Elevating black voices the Spike Lee way

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Spike Lee’s film-making career. To those who do not know him, he is the first African-American to make it big in Hollywood, if you like.

Lee produced and directed films like School Daze, Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X and, my best movie, Bedazzled.

Of course, he has got other works.

I found myself thinking about him because he preferred to be interviewed by black journalists when he broke into the international spotlight.

That was big news, that a black man could decline media interviews and exposure by white global forces that had appropriated the right to define what other people represented and meant.

I had been invited to interview him when he visited the country to film and promote Malcolm X in the early 1990s but for some reason the interview did not take place.

I’ve been thinking about Spike because his stance has an important lesson for South African creative intellectuals who are black. Unless they adopt the Lee stance, they are allowing their history to be written by other people who don’t understand them.

You see, those who write newspaper profiles, features and reviews about black aesthetics, for instance, control the future because that will be tomorrow’s history and heritage.

We cannot ignore the single most important truth about South Africa: local whites don’t know blacks, let alone their condition. I know you may charge that this is an unfair generalisation but when it comes to the black reality, whites are foreigners.

What they speak about, know or write in their newspapers is mostly an illusion or perpetuates a stereotype. My big question is: why do blacks allow whites to be the judges, reviewers and critics who give the final word on the black aesthetic and condition or what makes it tick when they know absolutely nothing about it?

Of course, it is not enough to say this is a vicious legacy of apartheid and racism where whites are so superior that they continue to pronounce their ignorance about the black condition and it is taken as gospel truth, especially by blacks themselves.

I think black creative intellectuals must put a stop to this!

Part of putting a stop to this lies in asking the question: why are there no African critics to review and critique works by black creative intellectuals?

Now, as far as I am concerned, it is not a mistake that there are no black critics.

Someone else may even be right to say that there is no culture of criticism in South Africa, which is permeated by fake consensus on critical issues. But the absence of black critics is a deliberate creation of the bourgeoisie existence to perpetuate a situation where whites are the experts and they tell us what is black and what is not.

In fact, whites and their cohorts have retained the power and monopoly not only to define blackness but to reinvent it in the white image.

As I have said, those who review plays by Aubrey Sekhabi, Martin Koboekae, Mbongeni Ngema and James Ngcobo in the present control the future in that they are writing African history.

If blacks want to control their past and future they must, like Lee, insist that blacks be given preference, space and time to review their creative output.

If they do not, blacks should not be surprised when their history, in 50 years’ time, is viewed through a white lens and is presented from a white perspective.

I want to believe that one of the major aims of the struggle was cultural self-determination.

Unfortunately, there is far too little of that in cultural journalism and the creative industries.

It is a problem that needs a Spike Lee approach.

As Albert Einstein said: “We cannot solve old problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”