COVID Relief and the Dynamics of State Care in South Africa’s Performance Economy

Abstract

This article addresses South Africa’s Covid relief plan for its creative sector—the Presidential Employment Stimulus Plan (PESP)—as a locus for understanding the evolution of state arts sponsorship since the country’s first free elections in 1994. It begins with an historical discussion outlining the evolution of various philosophies of national arts sector caretaking. Particular attention is drawn to the philosophical shift from democratic aspirations during the transition from apartheid in the early 1990s to the sector’s steady integration into a broader neoliberal development strategy leading up to the present. National policy papers and development programs from the last two decades demonstrate the steady entrenchment of an economistic approach to the arts, decoupled from principles argued for during the transition to democracy such as education, national cohesion, or cultural representation. Structural dynamics governing the creative sector are crossed by the political prerogatives of artists who rely on state arts funding. To explain the tension between government care regimes for creative and cultural industries intersect with historically situated philosophies of how the arts intervene in communities facing crisis, we end our discussion through an analysis of a project funded by the PESP: i-Yeza, the Covid-19 Awareness Roadshow. Pivoting from macro-level discussion of arts policy to ethnographic analysis of this specific project’s conception and reception demonstrates how community consciousness diverges from neoliberalism’s instrumental logic. By linking the legacy of socially critical township theatre to Covid awareness and vaccination, i-Yeza performs a politics of care premised on a vision of national moral redemption despite state decay.