3-mob.com 
In a city already starved for diversity in entertainment you wonder what will happen now after a second stage, Misty’s in Newlands, shut its doors.
Book Cafe did the same a month ago and now live performers will be left with slim pickings as stages are becoming a rare commodity.
In all this there has been a weird silence, eery even.
You hear murmurs of possibilities and the sort but you see something that looks like a dagger in the soul of the live performer.
Because, particularly in the case of Book Cafe, it was a space where the amateur performer worked hard and became a professional. It is a place where art could see space and breathe with the reckless abandon of youth.
Sure things are tight, but sitting out in the cold is the artist. One of the few areas that is pretty fully indigenous is ignored by policy in action. If there is there policy is created by disconnected people with doctorates who never go out to where the people consume content.
If we leave this happening for long enough, future generations will be without story tellers to connect them to their past. They will have to start from scratch.
You see, without these youngsters getting access to seeing their own on stages, they will adopt the values of those stages they see on TV or YouTube.
So it will be much like what happened to many who grew up on Radio 3. The foreign music could be easily accessed and our own was confined to some other space. The mainstream clubs didn’t play it.
And now when they ask us why we can’t sing or rap and the sort based on our culture, we ask them, what culture they taught us? After all, schools would not let us speak local languages as a policy. And radio and TV rarely showed local programmes.
So when you say culture, what culture?
And that will be asked by the next generation one day. What art? Where is it? And what happened to it?
We’re not even asking government to care. But do you?
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