SASS Symposium 2021: why the South African saxophone archive matters

Two days of playing and conversation about the South African saxophone tradition: that’s what this year’s edition of the South African Saxophone Symposium (SASS), curated by Mthunzi Mvubu at the Gauteng Academy of Music in Daveyton and online, has assembled.

Khaya Mhlangu

I was lucky enough to be a panelist in the Sunday morning discussion about preserving the tradition.  Lucky, because my co-panellists – chaired by music writer Percy Mabandu, biographer of Yakhal’Inkomo – were players Khaya Mahlangu, Salim Washington and Linda Sikhakhane: a sample from some of the most exciting reed voices in the country.

Just how rich the archive is was illustrated by Mahlangu: a walking encyclopedia of the history as well as a formidable player and composer. The memories were priceless – hearing Mankunku and Dudu Pukwana blowing at Mofolo Hall; how the late Duku Makasi, his own instrument in for repair, borrowed the then much younger Mahlangu’s axe for a show. “I’ve never heard it sound so good!” he recalled.

US-born, UKZN-based Washington reminded us just how world-class and distinctive South African reed-playing is. He described how, having heard and admired exiled players such as Pukwana when he was still in the States, he arrived in South Africa to be bowled over by an entire pantheon of sax stars he’d never even heard of.

Washington asserted the distinctiveness of the South African sound; we swing like fury, but not necessarily in the (sometimes hackneyed) Amercan way.

The word that kept recurring was ‘voice’. Mankunku often asserted that ‘how you play is part of how you greet, how you live’. It’s in musical phrasing, intonation, feeling, attack, and language – the lexicon of sounds and riffs a South African player draws from. It’s in epistemology: how musical knowledge is constructed and defined. And it’s in the experiential content of the messages conveyed and the stories told.

While all of that is constantly in conversation with international jazz – South African players have never been less than hip to overseas developments – the conversation must be two-way.

That led to contributions from everyone on why all that isn’t part of jazz curricula here.  The standard academic response is often that “Naturally, we include a few South African compositions – but there is so much other essential content that space is limited…”

That answer is – at best –lame.

Creating a curriculum is always an act of curation. That is to say, it always involves deliberate choices about what is included and excluded, in what sequence and juxtaposition, and with what framing and context. Why Glenn Miller but not Cab Calloway – or indeed his older, distinguished bandleader sister, Blanche https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1ONioLp4I ? Or, if we’re talking bandleaders and arrangers,  why not Zacks Nkosi, Eric Nomvete or Mackay Davashe?  Any decent teacher knows it’s always possible to make different teaching choices that remain effective. Especially when the alternative is to marginalise a unique national tradition that – when the world gets to hear it – the world is wowed by.

Why the world might not hear our jazz enough was what I talked about. Go to Google, which some people assume contains all the knowledge in the world, and you’ll soon find out why. Charlie Parker has more than 83 million Google entries. John Coltrane has 61 000. In neither case is that anything like enough.

But Kippie Moeketsi has 1 400 entries; Bra Khaya  500; Bra Barney Rachabane just under 250; and Makasi 217.  Important regional figures such as Eastern Cape reedman Dudley Tito, often have a handful – or nothing.

Linda Sikhakhane

Look for women reed players – the panel should not have lacked those – and you may find Madubulaville’s Lynette Maphantso Leeuw. She was initially given a sax by her label just to create an intriguing image. But she developed a genuine interest in the instrument, grew to love playing, and told researchers about the struggles in a male-dominated environment she had to fight to pursue that passion.

You’ll find an organising career, but you won’t find anything much about the music of the late  Queeneth Ndaba, the mother of Dorkay House. She was playing sax slightly earlier than Leeuw.  And then there are the women reed players before her, some of whom researcher Lara Allen tracked down, but many of whose names we don’t even know to search for.

Meanwhile our media, with a few notable exceptions, has almost stopped covering music beyond lowest-common-denominator commercial pop (much of it international) altogether.

Much of the historic archive has never been digitised, and the tragic UCT library fire underlines how vulnerable purely paper archives are. Online resources are increasingly retreating behind paywalls.

