figure, Ntiskana, the son of Gabha of the Cirha clan. It is said that this young father, a person of some substance in his own community, began experiencing visions that exhorted him to convert to a new religion. After one particularly acute such experience, he went down to the river and washed-off the red ochre with which the Xhosa people decorated their bodies and adopted this new religion. Carrying a wooden cross of his own construction, Ntiskana began preaching about 200 years ago. As he had no bell, he used his voice to call his followers to prayer.

The chant, known today as Ntsikana's hymn, represented an interesting intersection - cultural change propagated through a traditional mode of expression. Like the Muslim muezzin or azhan, Ntsikana employed a chant to convey his message of change and his call to his people to embrace a new world outlook. Ntsikana's visions, instructing him to read, some authorities say, stimulated the drive for literacy amongst his followers, who constituted one of the earliest communities of Christian Africans. As a cultural figure Ntsikana represents the face of an indigenous African modernism, concealed within the cocoon of the Christian faith. In social as well as religious terms he was a prophetic figure as a portent of the future of both African communities in South Africa and of Christianity among the Africans.

Ntsikana's hymn, like his mission, represents the van of an African modernism that still values and seeks to preserve every aspect of African tradition and culture that has universal significance. Ntsikana was not a subjugated colonial subject, seeking solace in the faith of his conquerors. He and his growing band of followers were free people, living within their own kingdom under their own rulers, living under their own laws, who had exercised a conscious choice to embrace and adapt to their own uses the skills and the technology that the white colonial society possessed in such abundance.

Christianity, freely chosen rather than imposed, represented the ideology and the lifestyle of these modernists chose. Christian Missionaries had been active among the black communities in South Africa since the establishment of the Moravian mission station at Genadendal during the latter part of the 17th century. Missionaries came in the wake of the colonial soldier and administrator. But, once a colonial presence had been established, they often preceded colonial officialdom into unconquered territories. Such was the case with many late 18th century and 19th century missionaries.

Thus Moffat preceded the British colonial office among the Tswana and Ndebele. So too in their day did Van de Kemp, Williams and Phillip precede the colonial conquest of the Eastern Cape. Christian teachings were among the numerous ideas the un-colonised Africans became accustomed to within their rapidly changing society. There was the constant threat of aggression on the one hand, but there were also the new opportunities offered by the adaptation of European artefact, skill and technology, on the other. To Ntsikana and his followers the book, the written word, and literacy were the gateway to the "Fountain of Knowledge". Books occupy an important place in the preservation and transmission of information, knowledge and experience.

They are the most essential educational tool. Hence the importance of an event like tonight's celebrating our literary heritage. It is most appropriate that the South African Literary Awards are inaugurated in a manner that does not recognise one book or author, but honours an entire body of work by the writers who have been chosen in recognition of their contribution to the development of South African Literature. The inauguration of the South African Literary Awards is the continuation of what began on 5 March 2005, when we bestowed the status of National Poet Laureate or Imbongi Yesizwe Jikelele on Professor Mazisi Kunene.

We recognised Prof Kunene for his selfless dedication to foregrounding and championing African Literature, particularly literature in the indigenous African languages. That too was a collaborative effort between the Department of Arts and Culture and the write associates, a good example of a public-private partnership for the advancement of the arts sector. I indicated then that it was the first of many awards that the Department of Arts and Culture intends to establish. On 27 and 28 May 2005 we launched the National Literature Exhibition which included lifetime achievement awards for writers in all the languages recognised by our constitution. The National Literature Exhibition is part of a Department of Arts and Culture led campaign to promote use of the indigenous African languages in literature.

We have 11 official languages. The Department of Arts and Culture, as the guardian of our collective heritage, is committed to ensuring the equitable development and use of all these languages. It cannot be regarded as a coincidence that the major social revolutions around the world have been associated with literary movements. The first African writers in South Africa regarded themselves as the heralds of a new era of great expectations for the African people. Literacy, they thought, would open up the doors of world culture and the immense storehouse of human knowledge to their people.

Those who sought to exclude Africans permanently from such vistas, in turn tried to devise various means of ensuring that they remained non-literate, innumerate and as un-informed as possible. As a government that takes seriously the challenge of making the 21st century an African century, we are determined to ensure that all our people have access to literacy. As Chinua Achebe explained through one of his characters, there is much more of crucial, social significance to storytelling - in our era, the writing of books - than mere entertainment. Reading, writing and books as literary and cultural artefacts, have become an essential part of our heritage.

