1 June 2021 - Judy Seidman
Four decades later, post-apartheid South Africa barely recalls the Medu Art Ensemble's contributions to the liberation struggle. But that could be changing.
The collective was formed by South African cultural activists exiled after the 1976 Soweto uprising and it worked with artists back home, Botswana citizens, and some from other countries. Medu used the creative arts – visual image, theatre, music and literature – to give voice to South Africa’s liberation struggle. In 1982 Medu brought several thousand cultural activists to Gaborone for a conference entitled
Culture and Resistance, proclaiming that
Culture is a weapon of Struggle.
A Pan Africanist and anti-colonial enterprise, Medu engaged with international revolutionary art including the work of German theatre-maker Bertolt Brecht, Vietnamese resistance poetry, the Mexican mural painters and Chile’s muralists who spoke back to dictatorship.