Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  The painter Sam Nhlengethwa said, “People look at my work and they ask me, ‘How can you do such happy pieces out of the township?’ In the townships, it’s not just war. We have music, weddings, parties, even though people are dying in the next street. When there is violence, people from outside look only at that. That’s wrong. I try for a ratio in my art that reflects the reality: thirty percent violent pictures, and seventy percent happy, festive gatherings. The other day I woke up and walked out my door and almost fell over a corpse. So that’s a part of my reality, and it goes into my art. But I went out to where I was planning to go anyway. That’s how my life is balanced.”

  I traveled to the Durban township of Umlazi with Alois Cele, a commercial painter who has in the last five years built up a trade in T-shirts, signs, and billboard advertisements. Now he is expanding (curiously) into the juice trade. Cele is a bit of a Zulu hotshot; he teaches voluntary workshops in his township and has been approached by people from other townships who would like him to expand that program. His success and swagger have given him an air of authority. People come to him for T-shirts and other goods, and he tells those people, who often belong to different political parties, when to come back. “I tell the PAC guys and the ANC guys and the Inkatha guys, all of them, that I’ll have the shirts on Wednesday around four o’clock,” he said, “and then I keep them waiting so that they’ll have to talk to one another. They sit there fuming, but they see one another as people, too. You can do everything through the art business.” Cele’s ambitions extend well beyond the art world: “I’ll teach people to think for themselves. Zulu people are dangerous because they are illiterate and believe the first thing they’re told. They don’t want to think for themselves. Zulus always work together; when they cause trouble, they do it together. I want to teach them to be independent! That’s the only way.”

  Apartheid had four categories: white, black, Indian, and colored. In Cape Town, I went to the colored township of Mitchells Plain with Willie Bester, who is perhaps the most highly regarded urban, nonwhite artist in South Africa. Bester was the son of a colored mother and a black father; he was classed with the colored rather than with the black population, thanks to letters from his school saying that his behavior was of a high standard and that he was therefore not really black. Bester joined the police as a young man, “to fight crime—and so no one would steal my bicycle.” As a colored policeman, he was supposed to fight the ANC, but when he read ANC literature, he found it moving. “These weren’t the people for me to be attacking. These were my people. If they were the Communist enemy, then I knew I was also the Communist enemy.” Assigned to riot duty, he arrived at the station one day to find a floor-to-ceiling stack of slaughtered black youths. “One of the officers told me to get rid of the blood that was pouring all over the station, and while I was standing there, stunned, someone else grabbed a fire hose and began washing the blood away, because they thought it would look bad if the media showed up. All these policemen were congratulating one another on how many people they’d killed. I went home that night so sick I couldn’t move for days.”

  The colored population today has neither the privilege of the whites nor the self-actualization of many black Africans, and some colored people cling to the slight privilege they enjoyed during apartheid. They have too much to be blatantly destructive (like a good many black Africans) and too little to live well (like most whites). This population is fearful in two directions rather than one. Bester’s powerful collage-assemblages use found materials of the township in juxtaposition with painted images. One work has bits of barbed wire; a copy of the government book categorizing the various races; snapshots of a racist attack that, according to official documents, never took place; and a police officer’s ammunition belt. “When I was younger,” Willie Bester said, “I did pretty things for white men to buy and hang in their houses to help them ignore what was happening outside. Now I am free. Now I do work about real life and the problems of the townships. Now I am working for myself.”

  Black Art, Yes; Black Artists, No

  Bester’s assertion is only half-true. He may be working for himself, but almost all of his collectors are white. Liberals buy his work both because it is good and because buying it relieves their sense of responsibility. In the current climate, work by nonwhite artists in which they express their suffering is what white collectors want; you can no longer please them with attractive Cape landscapes. This is progress, but it’s hardly freedom. Some nonwhite people express an interest in nonwhite art, but few collect it; indeed, few take on board the idea of art as a commercial enterprise. Some of Willie Bester’s neighbors own and enjoy his work, but when they attended the opening of his big Cape Town exhibition, they could not believe the prices and were bewildered that so many white people wanted to interview, meet, and celebrate him. David Koloane’s paintings are collected by a few black doctors, and one hangs in Nelson Mandela’s home, but this is a small and rarefied audience. Koloane said, “The area where the Johannesburg Art Gallery is located was a whites-only park. And now it is a mostly black park. The black people like to take snapshots of one another at the gates of the gallery. But none of them ever thinks of going in.”

