Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  Several white South African artists I met referred to the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) as “black racists”; the PAC motto has been “One Settler, One Bullet.” This political group is far to the left of the ANC. But when I met Fitzroy Ngcukana, the PAC’s secretary for sports and culture, at eleven o’clock at night in a downtown Johannesburg jazz bar, he was much more forthcoming than any of the ANC people with whom I’d met. He was moderate in his views and expansive in his manner. We talked through much of the night. “People in the arts are free spirits and have the right to every approach,” he said. “They should do what they want without political control. Black and white artists should be friends, should learn from each other, cross-pollinate. Sectarianism must stop with the arts.”

  The Hinterlands

  In some sense, the art of South Africa all feels sullied. The work of black artists has been polluted by their reliance on a white market; the work of white artists has been contaminated by their inevitable complicity in an exploitative system. Oppression poisons both the oppressors and the oppressed, who all long for an imagined, highly romanticized innocence, something untouched and genuine, a prelapsarian rightness. Nowhere has that fantasy seemed closer to the surface than in Venda, one of the quasi-autonomous Bantustans where black people lived in ostensible independence with limited rights of self-governance—albeit with no economic means to sustain themselves except handouts from the central South African government.

  As you go north from Johannesburg, the landscape of South Africa grows in scale and grandeur, and you begin to feel that you are incontrovertibly in Africa: the vague Europeanizing influence that is so powerful in Cape Town and half-successful in Johannesburg seems to disappear. If this area is a hotbed of gross Afrikaans conservatism, that must be because it is so obvious here that you cannot shut out Africa with a high fence or a well-planted garden of foreign herbs and flowers. The closer you get to Zimbabwe, the uglier the white cities are, and the more gratuitous their ugliness seems. I have never been anywhere else so incongruously free of charm as Pietersburg or Louis Trichardt. The road from Louis Trichardt to Venda climbs slowly into the gentle, lumbering hills south of the Limpopo River. It is still the N1, the biggest highway in South Africa, but its many lanes have dwindled to a ribbon of tar with dirt paths forking from either side. There is not much traffic: a few trucks taking goods up to Zim, a few combies (minibuses), an occasional farm vehicle. When you arrive in Venda, you are made quiet by it; an air of mystery and joy and of a dialogue of spirits hovers over Venda the same way an atmosphere of excitement and bustle and urban decay hangs over New York.

  The first time I visited South Africa, two years ago, Johannesburg dealers had described Venda as the land of the innocents, where an authentic black culture still reigned, and I thought it might be the missing link that would make sense of my experience of South African urban black and white art. The Venda people have been carving curios for a long time—bowls, animals, little figures—and the new Venda art, suddenly fashionable in the past five years, connects to this tradition. Some of the works are just inflated knickknacks; some, parareligious objects; some reflect a Western idea of art. The story of their integration into the South African art market is a pretty good parable for the confused but touching cultural interaction that will be the basis of the New South Africa.

  There are no road maps of Venda, an area of about three thousand square miles. The artists are not easy to find; most don’t have electricity or indoor plumbing, much less a telephone. You just show up and they are usually at home—and usually glad to see you. The artists are all religious, but it’s hard to explain what their religion consists of: it is a hybrid of Christianity and a dozen other mythologies, with regular visits from the spirits of the past, a lot of sangomas, and a priestess who rules over the nearby lake where your ancestors turn into fish. When you arrive in Venda, you can get initial directions from Elias, the old man who runs the curio shop by the main road. These you must follow up with local directions as you get closer to where you are going.

  I went to Venda with the Cape Town artist Beezy Bailey, and we headed off first to visit Noria Mabasa, the only woman among the Venda artists. We turned off the main road at a field of hemp and passed through a village of mud rondavels with pointed thatch roofs; the people all stopped to look when they saw our car. Many of the women wore traditional dress, their breasts bare, their wrists and ankles glittering with hundreds of thin silver bangles, their bodies wrapped in brilliant, geometrically patterned cloth.

