Rampholo Molefhe
17 December 2008
One of the works that has immortalised the late South African artist, Thami Mnyele, is the design in 1984 of the hand, shield, spear and wheel that is now used as the logo of the African National Congress (ANC). Mnyele lived in exile in Botswana from 1978 until his murder at the hands of the South African Defence Force in 1985. If he lived in these times, how would he respond to the contemporary world reality, Correspondent RAMPHOLO MOLEFHE ponders
"The act of creating art is not different from the act of building a bridge. It is the work of many hands," Mnyele once commented.
He would have been 60 this year, as old as one of the most profound documents celebrated on December 10, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Mnyele was speaking at a time when Western democracy was firmly in the control of the right wing with Ronald Reagan, who presided as governor during the Los Angeles riots in the United States, and Margaret Thatcher, who denied British steel workers the benefits of their contribution to industrial development at the helm.
They crafted the policy of 'constructive engagement' with the South African leaders, demanding that the liberation movement should denounce violence as a condition without which they would not put their weight behind efforts to dismantle apartheid.
They believed that the American and British companies that had interests in South Africa were under no obligation to withdraw their investments, gingerly arguing that they were encouraged to treat labour there, as it would be treated in their countries of origin.
Collusion of the leading Western countries in the continued life of the apartheid regime strengthened its resolve and the regime was encouraged to mount military raids in Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique and to prop up the Bantustan governments, the most visible of which were Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Kwa-Zulu and Lucas Mangope's Bophuthatswana.
Well before 1990, and Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, the anti-apartheid movement would not have anticipated the full impact of what the Western press celebrated as 'the collapse of the Eastern bloc' countries, including the Soviet Union, which had for 50 years given inspiration to the liberation movement in Africa in general and the southern tip of the continent in particular.
The liberation movement and the artists who were empathetic to it, still had cause to celebrate the efficacy of the armed struggle and the Kalashnikov rifle that became almost synonymous with revolutionary struggles all over the world.
The artists - Mnyele among them - found it impossible to evade the images of that proverbial barbed wire fence that divided white and black society, permitting the 'kaffir' peoples to see the swimming pools of the privileged Europeans, but always preventing them from entering to swim, as Henrick Verwoed pronounced.
Even the most optimistic of the artists were compelled to employ the imagery of the broken chain that joined the handcuffs, portending the break to freedom of the 'native' populations from virtual slavery on their own land.Implicit in Mnyele's pronouncement that making art was not unlike building a bridge, and that it was 'the work of many hands', was the affirmation of the ultimate possibility that, in the end, it would be the black communities of southern Africa, in the largest sense of that expression, who would together, triumph over apartheid and settler colonialism.
Even as that would have been the immediate tactical goal, the more profound strategic goal had to include emancipation of that preponderant majority whose quality of life did not change in any meaningful way under the stingy democracies in the likes of the monarchy of Swaziland or benevolent one-party dictatorship of contemporary Botswana.
And so the many hands could not have been of a few artists - or guerrilla fighters - searching for an isolated freedom in Francistown, Gaborone, Cape Town, Johannesburg or Harare. Rather, the 'many hands' must have referred to the physical, intellectual and creative effort of the communities of all the indigenous peoples of southern Africa.Such a pronouncement banishes parochialism and sectarianism in the liberation struggle.
That means that no single group could on its own claim proprietorship of either MEDU, as a cultural resistance movement, or the armed struggle, all of which taken together constitute the liberation movement.
Only the many hands of the practitioners of apartheid and the colonialists would be excluded from the effort at liberation, precisely because they were - and still are - the objects of struggles for freedom in Botswana, South Africa and the world.
The Culture and Resistance Festival could not have been anything other than the culmination of concerted efforts of the National Museum and Art Gallery, the University of Botswana, Maru-A-Pula and artists from Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa, many of whom should find their proper place in the records that speak about MEDU and its activities.
Had Mnyele been alive today, he surely would have had to address - artistically that is - the reality of a politically emancipated southern Africa living in a global world increasingly dominated by the powers that advocated for 'constructive' engagement with apartheid; the US and Britain.
Mnyele's art would have had to rethink the possibilities of an improved quality of life under nominal political independence in his 'House of Exile' in Botswana, and the efficacy of the democracy that South Africa discovered 10 years after his passing.
He would perhaps have had to contemplate the dilemma of the Africans who for many years held their breath, praying for a future that would deliver the swimming pools that they were denied by Verwoed and apartheid.
As matters stand, the newly founded Congress of the People - popularly known in its short life as COPE - in South Africa, offers a political affirmation of that statement, that liberation, like the making of art, is a community effort, and it will always refuse to be appropriated by sectarianism and blind partisanship.And so, the advent of a slightly more broadened democracy - one that is non-racial, non-sexist - beckons for answers relating to quality of life of the citizen. So too, does it test the clichés and slogans of one historical epoch of 'struggle' against the demands of the new cultural and political dispensation born of that struggle.
It is a challenge that Mnyele should have welcomed. This statement follows his earlier observation: "Therefore art is social. So are the other art forms like writing, theatre, and music and so on.
This means that art is part and parcel of the rules and laws which govern societies. So, the fact that in South Africa the majority of the people are engaged in a struggle for liberation means that art and cultural workers cannot be divorced from this process".
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 Mmegi/The Reporter. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
