Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
IN one of the last unpublished interviews that Cont Mhlanga granted to Sunday Life before his death, the veteran arts doyen was adamant that the entrance of various television stations onto the country’s broadcast scene was not necessarily a sign of good tidings for the country’s content creators.
If one knew Mhlanga well, they would be familiar with his desire to play devil’s advocate at any given opportunity. He was a man that never let the opportunity to throw a spanner in the works, just for the fun of it, pass him by.
Perhaps due to his keen, intelligent mind, which needed to be constantly sharpened with debate, Mhlanga took the sport of arguing very seriously. On this occasion, as he exchanged voice notes on WhatsApp with this reporter, Mhlanga had his sights set firmly on the country’s content creators, who were salivating as various TV stations around the country went on air. Mhlanga, as he watched young actors, producers and directors pass through his office doors with dollar signs in their eyes, felt that their hopes were misplaced.
Memory Kumbota
“What is very unfortunate is that content creators have been caught unaware of the change in the new media landscape. It’s been easy for them to just exist as content creators, without them needing to create professional associations. In an environment where there are so many TV stations, and quite a lot of them commercial, the biggest losers, if they really don’t change their attitude, is going to be the content creators. They will lose big time. Why? Because they will be running headless, with no standard rates, no ability to negotiate, no equity…they will be just throwing their content from this broadcaster to the next. It is important for content creators to come together. Writers come together, DOPs come together, producers together, actors together and start to understand that a new environment in the media landscape in this country has arrived.”
A year after his passing, with each passing day it seems Mhlanga’s words were indeed prophetic. These were not the rambling thoughts of a quarrelsome old man arguing for argument’s sake. The country’s content creators are still largely operating on an individual basis, with hardly any umbrella organisation to look after their shared interests.
Mhlanga’s words, it seems, have come to pass. Perhaps in his little corner of heaven, Mhlanga looks down upon the country’s new generation of content makers as they run from one broadcaster to the next, pawning off their content for pennies, with a smile on his face that says “I told you so”. In all likelihood, however, his ghost still hovers around Amakhosi, displeased at the fact that his words, even in death, continue to fall on deaf ears.
For years, Mhlanga spoke passionately about the need to create viable unions, funeral plans and emergency funds for artists.
Arts guru, Raisedon Baya said he believed that this was a sticking point that would have Mhlanga turning in his grave.
“He was a person that was really passionate about institutionalisation. He was someone who really wanted to see the building of long-lasting institutions and I am quite sad that culture is just not there in Zimbabwe and we seem to be preoccupied with individualising things in the arts instead of institusionalising them. A lot of our institutions in the arts have broken down and there is no one in any office that matters who is striving for their revival. No one is making sure that institutions stand and live longer because those are the things that can have a lasting legacy. If we adopt the selfish mentality that it is all about me, then when I go or I retire all that will be lost as well but with institutions we maintain a lasting legacy. We need to revive institutions, perhaps even starting with Amakhosi itself,” he said.
In addition, Baya said that theatre, Cont’s first love and the cornerstone from which the city’s once vibrant arts sector was built, was now a largely forgotten art form, with the cobwebs gathering at Amakhosi, Bulawayo Theatre and other venues around the city that are hardly ever used for their intended purpose.
“What are we doing right? I think the idea is that we have to keep moving and keep creating and keep training. We know that he was a man that was passionate about young creatives and the discovery of new faces. I believe that is something that is still going on, not just at Amakhosi but in different places. For me, that is one huge positive because we are still churning out new faces, new creatives.
“On the negative side, I am sad that we are not producing theatre as much as we used to do because remember, he was the pioneer of township or African theatre and the dryness that we see at the moment is very sad because it feels like we are letting him down. I really think we need to come back and produce theatre because that is what he was passionate about first and foremost,” he said.
In his lifetime, Mhlanga was a man who fought passionately for artistes from the city’s townships, who were regarded as outcasts at some point, to get their dues. A part of this meant taking art to the western suburbs, to people who were starved of locally produced content. For Memory Kumbota, the desire to move art from the townships to near the Central Business District is evidence that Mhlanga would still be distraught at an arts scene that had failed to relocate its compass. However, Kumbota acknowledged that art was now being made in a much different world from the one Cont operated in the 1980s when Amakhosi was founded.
“His art, like any other was a product of its time. Cont started his theatre work by filling a void in indigenous black theatre after 1980. He is one of the pioneers that brought black African township voices to the main theatre stage in the country. He brought this with urgency and intensity. His work within the township brought active participation of the people in the theatre space as audiences and participants, as subjects and social change actors. That is the reason his plays were popular.
“Largely today most theatre artists have tended to move away from the township or community platform as a launching pad. Perhaps I speak of myself here and a few others I work with. We are tackling more universal issues because of the time we are in, like I say art is a product of its time. The work we do now is largely different. It has not the urgency nor intensity of the revolutionary theatre of the 1980s when black theatre was finding its new voices and new audiences. One can see that by comparing the proliferation of township theatre groups in 1980s and 1990s and that of today. The number of theatres shows in township halls compared to other creative spaces that we can now access,” he said.
Kumbota said despite that the best way to appease Mhlanga was to take lessons from his storied career and give them a modern twist.
