First published in German by Steidl Verlag, Göttingen, Germany 2010 This English edition first published by Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd, South Africa 2010 10 Orange Street Sunnyside Auckland Park 2092 South Africa (+27 11) 628-3200 www.jacana.co.za © 2010 works by various individual artists © 2010 portrait photographs by Sally Shorkend © 2010 text by various individual contributors All rights reserved. ISBN 978-1-77009-889-3 Cover design by Jacana Media Book design adapted from Steidl Design/Sarah Winter Set in Times 12/15 Printed by Ultra Litho, Johannesburg Job no. 001334 See a complete list of Jacana titles at www.jacana.co.za
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Positions Contemporary Artists in South Africa
Edited by Peter Anders and Matthew Krouse on behalf of the Akademie der K端nste and the Goethe-Institut
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AKADEMIE DER KÜNSTE
The original POSITIONEN series is published in Germany by Johannes Odenthal and Hans-Georg Knopp on behalf of the Akademie der Künste and the Goethe-Institut. Ranging from resistance to education, contemporary artists are increasingly raising opposition to economic pressure, radical social change and rapidly changing identities. How do local contemporary art scenes respond to the worldwide dynamics of globalisation? What social, political and cultural positions do individual artists adopt? With the POSITIONEN series, developments within today’s cultural flashpoints will be illuminated in interviews, portraits and essays. Throughout, the focus is on the artists’ individual perspectives, not theoretical or historical concepts. Each volume is produced in direct dialogue with journalists and cultural scientists from the respective art scene. Hans-Georg Knopp, General Secretary, Goethe-Institut Johannes Odenthal, Head of Programmes, Akademie der Künste
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Contents
Love in the time of Zuma: Mandela’s children reach adolescence 8 Introduction by Matthew Krouse and Peter Anders
‘I Write to Fight’
A big step: Abject bile and revolt in the work of Lesego Rampolokeng 19 Andries Walter Oliphant Chimurenga: Communal yard for sick heads 25 Ashraf Jamal The bounds of the expressible: Zapiro and political cartooning in South Africa 47 Jane Duncan Paul Grootboom and the quest to reroute South African theatre 61 Kwanele Sosibo
‘What Rainbow? ’
The political, marginal and sexualised nature of black masculinity 77 Boyzie Cekwana talks to Rodney Place
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Uprooting & re-routing the Afrikaner male: Peter van Heerden’s abject performance art 91 Megan Lewis ‘I dreamt I saw a large herd of cattle’ 107 Nandipha Mntambo talks to Anthea Buys Twin brothers, twin towers and digital dichotomies 119 Yunus Vally A staccato movement of expansive and neurotic individuals: Robyn Orlin’s search for the expression of contemporary dance 131 Matthew Krouse
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Living memory: Gala – Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action 147 Shaun de Waal
‘New Street, New People, New City’
Artistic work with and in space: Urban geographer Ismail Farouk analyses the logics of inequality 159 Cara Snyman ‘I’m an outsider in Jo’burg’: Kudzanai Chiurai and the pains of exile 173 Percy Zvomuya Forms of power and powerlessness: Photographer Guy Tillim researches perceptions of reality 189 Sean O’Toole
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A cinema beyond escapism: Khalo Matabane visualises the unsolved problems of South Africa 199 Zingi Mkefa
‘Tipp-Ex Politics’
Reversing the hierarchy of reality and its representation: Michael MacGarry unhinges Africa’s political myths 215 Anthea Buys Celebrations of the spirit of tragedy: The theatre of Brett Bailey 227 Anton Krueger Shock of recognition: Sue Williamson and South African identity 251 Chris Roper
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History, memory, tourism and curatorial mediations: The Hector Pieterson Museum and the representation of the story of the June 16 1976 uprisings 263 Ali Khangela Hlongwane 283
Biographies
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Photo Credits and Captions
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Paul Grootboom and the quest to reroute South African theatre
Kwanele Sosibo
Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom was born in Meadowlands, in Soweto, in 1975. He was the winner of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Drama in 2005. He began writing scripts for film and television in 1993 but moved to theatre when he became the Development Officer at the South African State Theatre some years later. Plays include Cards (2006) about an inner city brothel run by a cruel Nigerian pimp, Township Stories (2007) in which a young girl escapes the bondage of her family while her father hires a contract killer to dispense with her and Foreplay (2009), a free adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde.
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The town of Mafikeng is situated in the North West Province of South Africa. It is the last town on the road to Botswana and in this enclave, the desolate capital of a platinum rich province, an annual arts festival is held that sometimes reveals remarkable things about the South African psyche. The festival is called The Calabash. Back in 2002 The Calabash was used as a platform to launch a new play called Cards that was to be about the tough and often tragic lives of women who service a brothel in Johannesburg’s high-density ghetto called Hillbrow. The play was to be directed by someone called Mothusi Mokoto. But when actors, who went on research forays into the violent Hillbrow streets, returned bloodied and bruised, Mokoto lost his job. So the North West Arts Council decided to hand the responsibility to their resident writer, the little-known auteur Paul Grootboom, and a great career was launched.
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The script for Cards was a shambles, at least according to his grand, crystallising standard, resulting in two days of frantic rewriting, followed by four more days of manic rehearsals. When the curtain was finally lifted on the play, the audience was floored, signalling the dramatic arrival of a fearless playwright. Cards, which is the story of characters whose lives revolve around a rapidly unravelling Hillbrow brothel, would be staged for four weeks in Mafikeng before doing a gradual round trip to the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, and later the State Theatre in 2004. The piece also showcased at the Market Theatre in 2005, returned to the State Theatre in 2006, before a homecoming of sorts at Hillbrow’s Windybrow Theatre. In the process, it propelled an unfazed Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom to notoriety in the South African theatre landscape. He remained matter of fact about the refreshing stylistic leap. ‘My directing drive and style for this play, (and, incidentally, my other plays) is first and foremost cinematic,’ he would tell anthropology professor David Coplan in In Township Tonight! ‘My interpretation and intention with theatre is to prove that theatre has much more in common with cinema than there are differences between the two mediums. In short, this play is an attempt to merge the two mediums of theatre and cinema.’1 Today, Cards sports two writing credits, but the tiresome length, the cinematic flourishes and sardonic wit are all Grootboom’s touches. The piece’s rapid transformation during that chaotic, sleepless week in Mafikeng was no small feat. The deft cosmetic surgery performed on it is something the playwright had been gearing up to, hence his departure to Pretoria’s State Theatre in 2002. There, Grootboom was required to ‘fix’ a community or independent play for the weekly staging of a programme called 52 Seasons. ‘So you can imagine what a lot of work it was,’ he writes via email. ‘Fixing a play every week, from Monday to Wednesday and having that play open on Thursday. This exposed me to community theatre and taught me to work fast and hard. I use this valuable experience even when I do my own work.’
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Since then, much of his time has been eaten up by dramaturgical duties. Yet when he clinched the 2005 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for drama, many thought him to be an overnight sensation. But the resultant scramble for his credentials bore witness to a prodigious talent who had tirelessly worked on his craft for well over a decade. Grootboom was born in the Soweto township of Meadowlands in 1975. Like many township kids, he grew up watching the overthe-top pulp of Steven Segal movies. By his teen years, his young fantastical ego was focused not only on emulating the likes of the ponytailed aikido master, but on rendering him obsolete. ‘I wanted to be him and I thought I would write myself such a role,’ he reminisces now with some embarrassment. However, he would initially enrol as a BSc student at the University of Witwatersrand, before sending a film script to television producer John Rogers, a move that altered the course of his life. Sufficiently impressed, Rogers took the aspirant scribe under his wing and fed his voracious appetite for perspective with books and discussions. He also introduced him to playwright and director Aubrey Sekhabi, with whom a prolific partnership would be forged. Sekhabi fanned the prodigy’s creative flames by inviting the youngster to rehearsals, showing him the ropes of the director’s chariot. This set the stage for a string of collaborations between the pair, spanning television and theatre, yielding classics such as Not With My Gun, and a 13-part television series entitled Orlando. Cards’ marketing strategy, which included a provocative poster in which the drug kingpin and pimp Mubara, (initially played by soapie star Siyabonga Twala) is staring at the world beneath a woman’s G-string-framed derriere, was just one of the factors contributing to its propulsive impact. The others, of course, were his brilliant use of the stage (especially at the expansive Windybrow), the stylised depiction of sex and some populist didacticism, which justified an end to his means. This set the tone for his other works, which were equally drenched in grit, with their directorial wit the key supplier of buoyancy.
