THE HOUSE THAT APARTHEID BUILT
An exhibition at Wits jolts the viewer into perceiving afresh the history of black and white segregation in Johannesburg. Ivor Powell reports
AS you walk into the exhibition (Setting Apart), you are confronted with long passages of text inscribed on plastic and suspended between sheets of glass.
The exhibition is presented at Wits University’s Gertrude Posel Gallery as part of the university’s History Workshop. You are informed, as you read through the text, that it is about “the interconnectedness of power and space” and challenges “the rush to erase the memory of the past”.
It is only the first piece of a lot of reading you do as you move through the exhibition.
(Setting Apart) is not the usual, visually-directed kind of exhibition. It is an installation of documents connected with the systematic segregation of whites and blacks in the Johannesburg area in the course of this century — or, to be more precise, the shunting of blacks from place to place in accordance with the various, often bizarre whims and policies of the government of the day.
The exhibition was initiated by architect Hilton Judin and articulated in conjunction with Wits sociologist Deborah Posel and geographer Sue Parnell, as well as students from the Newtown film school, who made a series of video interviews with removals survivors.
Most of the documents are originals, gleaned from the state archive in Pretoria, penned by such functionaries as police officers tasked with maintaining law and order or Native Affairs officials concerned with conditions of hygiene (whether physical or genetic, one is often not able to tell easily). There are also minutes from meetings protesting against removals, and various other records of resistance mounted to such attempts at social engineering.
By contrast, the pictorial content is minimal, unless one includes maps, diagrams, postcard-sized photographs of the most blandly documentary kind.
Nothing is allowed to interfere with the major purpose of the show: to present the viewer with the raw and more or less unmediated data of the way that living space has been structured and manipulated in the pursuit of power. It is a show designed to raise issues and ask questions relevant to the purposes of the latest History Workshop — the revisiting of archives and the rewriting of this country’s past.
Nevertheless, the overwhelming impression one has in moving around the exhibition is of the artfulness of it all. The presentation of the documents — particularly in the suspension of papers between sheets of glass that have been industrially bolted together, the age and perversely grubby patina the documents have acquired through use — recalls such pioneers of the post-art age as Marcel Duchamp, for whom language and information came to function as so many more materials in art-making.
Something of this consciousness is to be found in (Setting Apart), and it is precisely what makes it more interesting than a lecture would have been on the same subject — or, for that matter, the kind of lecture in pictures one might have expected an exhibition on the subject to become.
On one level the exhibition is structured in a relatively linear and schematic kind of way: it traces the issue of housing for blacks from an inner-city domicile in the early part of the century to the founding of Western Native Township in the 1930s and, 20 years later, the establishment of Meadowlands, to which most residents of Western were removed.
But, subverting this, the documentation itself is fragmented — a page here and a page there from any given document — and one is forced to pick up impressions rather than narratives from the material on display. The viewer is forced to put the pictures together out of details, and the details themselves are given a far stronger life in the process than they would have had if the pattern had already been created.
The point of the process is to jolt one into new ways of perceiving what must, after all, be painfully familiar to any half-conscious South African.
Thus, for instance, one notes the peculiarity of the references throughout to women living in the various settlements the organisers have documented. “Loose” Portuguese women at an inner-city site are described in 1927 as not following “legitimate occupations” and as being “ordinarily engaged in liquor selling and other immoral practices”.
In another place reference is made to the plague constituted by the “loitering class of native women”, and so on, until one wonders who really constitutes the social problem, the men using all the adjectives or the women of whom they are being used. It comes as little surprise to discover that, according to a 1929 census, there were only 111 single women living in Johannesburg, as opposed to 2 532 single men.
One could object that the history of segregation is being shown (according to the current academic fashion) as a random assortment of bungles, accidents and pieces of crisis management without any convincing exploration of racist ideology. Nevertheless, it is hard not to come away with a powerful impression of the banality of the evil, and just as hard not to look into its stupidly human face.
In closing, one might quote Judin on his motivation for floating the exhibition in the first place: “There are already plans before the new government for the construction of satellite townships — rows and rows of low-cost matchbox houses, pretty much like the ones that they thought were such a good idea in Meadowlands. That concerns me, as does the fact that they just renovated the old Albert Street Pass Office. Such places could be preserved as sites of memory.”
* There will be music, dance, videos, drama, films and exhibitions all day tomorrow at the University of the Witwatersrand during “Making Senses of Democracy”, the History Workshop Cultural Day. Admission is free.