Chronicle Editor
Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
IT was meant to be the edition that marked a milestone in the life of Intwasa Arts Festival koBulawayo.
After 20 years, this was the edition that would announce that the arts extravaganza, now officially out of its teens, was fully grown up. It would be during this edition that it would showcase the kind of resilience that had seen it weather countless storms over the last two decades.
Intwasa had survived it all. It had lived through disgruntled performers, harsh critics, and even a pandemic that threatened to wipe it off the arts calendar.
Sure, Intwasa coughed for a while but with grace, it regained its poise and the arts in Bulawayo looked like they were now on a better footing.
Then in 2022, disaster struck as after 17 years during which the festival had always unerringly announced the arrival of spring in the city, things took a turn for the worst. Intwasa would not be held that year, organisers announced, as funding challenges had put paid to any hopes of banishing the ghost of Covid-19 once and for all.
Now two years later, Intwasa has announced that there will be no song or dance to announce the arrival of spring in Bulawayo again this year. The same funding challenges that dogged the festival two years ago have returned to haunt it again, organisers announced this week.
“Intwasa Arts Festival koBulawayo wishes to inform all artistes, partners, stakeholders, and the general public that the 2024 edition of the festival, originally scheduled for the 25th to the 28th of September, has been postponed to a later date.
“While the main festival has been postponed, Intwasa will continue to host stand-alone activities throughout October and November 2024. These events will keep the spirit of the festival alive and provide ongoing opportunities for artistes and audiences to engage with the arts,” read part of the Press statement.
The announcement was a body blow to arts lovers in Bulawayo, who hoped that the city’s premier arts festival was now fit again. The latest postponement has once again led to questions on the health of the arts extravaganza, with some expressing fear that it might one day find itself defunct like the Harare International Festival of the Arts (Hifa). Once the country’s biggest festival, Hifa folded in 2018 and has not returned since.
In an interview with Sunday Life, Intwasa Arts Festival Director Raisedon Baya expressed hope that Intwasa would see out the worst of its troubles and not end up like Hifa.
Baya said while such concerns were valid, there was now a need to acknowledge that Intwasa was now active throughout the year and thus did not need a single event to validate its existence.
“If we are talking about Intwasa, for me and others there’s no fear that we might fold and go the way of other festivals in the country.
Like every company and institution in the country, we face a lot of challenges and things are not as rosy as we would like but we are doing a lot of things to fill the void in the meantime. We will be doing a lot of activities throughout the year like workshops, films, and workshops. Over the past few years, we have been evolving. We are no longer just a one-week event. We do a lot of other things, including Intwasa short stories and other projects that are outside the festival. All those are still ongoing and there’s no issue with that,” he said.
Baya said in their search for perfection, they had decided not to host a shoddy festival, as most of the resources that they had been promised would only be delivered after September, the month that the springtime festival is usually held.
“The resources we were getting were coming late, so we shifted some events to October and November and maybe then we will just do a smaller version of the festival in December. We have mentioned the challenges that we have faced in the past and this is just due to the basic funding challenges that are being faced by everyone. We all know the situation faced by everyone. Be that as it may, we will still be doing stuff that is aligned with the Intwasa Festival over October, November, and December,” he said.
Baya said that they felt that if they held the festival with the little resources that they so far managed to muster, they would deal a fatal blow to an event that was meant to be the prime advertisement of Bulawayo as the country’s cultural capital.
“We have faced a few issues when it comes to the organisation of the festival because we knew that in terms of resources, we might not get all that we need by September. As organisers, we felt that because things were looking tight financially, we could do a shoddy thing for the sake of just doing anything. So, we just moved it to December so we can tighten our programmes. We want to make sure that we know just how much we have in our coffers and then we can go ahead and pick the events that give us value,” he said.
Baya said they had not concluded the line-up for forthcoming events due to pending agreements with prospective sponsors. The plan, he said, was to make the festival sustainable and lessen its dependence on well-wishers and sponsors.
“What this means is that at the festival level, certain things and models might need to change for sustainability. In the past, we were doing the festival just for the sake of enjoyment for the people of Bulawayo. It was a product that we just needed the city to enjoy. Now things are different. We need to make this sustainable and that is what we are spending our time working towards.
We do have a plan for the programmes that we want to roll out in November and December but we have to wait before we announce anything because some agreements need to be signed and sealed first before that happens,” he said.
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