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2005’s Relativity: Township Stories, co-written with Tsotsi star Presley Chweneyegae, depicted a veritable Gomorrah, where the characters momentarily redeemed themselves in a musty shebeen
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(drinking hole) before returning to their sadistically dissipating lives. Only this Gomorrah didn’t burn, as it did in the Bible. It seemed forever spot-lit by the ghoulish glow of a flaming moon, underscored by the howl of an ironic, almost callous soundtrack. The wretched night only watched, unnerved, as the inhabitants incinerated each other. The web of disillusionment in this dystopia was extensive, and seemingly inadvertent. A quick scan of the characters on stage bore a detective who burnt balls and sodomised his son; a small time crook routinely beating up a runaway; and an emasculated husband whose wife ran off with a Malawian national called Lovemore. Subsequent press articles would rightly claim that the play was inspired by life in the townships surrounding Pretoria. Three years after Relativity premièred at the State Theatre, the shanty towns surrounding Atteridgeville would spark off one of the country’s most violent waves of xenophobic attacks, belatedly giving the inferno depicted in the play added resonance. Telling Stories, which also ran at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels (2007) told the story of an ill-fated writer who infiltrates a street gang in order to lend his stories more grit. A version clocked in at around three hours, making it probably his most indulgent, yet insightful exploration of the compulsive process of creation. The theme was also interrogated, by a weird twist of fate in Interracial in 2007, an exploration of race in post-apartheid South Africa which premièred at the National Arts Festival. Interracial shook the theatre fraternity and its author unexpectedly on appearance at the annual festival, to such an extent that he is still figuring ways to make it more palatable to future audiences. The play featured an all-black cast, an irony that was not entirely by design, but one that found itself woven into the narrative of the production with ingenious effect. ‘I wrote it to get people to acknowledge the problems we have in a post-apartheid society. The law says apartheid is over, but it’s not. People claim that they’re happy with the current state of things, but they’re not. The pretence really bugs me,’ he told a Grahamstown-based website.2
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Grootboom’s subsequent efforts to land another production at the festival’s main programme have come to naught. Cats and Dogs, an earlier version of Welcome To Rocksburg, his comicbook-inspired ode to developmental theatre, showcased on the event’s fringe programme. Rocksburg’s meagre audiences, during its brief run at The State Theatre in late 2009, are indicative of the challenges that lie ahead in the presentation of theatre to mass audiences, especially where the hook is not sensational enough to let word of mouth do all the work. It is a challenge that has not only informed the stories Grootboom has chosen to tell, but the manner in which he executes them. In the ensuing interview, conducted largely during Foreplay’s second run at the Market Theatre (in January 2010), Grootboom elaborates on his tightwalk through South Africa’s parochial theatre terrain and attempts to map out his escape route to the future. Simply put, Foreplay was an edgy sex comedy about relationships across age and class divides (although not about the colour divide since the entire cast was black). The work was loosely based on Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen (1900), using South African scenarios and the play’s characteristically circular structure to question the libertarian values of post apartheid South Africa. Kwanele Sosibo: Much of your career as a playwright has been linked to the State Theatre. Does the role you currently play there affect the creation and presentation of your work? If so, how? Paul Grootboom: Yes, it does, I guess. It makes me have an acute sense of self-censorship. This is because I know I don’t represent myself, I have an institution to represent. That also drives one to care more about reputation than one normally would. Even though I love great, reckless artists, filmmakers and novelists, one can’t emulate that fantastical lifestyle because of the fear that I will misrepresent the State Theatre. KS: What are the class differences between the people that attend your work at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg to the people that frequent the State Theatre in Pretoria? For an international readership it is necessary to explain that Pretoria, the capital city of South Africa,
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it is a rather secluded city about 60 kilometres from Johannesburg which is the country’s economic hub, and a much more permissive environment. Pretoria still values its Afrikaner roots. PG: At the Market Theatre it’s more of a diverse type of audience. In Pretoria, the racial lines are more rigidly drawn up. So when you do something like the plays that we do, mainly a black audience will come, and it is not necessarily a theatre audience. It’s more people who will be interested by something or will be recruited by the marketing department. People in Pretoria don’t like the work that much, then when it comes to Jo’burg, suddenly there’s a big deal. Even people who saw it in Pretoria, will come to Jo’burg and give it more importance, because it is at the Market. I don’t know how it works, but I think it is very interesting. KS: What have you noticed about the differences in how people receive the work in different locations, even say locally between the Market Theatre and the State Theatre? PG: The Market Theatre, it’s a more intimate space, so the audiences feel the nuances more than at the State Theatre, which is a bigger venue. So there it was almost voyeuristic and separate from them. With regards to, for example, London [Foreplay was staged at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in 2009], the people there didn’t
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really like it that much. I think they felt it lacked subtlety. I had a problem with that statement. I think it is an issue of being uncomfortable with certain things, but then on the other hand, you find that people in Belgium‌ they really liked it a lot. One thing we kept on getting in London was that it’s not nuanced. KS: What is the value of international travel for a production, for you as a director, for the actors and all the parties involved? PG: The value is that one wishes for global recognition when one works, and through this, it is one step towards it. Also, you are exposed to other working methods and you come home with a broader, more universal approach. KS: Do you have to tailor your work to each setting?
