A Shrine for my Father

A couple of months ago, The Sundance Institute from the USA invited me, amongst others, to participate in a multiple-day workshop on Theatre, that they were coming to organise in East Africa.

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As someone who had been aware of Sundance due to an over-exposure to Robert Redford in my itinerant youth (I had lived in 5 different countries before I was 25 years old), I was aware of the Institute as an earnest artistic development of Redford\’s career in the arts. I remembered his acting most from a film called The Hot Rock, about some African diplomats in the US trying to organise the retrieval of a diamond that belonged to their country through hiring a team of bungling burglars of whom Redford was the leader. I remember, as a young man, really liking the way the Africans were portrayed. So much as he was only an actor in the film, I thereafter developed a liking for All Things Redford. Years later, I saw his brilliantly directed low-key film: The Milagro Beanfield War. The film was basically about the deliberately attempted impoverishment of a small Hispanic rural community, that made me think of Native Americans.

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The Institute have started a 5-year long commitment to engage in the development of Theatre in East Africa, in the hope perhaps of helping do to theatre here what they have achieved with Indie Film in the USA.

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I was very reluctant to get involved. From the time I had worked as the Director of the Uganda National Cultural Center (and National Theatre), I had become used to the seemingly endless train of visitors from somewhere in the white, judeo-Christian universe coming over here to see how to “develop” one branch or the other of the arts. Despite some 20—40 years of if this kind of investment, there is still little to show as a direct positive product.

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In one of my earlier interactions with American promoters of the Arts In Africa, I was contacted by a large, very well-known Humanities body with a global reach who shall remain nameless for now. They wanted to know what it was they need to know in order to work effectively in Uganda. After repeated visits from them that produced many long drawn-out discussions, they realised that the issue was huge. So, I was asked to write an extensive analytical report for them, giving the past and present of theatre in Uganda.

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As a private organisation, their rules prevented them from giving money to public bodies like mine, and yet they did not seem willing to bestow upon me the title of “Consultant”. Nevertheless, I felt that some form of payment should take place in return for this work. I therefore told them that I would do this in return for them donating one (yes, one) laptop computer to the National Cultural Centre. On hearing this, their Programme Officer (a white man) seemed genuinely surprised and asked: “what do you need a laptop computer for?”. Now, I am my mother\’s son, and my father was her husband, and together they developed a highly refined strain of sarcasm that infected all of their children. So my immediate answer was to tell him that the desk in my office had been unstable for sometime due to one leg being shorter than the other three, and that I had worked out that it would take an object exactly the thickness of a closed laptop computer to fit the gap under the short leg and stop it from rocking. His jaw was still dropped as I walked away. We stopped dealing with each other after that.

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With that kind of background, I was naturally quite reluctant to be drawn into another cycle of discussing Uganda\’s theatre challenges with another set of non-Africans.

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But Sundance, with their wonderful track record (in film at least) were here, promising to be different.

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Great aspirations. Nice people.

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So why did I sneak out, never to return, early on the morning of the second day, weighed down with the same weary feeling I have had so many times before?

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One reason of course could be the disjointed, and sometime mutually negating effect of having Italian Embassy, The British Council, The French Alliance, The Uganda-German Cultural Society and the United States Information Service all trying simultaneously to implement often overlapping arts projects and programmes within Kampala city..

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Another could be the quiet puzzlement by the African recipients of all this largesse as to why they are discussing the arts with people who are often less knowledgeable than them on the subject matter.

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Another could be the natural effects of these programmes imposing a “sameness\” on all the participants. There are many diverse and disparate views on what constitutes “good” and “bad” art in Uganda. Some “art” has taken the “parade art” (basically, writing and performing for the powerful and exalted) route, other art has taken the “airport art” (doing it for the tourist trade) route, another form has resorted to pandering to every perceived whim of moneyed audiences in a desperate (and increasingly faltering) attempt to hold their attention and loyalty. Other practices started off serious. In fact deadly serious, and have remained so. Such is life. “Nothing tastes the same to all tongues”, goes one Ganda proverb.

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Unfortunately, this has not stopped all these wonderful arts developers from herding the representatives and products of all these disparate approaches into one room for one workshop every time they decide “Let There Be Art”. To insist that people who work in the same industry, and live in the same city, and yet who have clearly made a decision not to consort with one another, must now be Gathered Together In Your Name is the height of insensitivity, if not vanity.

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And this is only the first area of problems. The bigger one is on the assumptions around the processes of teaching and learning.

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To be sure, Post-Columbine America has a hugely rich tradition of artistic expression. Thanks to the very open mind of Robert Serumaga (1939-1980), I was fortunate enough -as someone growing up in his home- to be exposed to American expression as varied as I Never Sang For My Father, Cotton Comes To Harlem, Who\’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Effect Of Gamma Rays On Man-In-Moon Marigolds, A Raisin In The Sun, Tobacco Road, Long Day\’s Journey Into Night, Purlie the musical (yes, you read that right) as well as writers like James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Salinger, John Steinbeck and the music of everyone from Quincy Jones, Ray Charles, The Morehouse College Glee Club, James Brown and Mahalia Jackson with the entire Stax Records collection in between. I read, listened to, and explored enough to learn that America was a very diverse place held together by a common angst held in check by an eternal optimism.

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But this is not to say that other forms of expression do not exist, and are not equally, if not more valid. This is why the Milagro film so intrigued me. It talked about a different perspective, a different sensibility regarding how the universe -and America- could be understood and navigated. It is this memory of “something Sundanced” that made me allow my many friends in the theatre world to persuade me to go against my pre-programmed instincts, and