From Cosmopolitanism to Cosmology and Back Again: Co-Curating a Practice-Centred South African Jazz Collective, 2020-2022
Date
2022-09-16
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Publisher
Arts Research Africa
Abstract
Since 2005 as a researcher, and since the early 1990s as an organiser who worked in Pretoria as South Africa transitioned towards democracy, Brett Pyper has had the privilege of knowing a community of practice that occupies a distinct, under-recognised position in the country’s internationally famous jazz culture.
Known variously as jazz appreciation societies, social clubs or stokvels (mutual aid associations), these township-based collectives played no small part, during the long night of apartheid, in preserving and developing the vibrant, cosmopolitan African cultures that were suppressed and dispersed under racial and ethnic segregation policies. They did so in spite of restrictions on public gatherings, and in communities with hardly any civic or cultural amenities. After the formal end of apartheid and the lifting of cultural boycotts in the 1990s, the country’s reintegration into circuits of international cultural exchange resulted in the establishment of several globally benchmarked festivals. Meanwhile, these community-based jazz societies underwent their own efflorescence, though in relative isolation from the festivals that take place in downtown convention centres for a globally mobile, relatively elite clientele. These developments emblematise the promise as well as the limitations of the post-apartheid transition: while the existence of platforms for international jazz luminaries serves as a powerful symbol of change and a vehicle for the assertion of transnational cultural and political ties, the audience for jazz music in South Africa remains largely excluded from participating in these celebrations of avowedly post-apartheid culture.