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PG: No, I tailor it to the venue rather than for a particular audience or particular environment. KS: If we can talk a bit more about some stylistic staples, why do you always go for grand pieces in terms of length. What role does it play? PG: For me, length is very, very important. You must remember, I’m from that culture, where I’ve been watching very lengthy movies. Ever since, I’ve liked them because then you can focus on a detail. There’s a film called Irreversible, which answers this question of length. There’s a rape scene almost like the rape scene in Foreplay. The rape scene in Foreplay is actually a homage to it. The scene is close to nine minutes. This woman is raped at the end, it’s all one shot and it’s not cut. And it goes on for long. When it starts out, you’re thinking okay, then when it goes on beyond what you are used to, when it goes on beyond a minute for example, then you start being uncomfortable, with the length, specifically. But then its amazing that the more it goes on, you start caring, because it is no longer just a scene that is shot in a movie, you start getting worried and caring, which I find a very effective technique. Because, in Irreversible, the whole point was, how then does the husband go about revenging that rape. I think length does that to people, because first you think, they should have cut it here, then you think, why are they keeping it this long, then the questions come in which take you to the right train of thought. KS: The performers that you work with: a lot of the time you find the same pool emerging. What do you look for specifically in an actor? What must they bring to the table? PG: It’s the issue of bravery when you are doing certain things which are questionable to a lot of people. The second thing is that you don’t waste time with anything. Once you give them the idea, and you explain to them what you really want to do and you’re not sure what boundary you want to reach, you agree basically, from the word go. But right now, I’m obsessed with the idea of working with new people. KS: One reviewer of your work said she felt very sympathetic
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towards your actors. Do you think you take a lot out of them? PG: If I do, they don’t tell me that because they seem to be fine with it! A thing that people miss when they watch the play for the first or second time is the process of how we work the piece. I’m very sympathetic to the concerns of the actors. Like for example a nude scene, I could never do it with somebody who doesn’t want to. But it’s one thing for an actor to lie to you and say they are completely sure, then I can’t really do anything about it. I always tell them that they have to be completely sure, not only with nude scenes, but with violent scenes or whatever, you have to drive people to where they are completely comfortable. I think it’s more hectic in the rehearsal room than it is in performance, because in rehearsal rooms we use certain techniques which are really hectic for them. KS: Can you explain a bit more about the techniques? PG: I don’t accept that actors should fluff lines. In my plays, one thing I’m proud of is that they don’t. I don’t accept that actors should be distracted if something happens out of the ordinary. The reason that never happens is because there are word runs that we do, where actors have to run, walk or jog saying dialogue. I slap my hands and they change pace. But the more it goes on then they get used to it. But some of them vomit after one session, some can’t handle it, others can. It’s the one thing that I force them to do. The technique does something to them in a psychological manner, so they know they are on the right level, when they perform, they don’t have to rely on adrenaline. KS: You always try to give a glimpse of the creative process in your work, where, there is like a parallel narrative, at least sometimes, where the writer is a central character. Is that an attempt at placing yourself in the middle of the work, making each work autobiographical, to an extent? PG: To an extent each work is autobiographical, but I’m trying to represent the quality of the creation of the piece, almost like a reminder to the audience that somebody is creating this. For example a character in Foreplay, I based completely on Gibson Kente.3 It has very little to do with me. But it is a constant reminder to the
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audience that some of the things are wrought out, the story doesn’t exist on its own. KS: Why is it important, to remind the audience of that? PG: Because sometimes, something just becomes an entertainment piece, and people forget the aspect that they are supposed to be picking certain things up. It’s true with our audiences. In other countries, possibly even with the whites down here, they are a lot more exposed to things like postmodern theatre, which our audiences are not. Also, I am sort of obsessed with removing backstages, seeing actors when they are doing all those things, because people want to live in that illusion that this is a reality which it’s not. It is unlike just putting up a slice of life on stage and just allowing people to wallow in it. KS: Does that reminder allow you to get away with a lot of things that people consider gratuitous? PG: I don’t think I’m getting away, I’m getting a lot of flak. Maybe with the general audience I might be getting away. I try to draw the audience in with something and break it with something gratuitous. And when you break it, they find themselves unable to switch off because they were already so involved. KS: I’m particularly interested in the work Interracial. Why hasn’t it been staged widely in South Africa? It has been described as ‘out of sync with preconceived European notions’ of what South Africa is all about. The play showed a homeless white man and his girlfriend befriending a suicidal black youth and, on the other end of the class spectrum, a white therapist discovering that his wife is cheating on him with a black man. He has the couple killed by an assassin. One critic said the play is summed up by a monologue which ends with the words, ‘If you don’t want to play with us, just go back where you came from.’ PG: It went to [the National Arts Festival in] Grahamstown, where it was said to be racist by the white audience. Black people started chanting [during the interracial killing]. Then from Grahamstown, somebody from Poland wanted it. After Poland, I talked to Aubrey Sekhabi, who is my boss at the State Theatre to see if we could stage
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it there. I wanted to see if we could do it without being called racist. And when we did, blacks still reacted like that, which I thought was dangerous. I don’t want to do it again because one day they are going to kill a white person in the audience. KS: Did you anticipate that impact or reaction, in Grahamstown? PG: In the same way it shocked the white audiences, it shocked me also, because you don’t want to be held responsible for waking up the same emotions in people. KS: Are the accusations of racism based on some black people’s reactions to it, or are they based on a fundamental interrogation of the script? PG: I think they were shocked that black people were reacting that way. I mean the play was not over, this person was still doing his monologue, but they were already standing up and chanting about it. It is a scary thing because you don’t know what might happen. It almost promotes anarchy, but very racist anarchy in a way, because even if I believe the content is not racist, they are bound to read it like that because it questions their comfort around the race issue. KS: Are you saying South African audiences are not ready for it? PG: That’s what I experienced. They are not ready. KS: Are you not saying that, perhaps, out of timidness? PG: It’s a fear, like I’m telling you. I had a lot of time to then stage it again, and when we staged it, it really horrified me that they were reacting that way. KS: Can you tell me about its journey to Vienna, to the Wiener Festwacher? PG: Well it was uneventful because a lot of people enjoyed it there. But the one woman came to me, she was horrified – an old white woman. She came to me and said that she helped the antiapartheid movement and she is shocked that she is being told ‘fuck you’ at the end of the play. I just thought that she was missing the point, so I consciously tried to talk to other audience members. And as I talked to them, I realised that it is only her who holds such a belief, but that was about the only thing that happened in Vienna [at the Wiener Festwochen].
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KS: Is it shelved indefinitely? PG: I’m trying to see how I can bring it back without being accused of igniting… KS: Hate speech? PG: Well this is what it was called in Grahamstown. I need to see how I can stage it without racial violence coming into play. KS: Can we speak more about the dynamics of race, and the playwright. How do they come into play? What constraints do you face as a black writer? PG: A lot. Firstly, there is a cabal of white producers and they will only accept you if you are window dressing for them. I happen to be lucky with the State Theatre because I’m employed to do theatre, which is good, but I know a lot of people struggle and they are ostracised because they are, first, not of the right skin colour and, second of all, abancengi – unapologetic. I mean this is why I wrote that last scene, actually, in Interracial. KS: Are you saying you are in a unique position as a playwright, particularly with the position you have at the State Theatre? PG: Yes, I mean, particularly now, I am being ostracised for doing Interracial. I mean, Grahamstown, for three years running has rejected my proposals… I am getting talks that: ‘Oh! He’s just going to do Interracial!’ So they have basically banned me, in their own little way! I mean, I was even surprised that Foreplay was invited to the Market Theatre. On the other hand, international white people, because they are not in the mix of this thing, they can look at the situation with clear eyes and they can see it. KS: Did the experience with Interracial tell you anything you didn’t know about South African attitudes? Did any of what happened come as a surprise to you? PG: It’s not a surprise really because it happens nationally, with everything. Whatever opinion you can have about Julius Malema, for example, with a lot of the things that he says and the way a lot of white people react to them, it is a clear sign [of their prejudice].4 So it wasn’t a surprise on that level, but on the other hand it was a surprise because I thought they would understand that this is just a play.
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KS: Judging by the works that you have seen and what you know about the scene, can you sum up what you feel is the direction that South African theatre is headed, and who are the new voices breathing life to it? PG: The problem is that the South African theatre scene is quite small and it is still struggling. New theatre makers come along and lose heart – and I don’t blame them. I think whenever you have a case of a lot of people eating a small cake, weaker people are always going to get squashed. Of course there are many new voices – too many to mention here – but I think they are made to struggle unnecessarily. I have worked with many talented young voices but many people don’t know them because they are made to struggle to stage their works. I wish I could be more positive, but… KS: Lastly what do you think it will take to lift South African theatre out of this morass? What will it take to give more room to black voices and more people walking through the doors? PG: A serious revolution is needed, sort of like a new wave of voices, but it won’t just happen. I know I’m not answering the question directly, but it’s a difficult question to answer. Let’s just pray that such a revolution happens organically. When it is forced, you get left with only demoralised, wounded theatre makers.
1 David B Coplan, In Township Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre, 2nd edn, University of Chicago Press 2008. 2 Qudsiya Karrim, A self-educated success story, cue-online August 2007, cue.ru.ac.za/ theatre/2007/self-educated-success-story.html. 3 Editorial note: Gibson Kente (1932–2004) was a South African playwright based in Soweto. He was known as the Father of Black Theatre in South Africa, and was one of the first writers to deal with life in the South African black townships. Three of his plays drew criticism for being anti-apartheid and were banned, and he was jailed for one year in 1976 on conclusion of the filming of his play How Long? [Online] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Gibson_Kente [Accessed 29 March 2010]. 4 Julius Malema is the president of the African National Congress Youth League. He is best known for his controversial statements and speeches, and vociferous support for the President of South Africa, Jacob Zuma. [Online] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Malema [Accessed 29 March 2010].
