Not all those present at the opening ceremony of the academic year thought Katinka Polderman’s performance of her song ‘Tanzania’ was a laughing matter. The comedienne performed just after the awards ceremony of the Internationalisation award for a study program with several students and partners in African countries. ‘It was poor timing.’

Monday afternoon, in the Vereeniging. Comedienne Katinka Polderman is the final act of the Opening of the Academic Year of Radboud University. She starts her performance with a rendition of Tanzania, a song in which she voices a Dutch person wondering what happened to all the money she gave to Tanzania.

While it does elicit some laughs, a part of the audience squirms uncomfortably in their seats. Sara Kinsbergen is among them. The professor of Development studies and the programme director for AMID Young Professional received the Internationalisation award just moments before. ‘At AMID Young Professional we try to contribute to the decolonisation of international cooperation’, Kinsbergen says. ‘We try to move past the traditional North-South way of thinking.’

A video of two ‘change agents’ from Kenya and Uganda was shown at the awards ceremony. In it, they explaim how the AMID Young Professional programme trains them to meet the sustainable development goals. Immediately afterwards, Polderman walks on-stage. ‘We just talked about Kenya, now let’s talk about Tanzania’, she says at the start of her performance, before launching into the ironic song.

Decolonising

Dirk-Jan Koch, professor by special appointment of development cooperation, was incensed by the performance. The prevailing image of Africa and the African peoples is one of the biggest hurdles in Development studies and development cooperation,’ he says. ‘We are using a more equal approach, which is exactly why we won the award. The stereotypes used in the song are patently ridiculous.’

‘The stereotypes used in the song are patently ridiculous.’

The AMID-laureates very nearly arranged a livestream so their colleagues and students in Kenya and Uganda, according to Kinsbergen, so that they could follow the awards ceremony. ‘But in hindsight I’m very happy that they didn’t. I doubt our colleagues would have felt understood.’

The two social scientists do emphasize that the performance by Polderman – who was also Radboud’s artist in residence last year – was possibly simply an unfortunate confluence of events. ‘I believe that people like Katinka Polderman can make us think in ways that others can’t’, Kinsbergen says. ‘And in fact, her final song about ideals did exactly that.’ But the picture she painted about countries like Tanzania is still so very prevalent that I don’t think the actual message came across.’

Colonial Sentiments

Johan Oosterman, who brought Polderman to campus for the Gelders Erfgoedfestival (heritage festival), also felt that the performance of Tanzania was a bit awkward. ‘I noticed the same thing in the people around me’, he says. Oosterman has a sense of what went wrong. ‘For her second and third song, Polderman explained the ironic meaning beforehand, but she didn’t do so for the first one. And right after the Internationalisation award, that felt almost inappropriate.’

However, the programme director of Radboud Heritage also comes to Polderman’s defense, saying ‘anybody who gave it some thought, could tell that this was not Katinka’s opinion, but rather that of the character she portrayed: the upstanding citizen who believes that some gratitude is in order after all the support to Tanzania. It mocked latent colonial sentiments that still exist today. I’m a little familiar with Katinka, and I can imagine that she intended for us to feel a bit uncomfortable.’

Diversity and Inclusivity

Professor Ivo Nieuwenhuis writes reviews of comedy performances for Trouw, and he is presently working on a book about humor sccandals which is set to appear in May of 2023. He can recognise several mechanisms of such a scandal in the performance at the Opening of the Academic Year.

The expert in Dutch studies points out that Tanzania is one of the older works from Polderman’s repertoire: it first appeared on the CD Polderman Kachelt Door in 2011. ‘Subjects like diversity and inclusivity are much more prevalent than they were ten years ago. Comic songs that used to be considered funny are often seen as problematic today. Nowadays, people tend to say that this kind of song is no longer acceptable.’

‘Subjects like diversity and inclusivity are much more prevalent than they were ten years ago’

However, Nieuwenhuis does feel that a song like Tanzania would still fit in one of Polderman’s shows. ‘In that context it’s easier to consider it as an innocent song. But it’s a much more sensitive matter when performed at the Opening of the Academic Year, in front of an international audience that are likely unfamiliar with her work. That can lead to uncomfortable moments, which is, in fact, what happened.’

Open Assignments

The contents of Polderman’s performance were not known to Radboud University’s Executive Board beforehand. Nor should they be, according to university spokesperson Martijn Gerritsen. ‘The Executive Board continues to value providing open assignments to artists for their contributions to the Opening of the Academic Year.’

According to the spokesperson, the Executive Board understands that responses were mixed in the wake of Katinka Polderman’s performance. ‘Art is always open to interpretation, and it is a good thing that this can be discussed.’ The spokesperson declined to comment on the Executive Board’s personal opinions of the performance.