  South Africa has only three important commercial galleries, all white-owned with almost exclusively white clients, showing a lot of black work: the Goodman Gallery (oldest; the flagship), Everard Read Contemporary (hottest, newest, trendiest), and the Newtown Gallery (a bit unfocused). How is a nonwhite population to resolve this monopoly of control? It is not simply a matter of who has capital, but of who has the will to engage in this commerce. Eighteen months ago, playwright Matsemela Manaka declared his Soweto home a gallery. When I visited, I found his crew patiently explaining to callers what art was; these visitors, though curious, were there more to observe the strangeness of the setup than to understand the messages of the work. Linos Siwedi has set up shop as a dealer, but though he used to sell from Soweto, he is now working through Johannesburg because the blacks won’t buy and the whites won’t come into a district they still perceive as dangerous. He’s a middleman, keeping track of what happens in the townships, getting the work into the public eye, setting up exhibitions in rented spaces. He even sets up private art tours of the township for rich visitors. Of the white liberals who have taught in the townships, he said, “They taught people how to make things, but not how to sell them.” But his admirable effort cannot compete with the larger, commercial, white-owned galleries.

  Some people feel that even the radical artists of the black consciousness movement have been co-opted by this system. In allowing their work to be sold by white people to white people, they have become complicit in the existing power structure. Fikile Magadlela was long held up as the ultimate exemplar of black radicalism, but he was among the first to be snapped up by white dealers. “If your work is in an art gallery, it is working for the state,” Malcolm Payne said. “Fikile, too, wanted to sell.” Fikile was shown at the Goodman Gallery long before the waning of apartheid. Durant Sihlali’s work sold well in the galleries of apartheid-era Johannesburg. “It was incredible to me,” he said. “The perpetrators of injustice would buy my work and hang it on their white walls without ever noticing that it was telling the story of their cruelty.”

  These artists won prizes at art competitions. South Africa has more competitions in more fields than anyplace else on earth, and these, in Payne’s view, “became the most powerful instrument of oppression.” Although Fikile spoke to me about blood and suffering when we met, he spoke as much about his white collectors, and his recent work seemed studied and somewhat artificial. More than one commenter warned that an artist might “go the same way as Helen”—a reference to the painter Helen Sebidi, whose beautiful work became repetitive after the galaxy of prizes she won from white juries led her to repeat her inspiration rather than renew it. Even as these painters’ art of struggle became a commodity, it served to answer their own struggle to survive. Now, township artists are acc
used of reducing their heritage to pablum for the white market; crossover artists, of working in a “European” mode.

  I knew that the black Durban artist Trevor Makoba had been featured in the South African exhibition at the most recent Venice Biennale, so when I visited his township, I asked him about the allegorical picture that had been exhibited, which depicted a piece of cheese in the shape of South Africa being nibbled from one side by a black mouse, and from the other side by a white mouse. He, in turn, asked me all about the Biennale. Was it really an important exhibition? Would a lot of people have gone to see his work? When I finished describing the show, he said, a bit sadly, “I’m glad that I have been in this exhibition. But I do wish that they’d asked me first. I would have liked to talk to them about it.”

  I was astonished. “No one asked you whether you wanted to be in Venice, representing South Africa?”

  “No. The first I heard of it was the week of the opening.”

  South Africa’s invitation to the Biennale (after decades of exclusion) sat with government officials for ages before the rushed “democratic” selection of the artists, whose work was shipped in days. The government paid for bureaucrats to go to the opening, but did not provide tickets for artists. Several white artists bought their own tickets, and when the South African authorities found, to their embarrassment, that they had many white and no black artists in town, they quickly sent tickets to black artists. In most instances these were people who had never traveled across their own country, much less overseas. The sculptor Jackson Hlungwani sent a message saying, “The radio is good but the message is bad,” indicating that though he might have liked to travel, this was not the way to go about it. He declined to leave his home in Gazankulu. Makoba made a valiant effort, but even with the help of white friends he couldn’t get himself on a plane in time. No one seemed able to say what the arrangements would be in Venice, what would be paid for, how the artists would eat. “The clear implication,” observed Sue Williamson, a white Cape Town artist, “was this: you are not important; only the fruit of your labor is important. It’s what the whites have been saying to the blacks since the start of apartheid.”

  Art from Above

  In Gazankulu in the late apartheid period, white liberals set up a program for local blacks to explore their heritage by learning basket weaving. Since the appropriate grasses did not grow locally and none of the local people knew how to weave baskets, the organizers had to import materials and teachers. No one observed that this area was rich in clay and that these people had a tradition of clay modeling. The basket weaving was absurd. It’s not that artists in Gazankulu should have to work only in local media, but simply that ignoring the clay and importing grasses is so wasteful not only of resources but also of abilities; it represents a monolithic view of black people that is one of apartheid’s ugliest legacies. Art made according to a political agenda dictated from on high is seldom revelatory.

  South Africa has no tradition, in either the black or white communities, of going to look at pictures. In the same way that developments in American ichthyology tend to be of interest primarily to American ichthyologists, art in South Africa is of interest primarily to South African artists. Though art’s audience is limited to its producers, as it was in Soviet Moscow, that number is not small, because in the New South Africa, everyone is being encouraged to make art, including many who, left to their own devices, would never consider such a possibility. “Rural outreach” programs, big on the liberal agenda, attempt to persuade people far from urban centers to make art. To this end, enterprising individuals have descended on one community after the next with big pads of paper and lots of crayons, or with beads and thread. The work produced through these programs is touted as highly “authentic.”