At the end of apartheid, there was deliberate vandalism when the SABC, in its Gadarene haste to destroy tapes that showed just how obedient a servant of the racist regime it had been, also managed to lose quite a lot of its library of transcription tapes – for some South African jazz players, the only recordings they’d ever made. Many older labels have gone bust or don’t care about preservation.

But digital archives can also disappear if their formats become incompatible with updated platforms, if nobody is tasked with updating them regularly, or if those who host them can’t afford to keep them online.  A musician’s Facebook and Instagram pages, the blogs people have done about them, and anything else digital and stored in the Cloud, can, at any time, just disappear because some multinational capitalist platform decides it’s ‘obsolete’ or not earning enough. Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google and Spotify – we call them the FANGS – all have that power.

So what are future researchers going to be able to find about our sax tradition?

Salim Washington

Add that this country’s huge digital divide makes everything online expensive, and sometimes impossible, to access for many. 

Though those and other issues of access still have to be resolved, higher education graduate research dissertations, the SAMRO library, the archives of record labels such as As-Shams, and other institutions such as Jonathan Eato’s Contemporary Music research Centre in York in the UK are all among the small number of places where archive is being preserved. Some independent music labels such as Matsuli commission researched liner notes for South African reissues – although some don’t. The Saxophone Symposium itself is recording this weekend’s interviews with the greats.  

Saxophonist and jazz historian Dr Lindelwa Dalamba, in a reflection on The Blue Notes https://theconversation.com/what-lost-photos-of-blue-notes-say-about-south-africas-jazz-history-125163 , reminds us of musicologist Christopher Small’s perennial question about music-making: “What does it mean when this performance takes place at this time, in this place, with these participants?” When musicians are alive, we can ask them and record it. Once they’ve passed, we can still research and theorise, but the agency and direct voice of that music-maker is gone. A library, as the African proverb has it, has burned.

That question (as well as so much incomparable beauty, intellect and creativity)  is why the archive matters. Now go away and listen to the first one minute twenty seconds of Blues Stompin https://wearebusybodies.bandcamp.com/album/kippie-moketsi-hal-singer-blue-stompin  and try to answer it …

Live music’s Covid recovery – the North-South gulf yawns wide

“None of us [music organisers] can exist without musicians. Our priority has to be supporting them.”

Randall Kline – SF Jazz

Those were the words of SF Jazz founder and Executive Artistic Director Randall Kline last Thursday.  Kline was a panellist at the Jazz at Lincoln Centre 2021 Jazz Congress virtual session on Returning to the Stage: navigating reopening for presenters, which I chaired.

The centrality of nurturing musicians was the shared sentiment of all of us: myself, Joy of Jazz producer Mantwa Chinoamadi of T Musicman, Pelin Opcin, Director of Programming at Serious, which produces the London Jazz Festival, and Georgina Javor Vice-President for Concerts and Touring at the Lincoln Centre. However, the most prominent message of the discussion was the widening gulf between the rich nations of the West and Africa, as we all strive to put bread back on musicians’ tables.

At New York’s Lincoln Centre, Javor noted, the current focus was negotiating with the city in creating outdoor events on more than simply the spaces the Centre controlled. Despite rising US vaccination rates, Javor wasn’t envisaging a large-scale return to indoor events until October or November.

44.6% of the population of New York is already vaccinated.

That was Kline’s perspective from San Francisco too. His June festival was planned as “mostly digital”, but with some trial indoor events to test practicalities and audience sentiment; planned July events would be outdoors. “Vaccination is key”, he noted, not only for health reasons but also for its reassuring psychological effect on audiences. He also noted the “shifting sands” and “shards of information” about Covid, its variants and effective public health measures on which all organisers still had to base their decision-making.

40.7% of the population of California is already vaccinated.

