Lockdown Extended: Corona Chronicles

By Melinda Ferguson

Sentenced to Lockdown, regarded as "non-essential", a group of 30 South African writers get together in a virtual Corona Collective, to pen Lockdown Extended. This historical gem includes a list of South Africa's most celebrated and awarded fiction and non-fiction authors, including: Sisonke Msimang, Lebo Mashile, Fred Khumalo, Khaya Dlanga and Marianne Thamm. Profound, mad, sad, insightful and also hilarious and uplifting, each writer digs deep to find true meaning in the time of Corona. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melinda Ferguson Books
• Release date: Apr 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781928421245

Melinda Ferguson

Melinda Ferguson is the bestselling author of her addiction trilogy Smacked, Hooked and Crashed. She is also an award-winning publisher. In 2016 her groundbreaking title, Rape: A South African Nightmare by Prof Pumla Gqola, won the Alan Paton Award for non-fiction. In 2020 she joined NB Publishers under her imprint Melinda Ferguson Books.

Book preview

Compiler/Publisher Note

Lockdown Extended

23 April, 2020

Sentenced to Lockdown, on the 27 of March, overnight regarded as non-essential – I found myself trying to figure out how suddenly all us creatives – writers, poets, actors, singers, publishers, musicians, painters, sculptors – had literally become irrelevant, according to COVID-19 Lockdown regulations. After Donald Trump threatened to cut funding for the arts in the US in January, this meme went viral on social media:

When Winston Churchill was asked to cut arts funding to support the war effort, he replied: ‘Then what are we fighting for?’ Apparently Churchill never actually said this, but sometimes fake news can serve as inspiration. Here in South Africa creatives have never been supported by any meaningful state funding. But we have plenty of passion.

At the end of March, my first response against creative suicide, Lockdown The Corona Chronicles was published after a group of 17 authors, under my benevolent whip, got an e-book together in just 7 days.

Twenty four hours later I went back to the drawing board. I must have been withdrawing from the endorphins that come with creative surges. I dipped into wishful thinking mode and made a list of authors I’d love to collaborate with. You know those mood board things everyone on Facebook has been urging us to make? Over the following days, I decided to take my chances and approach the list, in the hope that at least three or four writers would agree to go on a new, mad venture with me. Turns out all 30 of them agreed. And so Lockdown Extended was birthed, from start to finish, in an incredible explosion of creativity and commitment, in just 10 days.

Thank you my Corona Collective: Pumla Dineo Gqola, Sisonke Msimang, Lebo Mashile, Chris Roper, Ferial Haffajee, Jonathan Ancer, Sara-Jayne Makwala King, Fred Khumalo, Haji Mohamed Dawjee, Khaya Dlanga, Tracy Going, Rahla Xenopoulos, Phumlani Pikoli, Ben Trovato, Steven Sidley, Hagen Engler, Rof Maneta, Rachelle Greeff, Dave Muller, Dudu Busani-Dube, Everjoice J. Win, Helen Moffett, Barbara Boswell, Siya Khumalo, Chris Du Plessis, Issy Lagardien, Marianne Thamm, An Wentzel and Melusi Tshabalala.

You’re all as insane as I am and boy, do I love crazy. At least we’ll have a book to prove that we woz there.

Thank you NB Publishers for being the best publishing house for a girl with madcap ideas, some very scary pull rabbits out of the hat requests and superhuman deadlines. Wilna Combrinck you are a publisher’s dream designer. Thank you my Mat and cats for being my home.

Melinda Ferguson

Lockdown: No laughing matter

Lebo Mashile

Cororo

M’coristo

Corrido

Cocovela

Coco V

Coroza

Cocorella

M’corostina

Corollary

Corolla

Roroza

Coconut

Corobrick

Corovela

Corry

Corayray

Coronza

Coroniza

The Rona

When the first South African case of COVID-19 was diagnosed on 4 March 2020, the most explosive and innovative corner of the internet, also known as Black Twitter, erupted with a litany of pseudonyms, memes, and jokes, that ushered in the beginning of the end, in the best way we know how: with gut-splitting humour. This is what we do. South Africans are some of the funniest people on Earth. With a sense of irony and sarcasm born out of consistently turning agony into light, we did what we had done in the face of tragedies like the HIV/AIDS pandemic, Jacob Zuma and the Guptas, Apartheid’s atrocities, government corruption, white supremacy, and deadbeat fathers. We closed the front door, and as a family, we laughed our asses off.

