Langa is a black township on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa. Driving into the township, coming off the exit ramp from the N2, you are greeted by a sign. A large billboard advertising Coca-Cola (certainly not a unique image in the iconographic landscape of South Africa) underlines the phrase “Welcome to Langa.” The inanity and inherent irony of the corporate advertisement?symbolic of the cultural imperialism and neo-colonial conquests of the global North?juxtaposed with the declaration of welcome by the township bothered me greatly.
Townships, long symbolic of the injustices and inequalities of colonialism, adopt a similar function today in the context of a militant global capitalism. These are undoubtedly “third world” spaces, but they are casualties of the “first world” led neo-liberal economic order and the exploitation and oppression intrinsic to this phenomenon. Whereas many people were shocked at the proliferation of the American flag in the most impoverished ghettos of the United States following Sept. 11?the flag being the nationalist kite of a government which has never represented those spaces or the people who inhabit them?the omnipresence of corporate imagery in the townships, although perhaps less voluntary of a trend, is equally illogical in nature.
The “sponsorship” of Langa by Coca-Cola is representative of the type of charity which dominates in today’s world: the kind of philanthropy in which obscenely wealthy individuals, nations and corporations throw pennies back at people and places from whom they have plundered their fortunes. In a world in which young professionals drop coins into empty guitar cases on the sidewalks below, while planes drop packets of food wearing the image of the American flag into craters (where bombs fell minutes before, courtesy of the same benefactor), metaphors for a vertical charity are easily found (as compared to the ideal of a “horizontal,” more collaborative method of humanitarianism). The empty guitar case is the perfect symbol for the negation of artistic space/freedom, an unfortunate side effect of corporate globalization and the manner in which it causes the majority of cultural/artistic production to become neutralized and subservient to the social hierarchy.
In spite of the imperialist imagery omnipresent in Langa, the artistic spaces of this community have survived and flourished, creating and perpetuating a communal and cultural identity which stands outside and in opposition to the prepackaged, mass- produced offerings courtesy of the culture industry. In my stay there I witnessed some incredible marimba music by kids half my age and was fortunate enough to be shown some unique and meaningful drawings by a young girl?only two instances of what is a dynamic artistic environment.
In rebelling against the emblems and icons of the cultural, economic and political neo-colonialists, we are standing up to the misguided worldview and value system that these symbols represent, as well as proactively opposing perhaps the most soulless, prosaic “artistic” form: the corporate advertisement. To shamelessly borrow the words of my brother, Josh, who wrote in Continua, “We live in an age when the planetary media-scape of shared symbols and visual icons, from the Swoosh and the golden arches to the cross, the crescent and star, and the American flag, are more than ever the currency in which we all formulate our identities. The struggle to create art and form human collectivities around icons not obedient to the hierarchical dictates of militant nationalism and the corporate world order is a struggle we must wage and must win.” This is a struggle which is, for the time being, alive and well. However, currently there exist numerous efforts from the ruling classes to appropriate even the most dissenting of historically peripheral art forms (e.g., hip-hop) for the furtherance of their own imperialist agenda.
Following the example of the people of Langa, we must fight even harder to make art and music that does not surrender itself to the state, or the corporate world, and instead functions as an outlet where people can express the problems they see as endemic to today’s reality, as well as articulate a vision of what a planet founded on a fundamental humanism (and not a fundamentalist nationalism or capitalism) would look (and sound) like.