Georgina Javor

In London, Opcin was optimistic that the London Jazz Festival could “take the wind behind our wings” with a full capacity London Jazz Festival including overseas artists in November, following the UK government roadmap. She described a trial event at Liverpool’s Sefton Park last week, using Lateral Flow Tests (LFTs) for Covid on attendees; results of the study were still awaited, but LFTs had proved effective in other contexts. Some indoor venues, Pelin said, were already opening at reduced capacity, and specialist “boutique” festivals that could space limited audiences were going ahead mid-year. However, some bigger festivals scheduled before October/November had postponed, not only because of health considerations but because international travel between the UK and other countries remained restricted.

32.5% of the UK population is now fully vaccinated (two doses), with more having received their first dose.

However, Opcin noted, no organiser could ignore the pressing issues of inclusivity and access to vaccines, both in their own countries and in the rest of the world.

That was underlined by Chinoamadi from South Africa. For Joy of Jazz it was “back to the drawing board – we’re still waiting for that safe space.” Though the Festival was exploring partnerships for a future hybrid festival – part outdoors; part web-based – South Africa’s highly unequal access to broadband meant that South Africa’s most important jazz audience, its own citizens, were often excluded from online events. A visibly-moved Chinoamadi recounted inviting artists to the T Musicman offices so they could make use of digital facilities there.

Joy of Jazz normally plans a six-month publicity build-up. Given that the public health situation here remains uncertain, with parts of the country having entered their Covid third wave, that couldn’t yet start. In addition, corporate festival sponsors with their own pandemic-related business problems, were looking very hard at what return on investment any festival support could bring them. Meanwhile, 41% of South African musicians surveyed on the issue report selling their equipment to survive.

In South Africa, 1.1% of the population is fully vaccinated.    

Pelin Opcin

A handful of studies have now suggested that – under the right conditions – live music events are not major spreaders of Covid. But those conditions demand spacious, well-ventilated venues, no packed crowds, and adherence to mask-wearing and other safety protocols throughout. Studies in Halle in Germany and at Spain’s Primavera Festival in 2020 (at 60% capacity with advance rapid testing), and in Dortmund this year under the supervision of the German Environmental Agency all supported similar findings. https://www.nme.com/news/music/a-second-study-finds-that-music-venues-are-not-places-of-infection-for-covid-19-2856657

Fresh air, either in an outdoor setting or from specific kinds of air conditioning equipment, is the most important risk-reducer. (see https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/949555 and https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n913 ) To that end, London’s 100 Club, for example, is installing new PRS (pathogen reduction system) air conditioning technology, which can be fitted to existing systems.

That will work for well-resourced music settings, but many of the jazz clubs we love are cramped dives surviving on a shoestring. In South Africa, we face the additional problem that there are very few wholly dedicated music venues: most earn their revenue primarily from food and drink sales, whose consumption precludes continuous mask-wearing. And right now, with the third wave raging and deaths rising, venues that don’t enforce the protocols are, quite simply, death-traps.

So how are smaller venues managing, and how is government assistance in the various locations fitting in to recovery?

Javor described support initiatives such as the “Save Our Stages” fund (https://variety.com/2021/music/news/sba-save-our-stages-indie-venues-next-week-1234970610/ ) – but she noted that independent venues had waited five months to receive this. Covid, she said, would mean long-term changes in venue practice for everyone: as one example, all JALC contracts now contained a Covid indemnity clause. Opcin approvingly noted an improvement in official UK responsiveness since the early months of the pandemic, but conceded that official systems were still set up to deal better with large formal organisations than with the freelance creative workers and small business entities that dominate the music industry everywhere.

Kline also described existing state and national initiatives. SF Jazz’s main concern, he explained, had been “to keep our constituencies close”, so the organisation had been streaming archive videos regularly. “Our highest goal has been getting money to musicians…and keeping the ecology going,” so wherever possible revenue from these was split 50:50 with artists. Additionally, musicians had been hired to record distanced educational events that could be broadcast.

Chinoamadi described the South African relief situation, including the just-concluded 30-day sit-in at the National Arts Council over the halting, confused and questionable progress on disbursing PESP funds. She pointed out that for both festivals and venues, the South African digital divide meant revenues from streaming ticket purchases were tiny. “I find myself buying tickets for things I know I won’t attend, just to contribute,” she confessed.