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Uprooting and re-routing the Afrikaner male: Peter van Heerden’s abject performance art
Megan Lewis
Peter van Heerden is a Cape Town based performance artist who, with his collaborator Andre Laubscher, creates work under the company name erf [81]. Van Heerden completed his Masters Degree (Cum Laude) at the University of Cape Town Drama Department in 2004. His live art installations including the controversial So is ’n os gemaak (This is how an ox is made) at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown (2004); Bok (Ram/Goat), commissioned by the KwaZulu Natal Society of the Arts (2006); 6 Minutes (2007), commissioned by the Dance Umbrella and Flowers for my Flesh (2007), which was selected as one of the winners of the Spier Contemporary Art Awards. In 2008, van Heerden and Laubscher were commissioned to perform Totanderkuntuit (Throughtheothercuntout) at the Klein Karoo Nationale Kunstefees in Oudtshoorn. He is currently working in the United States, where he has performed at the University of Minnesota and been awarded a residency at the Baltimore Theatre Project.
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As the architects and benefactors of apartheid, Afrikaners, the 3.6 million white settlers of Dutch and French Huguenot descent who colonised and then dominated the southern tip of Africa, are easy – often legitimate – targets for derision and scorn. But Afrikaners are also an integral part of the complex social fabric that makes up democratic, post-1994 South Africa. As former President Nelson Mandela advocated, and as poet and journalist Antjie Krog suggests, their attempts at reconciliation, transformation and contributions to
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the moral fibre of South African culture need to be respected and accepted for the country to move forward and to thrive. To constantly cast the Afrikaner as what Krog refers to as the 窶話ad racist on the
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rise’ is to remain fixed in a cultural dynamic of the past rather than forge new ways of being in the present and for the future.1 The Afrikaner male is a figure historically laden with difficult baggage and negative associations – as a racist patriarch, blindly and bull-headedly dominating everything in his path, be it women, children, black Africans or animals. And yet, he is also a heroic figure, a risk taker, trekking forward through challenge, stalwart protector of his volk (nation), levelheaded, thoughtful and a creative problem-solver. Embedded within this figure is a sense of discordance, a harsh mixture of sounds and images; multiple truths collide within and upon his body. And it is this discordance that 37-year old artist Peter van Heerden wrestles with through performance. Van Heerden’s live art installations are some of the most provocative, ethically engaged, and challenging work coming out of contemporary South Africa. He works in close collaboration with artist, social activist and pig farmer, Andre Laubscher, and the two present work under the initiative erf [81] cultural collective. The tensions within this Afrikaner masculinity are manifested in the Anglo-Boer War general, Koos de la Rey, after whom a song by pop singer Louis Pepler (a.k.a. Bok van Blerk) was written in 2006. Van Blerk’s song skyrocketed up the pop charts and into the hearts, minds and ears of many contemporary Afrikaners. The mainstream media made much of the song, its accompanying video, and the ‘De la Rey’ parties inspired by the music, complete with their old, apartheid-era South African flag-waving, and nostalgic performances of white solidarity and Afrikaner pride. But, as Krog has argued recently, such media representations paint a simplistic picture of racist white people, ‘hijacked by right-wing sentiments’, circling their wagons in the face of black majority rule.2 Krog suggests that there is a deeper, more important need expressed in van Blerk’s song and in the rallies of community that it inspired; namely, the longing to connect to something pride-worthy about the Afrikaner, something to hope for rather than be ashamed of. Koos de la Rey, the historical figure, was doggedly just and even-handed, arguing against war until the last; and, in the heat of
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battle, he treated the British general, Lord Methuen, with dignity and compassion. The refrain of van Blerk’s song, which has been interpreted as a call to arms, asks, ‘De la Rey, de la Rey, sal jy die boere kom lei? (will you come to lead the Boers?)’ Rather than a battle cry, the call could also be read as a yearning for Koos de la Rey’s principles and humanity to be the guiding spirit of young Afrikaners rather than the outdated, racist logic of apartheid and white superiority. The tension for contemporary Afrikaners is, as Krog suggests, to ask ‘how can they, the youth, live as fellow citizens without betraying those whom they love, but who have upheld apartheid?’3 Or in other words, the tension is between a shame about the past and a desire to move forward as members of a multicultural democratic South Africa with pride in their culture and their contributions. The controversial figure of the Afrikaner male – an interstitial, liminal figure caught between the horror and shame of the past and the uncertainty of the future – is the persona van Heerden embodies in much of his work. Sporting a bushy beard, suspenders, rope belt, and with veldskoene on his feet, van Heerden embodies the swaggering nomadic trekboer4 of the colonial frontier: daring, driven, and not afraid of getting dirty.
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Concerned with South African masculinity and race in a moment when white men have undergone a seismic (symbolic if not material) shift in power – from being the rulers of the country to becoming one of eleven official language groups and an ethnic minority in a democracy – van Heerden’s work circles around the question of how the privileged perform themselves once their privilege is deflated. And his work demands a re-imagining of old identity formations, a deep re-thinking of possibilities, in order to forge a future for all South Africans in this complexly cultural multiracial society. What drew van Heerden to the trekboer figure is ‘the perpetual mobility of this Afrikaner identity, the motion of identity from one space to the next [that] forces adaptation, physical adaptation through geographical transformation of landscape and social [adaptation] through human or animal contact.’ For van Heerden, ‘Afrikaner identity is still in motion, his uitspan [the place in the trek when oxen and men were given a chance to rest, eat and recuperate] is yet to be decided.’5 The concept of motion – the journey, the trek, the routing – is the central frame through which van Heerden makes his art and seeks change in his world. By inhabiting the figure of the trekboer pioneer of the 17th century Dutch colonial project – the nomadic man-on-the-move, the frontiersman in flux – van Heerden positions himself in a fluid role, able to travel, like the migrating trekboere did, across time and space. He anchors his journey in the familiar ethnomythological tropes of the Afrikaner: God’s chosen people, entrepreneurial pioneers forging their way into uncharted territories, bearers of the light of civilisation into the darkness of Africa. Resisting the reductionist ‘bad racist’ image, van Heerden asks his audiences to question and deconstruct the assumed authority and blind nostalgia behind the trekboer figure, a symbol used by the Afrikaner Nationalist project to unify and galvanise an ideology of whiteness and superiority. While he does not create work with an audience in mind – rather, he makes work that is ‘necessary… that feels vital to [him] as a person’6 – van Heerden’s audiences are comprised of a complex mélange of South African identities: from enlightened, liberal-minded intellectuals and
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art lovers who also question and examine the past and present to rightwing, bottle-throwing thugs and Bible-beating religious conservatives to whom his work is considered a threat and a challenge. By creating free installations at festivals around the country, he is also able to attract non-traditional audiences – street kids, working-class Black and Coloured South Africans – for whom much mainstream theatre and art is often financially and socially inaccessible. The successful tour of his new work Ubuntu in the United States7 affirms that the material van Heerden engages with is of a particularly South African brand, requiring and creating a familiarity with the symbols and practice of apartheid and its aftermath. Aiming to manifest and activate change in the world, van Heerden works through his own body, which is marked by, and carries the baggage of, his upbringing under apartheid and his subsequent coming-to-consciousness as a white man, artist, and human being. Born in Johannesburg in 1973 to an Afrikaner father and a Brazilian mother, van Heerden, like many white South Africans, was a child of privilege, schooled at the all-boys’ St. Peter’s Preparatory and St. Stithian’s College, before attending Rhodes University for a BA in Drama and Classical Civilisation. It was at university that he came to political and artistic consciousness; there he committed himself to working through the performing arts to address vital, challenging, and often unspoken social and cultural issues impacting South Africans in the new democracy, especially white identity and masculinity. While preparing for his one-man show, Ubuntu, at the University of Minnesota in January, 2010, Peter told me: ‘I have always been fascinated by the past, by old things, and by the residue the past leaves on our bodies.’ In order to purge or work through the past, to create change for the future, and to rid ourselves of outdated habits of the past, van Heerden believes we require a process of catharsis, the kind of visceral encounter with embodied ideas that performance art is able to offer. Van Heerden’s live performance creates spaces for such catharsis by offering both the performer, and by extension his audiences, a space to journey through ideas, identities, symbols, visual and
