COMMUNITY ARTS
Coming Full Circle — A Personal Reflection Rooted in the Teachings of the late Simba Pemhenayi
By Thami akaMbongo Manzana
As we move closer to the Community Arts Indaba, I find myself reflecting deeply on teachings that began for me in 1998 at an institution in Cape Town called the Community Arts Project (CAP).
At the time, I could not have fully grasped how formative those lessons would be, nor how relevant they would remain decades later.
Today, it feels as though those teachings are coming full circle.
Source: University of Cape Town. Libraries. Special Collections BC1195 Community Arts Project.
Before embarking on my studies at the University of Cape Town in 1999, I had the privilege of studying at CAP, where I was exposed to courses such as Cultural Studies, Theatre Studies, and, most importantly for me, Community Theatre.
CAP was not just an institution; it was a space of rigorous questioning, political consciousness, and deep engagement with the relationship between art and society.
It was within those classrooms that I encountered the late Simba Pemhenayi, whose approach to Community Theatre fundamentally shaped my thinking and practice.
What made Simba exceptional was his insistence on process. He did not allow us to treat Community Theatre as a label, a genre, or a geographic shortcut. He taught us to interrogate how theatre is made, why it is made, who it is made with, and whose interests it ultimately serves.
His unpacking of Community Theatre Development — distinguishing between Community Theatre FOR Development, IN Development, WITH Development, and AGAINST Development — was not merely theoretical. It was a political and ethical framework that demanded accountability from practitioners.
Still today, I observe how many practitioners within the Cultural and Creative Industries, and even academics, continue to conflate Township Theatre with Community Theatre, assuming they are one and the same.
This confusion persists despite decades of practice, scholarship, and lived experience that suggest otherwise.
Township Theatre refers to work emerging from a specific historical and spatial context. Community Theatre, as Simba taught us, is defined far more by process, relationship, and power than by location alone.
I miss the way Simba would patiently, yet firmly, unpack these differences. He understood that when we collapse these terms, we do more than make a semantic error. We reproduce narrow, racialised, and often deficit-based understandings of community.
We reduce community to blackness, blackness to poverty, and poverty to a problem that art must fix. In doing so, we strip communities of agency and flatten the complexity of their cultural lives.
As a former student of the Community Arts Project, and as someone who has spent years observing how the term community is used, misused, and contested in arts discourse,
I am increasingly aware that the question before us is not new. What is new is the urgency.
In today’s South African context — marked by inequality, institutional fatigue, funding pressures, and shifting cultural politics — the need to define or redefine Community Arts has become unavoidable.
Simba’s framework invites us to ask difficult questions beyond theatre.
Do we practise Arts FOR Community, where communities are recipients of predetermined agendas?
Arts IN Community, where work happens in a space but not necessarily in relationship?
Arts WITH Community, where power, authorship, and meaning are shared?
Or are there moments of Arts AGAINST Community, where artistic practice confronts harmful norms and internal contradictions?
These distinctions matter because they reveal our values, our ethics, and our understanding of accountability.
As we gather for the Community Arts Indaba, I am not seeking closure or a single definition. Rather, I am looking forward to learning how, in this moment, we are collectively defining and redefining Community Arts in South Africa.
What has shifted since 1998? What remains unresolved? And what wisdom from earlier generations, like Simba’s, are we still struggling to fully embody?
Image: Simba Pemhenayi
May the soul of Simba Pemhenayi continue to Rest in Power. May his spirit, and the spirits of the many cultural workers who dedicated their lives to the values of Community Theatre and Community Arts, visit us this week as we engage these complex questions.
Their presence is felt whenever we choose depth over convenience, process over branding, and relationship over rhetoric.
The Creative Passport invites artists, practitioners, academics, funders, and cultural workers to share their own understanding of Community Arts, grounded in lived experience and honest reflection.
Let us engage.
.jpeg)
Comments