  We found Mabasa sitting outside with some friends and relations, barefoot, dressed in a blue smock and a multicolored knitted hat. “Most of my things are in Johannesburg now, at an art gallery,” she said. “Too far away.” But a few pieces were still scattered around outside. She carves hollow trunks into rings of people reaching out toward one another, or dancing, their faces turned outward, strangely intricate. Next to her rondavel, Mabasa had built a new house of poured concrete. “From my art I am building this,” she said proudly.

  “It wasn’t my choice to make these things,” Mabasa told us. “I was sick. So sick, terribly sick.” Mabasa shook and hunched over, as if ill. “And I had a dream, and a terrible old woman came to me in my dream. And I was very much afraid.” Mabasa stood up to imitate the old woman and pointed with one arm rigid. “She said I must make some figures from clay, for being well. So after this terrible dream I began to make some figures, and I got well.” Mabasa smiled wide. “Oh, I was so well again, with making these figures. And it lasted, oh, some years.” Mabasa’s laugh is like an explosion. “And then I was ill again. And again this terrible woman came to me in my dream, and she said I must stop to cut my hair. So each time as it was growing, I began to get more strong and more strong with this hair, and I never am for cutting it again.” Mabasa took off her hat to reveal a fibrous topiary of hair that had been neither cut nor combed. “And then this old woman came a third time and told me to carve, and that it was the last time—if I carved, she would never be coming and bothering me again. When she was gone, I began to carve my dreams, to keep her away. And she has never bothered me again. Now, when it is a strong dream, I begin with making my carvings.” We walked together behind the house; Mabasa picked some mangoes, which we ate. “Now these people are coming from Johannesburg and they take my carvings away and sell them. I went to Johannesburg, too. Too many people! Terrible place.” She put her hands up to the sides of her head.

  Mabasa’s work was about to be shown in Amsterdam, and she was being flown out for the exhibition. It would be her second trip out of Venda. She was the only person in her village to have left it. We warned her that Amsterdam gets cold in winter, and that she must take warm clothes.

  “It’s really? It’s really?” She took snuff.

  “You know that there is not so much snuff in Amsterdam,” we said.

  “No? I will take a big bag of it with me.” She spread her hands wide to show how big and shook her head with the wonder of it. “Do they have cigarettes? Mangoes?”

  We wanted to see the Ndou brothers, Goldwin and Owen. Mabasa said it was too difficult to explain where they were, and after some cajoling she agreed to come with us. Like Mabasa, Goldwin had earned some money, and he, too, had a “luxurious” concrete house with a battery-operated television. When we arrived, the mother of the Ndou brothers was standing in front of the house. Tall, erect, dignified, she was bare breasted and wore traditional clothes. When she saw the white men coming in their car, she disappeared into her rondavel, next to Goldwin’s house, and emerged wearing the housecoat of a domestic servant.

  For fourteen years, Goldwin worked on the railway and lived in a township hostel. Then one day, in Venda, he cut down a mopani tree and saw the hard, dark wood at its center. “I said to my little brother Owen, ‘In Johannesburg they are selling some things from this wood for big money.’ ” Each made a carving, and they took them out to the road to sell, and Goldwin never returned to the railroad. Goldwin
speaks slowly, but Owen is anomalously slick. The first time I saw Owen, he was wearing a silk jacket; the second time, he was in tartan trousers and Italian-looking loafers. Three thousand years of history seemed to lie between him and his mother. Unlike other Venda artists, Owen was pretty clued in on current South African politics, but he supported no one. “It’s the good thing in Venda,” he said, “not too much politics, and no one fighting for politics. No violence.” At Owen’s house, I saw a painted wooden sculpture of an angel, wearing a dress Jean Paul Gaultier could not have conceived of, her enormous breasts projecting from green accordion pleats. Another recent work is a six-foot-tall rabbit dressed in plus fours holding a golf club, called Sport for a Gentleman. Owen has never seen a golfer, or anyone wearing plus fours. And why a rabbit?

  We sat in Goldwin’s house drinking beer and listened until the sun set to the international news, which came from the mouth of a six-foot monkey he had carved to hold the radio. Though the Ndou brothers’ work, often inspired by their dreams, feels ritual in its strangeness, they are making it to sell and do not weep when a dealer comes and takes it away. They have fixed prices, can negotiate rationally, and have even signed contracts.