Mantwa Chinoamadi

A questioner from the Jazz Congress session audience asked if South African livestreams were accessible internationally, and how information about them could be found. In one of the most wonderful moments of the evening (morning in the USA), support from the other panellists was immediate, powerful and warm. If they had information about South African jazz livestreams, SF Jazz, JALC and LJF were all willing to use their own channels to draw the attention of potential dollar and sterling paying jazz afficionados in their locations to these broadcasts.

That means information in good time, a secure, easy-to-use mechanism by which buyers can pay in other currencies, and not just a band name – because most Britons and Americans do not know our artists, our jazz milieu, or what kind of music to expect. But it’s worth a try…

A good place for overseas listeners to start might be by finding streams from the 2021 SAMA jazz nominees: pianist Sibu Mashiloane for iHubo Labomdavu; reedman Linda Sikhakhane for Open Dialogue; bassist Banda Banda and the Crocodiles for Africando; pianist Nduduzo Makhathini for Modes of Communication Letters from the Underworld; and pianist Thandi Ntuli for Live at Jazzwerkstatt. Plenty of pianos this year, and a very strong representation from KZN, which is a nice contrast to the Joburg and Cape Town-centric lists of some previous awards. I congratulate them all and refuse to choose within this inappropriate zero-sum-game format. Music isn’t a contest, it’s an expression of unique creativities and each of these distinctive voices deserves its own accolade.  Let’s hope our scene survives to nurture more of them.  

Andile Qongqo’s Afro Qeys and the scenes we still don’t know

When he sent me his latest CD, Afro Qeys https://music.apple.com/za/artist/andile-q/1443248089, pianist, music director and educator and composer Andile Qongqo reminded me that he is based in Mangaung and that “we are usually overlooked by compilers and jazz enthusiasts.” He’s right, and his reminder coincided with conversations I’ve been having recently with colleagues about jazz artists we all have – or have not – heard about.

It used to be that outside the Joburg-Cape Town axis, entire scenes flourished under the media radar. Thanks to the diligence of artists such as Neil Gonsalves, Salim Washington and Sibu Mashiloane, Durban jazz-makers have now joined that better known landscape. A fairly distinctive Durban jazz sound is now audible, as other players pick up the signifying on community musics that Mashiloane (and, earlier and mainly on Joburg stages, Nduduzo Makhathini) does.

But Mangaung? Especially in the Covid-restricted absence of a live Macufe Festival, that scene remains best known to its own, fiercely loyal fans.

Dolly Radebe (as the museum caption calls her) sings with the Jazz Symphonators at Batho Community Hall, c.1950s

Yet all the ingredients that contributed to flourishing jazz scenes in bigger metropoles from the 1940s onwards were also present, with the same result, in Mangaung: a close-knit, working-class Black community; active churches providing places where music could be learned by any aspiring congregant; leaders such as the Rev Selby Msimang and Thomas Mapikela whose political activism helped encourage cultural pride; and the Batho Community Hall, which offered a stage to artists such as the Harlem Swingsters, the Jazz Symphonators, Miriam Makeba and Dolly Rathebe, alongside local musicians. Just one website, https://nationalmuseumpublications.co.za/oral-history-brings-memories-of-mangaungs-jazz-music-era-back-to-life/ ,captures some of those memories: the image is sourced from there.

Although his work long post-dates that classic era, Qongqo’s musical life https://www.musicinafrica.net/directory/andile-q followed the same historic pattern of musical interest and aspiration leading to self-education. He started piano relatively late, at 15: “I had to learn and watch people from a distance,” he told the Sowetan https://www.sowetanlive.co.za/sebenza-live/2020-06-25-watch–how-this-jazz-pianist-challenges-the-limits-of-age/. Subsequently, he earned his licentiate diploma in jazz piano from Trinity College London.

Since then he has worked as a music educator and producer, directed musical productions and released a 2018 debut solo album, Q Signature (which was nominated for multiple Mzansi Jazz Awards) as well as performing prolifically as leader, guest and solo artist.