Can you blame us? Even if anyone did, we didn’t care, because how else do we cope with the rabbit hole, that is our historical and present day landscape? This is the humour that comes from hearing aunties and uncles relive tales of torture. The kinds of jokes your rational mind doesn’t want to laugh at, but that’ll have you holding your stomach and fighting tears, as you cackle. Jokes about detention at John Vorster Square and the chunky Boere cop’s gut, hanging over his belt buckle, as he lifted a hand the size of a frying pan, to slap the living daylights out of a skinny passionate activist. In the wee hours of the morning, after a long day and night of celebrations, wildly inappropriate jokes about how sellout black cops placed our heroes’ testicles between wooden drawers and repeatedly slammed them shut, fly out of the mouths of elders, who are still reeling from PTSD.

We joke about addictions, because we are an addictive society. We laugh at the pickled faces and fermented lives of relatives who play the Shakespearean court jester in dramas, shaped by our collective responses to heartache. Our shared family archetypes mirror anguish that has not been elucidated with the sensitivity it deserves just yet, because the sorrows continue to persist. We are a resilient people, and the terrors that haunt us, keep getting remixed. We endure similar horrors with different faces and forms in ever increasing succession. So we do as we have always done. We perform our resistance through laughter.

It helped that the face of COVID-19, when it first presented itself in South Africa, was white and elite. It came in aeroplanes with the baggage of 1652 hanging from its well worn passport. It hit the small minority of people, who had enough money to holiday in Europe shortly after the start of the school year. The first three months of any year are a time of financial tightrope walking for folks, whose pockets have been fleeced by the extended December holidays: new school uniforms in January, and fresh-from-the-packet stationery. Just as we were beginning to recover from this annual financial blow, at the birth of a brand new decade, here comes a plague that seems to be targeting those who have plagued our ability to ever feel a sense of security, in the land that is ours, but that we do not own. Maybe there is a God, and maybe She truly loves Black people.

A joke exposes the one who tells it and the ones who laugh. The Republic of South Africa is the house that Apartheid built, and we struggle to destroy its foundations. Extending our penchant for xenophobia, to include people of Chinese descent in South Africa, gave us yet another population demographic to other; another trauma to weaponise against each other. The jokes continued to fly as the segment of the population that could afford to, began stockpiling face masks and sanitiser. WhatsApp video monologues criss-crossed the cyber world, explaining that this was not a disease for people who eat Rama, atchaar, polony, and inkomasi. This was not a disease for those who suffered from high blood pressure, gout, diabetes, pneumonia, and TB. This was a disease that had gone to an Anglican private school and had a posh accent. This was a disease that had never set foot inside a taxi rank. Cororo had a target market.

On 16 March 2020, the eternally hunky Idris Elba sat before the world on Instagram, with his equally beautiful, heavily pregnant wife, Sabrina and announced that he had tested positive for Coronavirus. Black Twitter collectively gasped. Sure, Idris is a wealthy superstar, but in all of his ebony sculpted dreaminess, this half Ghanaian-half Sierra Leonian-Brit proved that M’Coroza likes chocolate too. As more cases emerged, as schools nationally announced their closures, as the gig economy in South Africa collapsed, due to the government sanctioned social isolation mandate, the wheels of normality came to a startling halt. Suddenly we were not exceptional. We were vulnerable too, and many of us grew scared.

Coco V inched closer and closer into my private world through my profession. Within 72 hours, the tour I’d been preparing for in September and October in London and Nigeria, was suspended indefinitely. My performance in Valencia, Spain which was scheduled for the end of April, was shifted to later in the year. The Indian film production company for which I had been doing research, character development, and translation work, suspended production as India entered its Lockdown. As I write this piece, more than three weeks into Lockdown, I should have been in India doing pre-production work right now, but this is another lifetime ago.

