Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (25 page)

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 ridiculous, 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.

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.