Afro Qeys employs a trio format for its 15 tracks and, declares Qongqo, “celebrates Africa in piano in all its rhythmic forms.”

Mangaung jazz happens a lot in relaxed, Sunday afternoon lounge or open-air venues – the kind of feel Don Laka’s music related to so well – and some tracks speak to that audience vibe. If you like, those tunes are a more pianistically complex response to the repetitive, groove-oriented, dance and chill riffs of amapiano. DJs cut the monotony with cleverly layered samples; Qongqo’s skillful playing and catchy original hooks don’t demand diluting in same way. Still, tracks such as Jungle Groove, Man Your Post and Fancy Footwork could easily have a similar appeal for listeners – and dancers – in the right setting.

But that’s not Qongqo’s main business on this album, as his explicit statement about African piano rhythms declares.

Q Signature was exactly what you’d expect from a debut album: it displayed the artist’s range, with a bit of something for most listeners, underpinned by his gift for appealing compositions, and carefully honed playing technique.

Afro Qeys is a far more effective showcase for what’s clearly where Qongqo’s heart lies: those rhythms – shaping them, unpicking them and weaving them around melodies that remain catchy enough to keep the complexity of what he’s doing accessible. The wistful Ngamagxa is for me one standout: a hymn-like theme anchoring really intriguing patterns. Others are Mangaung , a Hurry-Up-and-Wait-style juxtaposition, and Madolo Phezulu, which has the feel of an early Bheki Mseleku composition about it.

The album concludes with 5:4 Dance, whose title tells you exactly what it’s about, but in no way prepares you for the breathtaking little impro that asserts itself about halfway through. That last one’s for classic African Jazz fans, right back to the generation that grew up nourished by Batho Community Hall’s legacy sounds.

Andile Qongco

As readers of this column probably know, easy Sunday afternoon vibes are not what I listen to the most – but those four tracks have all gone on regular repeat for me. (Even if, as usual, I’d have liked longer tracks and some more accompanying instrumentalists – some of those clever compositions could open wonderful doors for brass and reed improvisation.)

But Qongqo’s email to me, and his album, also raise another interesting question. How many more distinctive ‘local’ jazz scenes and their musicians are out there that we should be hearing and writing about? A national mapping exercise is long overdue, so the musicians – who often spend their whole lives keeping the flames of community music alive – get acknowledgment, and we find some more jazz serendipity.

Remembering Zim Ngqawana 1959-2011

When you put something in a glass case on a museum pedestal, you limit and mute it.

Ten years ago on Monday, May 10, multi-instrumentalist, composer, bandleader and educator Zim Ngqawana died after a stroke, aged only 52. That was a view he often expressed in his fiery younger days, citing fellow-musician Trevor Watts’ comment that a player could be either “a creator or a curator” – and opting firmly for the former.

“There’s no room in musical development for simple imitation”, he said in 1993. “We have to find our own musical space, rediscover and rework our musical heritage and put our own signature on it.”

That inspired search for grounded innovation marked Ngqawana’s life, and the ten-year mark is a good time to look back over his contribution. It’s also about the time when the pedestals and glass cases usually start getting wheeled out.

To an extent, that’s already happened to several of our music heroes. As one example, vocalist and scholar Nomfundo Xaluva observed at an SAJE panel last month that alongside genuine musical homages, a veritable Bheki Mseleku industry is beginning to emerge. It’s one that selects and remembers those features of Mseleku’s music that an un-transformed music curriculum can accommodate without discomfort, while forgetting the rest – including how shamefully universities here gave Mseleku the cold shoulder while he lived.

Let’s hope it doesn’t happen to Ngqawana.

The Gqeberha-born musician started in music early, absorbing and participating in the community ceremonies and celebrations around his home, and fashioning a reed flute for himself. But his introduction to a metal flute didn’t happen until he was 20. Lacking the formal papers, but picking up a lot gigging around with the Afro-Teens, the Black Slaves and (briefly) Pacific Express, it was sheer talent that got him into music programmes first at Rhodes and then UKZN, where he was part of the Jazzanians https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2fMDjtYI84 . That, in turn, took him via a Max Roach Scholarship to Amherst, where Roach, Archie Shepp and Ysuf Lateef were among his teachers. Back home, he worked with veteran Tete Mbambisa, and with Abdullah Ibrahim’s Ekhaya among others, but rapidly began pulling together his own ensembles to express his own direction, with gigs on stages such as Kippies, the Market  and State Theatres, jazz festivals https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWjlPiJlihE  and the old Bassline.