I am used to living in multiple worlds that stretch across timelines, time zones, projects, and gigs. At any given time, I am a millipede with independent appendages, where each immerse in a separate reality that feeds the tapestry of my life. I am not alone. This is the world of the freelancer, the self employed, the creative, the entrepreneur, and the gigging artist. I watched as Corona cut my peers off at the knees, as their overseas tours were cancelled, and with the blink of an eye, I found myself in the same position. Days before the announcement of the social isolation mandate, I still had a few gigs left in South Africa, and at the time, I had no clue that these would be the last events that I performed for live audiences, in the way that I have grown to love over the past two decades. I did not know that those jobs were my farewell to reality.

Artists sense what is percolating in the air and give birth to it. Historically, revolutions have often been fed by major creative shifts. There is a symbiotic relationship between politics and art. In this light, naturally, COVID-19 hit the creative economy first and viciously. Social isolation meant no more gatherings of over 50 people – which meant no more gigs. This was as true for South Africa as it had become for the rest of the planet. An entire creative value chain of performers, sound and lighting technicians, stage managers, costume designers, set designers and builders, ushers, ticket sellers, grips, stage hands, producers, writers, publicists, agents, arts managers, theatre staff, festival programmers, eventing companies, administrators, caterers, decor suppliers, drivers, and every independent vendor selling programmes, merchandise, chicken wings, chips, and boerewors rolls, outside of the gigs, was out of work. And out of luck.

I immediately went into scramble mode, chasing payments for outstanding invoices. This quickly escalated to fight mode, as I confronted an agent who wanted to hold on to my money for their own cash flow and the awful payment processes of corporates, whose bureaucratic financial systems have kept a loosely fixed noose around my neck. This exposed a toxic truth about the way that many freelancers, artists, and self employed individuals work. At any given time, there is a wad of money in the form of unpaid invoices for services rendered, that hangs just above my head, like a cartoon thought bubble. I can see this money, but I can’t touch it. I know it’s my money, because I earned it, but it’s not in my account. I’ve grown accustomed to the relentless sea of vendor forms and supplier database forms that I am invariably confronted with, when I am requesting my money from public and private sector clients. I compensate by chasing more work, in the interim, in order to make up for the shortfall of cash. This is the treadmill that I have been on for my entire career. There has never been time to examine the systemic nature of its abuse. Cocorella destroyed my gigs. Now I have the time.

After President Ramaphosa announced the national social distancing mandate, the following day, key players in the cultural sector met with the Minister of the Department of Sports, Arts and Culture, Minister Nathi Mthethwa. Quickly observing this meeting in a report on the news, I noticed a room dominated by male industry players, who ranged from state-funded theatre CEOs, to record company owners, to civil servants, employed by the department. The Minister presented the outcomes of this meeting more than a week later, in response to the President’s announcement of an impending national Lockdown. Some of the suggestions, such as using state-funded theatres to record live performances, which would then be streamed online, were simply no longer possible during Lockdown.

R150 million, the budget for the first quarter of the year for the Department of Sports, Arts and Culture, has been set aside to offer assistance. These funds, which amount to the combined budgets of a handful of festivals and major sporting events, are being shared across two different sectors, namely sports, coupled with arts and culture. This is the result of a merger in 2019 of what had previously been two separate government departments, in an effort to streamline a cabinet, that had become severely bloated during the Zuma administration. Now artists find themselves without work. Athletes find themselves in the same boat, and at the same time, many athletes are also stuck in far flung corners of the world, hoping to get assistance from government to come home. It seems unlikely that this money will solve the problems of two very different value chains, that have been up ended, due to COVID-19.

The Department of Sports, Arts and Culture put out briefs in the last week of March, asking people to quantify how much income they had lost due to COVID-19. These figures needed to be accompanied by supporting documents in the form of invoices and contracts, that would prove that the work that had been lost, was in fact real. By the time I became aware of these government briefs, I had less than a week to put together the necessary supporting material. Trying to chase clients and colleagues to retrieve contracts during those first few days of Lockdown, was a logistical nightmare. Printing shops were not open. Lost or broken phones and laptops could not be fixed either. I spent six days chasing supporting documents for my biggest contract, and when they finally came, I submitted my application 30 minutes after the deadline, only to be promptly informed that my application would not be considered. Why was the sector only given a week to apply for these funds? Why is there even a closing deadline during an ongoing international pandemic?