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visceral images, and to reflect on our own reactions to what we encounter through his work. ‘As new places and spaces are created and discovered,’ suggests van Heerden, ‘so [my] body has [and those in the audience have] to negotiate its behaviour to the rules of these new spaces; and in so doing develops new behavioural vocabularies that will manifest, inscribe and imprint on the inner landscape of th[ese] bod[ies].’8 In his first major solo piece, So is ’n os gemaak (This is how an ox is made), which premièred at the 2004 National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, van Heerden dangled by his feet from an ox yoke, the words bok (ram), skyt (shit), Piet (Pete), volk (people/nation), harnas (harness), and bitch scrawled across his naked body. Thrashing his head through a large pile of grond (earth) below him, he struggled to breathe, drowning in the soil of his birth, swallowing mouthfuls of dirt, regurgitating, choking, breathing. Then, his testicles tied to the yoke, he pulled it forward, literally voortrekking,9 straining with and against his manhood, caught between the past and the future in a gesture of castration, tension, risk, and masculine vulnerability. Through these simultaneous images of futile struggle and hopeful determination and survival, van Heerden offers up his white masculinity in a ritual sacrifice. ‘It is only through abjection of white masculinity,’ claims van Heerden ‘that a new practice can be celebrated. The process of holding up whiteness for exploration is not in praise of its hegemony, but rather as a condition for sacrifice… This ritual sacrifice of whiteness must become a feast and celebration, to enable the formulation of a new non-racialised practice.’10 Often called a soutpiel11 as a child by Afrikaners who read him as ‘one of them’, even though he has an Afrikaans surname but was raised in an English-speaking household, van Heerden also offers his hybrid identity up for scrutiny. His manhood is strained between the past and the present, between Afrikaner and English traditions, between strength and vulnerability, between power and abjection. Holding his own body, particularly his own genitalia, in such tension, van Heerden literally has the balls to model the sacrifice required for transformation.
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Van Heerden roots his work in the familiar metaphors and symbols of the colonial and apartheid past as he (re)routes thinking about those ideas in the present. Calling himself a voortrekker (pioneer), draadtrekker (wanker), saamtrekker (one who pulls together), van Heerden is committed to an embodied practice of what he calls saamtrekking (pulling or journeying together) and saampraat (talking together). Through this practice, performer, space and audience engage with one another to wrestle with, examine and create meaning from the familiar symbols of the past and the complex negotiations of culture and identity in contemporary South Africa. In order to live up to the ideal of the Mandela era Rainbow Nation, to live side by side with each other, van Heerden believes South Africans must engage in practice, and practise new ways of being. ‘Whether it’s through art, or politics or picking up a packet thrown on the floor, we must keep practising to get rid of old habits and create new ways of living as a nation,’ he says.12 In 2005–6, Peter created Bok (Ram/Goat), a piece commissioned by the KZNSA Gallery for their Young Artist Project in Durban, which was also performed that year for the FNB Dance Umbrella in Johannesburg. In Bok, van Heerden staged several mock executions of ‘the Boer’ by pelting his blindfolded and shackled body with sacks of white lime and flour. The white powder explodes against his naked chest; a chair falls as his body collapses, we watch as he struggles for breath. Inspired by a photograph of the execution of a Boer War general at the hands of the British, this performance literally scapegoated his white body; a body marked and laden with baggage; a body contested, vulnerable, visceral, capable of feeling and pain. Multiple echoes of whiteness permeated the piece: the white blindfold covering his eyes, the white lime that explodes over his body, clinging to the hairs of his beard and marking his white skin with yet another layer of whiteness. Bok is anchored in the pain of the Afrikaner past – the moment of the Boer War defeats at the end of the 19th century – a pivotal rallying point for the Afrikaner Nationalist project that would eventually manifest itself as apartheid. Simultaneously, Bok excavates the white man’s position now, asking
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if we ought to ‘execute’ the Afrikaner for the shame and horror of the past, and if so, what part of that identity must die and what can remain a part of a South African future? White Afrikaners in the audience vicariously vomit and gag as saliva and breath ooze from Peter’s mouth, and they take the blows of repeated sacks of venom, hatred, shame, and anger into the body politic as his individual body absorbs the shock of them. In 2008, van Heerden and Laubscher created a nine-day installation titled Totanderkuntuit (literally, Throughtheothercuntout with a pun on the word anderkant, or other side). The piece was performed at the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees (KKNK), the annual Afrikaans-language art and theatre festival in Oudtshoorn. Guiding audience-participants through daily performances and installations around familiar tropes, symbols and heroes of Afrikanderdom, van Heerden deployed the trekboer character strategically, offering up fluid performances that moved between familiar and unconventional iterations of the Afrikaner male. Some in his audience identified with the trekboer as an icon around which to (re)circle their wagons in insular thinking and racism. For example, drunken youth pelted them with bottles in the middle of the night and showered them with racist epithets. Many people prayed for their souls and quoted
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Biblical verses in the guestbook. Others drew from van Heerden’s figure the best of Afrikanerdom – the can-do spirit, the brave pioneer, the reflective thoughtfulness of this guiding masculinity willing to (re)route his identity and practise a new way of being in his social landscape. Encountering Peter’s physical body in the ‘role’ of trekboer, audiences had to question their (un)consciously held beliefs and examine the blind nostalgia of Afrikaner ideology. As an artist using performance to catalyse dialogue around cultural issues, we encountered him in his multiple layers – as actor, trekker, radical, madman, hybrid – and in varied shades of the ‘character’ he inhabited during the installation – tough, risky, bold, vulnerable, naked, open to dialogue, thoughtful, mortal. Resisting a singular, fixed notion of the trekboer, in favour of complex, multiple shades of Afrikaner masculinity, van Heerden and his creative collaborator, Andre Laubscher – who embodied various iterations of Pa (Father), Dominee (Preacher) and Boer (Farmer/Afrikaner) – enacted complex, nuanced performances that offered audiences alternative identities to wrestle with and encounter. Through their bodies – which were made visible, vulnerable, porous, transformative – Peter
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and Andre enacted a different way of being Afrikaner men and asked their audiences to help (re)define what Afrikaner identity was, is, and can be. Andre’s body in the ‘roles’ of the Dominee/Pa/Boer, for example, operated simultaneously as familiar, racist, and oppressive; yet, when Andre offered plates of food to street kids with his 6-year old, black biological son (his bloedseun Theo) with him, he performed a radically different self than the traditional, familiar versions of Pa… or Boer… or Dominee. Each night, Andre played the abusive, domineering Pa to Peter’s Adam-esque character in a 30-minute playscape of stage pictures, short scenes between father and son, and heavy use of symbolic objects entitled Sweepslag (Colonial Whiplash). At the start of the piece, Peter ‘birthed himself’ from a bag suspended in a tree like a womb13 (invoking the Kunt in the title of the installation) to bring to life a new way of thinking about white male Afrikaner identity. He entered the playing space bloody and naked, his body viscerally abjected, a primal man crawling blindly through the dirt, snorting and grunting like a wild animal, searching for language, meaning, and identity. Then gradually, he acquired suitcases, the ‘baggage’ of Afrikanerdom with its troubled contents: whiteness, masculinity, and Calvinist determinism. Van Heerden, who counts feminist cultural theorist Julia Kristeva as one of his foremost influences, believes that ‘in order to… re-map itself; re-locate itself, [the physical body requires] a shedding… a type of catharsis.’ He enacts abjection to actively deconstruct and examine what (white) South Africans thrust aside in order to live. He believes that this ‘relocation requires an exposing of what lies inside to the outside.’14 Van Heerden slaughters sacred cows – the icons of South African history – and offers up their innards for our inspection, reflection and encounter. In these viscera we may see another way of being, see ourselves from the inside out. He calls upon all South Africans – regardless of race, class or creed – to engage in ‘acts of transformative behaviour,’ which he models by embodying this shedding or transformation with his own body.