Soon, he was also regularly networking and performing internationally.

The rest really is history: the awards, the ten albums (including DVDs), the growing following for both his music and his teaching. He adopted Islam in 1993 and began making his own journey through Sufism as it informed both music and life: “Music is still there when the sun goes down. It provides energy for a spiritually depleted universe,” he said in 1997.  

After a teaching stint in higher education, he founded his own college, the Zimology Institute. The institute had a sadly short life:, the premises in which he had invested everything were stripped by thieves for their metal the year before he died. Watch him and Kyle Shepherd in the aftermath, coaxing music from a wrecked and upended piano https://vimeo.com/108982799 

The first thing worth remembering about Ngqawana is that he was technically a superb musician, and knew the only way to stay there was through hard practice and study. He pushed his own technique relentlessly, exploring, for example, circular breathing, despite knowing it could pose life-threatening risks. He mastered all the saxophones, flute and latterly bass clarinet, as well as playing piano, harmonica and all kinds of rhythm. “European music, “ he mused in that early interview “ is sometimes obsessed by melodic lines. But you can live without melody. Rhythm can be enough.”

His second achievement was to be one of the prime architects of the South African jazz – what can we call it? Revolution? Renaissance? – of the early 1990s. His work and that of others among our own Young Lions infused fresh life into the scenes and recordings, and magnetised fresh audiences into venues.

When he started that ball rolling, fresh from the States, Ngqawana’s primary aim was to get jazz out of the clubs and into the concert halls. He saw the ‘gig mentality’ as destructive: musicians knew that promoters and audiences undervalued them in such settings, and so undervalued and limited themselves: “Too many musos are scared to break new ground and possibly face criticism.”

Well, he did get a few more jazz events into concert halls – but more importantly, he helped shift the culture of club gigs too. He introduced rituals of silence, incense and temple bells at the start of a set (something Ibrahim did only in concert halls): declaring clearly that this was serious business deserving of respect. And alongside that, he presented music that conscious South African audiences could take seriously because it narrated and connected with parts of their lives they already took seriously.  His re-visioning of the rite of passage song Qula Kwedini is a perfect example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMd_DyhyfyA .

His music grows audibly from album to album – not only flying further and further out, but also, increasingly, demonstrating there were no barriers between what some ears classified as ‘out’ and the first family musics he had encountered: “I’m getting more interested in new ways of giving the music a Xhosa cadence: trying to phrase it the way my father would have sung a hymn…[music] that can speak a language all people understand.”

He constantly experimented, not only with sound and form, but with decolonising the landscapes where music could be made and learned –“The possible has been tried and failed; now we have to do the impossible.” That was the genesis of the Zimology Institute, but also had its roots deep in earlier initiatives he willingly acknowledged, such as Geoff Mphakathi’s struggle era community music organisation in Mamelodi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCeODn5g8WU .

All that left a legacy in the music made by graduates of the Institute today, including Kyle Shepherd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8JJzN8yXG4 , Nduduzo and Omagugu Makathini, Shane Cooper, Mthunzi Mvubu and Malcolm Jiyane.  As he’d have hoped, each has built very different structures from those foundations. It left its traces in other places around the world where he worked, including in the memories of Chicago friends like fellow reedman Ernest Dawkins. Ngqawana inspired visual artists and writers: Sterling D. Plumpp dedicated a poem to him, asking rhetorically “How/did you get from here/to Harlem and back/on a Trane?”

But the reedman was also very human. He could be the kindest and most supportive of friends and mentors – but he could also sometimes be so focused on his goals that others around him felt invisible. Those who knew him saw many faces: conscious campaigner; be-suited hustler for gigs; serious dad; tough teacher; kind colleague; self-willed leader; sharp showman; gardener (“I love listening to the orchestra of the birds … and then the crickets come on in the second set.”); delphic sage – and joker.

