(ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT /02)

By Mercedes Sayagues Reprint | | Print |

Maria Cremilda Massingue and Mercedes Sayagues

MAPUTO, Sep 24 1996 (IPS) - An ambitious festival designed to showcase theatrical talents in the Southern African region has been abandoned because of the eleventh hour refusal of donors to underwrite the costs.

Only eight days before the curtain was set to rise on the first performance in the Southern Africa Theatre Festival, Mozambique’s minister of culture, youth and sports Dr. Mateus Katupha announced that two weeks ago the Scandinavian countries which had originally agreed to finance the event had pulled out.

Mozambique had made enormous efforts to ensure the show’s success. The Portuguese-speaking country is coordinator for information and culture for the Southern African Development Community (SADC) which groups countries in the sub-region.

Through Maputo’s efforts, the original budget of 800,000 U.S. dollars had been trimmed to about 500,000 dollars through the provision of free offices, staff and lending equipment.

Waldemar Ferreira, assistant to the festival’s administrator says that amount was “the bare minimum needed to have a decent festival.”

In addition, the government gave 84,000 U.S. dollars — a substantial sum for a poor country – which has been spent on preparations.

A newsletter has been published, and calendars of rehearsals and workshops are ready. Ten theatres were to host 48 performances of the official festival, while 36 functions of the fringe festival would have taken place in schools and community centers in Maputo’s bairros (neighbourhoods). An exhibition of masks (10 per country) was scheduled at the colonial fort Nossa Senhora da Conceicao as well as several workshops.

Augusta David Celestino, festival administrator and under- secretary of the culture ministry says: “This should be enough for donors and everybody else to see the importance we attach to the festival. My team has worked hard, now donors have to respond, and SADC governments have to act.”

The organisers have been trying to get private sector support, but “the contributions are not significant,” says Ferreira.

Clearly frustrated by the Scandinavians’ actions, Katupha says: “Their reasons are not convincing and we’re going to work with them to ascertain the real reasons. We are still going to negotiate with our partners to see if we can reach an understanding to reduce discrepancies.”

According to Katupha, after the Scandinavians’ move, the European Union put up 100,000 U.S. dollars, but this could not rescue the festival which is underfunded by 90 percent of its budget.

“You can’t make an omelet without eggs,” observes Ferreira.

But there are reports that donors were wary of funding the theatre festival because of their experience with the 1995 Music Festival in Harare, Zimbabwe. Some 1.8 million U.S. dollars went into funding that event, which was tainted by reports that some of the funds were diverted.

That suspicion dovetailed into ongoing efforts here by donors to pressure Mozambique to curb corruption which they claim is rampant.

The problem was brought into sharp focus a few months ago when for the first time, the media, led by the official weekly ‘Domingo’, reported the alleged mismanagement of the Co-ordinating Committee for Information and Culture (CCPIC) by its former secretariat, chaired by Yolanda Mussa.

Questioned on the allegations and whether these would not affect the work of the current secretariat, CCPIC Secretary General Renato Matusse said:

“There are no major problems. The main one is to know that the future is the most important thing. It is also important to convince donors that things will go well in this event.”

Of the Harare festival, Matusse says errors are inevitable with an event that big, “but we’re working with the Mozambique national committee to minimise possible errors.”

Some donors also argue that there are more pressing needs on which they can spend money, considering that the Maputo festival was to take place in one of the world’s poorest countries. Mozambique’s per capita income is 90 U.S. dollars a year and at last 66 percent of its 17 million people live in poverty.

An EU official in Maputo tells IPS: “Funding cultural festivals is not a priority for the European Union.”

“I can’t speak for the government but the shortcomings are not just on Mozambique’s part and culture has an extremely important role in the whole process of integration. In this we can be backed by international organisations such as (the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organsiation) UNESCO,” counters Matusse.

The postponement of the Maputo festival jeopardises the future of a crafts and visual arts festival in Namibia planned for 1997 and dance in Tanzania the following year. The series of regional cultural pageants approved at a SADC meeting in Windhoek in July 1993, kicked off with the Harare music festival.

“This is an opportunity for SADC to reflect on what it should do to ensure that its projects have an internal financial base and thus reduce dependence,” says Katupha.

Other critics argue that Maputo is not the best venue for a theatre festival. The city is fairly clean and pleasant, but its infrastructure has suffered from a bankrupt Marxist administration and 15 years of civil war.

David Abilio, director of the internationally acclaimed National Company of Song and Dance, and festival producer, disagrees: “Of all the SADC capitals, excepting South Africa’s, Maputo has the most and largest venues.”

However, some observers say while the halls are there, some are rather shabby. Celestino acknowledges that the venues are not in tiptop shape. “Our infrastructure needs rehabilitation.”

The EU will give ECU 124,000 to restore some theatres as support to Mozambique’s cultural infrastructure — not to the festival. A South African firm has started work in this area.

Although infrastructural weaknesses and shortage of funds are the main issues confronting the festival’s organisers, there are other concerns too. Theatre professionals like Manuela Sueiro doubt that SADC can organise a meaningful theater festival.

Still, he said, “we will support the festival, although we were not consulted from the beginning.” Sueiro is director of Mozambique’s most prestigious theater society, Mutumbela Gogo.

“We are dealing with bureaucracies that move slowly, and with amateur groups, who are not very organised,” says Abilio who is a member of the festival’s executive committee.

Angola, Swaziland and Zambia have not yet sent their programmes. This delays the preparation and translation into Portuguese of the programmes and the media kit. Translations are needed, since only Angola and Mozambique, among all 12 SADC members, are Portuguese-speaking.

“All participating countries know we speak Portuguese and I hope they will choose the pieces accordingly,” says Abilio.

African theatre, he points out, uses a lot of body language, mimic, pantomime, song and dance that can cross the language barrier. That will be badly needed. In March this year, ‘A Cena Lusofona’ (the Lusophone stage), a festival of theatre in Portuguese, brought to Maputo several groups from abroad. Local groups were sold out. Foreigners had low turnouts; they were watched mostly by other theater professionals.

“Some say the Portuguese from Portugal is hard to understand, others that the themes and mise en scene are not interesting to the local audience, but, for whatever the reason, Mozambican productions were well attended and foreign groups almost empty,” says Evaristo Abreu, director of M’beu (seed, in the Ronga language), a professional theatre group.

Not much revenue from tickets sales was expected since the price is kept low, at less than one U.S. dollar, to make it accessible to large numbers of people.

Another 36,000 U.S. dollars had been budgeted for badly needed publicity, lest the fiasco of Harare’s festival be repeated: great bands in half-empty halls due to poor publicity and venues chosen in low-density suburbs.

The festival’s regional committee is to meet Sep. 30 in Maputo to decide on the festival’s future. Katupha proposes rescheduling it for the first trimester of 1997, to avoid its clashing with the Windhoek Painting Festival.