Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (24 page)

The people I met in the townships all understood the effort involved in a visit; I was given a gratifying, perhaps exaggerated, sense of my own courage. Just by coming, they said, I was doing something for them. They knew that someone thought it was worth the trouble to bring me. That decision stood in contrast to their own experience of segregation. “I was excluded from many places during apartheid, and I am still excluded in many places,” the painter Durant Sihlali said to me as we sat in his house in Soweto. “And I am not so eager to include all the whites who say in their casual, offhand way that they want to come here. It’s my territory here, and I don’t bring anyone who I don’t like. It’s an effort for me to come into Johannesburg and pick someone up, think about their safety all the time, entertain them, and drive them home. I am not going to give my life over to doing it.”

Sihlali grew up under apartheid, but he is educated, self-assured, even diffident, with a rich use of the English language. As a young man in the sixties, he once stumbled upon some white art students and their teacher who had come to the township to paint. He watched them for a long time, then walked up to one and silently held out his hand. The art student handed Sihlali a paintbrush, and Sihlali finished the picture. The art teacher was impressed by his skill. Although Sihlali could not enroll at the school, the teacher invited him to model for them. “In this way,
though I never lifted a brush during class, I was able to learn everything, just by watching and seeing how the teacher criticized the students.”

For years, Sihlali made a living painting and selling seashell souvenirs and commercial signs; in his free time, he created a series of watercolors depicting local scenes. These figurative watercolors address few of the concerns about the nature of representation that occupy contemporary Western artists. But the work of black South African artists, which often focuses on family, history, and dreams, must be understood on its own terms. Sihlali’s watercolors document a life that the apartheid government wished to conceal. “My interest was not in beautiful things, but in recording our history,” Sihlali explained. “They are not an expression of rage; when you tell the truth, you don’t become angry. I felt I had to do it. Often it was a race against time. I painted against the bulldozers as a mode of protest, and when I finished painting a house before they destroyed it, I felt that I had won.”

Sihlali’s house was in Jabulani—or, as he called it, “deepest Soweto.” Houses in the township all have metal grilles over their windows, and Sihlali had made art even of these bars at his house, working them as narrative scenes, one showing a mother and child. We left that area and went to see Vincent Baloyi, a sculptor, and Charles Nkosi in the Chiawelo Extension section of Soweto. There we sent some children off to get us beer and sat in the front room talking. In the townships, you do not in general close your door to your neighbors except when you perceive a threat. It doesn’t matter if they are drunk or tiresome or if you just don’t like them; the house is open to all, and everyone stops to talk. “So you are in Soweto!” people would say as soon as they saw me. “You’re afraid now?” And everyone would laugh. “Tell them it’s not so bad, not so bad, not so bad,” they would say. Many wanted to know why I was interested in art. Art is the basis of a proud and almost sovereign dialogue that is rare and precious in the townships, that exceeds in its meanings anything you could adduce from the appearance of the work. “All this about equality and working with white artists,” said Charles Nkosi. “It’s going to take a lot of time. It’s like when you get a new hat. For the first time you have it, it’s really a nuisance. You just keep leaving it everywhere, you can never remember you have it, and when it’s on
your head, you feel the weight of it all the time. Even if you used to be cold, the new hat’s not easy to start having.”

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 accused 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.”