Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (26 page)

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 Kentridge. 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.

A month later, on a sunny day in Venda, Mukhuba took a panga, cut down the trees around his house, killed his wife and children, set fire to his home and all his remaining work, and hanged himself. Some people say that Mukhuba just went mad. Some say that
a spirit came for him. Many think that it was a
muti
death, that someone had cursed him. Perhaps it was the chief, who, some people say, was not pleased to see all the money and attention going to Mukhuba. Perhaps it was some other artist. Or perhaps it was the violation of a way of life that occurs when a rapacious market and a naïve artist come into contact. Everyone in Venda still talked about Mukhuba, but no one spoke about the circumstances of his death. In Venda,
sangomas
, witch doctors, are still held in awe. Some are much loved, but those who have misused their powers are stoned to death. “I am always thinking of Mukhuba,” Mabasa told me, and her big smile left her face for a minute, and she looked dark, and I was suddenly frightened.

On Seeing and Being Seen

Black artists are influenced by white culture just as white artists are by black culture. “To tell the truth,” David Koloane said to me, “my first influence was the local movie house, not the African tradition.” Tony Nkotsi has emerged as a remarkable painter by any standard—“but,” one ideologue I met groused, “it might as well be white art.” Ivor Powell has suggested that the “innocence” so many South Africans associate with Venda cannot continue indefinitely, that as the dealers keep going to Venda, the artists there will begin to cater to the market, and the magic will be lost. It will not work, however, for a paternalistic white establishment to set out to “preserve” the tradition. If it can survive, it will survive; if not, those who have witnessed it will always count ourselves lucky.

“What one is doing in one’s own studio doesn’t sound like the same question as what is happening in the country, but very often they are the same question,” William Kentridge told me. “The personal concerns have to be interesting as thoughts outside in the world, and what I contemplate in the world has to have resonance in the studio: there has to be something to make or draw. I work through inversions and transformations.” Those are the inversions and transformations that are central to the work of black and white artists in
South Africa. Politics is front and center in the minds of most South Africans in this period of new freedoms and new anxieties, but art that is only about the political situation tends to be dull. Sometimes, the refusal of politics can be a noble stand, but often art about artists’ internal processes becomes tiresome. Of all the South African artists whose work is both optimistic and pessimistic about both art and social progress, Kentridge is the most coherent. His work is always intensely personal and legibly political.