Humour is often the first thing to be erased when we start wheeling out the pedestals. But listen to Ngqawana fantasising about his dream jazz club. As well as the top-of-the-range stage facilities and acoustics, “We’ll have bouncers trained only to let the real jazz fans in. You won’t be able to buy a ticket unless you can name ten jazz composers and identify a photograph of a bass clarinet.”

So let’s, please, not make a plaster saint out of Ngqawana on the anniversary of his death. His music needs no justification; it sounds for itself. But it’s his humanity, in all those variable and not uniformly saintly aspects, that makes the music so supremely capable, even ten years on, of speaking for us and to us. You think you know him? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNvPHVxkDbM

Cricket stumps creativity on DSAC’s to-do list

The past ten days have made it very clear where the arts stand on DSAC’s priority list: bottom.

Those who believed the Minister’s flaccid response to the National Arts Council (NAC) crisis simply reflected an inability to take decisive action have been proved dead wrong. With Cricket SA’s recalcitrant Management Committee he did exactly the right thing, and he did it right on time.

Faced with their refusal to accept the proposed reform agenda, he waved the big stick of government takeover (which meant potential exclusion from international sporting arenas) until they buckled, then withdrew the threat. Matches were saved, fans can anticipate future internationals and – just possibly – both governance and diversity in cricket stand a chance of improvement. (There were compromises to secure agreement; it’s not yet clear how much these could erode the hoped-for outcomes.) The Minister deserves congratulations for some very politically savvy and effective tactics.

Compare that with the Departmental response to the state of emergency at the NAC — and in the performing arts sector more broadly – and a very different picture emerges.

Sibongile Mgoma (r) led the NAC sit-in

There’s a long history of governance and financial management questions around the NAC, going back far beyond this current board and its apparent inability to do simple sums. Yet since 1997 it has been the main national body tasked with promoting free cultural expression through support of the arts. Its survival and effectiveness are vital, even more so in a situation where Covid restrictions have severely hampered creative expression and destroyed creative livelihoods. Research shows that artists are selling their equipment to survive, making it near-impossible for some to re-enter their professions even if things pick up again.

For a full 60 days, artists sat in at its headquarters, demanding answers about how the PESP money ran out before all successful applicants had been paid; how apparently conflicted Board members had been part of decision-making and themselves been granted awards; and about how breaching contracts by withdrawing signed agreements so grants could be cut was legal.

(The March 30 South Gauteng High Court decision in favour of the National Arts Festival’s receiving its promised award robustly suggested it was not and set a useful precedent for future actions.)

DSAC through the Minister and spokespeople made a few late, hand-wringing statements about how it was all regrettable but that the matter was in process and would soon all be sorted out; how it was about “mismanagement not looting”; and how a forensic probe was to be launched. As if mismanagement on this scale of millions was somehow better… Some applicants have received their promised monies since then; many others still remain lost in the information dark and deeper in debt.

DSAC Minister Mthethwa: “mismanagement not looting”

On April 16 the NAC announced it had disbursed nearly R170 million of the R285 million available. The last substantial DSAC statement on the matter was a month ago.

Yesterday, on May 1, artists ended their sit-in at NAC headquarters. Their legal representatives announced that an application for investigation and mediation had been made to the Office of the Public Protector, with a deadline of “days not weeks” for some action.

Sibongile Mngoma, the driving force behind the artists’ action, noted that the NAC was not the only arts body with governance and disbursement questions hanging over it, and that the potentially irreversible destruction of livelihoods in the creative sector didn’t seem to be at the top of anybody’s agenda. Next stop, she declared, would be DSAC itself: “There’s still the rest of the journey to take.”

And we’re all still wondering about a Department whose portfolio should include investigating all of those questions, and which has just shown itself more than capable of hitting miscreants for six when a big-bucks international enterprise such as cricket is involved.   Where’s that big ministerial cricket bat when we really need it?