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Putting his own (literal and metaphoric white, male, AngloAfrikaner) body at risk, he debases himself, turns himself inside out, exposes his naked, vulnerable masculinity. Offering his body to the performance and to the audience, he re-routes thinking, modelling how one white man can push the boundaries of ‘normal’, the boundaries of what is thinkable, the boundaries between physical torture and endurance and mental elasticity. As he undergoes his physical and creative journey, he asks his audiences to trek intellectually and emotionally as well. As red welts erupt on his naked skin, Peter is baptised by Laubscher’s Pa figure with a wet oxtail switch, in an act of strategic blasphemy: ‘I baptise thee Peter the Ox,’ declares Andre as he whips him, ‘In die naam van God die Vader [God the Father], Sot die Seun [the Idiot Son], en Die Heilige Bees [the Holy Ox].’ The ox is a powerful symbol for van Heerden. As the beast that literally carried the Voortrekkers across the Drakensberg mountains in their ox wagons during the Great Trek,15 it midwifed a nation into existence. ‘[Oxen] dragged our country into being,’ he claims. As a beast of burden, laden with baggage, oxen are often also used sacrificially. Peter describes his use of the ox as follows: ‘In this trek of transformation, I am the ox. As a white South African man, I am harnessed to my [past] experiences, which I must pull through the present in to the future.’16 And to create the future, van Heerden sacrifices identities, and treks through the baggage of the past by abjecting his own white, male hybrid body. Peter’s use of the abject body – the body placed in contorted relation to its ‘normal’ functions – is his way of shaking up static, outdated thinking and calling for transformation in thought and in being in contemporary South Africa. Modelling the courage and daring required of such transformation with his own body, van Heerden commits physically to this work – he lives and breathes his art for installations that last up to nine days straight; he contorts and tortures his own flesh and risks his body in performance; and he takes a brand on his right shoulder after each major installation to mark the transformation of the work on his being.
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Through the process of othering and the act of physically performing, van Heerden undergoes a cathartic change, which he describes as follows: ‘The character I am enacting or using becomes othered and changes for better or worse.’ And through the visceral change he experiences in a public space, ‘the audience is forced to engage with the othering/abjection process [and] to question their assumptions… to react and act with an encounter in the present moment, a visceral moment that engenders some form of change.’17 Van Heerden’s saamtrekking practice allows for paradox, for colliding truths to encounter one another. The anger of bottlewielding young men coexists with profound conversations with people across race, gender and class lines. His work creates a space where the reflective and the reactionary can collide. And his practice, his wrestling with rooted identity and the routing he moves through in performance, creates spaces of possibility where reconciliation – often an overused word in the South African context – can take place. Rather than paying saccharine lip service to the notion of reconciliation, what occurs here is a merging of disparate entities (colliding truths) into a ‘harmony’, the simultaneous collision of different pitches to make chords. In other words, it is a reconciliation that consists of the holding of differences in relation to one another. By creating discordant images that require audiences to work, or trek, through their tension, Van Heerden’s performance art offers a way of being South African that is based on the acknowledgement and respect of difference (and the tensions that difference holds) rather than a hierarchy of difference that figures one group lording over others. Van Heerden’s work offers us a way to approach reconciliation – to take in disparate, conflicting parts, to wrestle with them, and then create something new, something workable and livable. Rather than continuing to monolithically paint the Afrikaner as evildoers in perpetuity, Antjie Krog calls for the acceptance of variegated, diverse performances of Afrikaner male identity.18 Van Heerden’s performance art is an embodiment of such a possibility. In his treatment of complicated, topical subject matter, his abject,
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visceral bodywork, and his difficult, engaging, draadtrekking, saamtrekking performances, van Heerden unpacks the past in the present to enable the future. And, in doing so, he continues to renegotiate, to uproot and re-route, what it means to be white… and male… and African.
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1 Krog, Antjie. ‘A new ancestor for our alienated Afrikaner youth’. Sunday Times, 7 November 2009. [Online] http://www.timeslive.co.za/sundaytimes/article183988.ece [Accessed 13 January 2010]. 2 Krog, ‘A new ancestor for our alienated Afrikaner youth’. 3 Krog, ‘A new ancestor for our alienated Afrikaner youth’. 4 In the 1830s, a small group of Dutch-descended itinerant farmers, known as trekboere, left the British-controlled Cape Colony and trekked with ox wagons into the northern interior of the country, where they subsequently formed several Boer Republics. 5 Van Heerden, Peter. Trekker Manifesto. MA Thesis. University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa, 2004, p 13. 6 Van Heerden, Peter (vanheerden.peter@gmail.com). ‘STUFF.’ E-mail to author (lewi0182@umn.edu). 20 January 2010. 7 In his solo piece Ubuntu, which he performed in Baltimore at the Theatre Project (November 2009) and Minneapolis at the University of Minnesota’s Nolte Xperimental Theatre (January 2010), van Heerden explored shades of his own South African masculinity through the mythic figure of the tokoloshe (a troublemaking creature with an enormous penis); rituals of initiation; and othering through the use of blackface. 8 Van Heerden, Trekker Manifesto, p 1. 9 The term voortrekker is the Afrikaans word for pioneer and literally means to pull or journey (trek) forward (voort). 10 Van Heerden, Trekker Manifesto, p 13. 11 A soutpiel, or salt dick, is a derogatory term used by Afrikaners to define an Englishspeaking man, with one foot in Africa and one in Europe, his genitals left dangling in the ocean. 12 Van Heerden, Peter. Personal communication with author. 10–17 January 2010. 13 Van Heerden uses the image of birth repeatedly in this work: as described above in Sweepslag; in 6 Minutes, he emerges from a bag of sheep and cow innards; and in Ubuntu, his clay covered body rips its way through a white sheet. 14 Van Heerden, Trekker Manifesto, p 8. 15 Again, the travel/journey image of the pioneer voortrekker/trekboer is central to the ethnomythology of the Afrikaner Nation. 16 Van Heerden, Peter. Trekker.co.za Peter Intro. [Online] http://www.trekker.co.za/peter_ intro.html. [Accessed 8 April 2008.] 17 Van Heerden, Peter (vanheerden.peter@gmail.com). ‘STUFF.’ E-mail to author (lewi0182@umn.edu). 20 January 2010. 18 Krog refers to ‘the forgiveness-asking of former police minister Adriaan Vlok’ and ‘Free State University rector Jonathan Janssen’s forgiveness of four Afrikaner students’ as examples of such complex, unexpected performances of identity.
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Forms of power and powerlessness: Photographer Guy Tillim researches perceptions of reality
Sean O’Toole
Guy Tillim was born in Johannesburg in 1962. From 1986 to 1990 he was a member of Afrapix, a collective of photographers who followed and produced images of the anti-apartheid Struggle. Later he moved from photojournalism to presenting his work in a gallery setting. More recent work includes portraits of child soldiers from the Democratic Republic of Congo (2003), portraits of displaced people from the Kuito province in Angola in the Kunhinga series (2003), the Leopold and Mobutu series (2004) and the Johannesburg series (2005), which involved spending long hours with impoverished residents of the original high rise blocks of flats of the once-affluent Joubert Park. In 2003 he won the prestigious DaimlerChrysler award for Photography.
