Siphakeme .Mnindwa
Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
IN his last days, arts doyen Cont Mhlanga bemoaned the fact that Bulawayo artistes mostly performed at venues dotted around the central business district (CBD).
For Mhlanga, this represented a great betrayal, as the city’s most prominent artistes were born and bred in the townships. This is where their artistry was first embraced and nurtured and Mhlanga reasoned that the artistes should take their performances to the people who made them.
Last week, Austria-based music star Vusa Mkhaya revealed that Mhlanga had also expressed a similar sentiment in a conversation before his death.
Mkhaya was reacting to videos of the community engagement segment of the ongoing Intwasa Arts Festival koBulawayo. While in the past the festival has made a buzz in venues around the CBD, this year Intwasa took its beloved live stage to townships around Bulawayo, attracting bumper crowds as residents took the opportunity to see some of their favoured local acts live.
“Cont Mhlanga would have loved this. My last conversation I had with him was about taking arts back to the townships where most of us started. He was not happy that we now do our shows in town (Byo Theatre and Academy of Music) forgetting the real people on the ground,” Mkhaya wrote.
While some will feel that Intwasa does not carry the same buzz without its popular stage at the City Hall, the biggest winners of the community engagement events have been residents who are usually starved of top-notch entertainment in their localities.
In an interview with Sunday Life, festival director Raisedon Baya said as Intwasa, they had always felt that taking the stage to the city’s western suburbs was essential for the growth and survival of the annual event.
“The community engagement dimension of the festival is not new. We have always wanted to implement it. We tried it once but because of resources, we could not do what we wanted. This year, we were lucky that the Culture Fund and European Union, when they decided to give us a grant, did so with the knowledge that the funds would be geared towards the community engagement initiative. This is because they know what this is meant to bring to the festival and we have seen that from the way communities have come out to support and enjoy the festival. So we are thankful to our sponsors for believing in the idea and supporting it. Everyone has now seen the potential of the idea,” he said.
Baya said that in the future, they wanted the festival to host an event in the townships every week of September. This, he said, would allow Intwasa to grow from merely being a one-week festival into an extravaganza that entertained Bulawayo for an entire month.
“We want to grow this concept and make it big so that it becomes part and parcel of the festival. The idea is that from next year, resources permitting, is that the festival just does revert to being the known one-week event again. We want to grab the whole of September and designate it as the festival month. Every weekend during that month we would be in the community, doing the engagement events. In week one, we would be in Cowdray Park, week two in Nkulumane, and week three in Mpopoma or Pumula. Week four, which is the final week, is when we have many activities around the city. That’s the mindset that we have as a festival now. From week one we should be having performances and people around Bulawayo enjoying,” he said.
Mhlanga said their selection of acts this year had also been deliberate, as they wanted a mixture of both the young and old so that different generations of the city’s artists could all learn from each other.
“When it comes to the events that we call engagements, I think they were a huge success. When it comes to the artistes that we chose, it was a mixture of the young and the tried and tested which for us I thought was good. It was in line with the objectives of the festival which require us to mix the experienced with the inexperienced because we want the young to learn from the old and vice versa. In the arts, there’s always room for improvement and we can do that by learning and sharing,” he said.
Baya also said that the engagements had also helped counter suggestions that music was the only form of entertainment that people in Bulawayo embraced, as other genres of art found audiences very receptive.
“The engagement also proved that it was high time we went back to where the majority of our people live and that is the townships. We went back and the people enjoyed the performances. Ultimately the performances proved that maybe we have been focusing too much on music. Everywhere we go music is at the forefront but I think our people love diversity. It was proven that they appreciated other genres besides that because they loved the traditional dance and they loved the poetry on display. When it came to the music, it was clear that they appreciated the different types of music that we have to offer in Bulawayo. We would go from rhumba to jazz and other genres and they would dance along. So, we are excited about this concept which we feel adds new life to the festival. We would love to see it grow because we feel like it would bring a fresh perspective on the festival,” he said.
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