That makes it imperative for government, non-governmental organisations and the private sector to work together in partnerships that will create greater access to reading materials, writing potential and publishing for more of our people. The importance of cultural expression, the full creative potential of the reading, writing and publishing sector will only be realised when all the diverse people of our country and the region have reasonable access to the means to write, to read and to be published. This imposes extremely serious obligations on our writers.

South African writers of our day have a critical role to play in fashioning new paradigms and expanding the boundaries of literary expression. The times we live in require them to go beyond the binary opposites that dominated the literature of the past. South Africa lives in an entirely different terrain. Struggle in our day has to be waged on a number of different fronts. Our writers have to wrestle with the challenges of nation building, of national reconciliation, of nurturing a human rights culture, of poverty eradication, of fighting the scourge of HIV and AIDS, and of redefining Africa's place in the world. By so saying we are not suggesting that they should now become propagandists for government or for other players in our plural society.

We merely highlight these issues because these are the existential dilemmas South Africans, and indeed the African continent confronts. "Writers and Responsibility" delivered by Nadine Gordimer in 1984, captures the contemporary challenges facing the writer in the words: "Ours is a period when few can claim the absolute value of a writer without reference to a context of responsibilities. To gain his freedom the writer must give up his freedom. Whether the impulse came from within, without, or both, for the black South African writer it became an imperative to attempt that salvation."

Many 20th century African writers, living through the long transition from pre-colonial, to colonial, and then post-colonial states portrayed the situation of the African as tragic. African writers, poets, artists and other leaders of thought had indeed experienced the modern era as highly ambiguous. The extremely destructive elements such as national oppression, economic exploitation and colonial racism were invariably interwoven with very constructive ones such as modern education, science, the transfer of modern skills and technologies. These excruciating ambiguities of modern times multiplied as urbanisation on the continent accelerated. Ambivalence, obliquity and dissonance consequently are prominent features of the idiom evolved by Africa's modern artists. Our continent's anguish has found its most poignant expression in the works of the post colonial writers many of whom have been the victims of censorship, government disapproval and sometimes active persecution.

The continent is now decisively living through a post-colonial era with Africans free to govern and mis-govern themselves. Amazingly its is during this period that a few among the intellectuals have been tempted to lend an ear to the siren songs of a backward-looking nativism, which is frequently presented as "authenticity" or as affirmation of African culture by its adherents. But the true face of "authenticity" has revealed itself many times on our continent. For three decades we witnessed the gross depravity of the Seso Seko Mobutu regime of Zaire (present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo), where a post-colonial indigenous elite, sheltering under the cloak of "authenticity", shamelessly plundered the national wealth in an orgy of cleptocracy. "African culture" and its affirmation have also been invoked as a pretext for perpetuating disgraceful feudal practices that degrade human beings, especially African women.

But the more visionary among the generation of writers, poets and playwrights who came into their after the Second World War, demonstrated that instead of wallowing in their alienation or seeking refuge in the past, the cause of the African writer is better served by integrating oneself with the common people and active engagement in political and social struggles for freedom, independence and social progress. Ngugi waThiongo of Kenya has been most exemplary in that respect. As we march into the third millennium, there are a number of important lessons African intellectuals can derive from our 20th century experience.

We expect the writers of the continent, where necessary, to unsparingly, and rigorously critique our recent past and our current performance. We expect them also to be keen advocates and defenders of tolerance, rooted in an appreciation that truth, beauty and good are elusive and extremely elastic and can only be sought in an environment of untrammelled contestation and debate among differing opinions. The best in the modern African political tradition has preferred secularism and advocated pluralism, not only to nurture and preserve diversity, but also for their intrinsic value. I have, on other occasions, indicated that one of the major challenges confronting aspiring writers is the absence of a viable and sustainable literary journal that would provide an appropriate platform to advance their skills.

We have made some progress towards the establishment of such a national literary journal. But, to develop the craft of writing in the absence of a wide readership would be foolhardy and wasteful. We need to engender critical mass readership in all South African languages. In the not too distant future we will be approaching writers to see what they are prepared to contribute towards the attainment of that goal. I promised not to be long, so I will now draw the threads together. Ulli Beier, an early chronicler of modern African creative arts, dubbed his literary journal "Black Orpheus". If our Orpheus is ever to win back his Eurydice, who was swallowed up by the darkness of slavery, colonialism and apartheid, like his classical namesake, he must march forward and upward into the light of the 21st century. He would be wise also to heed the admonition against looking back in nostalgic longing; lest, as in the classical tale, Eurydice is called back, and is reclaimed by the darkness of Hades.

Thank you.

Issued by: Department of Arts and Culture
8 December 2005