Dancing to a New Tune: Minister McKenzie’s Cultural Shake-Up

If sweeping clean were a person, his name would undoubtedly be Gayton McKenzie. Since assuming office last week, South Africa’s new minister of sports, arts and culture has been causing quite a stir.

Now as someone who has observed and participated in South Africa’s arts and culture scene for the past 30 years, I can’t tell you which I find more entertaining: the sheer delight and enthusiasm with which the larger-than-life former gangster has embraced his new job, or the frantic pearl-clutching from South Africa’s mostly conservative culturati.

When, on his first day in office, Minister McKenzie promised to make ‘spinning’ a national sport and elevate the Temple Boys to even greater fame, I’m pretty sure I heard a collective gasp of shock and horror from every corner of the land that is not a township, slum, or ghetto.

In fact, I’d be willing to bet that the 500 or so good citizens who make up the country’s opera and ballet performing class are worried sick they might lose their jobs should the Minister decide to redirect the river of public money that funds their elite institutions towards the ‘lower’ arts.

Now I’m not one to celebrate another person’s anxiety or distress, but when you take a wider view, I think it’s a very good thing that our new sports, arts and culture minister is a bit of a bull in the cultural china shop, ready and willing to shake things up.

I love classical music just as much as the next person. It warms the cockles of my old heart when I see a black person playing Vivaldi on the violin, singing like Pavarotti, or leaping through the air like Mikhail Baryshnikov. But I genuinely can’t remember the last time I felt the overwhelming urge to sit among a crowd of a thousand grey-haired white people to watch the latest rendition of Swan Lake just so I could call myself ‘cultured.’

The new Minister was also quick to congratulate Tyla on her double-BET Award win. While some dismissed his gesture as crassly populist and opportunistic, I got a kick out of knowing how much it irked all those self-appointed arbiters of South African taste who smugly dismiss the young lady as a skimpily-dressed pop princess without genuine creative talent.

Swanning around at their fancy book launches with plates heaped high with hors d’oeuvres, these are the same ignoramuses who couldn’t tell the difference between amapiano and gqom, or a bacardi move from a pantsula dance.

But the good Minister, being someone who didn’t grow up in LaLa Land, appears to know something they never will: if you give the people what they want, they will show up for it. Just ask the Marc Lotterings and Joe Barbers of this world.

He knows there are at least 500 more Tylas out there just waiting to be discovered, who could help build a local pop music industry that would create thousands more jobs than the relative handful created by the millions of rands of public money that gets poured into the so-called ‘high’ arts each year.

Now, I’m not advocating for the total defunding of the classics, but come on, can we at least have some balance? Let’s see what happens if we build a proper College of Popular Music in Mitchell’s Plain or Eldos where kids can learn how to write, sing, and perform everything from R&B to Disco, Reggae to House.

Or are we gonna wait another 10 years before the next Tyla pushes her way up from the streets?

The South African film and television industry has a different set of challenges: local broadcasters no longer have the budgets to fund high-quality productions, and SA filmmakers and the institutions that fund them still favour turgid nation-building melodramas that could get nominated for the next Foreign Language Oscar over entertaining high-octane genre films that appeal to the local masses.

On the distribution side, going to the movies has become eye-wateringly expensive. TikTok and YouTube deliver far more entertaining content around the clock than the boring and predictable stuff we get on local television screens, and it’s 100% free if you happen to know your friend or neighbour’s wifi password.

All of this means that even if you make films that celebrate popular local realities, it’s gonna take some very creative marketing strategies to get enough bums on cinema seats to sustain a meaningful local industry.

Think about it: the last time you went to watch a movie at the Waterfront or Cavendish Square and there was a good local film playing alongside a mediocre Hollywood blockbuster, which one did you end up spending your hard-earned R300 on?

The bright hope for South African filmmakers, of course, is the streamers like Netflix, Showmax, and Evod, but even they have to work hard to keep the audience’s attention.

Minister McKenzie, as a big movie fan, could you please encourage our filmmakers to diversify their genres?

South Africans are really tired of seeing prison and gangster movies, especially ones where it’s only Coloured people playing prisoners and gangsters.

How about we finally get some good horror, thriller, martial arts, comedy, buddy travel adventures, or sci-fi movies?

Let’s break the monotony of nation-building dramas and stereotypical gangster flicks and give the audience something fresh and exciting, like maybe a sci-fi horror film set in a prison where the gangsters have to karate chop the invading aliens and save the day.

Something, anything, that stretches our collective imagination, please, for the love of G-d…

Ryan Fortune is a journalist, film and television screenwriter, podcast host and more. Visit his website for more information.