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Central Johannesburg’s aging tower blocks, unvaryingly striated monoliths perched on a stony outcrop of land that could, with some imagination, be described as an escarpment, have about them a banal resoluteness. They endure. So too do the curious muddle of names by which they are known: Cape Agulhas, Stanhope Mansions, Jeanwell House, Sherwood Heights, Export House, even Manhattan Court. Flanking streets named Esselen, Pritchard, Smit, Twist and Nugget, Guy Tillim stayed in one of these uncommonly ugly buildings – it overlooked Plein Street – for a period of five months in 2004. He was working on a project that would, in its own modest way, signal a turning point, a project that in its tight focus would also retrieve from image oblivion the fragile, itinerant communities that struggle, endure, but rarely prosper in this nominal city centre.
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One evening, it was June 30, responding to a request from an old work associate, the photographer Graeme Williams, Tillim headed north out of town, to Rosebank. It was here, in a now defunct photography gallery, that the tall, athletic photographer, his hair greying and receding, frowned in response to a question I asked him. I don’t remember the exact wording, but I distinctly recall Tillim’s response. It was unequivocal: ‘I am not a war photographer,’ he told the small audience gathered to listen to our public interview. ‘What about Roger Fenton?’ I asked. As is well known, this pioneering British war photographer, unable to record the action of the Crimean War because of the antique nature of photographic technology in the mid-1850s, famously settled on a landscape strewn with cannonballs. Economical, spare, meditative rather than sullen, arguably even conceptual, Fenton’s famous scene of aftermath offers many useful cues for understanding Tillim’s practice. Tillim, a Johannesburg-born (1962) Cape Town resident, didn’t need this potted history lesson to prompt him. He ruefully smiled at mention of Fenton’s name. Speaking in a low, shy pitch, as is his habit, he whispered his defeat: ‘Yes, perhaps.’ That Guy Tillim is a conflict photographer is self-evident. Working
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as a freelancer for a variety of international photo agencies and publications still committed to documentary practice, he has over the last 30 years recorded conflict and its aftermath in South Africa, Angola, Congo, Eritrea, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, even Israel and Afghanistan. Over the last decade, however, having managed to put aside the exigencies of news photography and reportage, particularly in the period after receiving the 2003 DaimlerChrysler Award, he has increasingly opted to pursue self-defined projects. What might have seemed odd and incidental in his earlier work (a thicket of fans guarded by a military figure hidden in the shadow of a giant helicopter, a saluting figure rising above the tumult and blur of a jubilant crowd, an unapparent Congolese landscape viewed from the interior of a gutted militia camp) has now come to make absolute sense. ‘Ah, yes,’ we quietly exclaim. ‘Of course.’ Which is not to say that Tillim’s interest in power – the way it manifests, shifts and changes – has abated. It is ongoing. Sometimes it makes itself apparent in the way he engages with the symbolic markers of power in the post-colony, or in his search for the vestiges of a colonial past. His publications Leopold and Mobutu (2004) and Avenue Patrice Lumumba (2008), the latter facilitated by a
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photography fellowship at Harvard University, are eloquent statements in this regard. Enquiring yet allusive, distrustful of the gimmicky show and tell tricks employed by workaday documentarians, anxious, but without horror, obliquely self-referential – viewed as a whole, Tillim’s work from the last ten years offers a profound statement on the impatient interstice between conflict and change, between the past and a wished-for future. Power, a fecund noun that implies authority and control, its antonyms being helplessness and weakness, is, however, by no means the only subject Tillim investigates in his photography. Underpinning everything is his acute awareness of the constructedness of looking, and the fallibility of seeing. Then there is his distilled sense for the quotidian, the unremarkable, the ordinary: a paint flecked wall in the library of a Congolese sports club, the late afternoon sunlight as it colours a flower bed filled with geraniums in central Johannesburg. Tillim’s photographs ask us to see the obvious and unnoticed with fresh eyes. That we might understand things better – well, that is not primarily his drive, but it sometimes flows as a natural consequence. It wasn’t always certain that Tillim would end up this way, an author of quietly arresting photographs. For many years he was directionless, a wanderer. Tillim started working as a photographer shortly after earning a degree in commerce from the University of Cape Town, in 1985. He soon gravitated to the conflicts framing life in most South African townships, working as a freelancer for the news agency Reuters. At the same time he joined Afrapix, a self-funded, nonracial photographic collective established in 1982 by Paul Weinberg, Omar Badsha and other socially committed South African photographers. Membership duties, especially financial, proved ‘quite onerous’, recalled Tillim during an interview at his home in Kommetjie, south of Cape Town, in late 2009. More significantly,
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though, Afrapix helped vest the idea that there was ‘something other than photographing news’. Mentorship – be it the influence of those around you, or the mythology of those who preceded, men and women whose greatness one admires – has an important place in any artist’s biography. It doesn’t account for everything. The trajectory of Tillim’s life story has been shaped by many influencing factors, the birth of his daughter, Hannah, in 1990, being one of them. Broke at the time, he shared a house on Cape Town’s breakwater with the future political satirist, Jonathan Shapiro (aka Zapiro). Where some of his contemporaries, Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich, Ken Oosterbroek and Joao Silva in particular, were making names for themselves recording the pre-election strife in Johannesburg’s townships, Tillim was stuck in Cape Town. Partly, it was by choice: he turned down a job offer at the Weekly Mail, a left-leaning newspaper based in Johannesburg, the position later filled by Carter. ‘I didn’t know which direction I wanted to go into but I knew that wasn’t the one.’ In 1994 Tillim drifted east, to Hong Kong. A regular gig with Asiaweek, a subsidiary of Time Inc., allowed him to earn a moderate keep. It also enabled him to visit Afghanistan, this just as the Taliban were surrounding Kabul. It was the first time he made photographs
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of open warfare as opposed to civil strife. Emboldened, he looked to Bosnia. It didn’t work out – ‘thankfully, or not, I don’t know.’ Still ‘pretty much adrift’, he came back to South Africa for a period, living in a Cape Town apartment owned by photographer David Goldblatt. Somewhere in the midst of this shiftlessness, in 1996, he visited the Congo, travelling from Kisangani to Kinshasa along the Congo River on a large riverboat. It was a soft story, a bit of travel reportage he had proposed to a German magazine. Writing in the introduction to his debut book, Departures (2003), a book that collects his dissonant early work, Tillim admitted: ‘My journeys have been idiosyncratic, often purposeless, not so much to commit journalism as to travel for its own sake.’ Something about Congo, or Zaire as it was then known, compelled the photographer. Historical circumstance? Probably. 1996 marked the outbreak of the First Congo War. There are two ways of guiding one towards a deeper appreciation of Tillim’s Congo work. One is entirely factual, and requires more than a passing knowledge of the chronology of events that led to the end of Mobutu Sésé Seko’s three decade long grip on power in Zaire, in 1996. It is a story involving Rwandan Hutu militia forces, rival Congolese ethnic Tutsis, Congo’s vast mineral wealth, a man named Laurent-Desire Kabila, also the ghosts of Patrice Lumumba and one Léopold Louis Philippe Marie Victor, king of Belgium (1865–1909) and self-appointed strongman of the Congo Free State, a colonial fiefdom marked by a history of greed and inhuman cruelty. There is, however, thankfully perhaps too, an alternative way of telling this story, of narrating Tillim’s images, one that is less explicitly determined (and bounded) by historical circumstance. Like the narrator in Ronan Bennett’s novel The Catastrophist (1998), a cynical if romantic writer-journalist named James Gillespie, Tillim has been a benign observer of the Congo, his camera nonetheless offering a record of ‘the leprosy of its politics’ and ‘the low comedy of its calamities,’ to quote from Bennett. Comedy? In 2006, Tillim returned to Congo to photograph the democratic elections. One of the photographs he returned with is
