The National Arts Festival is an elite festival. Poor people are excluded. Even if art is made about poor people by rich people we can’t afford to come and see it!
Our attempts to engage the current festival management have been fruitless. The hostility to our struggles has been made very clear.
Therefore on 1-7 July the Unemployed Peoples Movement (UPM), Soundz of the South and the UHURU Network will host the 1st Rhini Festival of Resistance in Rhini (Grahamstown). We are happy to be able to announce that we will be joined by comrades from our sister organisation Abahlali baseMjondolo.
Our festival of resistance will include poetry, street theatre, a street art and graffiti workshop, music, political discussions, a radical film festival and more. Lesego Rampolokeng will present his poetry and films that will be shown will include Dear Mandela, The Uprising in Hangberg, Che, Injury Time, Hunger and more.
The festival will be opened by M.P. Giyose. Speakers will include Bheki Buthelezi, Ayanda Kota, Fundile Mafongosi, Richard Pithouse, Zodwa Nsibande and many others.
We refuse to celebrate 200 hundred years of Grahamstown. What do we have to celebrate in a town where there is 70% unemployment and racism remains rife? We refuse to celebrate 100 years of the ANC. What do we have to celebrate when we are living as we are and when our struggles are repressed as they are? Instead we will celebrate resistance in South Africa and around the world.
We will discuss the role of art and culture in our struggles, histories and philosophies of struggle and the state of oppression and resistance in South Africa. We will discuss how to take the rebellion of the poor to the next level never forgetting that communism is the real movement that abolishes the present state of things from below. It is a philosophy and practice of self-emancipation.
Everyone who is committed to the struggle, from below, and by the oppressed themselves, for a just world is warmly welcomed to join the Rhini Festival of Resistance!
For more information contact:
Anela Afrika, Soundz of the South: 083 447 2939
Ayanda Kota, Unemployed People’s Movement: 078 625 6462
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