  Creation of such work may help the “artists” to feel better; looking at it may help its audience to feel better. “The end product is not so important as the process,” Sue Williamson explained, but even the process she vaunts may be dubious. There is a difference between giving everyone the free voice that is the cornerstone of democracy and trying to make everyone speak in a “free” voice whether they are so inclined or not. Sue Williamson said earnestly, “Of course all South Africans are particularly pleased with themselves at the moment for having pulled off something that the world had thought was impossible, just when they’d been written off. But our race has denied that other race, and so every one of those people is important; everything they have to say is worth saying, and we must listen to all of it.” There is no such thing as an adequate response to apartheid, and the urge to white penance is admirable. But the suggestion that everyone is an artist—that every voice must be heard—is in the end a denial of individuality, not a celebration of diversity.

  Affirming that everyone is of equal importance, legally and morally, is one thing; saying that everyone has something to say of equal importance is cacophony; you cannot hear a thousand voices at once and understand what anyone is saying. You have to make choices. I saw Helen Suzman, the human rights activist twice nominated for the Nobel Prize, the week after the decision was made that the New South Africa would have eleven official languages. “I can’t bear to think what will be lost in the translation,” Suzman said to me. The urgency of acknowledging diversity should not upstage the imperative for some kind of unity in a national government.

  The Politics of It

  The ANC’s Department of Arts and Culture believes that art should serve the state, that the struggle is not over, that artists must help to establish the new paradise of South Africa. Chairman Mao advanced the same policy when he launched the Cultural Revolution. The non-party-affiliated National Arts Initiative (NAI), set up by artists and writers, believes that art should be publicly funded and that artists should be free to make art that is true to their experience. President John F. Kennedy advanced the same policy when he set up the National Endowment for the Arts. The writer Mtutuzeli Matshoba commented with some dismay, “While the NAI purports to represent the interests of ‘art and cultural practitioners,’ the ANC’s main objective is the cultural liberation of the disenfranchised people of South Africa. The ANC perceives cultural liberation not as an end in itself, but as an aspect of national liberation.” Many object to such a mechanistic, propagandistic vision of art, which leaves no place for free expression. Mike van Graan, head of the NAI, complained, “Those of us who fought alongside the ANC against apartheid thought that now at last we would have the peace to create, to sing, to laugh, to criticize, to celebrate our visions unhindered. We were wrong.” Later, he confessed to me, “We have literally been instructed to do work about the ANC but that makes no reference to ANC corruption because that gives ammunition to the nationalists.”

  Everywhere you go in South Africa, someone is forming a new committee. Whatever it is, its name is an acronym. At the launch of the NAI, which I attended in Durban, voting rights had been awarded to the AWA, AEA, ADDSA, APSA, ICA, NSA, PAWE, SAMES, and SAMRO, while provisional voting rights only were the lot of the ATKV, COSAW, FAWO, and PEAP. God help you if you go to an arts function in South Africa and don’t know what all these things stand for. The endless speeches at an ANC arts dinner I attended in a Johannesburg hotel were incomprehensible, even though they were in English, because they included such a dizzying, tedious array of such subgroups. This rage for committees is an unfortunate legacy of the ANC. At dinner with Penny Siopis and Colin Richards, deeply committed white liberals, I commented on the problem. Richards put his hands to his head, saying, “Those committees! Throughout the apartheid period we went to meetings of those committees—mind-numbing, endless meetings, thousands and thousands and thousands of them, hour upon hour upon hour. That was the only way we could show our support. It was a big part of what we could do against apartheid, but, my God, when I think of the number of tedious hours that went that way, it makes me weep.”

  In South Africa, people often said to me, under their breath, as though the air were bugged, “It’s ridi
culous, I know.” I heard this from rural people, black and white, in the Northern Transvaal; I heard it in the homes of the white bourgeoisie; I heard it from committed liberals; I heard it from township moderates, on great estates, on farms, in the township drinking houses called shebeens. No one in South Africa will publicly acknowledge the absurdity of anything but apartheid, because apartheid is so much worse than whatever is wrong with the country now. But everyone is aware of spending a great deal of time in an absurd theater of symbolic respect.

  The gratuitous complexity of this bureaucracy was often matched by a surprisingly simplistic approach to complex issues. In South Africa, big questions are very much in vogue. What is art? What is democracy? What is freedom? More astonishingly, confident answers to these questions abound. At the NAI meeting, matters that should have taken five minutes to cover took two hours, but matters that have concerned philosophers across the millennia were settled in time for lunch. As the meeting grew longer and longer, because every speech was being repeated in several languages, the head of the Credentials Committee, Nise Malange, stood up and said that because of the added difficulties, “The Happy Hour will have to turn into something else.” I was sitting next to the white critic Ivor Powell, who said that the headline for his report on this meeting would be just that line: no context, no explanations.