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a classic, even if no one but me thinks so. It shows presidential candidate Jean-Pierre Bemba entering a stadium in central Kinshasa. We can’t see Bemba’s face; he is squaring off with the future, the vast constituency of supporters in front of him. He is flanked on both sides by bodyguards, one of whom stares at Tillim, and by implication us, from behind gold-plated aviator glasses. This is power, the picture tells us. Power. One word. Beyond the surface of the picture and its refined statement lurks a back-story. The son of Bemba Saolona, a wealthy businessman and confidante of Mobutu, Bemba junior was himself a personal assistant to Zaire’s deposed dictator in the early 1990s. He is accused of perpetrating atrocities in the Central African Republic as well as eating pygmies in the northeast district of Ituri in 2002. (‘These are lies which have come from the highest levels of government,’ Bemba told Reuters. ‘The pygmies are alive and well.’) A popular figure in the western, Lingala-speaking portion of the country, which includes Kinshasa, Bemba’s 2006 campaign slogan was ‘One Hundred Percent Congolese’, a direct rebuke of President Joseph Kabila who grew up in neighbouring Tanzania and cannot speak Lingala. ‘Kabila is a foreigner,’ Tillim heard between the whistling and cheering that coloured his experience of following Bemba. Rather ironically, Bemba grew up between Belgium and Congo, and his mother is said to be Angolan. Remarking on the tumultuous politics that define the Congo region, Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost (1998), pithily states: ‘The Congo offers a striking example of the politics of forgetting.’ Arguably, the arc of Tillim’s recent photography, some of it made in Congo, would not have been possible was it not for his five-month stay in Johannesburg. A solitary and purpose-defined experience, it allowed him to think about how best to record life in Johannesburg’s vertical slums. While his earlier, pre-Jo’burg (2004) work evidenced what have since become career-defining leitmotifs – ruined architecture; uniformed soldiers; forgotten memorials; endless windows, oftentimes cracked – his Plein Street experience
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foisted on him the realisation that he wanted to make pictures that weren’t bounded by the expectations of photojournalism. In other words, something different to the stuff collected in Departures. The realisation came slowly. It happened six weeks into his project, after a review of a ‘patchwork’ of early photos describing the city. Seated in his Kommetjie home, an acoustic guitar resting on a stand nearby, a hardcover version of JM Coetzee’s collected literary essays Inner Workings (2007) lying on a table near his passport and a map of Africa, Tillim elaborated further: ‘I was on the verge of spending time with Cameroonians and Nigerians, also the police, when I thought, ‘I really don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do the same thing that I’ve done before.’ The whole notion in the first place that I could create a portrait of the city is absurd. I had to rethink it all. It was then that I realised all I had to do was be there, let the place speak for itself… I didn’t need to go into the street and make this projection, try to create little pieces of the puzzle that would fit together – because they wouldn’t. The impulses of the city are just too much, they’re infinite, and to attempt to photograph that in the logical sense was absurd.’ Breakthroughs and epiphanies are deceptive things to narrate. As it was, much of what Tillim is describing here – his way of looking and recording – was already crudely manifest in his practice before he had arrived in Johannesburg. In a December 2004 interview I did with Tillim, we talked about some of his favourite photographs from his Leopold and Mobutu series of photos, made between 1996 and 2003 and exhibited for the first time in Cape Town early in 2004. ‘Personally, I prefer the quieter works, like Mobutu’s terrace or Stanley’s stoep,’ he told me. ‘They offer a more thorough
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documentation that is less prescriptive, less journalistic, something stiller – a quiet moment. In a way this definition circumscribed my mission, but it also gave me a direction. I didn’t want to go to the Congo and simply try portray a dark and misty vision that would vindicate Joseph Conrad.’ Six or so years later, the quietude of his photography having won many plaudits, Tillim continues to work in this manner. How, I wondered out loud to him during my intrusion into his Kommetjie seclusion, is life different now from the days he was a broke, aimless photojournalist offering fractional views of a fractured continent to magazine and newspaper readers? ‘There’s a kind of freedom associated with having the resources for the first time in my life, to be able to decide where I want to go and what I want to do,’ is his uncomplicated answer. ‘I can follow very thin, ephemeral threads that end up I don’t know where. They don’t have to either.’
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P. 201: Khalo Matabane, When We Were Black, 2006. Courtesy Born Free Media. P. 205: Khalo Matabane, Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon, 2005. Courtesy Khalo Matabana. P. 217 left: Michael MacGarry, Fetish IV, 2008. AK-47, wood, nails,100 x 32 x 15 cm. Courtesy Michael MacGarry. P. 217 right: Michael MacGarry, Comrade II, 2009. AK-47, hippopotamus canine tooth, animal hair, epoxy, 100 x 34 x 11 cm. The Marvelous Collection, Courtesy Michael MacGarry. P. 220: Michael MacGarry, The Master, 2008, from the series African Archetypes. Inkjet print on cotton paper, 83 x 53 cm. Courtesy Michael MacGarry. P. 222: Left part of the image: Michael MacGarry, Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki, 2008, from the series Champagne Socialists. Wood, industrial foam, nippon wax, oil paint, steel, 73 x 22 x 24 cm. Private collection. Courtesy Michael MacGarry. Right part of the image: Michael MacGarry, H. F. Verwoerd, 2008, from the series Tipp-Ex Politics. Bronze, 70 x 24 x 24 cm. Private collection. Courtesy Michael MacGarry. P. 224 left: Michael MacGarry, Mercantile Capitalism, 2010. Bronze, prosthetic eyes, 30 x 26 x 33 cm. Private collection. Courtesy Michael MacGarry. P. 224 right: Michael MacGarry, African National Congress, 2010. White milk chocolate, armour-plated glass, 70 x 28 x 10 cm. Private collection. Courtesy Michael MacGarry. P. 233: iMumbo Jumbo: The Days of Miracle and Wonder, National Arts Festival, Grahamstown, 2003. Photo: Ruphin Coudyzer. P. 234: The Prophet, premièred in June 1999, National Arts Festival, Grahamstown. Photo: Elsabe van Tonder. P. 240: Big Dada, premièred 2001, The Pit, London. Photo: Guy Nelson.
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P. 253: Sue Williamson, Winnie Mandela and the Assassination of Dr Asvat, 1999, from the series Truth Games. Lithograph with printed and collaged gel papers. Printed by Eileen Foti at the Rugters Centre for Innovative Printmaking, New Jersey, 55,5 x 187 cm. Collection: National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C. P. 254: Sue Williamson, Winnie Mandela, 1983, from the series A Few South Africans. Photo etching with screenprinted collage, 100 x 70 cm. Collection: Iziko South African National Gallery. P. 255: Sue Williamson, Tony Yengeni – ‘wet bag’ torture – Jeff Benzien, 1998, from the series Truth Games. Laminated colour laser prints, wood, metal, plastic, perspex, 80 x 120 x 6 cm. Collection: University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. P. 256: Sue Williamson, Messages from the Moat, 1997. Glass, water, canvas, fishing net, re-circulating pump. Installation view: Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town. Photo: Cecil de Koorte. Collection: Iziko South African National Gallery. P. 258: Sue Williamson, Richard Belalufu, 2003, from the series Better Lives. Film still, pigment inks on archival cotton paper, 144 x 112 cm.
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P. 262: Hector Pieterson Memorial, front view. Photo: Sally Shorkend. P. 265: Hector Pieterson Memorial, memorial in front of the museum. Photo: Sally Shorkend. P. 270: Hector Pieterson Memorial, view out of the window with explicatory text on the glass. Photo: Sally Shorkend. P. 273: Hector Pieterson Memorial, entry area of the museum. Photo: Sally Shorkend. P. 275: Hector Pieterson Memorial, photo of the dying Hector Pieterson, 16. June 1976. Photo: Sam Nzima. P. 279: Hector Pieterson Memorial, memorial with photo of the dying Hector Pieterson. Photo: Sally Shorkend.
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