In 1990, in an article entitled "Preparing ourselves for freedom", Albie Sachs kicked off a national debate in the pages of what was then called the Weekly Mail by calling on his fellow ANC members to desist from "saying that culture is a weapon of struggle" (reprinted in Sachs 1990: 19). One reason he offered for this playfully controversial proposal was that, with a real weapon, "there is no room for ambiguity: a gun is a gun is a gun, and if it were full of contradictions, it would ... be useless for its purpose. But the power of art lies precisely in its capacity to expose contradictions and reveal hidden tensions" (20).