Something special is happening in the Eastern Cape. Or at least, something special is happening at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown later this month/early next month: the beginnings of the disaggregation of the catch-all categories, that have plagued and defined South Africa’s history, into self-selected, fluid, fascinating groupings.

For years (decades? generations?) South African people have been categorized – assigned to different groups by outsiders. Whether it was the British Government in the 1800s or the Apartheid government last century, and probably long before that. Groups were considered static, inflexible and uniform. Of course, the largest of these unbending group categories was race. South Africa, under Apartheid – and still today because of employment equity – had 4 race groups: Black, White, Coloured and Indian, further designated ‘white’ and ‘non-white’. All people were assigned to one or other of the race groups (whether or not they fitted) and their future would hence-forth be determined based on that race. The classification was so important that even ID numbers indicated a person’s race.

In the new South Africa, things have relaxed a bit and there has finally been a recognition that race is not a real indicator of the group to which a person belongs. But a society used to classification does not move easily to a flexible multi-culturalism. For many, the 11 official languages present a neat set of categories to replace race in the country. But the 11 drastically oversimplify the complex multi-cultural society that is South Africa. The idea that there are 11 distinct and internally homogenous groups in the country is laughable. These 11 groupings, while based on language are seen by many as a mirror of 11 (or at least 9) black ‘nations’. But this is a completely inaccurate picture of the country. These supposed ‘nations’, these static, homogeneous classes of people do not exist. People don’t fall neatly into 11 distinct ‘nations’.

The country is far more complex than that and is home to many more cultures.  Some of these cultural groupings are being explored/exploring their own existence through their distinctive music and dance at this year’s National Arts Festival. Through a series of lunchtime concerts – Rhythms of the Eastern Cape – the music and dance of five groups of Eastern Cape people will be presented: AmaMphondo, AbeSuthu, AmaKhoisan, AmaBhaca and AbaThembu. These groupings are not categories sustained by the imposition of an external labels; they are created and recreated on an ongoing basis by people who self-identify as part of the groups. They have distinct cultures in the sense of culture as a way of being and expressing identity. Their histories are necessarily complex, incorporating many influences, from the groups their ancestors met and interacted with on their long journey, over millennia, from the heart of Africa to their Southern home – a history often predating the recorded or recognised existence of the specific group – to the people they met on arrival in the Eastern Cape and the settlers with whom they shared their land and later a country. All these interactions influence the development of each distinct music and dance style.

True multi-culturalism is not simply attempting to assign each person to a pre-defined group in order to make it possible for these people who have different (static, unchanging) ‘cultures’ to work together. It requires a mental shift from externally imposed categories to the recognition that cultures are eternally adapted, adopted, created and recreated by the people who self-identify with those cultures, who view that culture/those cultures as an intrinsic part of their identity as ‘self’. It requires that each person be treated as a unique individual because generic categories imposed on others are never enough to explain or understand the cultural identities of individuals – crude stereotyping as illogical as assuming that all women or all people from the continent of Asia will think and act the same.

Multi-culturalism is the pioneering work of the groups performing at the National Arts Festival, not as activists, but in celebration of their cultures. Through sharing, exploring and enjoying their own ways of being, they will begin to reject the crude categories that were once imposed by others and implicitly celebrate the kind of multi-cultural society that will (and should) be.

Rhythms of the Eastern Cape will be at ILAM at the following times:

Friday 1 July 13:00 AmaMphondo
Sunday 3 July 13:00 AbeSuthu
Tuesday 5 July 13:00 AmaKhoisan
Thursday 7 July 13:00 AmaBhaca
Saturday 9 July 13:00 AbaThembu

Duration: 1 hour                  Tickets: free