AFRICA IS A COUNTRY

A South African production of the American opera, “Porgy and Bess,” is touring Britain (composer George Gershwin insisted on all black casts and they can’t assemble one in the UK) so the predictable moaning about whether black people care for opera are raised. The Guardian, in an otherwise informative piece today on the backgrounds of some of the cast, has to complain about the South African government’s “… blinkered view, early in the post-apartheid era, that opera was a Eurocentric, whites-only art form that deserved little or no state support.”

Separately The Economist echoes the same complaint: “… the [Cape Town Opera] gets no support from the South African government which tends to regard opera as a colonial import, having nothing authentically African about it. The company was downcast when neither Nelson Mandela nor any bigwig from the African National Congress attended a performance of “Fidelio” (the opera most closely associated with political freedom) that it gave in 1994 on Robben Island, where Mr Mandela was imprisoned for 18 years.”

That might be true, but it is not like the government is supporting any other art form. And the articles also misrepresent black people’s relationship to opera music. Take the case of black support and patronage of composer Welcome Msomi’s “Umabatha: The Zulu Macbeth,” which was first staged in 1970 (under Apartheid) and later the opera about the Bulhoek Massacre, which I saw at Artscape (then still the Nico Malan) a few years ago.

P.S. This coming Saturday’s episode of the BBC 3’s Music Matters also features the cast of the South African Porgy and Bess and more discussion about South African opera.