The Virtual National Arts Festival is the gift that keeps on giving. Already an extended event, it will continue until the end of July.
Readers of this column who consider me a “trendy lefty”, or who tire of reminders that arts and culture cannot be separated from race politics, have no doubt been relieved that my coverage of the festival over the last month has not entailed “self-loathing” references to the bearable lightness of being white.
But again, I’m afraid, I find that whiteness (with apologies to the Troggs) is all around me, and so the feeling grows ... to a head. I know I’m not the only one, because Juliet Jenkins’s Woolworths is one of the most popular items on the festival programme. It features on the festival’s “most viewed” page — or most listened to, for Woolworths is an audio drama.
Though it started life on the stage and has been adapted for 2020’s digital demands, this is not a radio play in the traditional sense. Rather, it’s a choral work in which the many voices of white SA are relentlessly lampooned.
The satire is pitch-perfect; Jenkins lays bare the absurdity of the days of our white lives, but she does more than simply mock. She also asks of white South Africans to take a hard look in the mirror, to consider the sources of our neurosis, narcissism and other diagnosable pathologies — whether they are mild or severe, and whether their symptoms are fear of black people or an obsession with rhinos.
It’s easy to make fun of the latter. This week SA Twitter has had a grand old time laughing at retired cricketer Kevin Pietersen posting a photo of himself in pensive sexy rhino-conservationist mode warning President Cyril Ramaphosa that “the animals will go” if the government doesn’t sort out the tourism sector. The economic and ecological threats are important, no doubt — but, as critical race and land analyst Scott Burnett pointed out, Pietersen’s tweet is “the perfect example of the whiteness of green discourse”.
Ironically, rhinos present a riposte to the ragtag clutch of self-important former sportsmen who have decided to respond to Black Lives Matter with “All Lives Matter” and, inevitably, with inaccurate narratives about farm murders and white victimhood. Campaigning to save the rhino doesn’t mean that you’re indifferent to the wellbeing of other horned mammals. Geddit?
Jenkins focuses on game farms as sites for the anthropological study of whiteness — no less than Woolworths, and rugby stadiums, and security estates — precisely because nature conservation in this country has historically occurred directly alongside, and has been enabled by, racism.
It’s inconvenient but it’s true; nothing is untainted. No pleasure, even the sublime joy of a game drive through pristine bush, is pure. Call it the new white man’s burden: everything we have taken for granted must be interrogated.
Of course, questioning everything doesn’t mean falling for ludicrous conspiracy theories that appeal to your deepest prejudices and unconscious bias. Lord knows, there are plenty of those doing the rounds. And some of them have now enjoyed the addition of a sheen of credibility thanks to nobody’s favourite shock jock and everybody’s third favourite Idols judge, Gareth Cliff.
Cliff’s show on eNCA, So What Now? — indeed, that Cliff has a career in broadcasting at all — is made possible by the stubborn insistence of whiteness that it remain the central and defining feature of human experience. Bad enough that he revels in the smug “I say what I like because I can” posturing of the self-important white guy whose faux commitment to freedom of speech is actually a means to turn up the volume of his own megaphone. But this week Cliff and eNCA took the spurious decide-for-yourself rhetoric a step further by inviting conspiracy theorist David Icke to air his claim that Covid-19 is a hoax.
Cliff is not a journalist, so his idea of a rigorous interview is to give a knowing smile rather than to interrogate the anti-Semitism and racism enabled by Icke’s contrarian delusions. What he blithely ignores is the cost of allowing misinformation to circulate; in this case, it is a cost that can be measured as a death toll.
He performs concern about his compatriots’ wellbeing, but by giving Icke a platform Cliff betrays his indifference to the fact that people in SA — to borrow from Jonathan Metzl’s description of Trump’s America — are “dying of whiteness”.
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