Angola feels a little closer now than it did three decades ago.
Back then television news counted the South African dead in the Border War almost every night. And Al J Venter was the embedded journalist who travelled with South African Defence Force (SADF) units in southern Angola, bringing us his deadpan voice over television documentaries on South Africa’s fight to keep ‘terrorism” at bay.
At that time there was silence. When the army came to my high school and spoke about our impending two-year national service, no mention was made of the Border War. And when my older brothers came home on leave during their national service, they never spoke about the border. I poked my teenage nose into their rooms when they were out, but all my rifling ever found were laundered lieutenant’s uniforms and a few innocuous snapshots of fellow troepies. These photographs could have been taken anywhere.
Fast forward past the cursory attention paid to the Border War during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the mid-1990s, Fernando Alvim’s attempt to exorcise the wounds of the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in an exhibition, Memorias Intimas Marcas (1997), and another 15 years of relative silence to the here and now.
Suddenly there is a concurrence of three substantial photographic projects that delve into the complexities of the Border War in southern Angola. Christo Doherty’s Bos is a reconstruction of the events and experiences of the war by this former member of the SADF’s notorious 32 Battalion.
John Liebenberg’s Bush of Ghosts is the photojournalist’s representation of a photographic archive compiled while covering the war for Namibian newspapers in the 1980s. And Jo Ractliffe’s As Terras do Fim do Mundo is a photographic revisiting of the sites of the war in southern Angola.
Collectively these three projects signal a renewed interest in a story that not only warrants the complexity of being retold in multiple voices, but also deserves to sit much closer to the familiarity of home.
Ractliffe’s is the only one of the three projects that is located in the contemporary landscape where the war once played itself out. It is a landscape that holds the memories of war like a poorly conserved archive, in the disintegrating remnants of mass graves, flaking propaganda murals, debris of planes, long-abandoned bunkers and overgrown parade grounds.
Like Liebenberg’s, Ractliffe’s photographs are a record of the ways in which this landscape holds a sense of the past. Both projects share a sense of the material veracity of what they remember about the war. At the same time, As Terras do Fim do Mundo is a reconstruction of the reference to war, not unlike the work of Doherty. Ractliffe’s de-miner near Cuvelai, awkward and invisible within his protective suit, could easily have been one of Doherty’s miniature models.
Where Bos constructs tableaux to remake the memory of the war, Ractliffe repeatedly meditates on constructed markers and memorials in the landscape itself.
These assemblages are curious fantasies, even pathologies, that reference a trajectory anywhere between the past and the future — sardine cans strung from a pole attached to the debris of an armoured vehicle, a plastic baby chair attached to an upturned bucket, or a military helmet, paint tin and fruit box attached to a dead tree branch.
Although Ractliffe’s scrutiny of the archival realities and assembled fantasies of the brutalised landscape of southern Angola contributes much to the richness of her project, it is her photographs of the woodlands and forests of the region that anchor the project as a whole.
The diptych of the woodland near Cassinga, which not only graces the front and back covers of Ractliffe’s book of the same name but is also an edition of images (which is sold out), is a beguiling double take on grasslands swept by the innocence of wind and nothing else. So too is her lush triptych of a forest on the road to Cuito Cuanavale.
But these woodlands and forest tropes, referencing the tradition of belonging in the history of landscape painting, are the seductive stuff of lies — not the untruths of the propaganda of war or the fallacies of decorated heroism, but rather the violence of an unfulfilled promise. It is the lie of these landmined landscapes, somewhere between fact and fiction, that addresses the complexity of bringing an enduring war a little closer to home.
Rory Bester is an art historian at the Wits School of Art and art adviser to the South African Reserve Bank
– Jo Ractliffe’s As Terras do Fim do Mundo is on at Brodie/Stevenson in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, until April 1