  The next day, we set off to visit Freddy Ramabulana. In this rural community, Ramabulana is an outsider. He lives in extreme poverty and suffers from a disfiguring skin disease. No one wanted to accompany us to see him. A Johannesburg gallery owner had warned us not to touch the children at Ramabulana’s place or we could get worms. Ramabulana’s carvings are rough, primitive, frightening. His sculptures feature marbles for eyes and glued-on hair and beards. He carves genitals in full detail, then clothes his carvings in children’s dresses, torn pajamas, long, faded shirts. When we arrived, he was kneeling in the dust and gluing the beard on a carving of a man with his hands stretched out in front of him, holding a large rock. We greeted Ramabulana, and he nodded but did not move; we stood for twenty minutes in the hot sun while he finished his work. Then he went inside his hut to retrieve a sculpture of a kneeling man with painted blood pouring over his face and body. He set the figure down, then positioned the new one above it, so that it was bludgeoning the kneeling figure’s head with the rock. Killer and victim both stared blankly ahead. Another piece—an enormous, roughly carved penis—lay on the ground, wrapped in a blanket. When we uncovered it, the children all giggled nervously and scampered around us.

  Ramabulana’s English was almost incomprehensible, but one felt that his Venda was also probably mumbled and bewildering. Bailey had brought some invitations to his forthcoming exhibition in Cape Town, and he gave one to Ramabulana, who studied it closely for a good four minutes. The painting was of two dancing men with teapots for bodies. “I can carve this,” he said. We had a hard time explaining that it was just a picture for him to enjoy, that we weren’t commissioning him.

  Later that day we set out to find Albert Mbudzeni Munyai, rumored to be mad; the last time his Johannesburg dealer had come to see him, Munyai chased him off the property with a panga, a blade like a machete. He lives in the northern part of Venda, and it took us an hour or so to get to the area. “Munyai? You must go down the hill and past the Zimbabwe Supermarket,” said the woman we asked for directions. “Then you cross the river, and after the third big tree on the right, you will see him, sitting in the middle of his orchard and singing.” We found Munyai sitting under a metal awning on the far side of the orchard, intent on his carving. When we drew near, he jumped up and welcomed us as though we were the friends of his childhood, embracing first Bailey and then me. He was good-looking and muscular and wore only a pair of shorts, his hair in tiny dreadlocks, his eyes sparkling. “You are from America?” he asked me, shaking his head with wonder. “You have come by flying?”

  I said that I had.

  “Look at you!” He leaned back. “Like a butterfly!”

  Munyai was first encouraged to make art by the Afrikaans sculptor David Rossouw, the first white artist to befriend his counterparts in Venda. Munyai was the gardener of a friend of Rossouw’s. At first they smoked hash together, then created art together; you can see each of them reflected in the other’s work. As we talked, Munyai’s wife sat beside him, sanding the sort of large spoon found in local curio shops. Munyai was driving scales into the sides of a wooden fish; we carried on a five-way conversation, with Munyai addressing at least as many comments to the fish as to his wife or to us. “I have to make the sculpture,” he said, “so the wood won’t be burned. It’s so beautiful, the wood! My God! I am saving these pieces of wood from the fire.”

  I asked him how he felt about selling his work.

  “Oh, my dear. It makes me so sad that you ask me this question. My dear, it breaks my heart every time. But I must have some tools for working. The children play more games with three pebbles than with two. But, my dear, these men coming for buying: this money talk is ugly talk.” Later, when we were looking at his work, which combines wood and metal, he said, “I cannot live with all my work. Thanks to God that these people come and take it away from me! It’s too strong for me, too powerful. If I live with it all the time, I am made weak by it.” We wanted to see his sculptures more clearly, but he hesitated to bring them out into the sun: “You don’t know what they can do.”

  Munyai sent his wife to fetch a sheaf of papers. “Can you tell me, please, what is in these papers?” Munyai had won an Honorable Mention in a pan-African competition for indigenous art. The judges declared that this artist, by melding postmodern influences with a traditional African spirit, had successfully synthesized separate schools of art and was therefore a voice of a rising Africa, at once a guardian of tradition and an avowed modernist. Munyai’s work was chosen over that of hundreds of other artists. “It’s really?” he asked. “My God, my dear, it’s wonderful!” He looked at me, his head to one side. “You will go and write about my work for the people in America?” I nodded. He burst out in a long, wonderful laugh. “Everyone must see it!” he said. Then, serious: “They must understand it. It’s magic work.” He walked us back to the car. He looked at it for a long moment. “Go on, then, and fly along the ground.”

