WeeklySA_AdminZENITH: South African creatives have managed only a piecemeal shot at America’s much-coveted awards…
By Jacob Mawela
Harlem Renaissance star-turn Langston Hughes wrote of names in Uphill Letters, a collection of his poetry, remotely evoking the famous Hollywood sign that resonates with the once-career industry of Philip Michael Thomas, a.k.a. Detective Ricco Tubbs of Miami Vice fame, coined the acronym, “EGOT”, back in 1984.
EGOT was a reference to his plans to win the “grand slam” of American showbiz, namely, Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony – in honour of outstanding achievements in television, recording, film and theatre. As of 2020, only 16 people – who include Whoopi Goldberg but exclude Thomas – have accomplished the feat.
Back home, some distinguished South Africans have taken their bites at the EGOT, albeit in individual slices, instead of the whole cake – as well as at other international standard accolades, namely the Pulitzer Prize and the Robert Capa Gold Medal, reserved for media practitioners.
EMMY
Struggle stalwart, Barney Desai’s son, Rehad Desai and his Uhuru Productions team won an Emmy in November 2015 for the documentary film, Miners Shot Down, about the August 10 2012 Marikana Massacre. Rehad, who had spent most of his young life in exile and only to return to what years later into a democratic order the Miners Shot Down website described as the “first post-apartheid massacre” had vented thus:
“I was a critical supporter of the ANC. Never joining because I was a socialist. To think they could kill people in such a calculated and brutal manner. And seeing what’s being called the embedded journalism that followed the massacre, I knew we had to do something. It wasn’t enough to just make a film”.
GRAMMY
Isicathamiya/Mbube outfit, Ladysmith Black Mambazo has garnered five Grammy Awards (between the years 1988 and 2018) for Best Traditional Folk Recording (1988), Best Traditional World Music Album (2004), Best Traditional World Music Album (2009), Best World Music Album (2013) and Best World Music Album (2018)
The Soweto Gospel Choir, an ensemble blending elements of African gospel, Negro spirituals, reggae and American popular music won three Grammy Awards in the Best Traditional World Music Album for their albums, Blessed, African Spirit and Freedom in 2006, 2007 and 2018, respectively.
Flutist, Wouter Kellerman received a Grammy Award for his 2014 Winds of Samsara album collaboration with Indian composer and producer, Ricky Kej. As part of his mission to work with and uplift children, Kellerman collaborated with the Ndlovu Youth Choir (a choir based in Moutse in the Limpopo province of South Africa) in 2018. Their African version of Ed Sheeran’s Shape Of You became an internet sensation, going viral with tens of millions of views on social media.
OSCAR
Charlize Theron’s Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of serial killer, Aileen Wuornos in 2003’s Monster made her the first South African to garner such a haloed accolade. At the time of Monster’s release, Theron had opened up regarding how she had based her performance on the “darkness” in her own life when in 1991, she’d witnessed her mother, Gerda, shoot to death her drunken father in self-defence.
TONY
Having been nominated six times, including for, for Best Play, for Sizwe Bansi is Dead and The Island (1975); A Lesson from Aloes (1982), Master Harold and the Boys (1982) and Blood Knot (1986) – doyen of theatre, Athol Fugard received a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the theatre, in 2011.
PULITZER PRIZE
Away from show business, few rewards hold as much fulfilment and prestige for journalistic practitioners as the Pulitzer Prize and the Robert Capa Gold Medal.
Established in 1917 by provisions in the will of American newspaper publisher, Joseph Pulitzer and administered by Columbia University in New York, the Pulitzer Prize awards, inter alia, achievements in newspaper, magazine and online journalism in the United States. Thanks to global media consumption and, in no less a role, the efforts of US representatives that a duo of South African lensmen, got their images end up in US newspreads.
Greg Marinovich was the first of the duo when, in 1991, he received the Pulitzer for spot news for a photo essay he recorded in Soweto whilst stringing for the Associated Press, on the harrowing death of a man known as Lindsaye Tshabalala.
The publishing of the photos didn’t sit well with the South African police, who subsequently tried to locate him as a witness to the murder – with him evading them through having credited them under a pseudonym.
Three years later, his friend, Kevin Carter followed suit by being recognized with the award in the Feature Photography category of 1994, for an image later known as: the vulture and the little girl – recorded pending a 1993 trip to document the famine unfolding in Sudan. Carter photographed a starving toddler trying to reach a feeding centre when a hooded vulture landed nearby. After taking the picture, he got up and drove away.
ROBERT CAPA GOLD MEDAL
The Robert Capa Gold Medal is awarded for “best published photographic reporting from abroad requiring exceptional courage and enterprise”. Named in honour of the Hungarian photographer of the same name and awarded annually by the Overseas Press Club of America, veteran lensman, Peter Magubane, appears on the roster of past recipients as the only African (let alone South African) to have scooped the accolade.
Marinovich was on-point in the following observation made in his book, the Bang Bang Club: “Black photographers had the language and cultural skills and contacts in black communities that allowed them greater insight and access, unlike the whites, who hardly ever understood even one of the nine major black languages. But black photojournalists were much more prone to harassment by the police – no white photographer was ever detained for 18 months in solitary as Magubane had been.”
The white haired octogenarian laid his hands on the sizeable bullion back in 1985 whilst in the employ of Time magazine, and in recognition of a portfolio titled: “Cry for Justice: Cry for Peace”.
