A Renegade Called Simphiwe. Pumla Dineo Gqola
Film Festival (1999), has shown at the prestigious Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO), the Tri-Continental Film Festival, Sithengi Film Festival and various others. She insists that she makes films about women and children as a deliberate political and aesthetic choice. Sithole has also made short documentaries for various news television channels across the world. She runs the UNiTE Film Festival, which is a joint project with the United Nations, to form a film festival with a difference. UNiTE uses a different set of films by and about women to encourage dialogue during the annual 16 Days of No Violence Against Women and Children Campaign, in a format designed and copyrighted by Yanaya Communications, a division of Nayanaya Productions. Sithole is also a founder member of Filmmakers Against Racism (FAR), a group of Johannesburg-based filmmakers who responded to the 2008 eruption of xenophobic violence against working-class and poor African nationals living in Johannesburg and Cape Town. FAR declared themselves “Proudly African first, and South African second”, and made a series of films, using their own resources, which were then shown in theatres, community halls and various other community spaces in order to intervene into the negrophobic violence and unsettle such feelings among South Africans. Her contribution to this project was the film Thandeka and Martine, and here she interrogated how women are affected by the displacement after the xenophobic outbreak. Focusing on Zimbabwean Thandeka and Congolese Martine, the film cast the spotlight on the layered gendered ways in which the crisis was experienced as well as the way in which it altered intimate relationships, parenting and senses of safety.
These are the kinds of artists that I think of as forming part of Simphiwe Dana’s community in a conceptual sense. There are others and different communities that a writer can claim for her subject, some of which are suggested in the chapters that follow. I have provided some information about each of the ones I mention in class and at the beginning of this chapter deliberately. I list them in order to say something about the very important ways in which these artists differ from each other, not only because they work in different artistic mediums, but also to illustrate something about the threads running through the off-centre choices they all make. They are also attractive to me partly because of their individual eccentricities which are evident within and in addition to their art works.
I am not saying that Simphiwe Dana’s renegade community is comprised only of artists, women, Black people, or only of Black women. But I have chosen to prioritise these artists for this chapter to clarify my own project here.
When I choose these particular artists to ask the question at the beginning of this chapter, it is to highlight both violence and possibility. Some of the most dangerous public messages in South Africa today are about Black girls. We are told often that they are not focused on the right things to build their future, that they are overly sexual, that they seek out sugar daddies, that they have reckless sex in order to get money from men and the State, that they are apolitical. Choosing such a list as I do here, then, I hope that my students will learn the tools to question dominance, choose to think for themselves, question whatever information is presented to them, and use these tools in order to be more than compliant citizens of the world. At the same time, it is not accidental that I have chosen to teach through creative genres, rather than choosing a Social Science discipline, which can also teach critical thinking and active citizenship as indeed all Humanities subjects are posed to do. While Social Sciences can teach critical thinking without a doubt, literary and other creative forms and their study require a double imaginative act: immersion in imaginative space in the viewing, listening and reading as well as the imaginative critical reading of the artwork as we try to understand what is at play, what matters, and what things mean.
My examples are all geniuses in creative genres. This is not an accident. They highlight quite explicitly the connections between speaking truth to power and creating alternatives. I also list artist game-changers because I want my students to think about the place of pleasure: as discovery, as disruptive and as a site of critical consciousness. This sounds counter-intuitive when expressed, but in fact, when I ask students to share what they associate these artists with, it is clear that this is not as far-fetched.
In response to any one of the named artists, inside and outside of class, even the reluctant fans or critical students say things like: ‘I think she’s beautiful but too intense’ or ‘I love her work but some of it makes me uncomfortable’ or ‘I disagree with the content of her work, but she makes me think’ or ‘I don’t like her work at all because she is so serious’ or even ‘I love her work, but I wish she’d make a happy film next time’. They know the work and feel strongly about it one way or another. Some students express more appreciative words of the artists.
It seems, then, that what these young people are saying is that these are women whose artworks and public presences make audiences think at the same time as they create products that are enjoyable. This is so much more than the bizarre South African obsession with ‘art that has a message’, which is only partly an inheritance from art for political ends. These are artists who are able to do something important in an age of celebrity culture where personalities are often famous for their capacity for self-promotion much more than for any particular capacity. Celebrity culture, as Thato Mapule shows, is often premised on the worship of the prominent figure in ways that are also at the same time linked to consumption. We cannot think about celebrity culture outside of the age of late capitalist consumerism. Fame meant something else a thousand years ago than it does now. It also required a different engagement. Mapule writes:
The preoccupation with famous individuals and stardom has its historical roots in the social fixation with monarchical subjects such as kings, queens and emperors. The status of these elite subjects was ascribed through lineage and blood line (Rojek 2001; Evans and Hesmondalgh 2007). Braudy’s (1987: 268) focus on Alexander the Great is useful in tracing the historical idealisation of fame and the emergence of charismatic authority as a central theme in conceptualising stardom and celebrity. The charismatic quality of these ascribed celebrities also distinguished them from ordinary individuals. These inherent talents were understood as a gift of nature or as god-given and could not, therefore, be explained rationally. The talents of ascribed celebrities represented the ideals that the untalented and ordinary individual could only dream of emulating and made such celebrated persons worthy of public admiration (Weber 2007:17–24; Dyer 1991: 57–60).
However, with the advent of democracy and capitalism, stardom has been democratised, giving way to a more utilitarian conception of stardom: celebrity (Turner 2004: 89). The notion of the utilitarian nature of celebrity was conceived of in Greek mythology, where the term ‘celebrity’ denoted to the fall of the gods and the rise of democratic governments and secular society. The Grecian conception of celebrity appears somewhat ironic when applied to the modern view of the term, as today’s famous persons do not possess royal or elitist lineage, but are ordinary individuals who have come to be treated like gods and are celebrated by many (Rojek 2001: 11).
In other words, as Mapule argues, the older model of fame applied to people seen as exceptional because they were born into that realm (royalty) or achieved such status (athletes or warriors). Such figures invited public admiration. They were seen as the polar opposite of what it meant to be ordinarily human. At the same time, Mapule shows that the more useful notions of celebrity are also not brand new because Greek mythology already possessed aspects of the famous as ordinary people who achieve celebrity.
Today, the definition of celebrity is much closer to being seen and manufactured. In her own words:
Celebrities are defined as public individuals who are held in great esteem in society because of their ubiquitous appearance within the media. The repetitive appearance of celebrities accrues these individuals’ discursive power in society over ordinary individuals… Unlike other famous persons within the history of fame, the modern celebrity lacks any talent or special achievement, but is deemed important because of their omnipresence within the mediums of print and broadcasting.
Something about Simphiwe Dana and the other artists I discuss above will not fit into this model of celebrity. Something about these women means they are able to retain a grasp of the collective imagination – whether creatively or sparking negativity – at the same time that they stand out. In other words, they can be on the cover of women’s magazines, have meals interrupted by fans who