  Our last day in the region, we went down to the neighboring area of Gazankulu to see Jackson Hlungwani, often identified as the greatest black artist in South Africa. Until two years ago, Hlungwani lived in an Iron Age site on top of a hill, among the great stone circles that mark the site of an ancient citadel. God came to Hlungwani and told him to live there, to make great carvings to His glory, and Hlungwani laid out a sacred ground filled with giant monuments, some of them as high as trees, surrounding a crucifix twenty feet high. Hlungwani became famous all over Venda and Gazankulu for his preaching and his life in “the New Jerusalem,” and for his personal iconography; his strange four-eyed faces, as eerie and intimidating as the heads on Easter Island, seem alive, as though Hlungwani has set free something organic in the trees.

  Five years ago, Ricky Burnett came up from the Newtown Gallery in Johannesburg and said he could make Hlungwani famous and send his work all over the world. Hlungwani got excited and told Burnett to take everything, and Burnett took everything. At the end of the retrospective, Hlungwani, enraptured by the adulation he had attracted, gave Burnett permission to sell everything. Hlungwani’s work went all over the world, and he became the most famous black artist in southern Africa. But when the great monuments from the New Jerusalem were sold, Hlungwani felt the spirit go out of him. Defeated and lost, he climbed down from his hill and left the stone citadel. Hlungwani says he has been betrayed and curses Burnett; Burnett says he has taken good care of Hlungwani and that if he didn’t want to sell the work, he shouldn’t have offered it. In 1985 Burnett had staged an exhibition called Tributaries, which flew in the face of the received wisdom that South Africa had no artistic activity outside white circles. Featuring artists from Venda and elsewhere, the show began to break down the solid wall between black and white artistic experience. “Tributaries was our Armory show,” said William Kentr
idge. But it can be hard to find the line between amplification and exploitation of these “authentic” artists.

  We found Hlungwani sitting in the shade between the legs of a giant devotional figure, carving a stack of angels. He started to tell us about his vision: “I’m rebuilding the Garden of Eden.” We expressed interest, and he said, pointing ahead, “You go up that hill until you see God, and then you will find it just on the other side, among the trees.” On the hill, we found God. Hlungwani had carved an entire fallen tree with a complex many-featured face (dozens of eyes, several noses); in the garden beyond, we found more carvings. Hlungwani told me that I must go and look the snake in the eyes. He sent me to the edge of the hill, where a ten-foot white piece of wood sat on several little wooden props. I looked at the butt end of the wood and came back. “It’s the snake,” he confided, “and it was in the ground and on the ground. That’s where the evil comes from!” he almost bellowed. “I dug it up and I am keeping it off the ground, and so now there will be peace. Peace in the New South Africa and in the world.”

  He brought out two carvings. “I have something for you, for your spirit. This one is finished.” He showed me an angel. “It’s perfect. This one is not for you.” He picked up the second one. “This one is not finished. I am giving it to you so you can finish it from your own spirit.” I looked closely at the two angels. “Use your brain! Give him a face yourself ! This angel is full of love! Tell the people in America all about it!”

  People in Venda still talk about Nelson Mukhuba. His surviving sculptures are astonishing: graceful and alive, as though the spirit of the wood had been released from it. When the Venda craze was just getting under way, the Market Gallery in Johannesburg offered Mukhuba a one-man show. Everyone in the Johannesburg art world went to the opening, for which Mukhuba himself had traveled down from Venda. Into the room he danced, among the swanky crowd with their glasses of white wine. He was wearing a high-peaked cap and walking on stilts, and from top to bottom, he was almost twelve feet tall. He had brought drummers from Venda, and as they drummed, he danced through the opening, incredibly lithe on his stilts; to add to the spectacle he blew fire from his mouth. The exhibition was a raging success.