The anchor of history has the potential to as easily drown, as moor a person — or a society.
It is trite, but, our pasts, especially what is erased, omitted or revised by the powerful, affects the present and echoes for generations into the future.
Too often these resonances have the weight of brutality and trauma.
Standard Bank Young Artist for poetry Koleka Putuma’s exhibition Theatre of Beauty at the Monument Gallery, explores the use of psychedelics and indigenous heritage plants in engaging with histories.
Poetry titled “MDMA” and “Myrrh” appear on the wall on wisps of cloth with stitched borders. Two films on separate screens in the final room of the exhibition reach into South Africa’s television history with cuts from advertisements across several decades.
These play with popular culture as biographical documentation. Who, growing up in the 1980s and early 1990s, has not been touched by the paradox of the chocolate bar advert featuring a kilt-wearing “Makhatini from Maritzburra’”? The skinny grinning black man almost a minstrel, and yet, paradoxically, also, a potent symbol of victory over whiteness in every advert.
Putuma has exploded internationally in the last few years and sadly she did not feature in the artist walkabout on 30 June — because she was in Germany. There was disappointment among the large crowd which had anticipated her presence and included young urban kids, the chattering classes, SA Communist Party veterans and academics working in decoloniality — which would have made for an engaging and diverse conversation on her work.
A lost opportunity for an eager audience.
Together with Putuma, this year’s festival has seen Standard Bank Young Artist (for music), Msaki, spread out their multi-disciplinary range. Msaki’s Del’ukufa exhibition at the Atherstone Gallery explores the use of music and indigenous knowledge systems and practises in healing, evoking memory and reclaiming the past.
The exhibition consist of mounds of earth — one with candles and crosses, another supporting a hanger for red and white cloths used by sangomas. On the walls are Msaki’s paintings and drawings which extend on the black and red colour theme, a series of videos shot with an eight-piece strings section (violin, cello and upright bass) and a enactment of a rural church with a red carpet under benches, a pulpit and a film about ritual and cleansing playing behind.
Msaki’s presence at the festival includes an ambitious programme of art and music with several performances, including the Embo Time Travel Experiment at the Guy Butler Theatre. Performing with a local children’s choir, two percussionists and strings and rhythm sections, Msaki had a sold-out crowd lapping up every note and lyric during a solid performance.
Another Standard Bank Young Artist (for visual art), Lady Skollie’s Groot Gat exhibition at the Gallery in the Round at the Monument addresses the erasure of Bushman paintings and the consequent “holes” of history — both personal and national — through a series of magical drawings.
All three exhibitions explore histories and indigenous knowledge systems that have been suppressed or destroyed by colonialism and apartheid. Systems which are increasingly relevant in the age of environmental crisis because of the centuries-old solutions they offer to pressing issues like food sustainability, anti-extractivist development models and bio-diversity.
The works are also potent responses to the history of violence so intertwined in a place like Makhanda. A town which still exhibits the thumb-prints of history on its neck, in a grip still tight.
Makhanda is, after all, a town founded as Grahamstown in 1812 after the Fourth Frontier war. It was initially named after Lieutenant-Colonel John Graham who ordered his soldiers to clear out the amaXhosa from the Zuurveld, as the area was then known, after that war.
The horror of the mass removal and extermination is recounted in Ben MacLennan’s A Proper Degree of Terror: “Graham’s Boers and Khoikhoi were hunting unwounded men, women and children alike as if they were wild beasts; they would have had little compunction about putting wounded men down like unwanted animals… the whole force returned to the base camp, ‘having so effectually carried my orders into execution’ said Graham to [oneof his officers], ‘that hardly a trace of the K****r man remains’.”
Graham’s orders, Constitutional Court justice Edwin Cameron noted in the unanimous 2017 judgment Salem Party Club and Others v Salem Community and Others, resulted in “a horrific and brutal clearing of all amaXhosa from the Zuurveld.
“Men were killed; women and children taken hostage. All villages were burnt. Farmlands were trampled by oxen. The population of amaXhosa retreated north beyond the Fish River.”
The are the histories which still leave us gasping for air. But that grip is being loosened by works like Putuma’s, Skollie’s and Msaki’s.