Chapter 11 - The National Arts Festival in Grahamstown

Summary

The National Arts Festival (NAF) in Grahamstown – now Makhanda – is South Africa’s largest, longest-lasting, and most prestigious festival. Although other post-apartheid festivals have launched new work, only NAF hosts African, European, and American work alongside local fare mostly in English and in national languages such as Xhosa, Zulu, or Afrikaans. It has also developed training and employment to offset inequality in the Eastern Cape. While these endeavours to enrich artistic practice, please audiences, and ensure the well-being of ordinary citizens are praiseworthy, NAF sponsors do not fully acknowledge the history of this inequity, which dates from Grahamstown’s founding in 1812 and extends through Anglophile pageants challenging Afrikaner cultural dominance but not the political economy of apartheid in the mid-twentieth century to initially cautious genteel efforts to diversify the festival in the 1980s, which provoked anti-apartheid boycotts. Despite advances since the 1990s, systematic representation of South Africa’s many cultural forms – from African variety through testimonial theatre and township musicals to performance art – was achieved only in the twenty-first century.