The government also put out a request for creative projects that could be produced during Lockdown. These projects have to be online, digital, and profitable. As soon as Lockdown hit, artists like myself began experimenting with how to share our work online. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram have become a lifeline for many who need to find outlets for our creative expression, in order to stay sane. Worldwide creatives en-masse began doing precisely what we have spent our entire careers fighting against. We started giving our work away for free online, for exposure. Experimenting with new online models, from live social media performances to privately accessed platforms, like Zoom, is essential to developing new ways of working in this indefinite period of uncertainty. The idea that government would support online creative models is responsive to the times. The notion that those projects must be profitable at this early stage of exploration is worrisome.

One of the painful hangovers from the Apartheid era, in our creative industries, is an exploitative attitude towards intellectual property, which tends to abuse black people, poor people and women the most, because we have the least access to capital that would allow us to develop content independently. For example, broadcasters like Multichoice or the SABC, regularly put out briefs, asking producers to supply new content in the form of television shows. Because these shows are paid for by the broadcaster, the broadcaster owns the creative property. The producer who has created the show gets paid for the labour required to produce it, as well as the production costs, but beyond that, they cannot leverage the show, no matter how successful it is, because the intellectual property sits with the broadcaster who financed it. The same goes for the writers who create the storylines and the actors who become household names, by bringing those storylines to life. Often these shows are screened multiple times in South Africa and in territories far beyond our own. Generations is the most popular soapie in Jamaica. Actors on Generations do not receive performance royalties for rebroadcasts. No one does.

The death of a celebrity in this country is often a ritualistic display of the long term effects of this abusive attitude towards intellectual property. We habitually question why people who are so beloved by audiences, die depressed, addicted, and poor. It’s because there is no long term benefit to being famous or to having a hit show, if one is not being paid royalties for rebroadcasts.

When the government put out briefs requesting new online profitable projects, it was acting as broadcasters in this country have always acted. Why should a national government be the owner of anyone’s creative intellectual property? How can this be seen as an attempt to relieve a beleaguered sector? How can government purport to be serving a transformational agenda, when its behaviour is consistent with a status quo that benefits capital-wielding broadcasters, at the expense of working creatives, who become little more than creative raw materials, in a machine designed to exploit? Why is government acting as a broadcaster or producer in the first place? The Department of Sports, Arts and Culture often puts itself in this position, where it acts as a booking agent or an eventing company. Why is government behaving like a competitive player in the sector instead of undoing ongoing injustices, by regulating the sector?

The Department of Sports, Arts and Culture exists to serve a constitutional mandate, that confers on every person the right to participate in the cultural life of their choice (Section 30 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa). South Africans deserve vibrant, diverse and accessible cultural spaces within walking distance of every person, regardless of race or class. Arts and culture are the frontline of transmuting generational trauma that manifests, as our high rates of violent crime, corruption, gender based violence, escalate. Being an artist in this country is a privilege, because every day I come face to face with the work of peers and colleagues who dive into the heart of discomfort and become way-showers for new ways of understanding. The fact that being immersed in these kinds of artistic experiences is a privilege, in a country where the right to culture is protected by the constitution, speaks to a failure on the part of government, to understand its role in creating an enabling environment for cultural life to thrive and to be made accessible, to everyone in this country.

Why does a sector that generates billions of Rands annually, not have a seat in the financial cluster sub-committee of parliament? If the Department of Sports, Arts and Culture were present in that important decision making cluster, they would be able to fully articulate how immense the production value chain of our sector is, and how many people, either directly or indirectly, are sustained by it. In a country where the informal sector, which often overlaps with the gig economy, makes up much of the economy, relief and funding models need to take into account how people work and how they earn income. As I write this piece, on the 18th of April, 22 days into Lockdown and two weeks after relief funding applications closed, Minister Nathi Mthethwa finally named the committee that would decide on how relief funds would be allocated for the sports sector. There is still no word on what is going to happen to those who applied for arts and culture relief.

Our country’s diversity, its complex layered influences, and intersecting histories, mean that we are fertile ground for creativity. South Africa produces artists faster than it can sustain them. COVID-19 makes casting our nets beyond this country very difficult right now, because all of us are locked down in one physical location. We finally have an opportunity to reflect, to be still, and to look at the muck that has clogged our institutions. COVID-19 exposes what has and hasn’t been working for a very long time. It points a powerful magnifying glass on public and private national systems. We are a junk-status country reeling from rampant