The Sun Does Not Dance on Africa

The Sundance Institute's African initiative means well, but a little enlightenment about our cultures would be nice.

The Sundance Institute recently embarked upon a five-year commitment toward "developing" East African theatre, in the hopes of doing what they have achieved with American Indie Film. I was among those invited to participate in the initial East African workshops, held last spring.

The program, according to Sundance, seeks to expand the scope of American theatre and simultaneously foster "the growth of the East African theatre artist and field through international exposure and exchange."

As a Uganda-based arts worker, I was mildly optimistic because of Robert Redford's involvement. I had come to like all things Redford after seeing The Hot Rock, a 1972 film about African diplomats in the United States who hire a team of bungling burglars to retrieve a diamond that belonged to their country. The portrayal of the Africans was appealing. Years later, his brilliantly directed, low-key film, The Milagro Beanfield War, sensitively touched on the contemporary Native-American experience.

Despite the positive Redford vibe, I was very reluctant to get involved in the East African Sundance Institute. From my time as the director of the Uganda National Cultural Centre (and National Theatre), I had become wary of the procession, from somewhere in the white, Judeo-Christian universe, of experts coming to see how to "develop" our arts scene.

Influential outsiders tend to impose a kind of "sameness" that leads Ugandan artists to pursue four types of approaches—all of them trite. There's "parade art" (basically, writing and performing for the powerful and exalted). Others specialize in "airport art" (primarily doing it for the tourist trade). Yet others have resorted to pandering to every perceived whim of moneyed audiences in a desperate (and increasingly faltering) attempt to hold their attention and loyalty. Another set of artists started off deadly serious (people were killed or nearly killed for making it) and have remained so. Such is life. "Nothing tastes the same to all tongues," goes one Ganda proverb.

Then there is the patronizing attitude toward us. Several years ago, I was approached by a well-known, private American organization that asked me to write an extensive analytical report for them—for free. Their rules prevented them from giving money to public bodies like mine. Nevertheless, I felt that we should be compensated in some form and suggested that they donate just one laptop computer to the National Cultural Centre. This surprised the (white) program officer who asked: "What do you need a laptop computer for?"

My parents had a highly refined strain of sarcasm that infected all of their offspring. So, I replied that it would take an object exactly the thickness of a closed laptop computer to fit the gap under the shorter leg of my office desk to stop it from rocking.

We stopped dealing with each other after that.

The idea of discussing Uganda's theatre challenges with yet another set of non-Africans was uninspiring. But Sundance, with their wonderful track record (in film at least) promised to be different. Great aspirations. Nice people.

So why did I sneak out on the Sundance meetings, 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?

Like any nation, our country boasts a rich diversity, one that should be reflected in our arts scene. There are traditional Ugandan art forms that are fairly faithful to our rich history. Then there are the groups that are more influenced by Uganda's colonial past, the so-called "modern" Africans. But in that workshop, Sundance gathered all of us theatre people together as if we were all the same. When the Sundance facilitators tried to draw parallels between Native expression in Uganda and in America, my "modern" African colleagues balked.

The facilitators sensed this, and instead of using the disagreement as a tool for engagement about the tensions between the many forms of post-colonial expression, they chose to defer to the "modern" Africans.

It was an opportunity to educate everyone about what it means to truly be in a pluralistic art scene. Instead, all we got was intellectual evasion.

The larger problem lies with assumptions about what Africans need to learn. The American arts tell of a very diverse place held together by a common angst, held in check by an eternal optimism. But expressions rooted in the non-dominant experience also exist, and is equally, if not more, valid. Milagro so intrigued me because it offered a different perspective and sensibility as to how America could be understood and navigated from the perspective of the Native Americans.

In Africa, indigenous Ugandans have many parallels to Native Americans. Like Native Americans, indigenous Ugandans are also trying to cope in countries run by an increasingly globalist, bullying and venal African elite. This is a fact easily overlooked by visitors to Africa.

The seam of expression in Africa that needs to be mined is analogous to that of the natives in America, and not the richly crafted angst of what is essentially a highly evolved European-settler culture.

We are not here to be given life via the arts. Creation has already happened. The real challenge that Africa presents to the world is the fallout from the failed attempts to wipe us out. Genocide, in this sense, is only a problem when it is unsuccessful. If it succeeds, then there is nobody left to seek justice. Survivors like us, however, place the world between two hugely conflicting narratives on how the past comes to the present in an angry knot of political, geographical, historical and cultural matters that we are still struggling to untie.

We need an artistic practice that can see and intelligently explore all of this, not arts developers who choose to herd all the disparate arts approaches into one room, for one workshop, every time they decide to "let there be art." To insist—as the "Sundancers" did—that people who live and work in the same city and industry, and yet who do not consort with one another, must now be gathered together in your name, is the height of insensitivity, if not vanity.

Were they assuming that whatever may have gone before did not really amount to anything, and that we could now imagine a new present and future, unencumbered by a different understanding of the past?

I did not get an answer. So, I left.

I hope, as they continue with their plans, the Sundance Institute comes to recognize that over here when they reference a native's ritual, they get the living native as well.

Kalundi Serumaga is a cultural activist, filmmaker and media commentator based in Kampala, Uganda.