James Ambrose Brown
Just when we thought we could safely forget the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)and the perpetrators could merge into their murky backgrounds … Just when we thought that words must fail to keep it all before our consciences, comes a fresh insight. You might say that it needed an artist to reveal the labyrinthine minds of torturers and killers working for political masters.
Judith Mason recently exhibited paintings and objects under the titles The Woman Who Kept Silent and The Man Who Sang. Perhaps only a woman artist could have conceptualised the inner horror and the spiritual torment of those who died at the hands of skilled interrogators.
Another woman, Antjie Krog, used words in the Mail & Guardian that recorded the laconic, almost mocking confessions of security branch operatives describing the final hours of their victims. They saw the defiance and contempt in the face of the naked woman they tortured for 10 days then shot in the head, kneeling.
The executioners of a man who saw beyond them to the horizon of a freedom they hated and feared heard Harold Sefola ask permission to sing Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika before they shot him. Yes, they admitted the deed – a political necessity at the time. To save the nation. And yes, Meneer Voorsitter, they had come to admire the courage of those they killed.
No one sitting on the commission could have visualised or imagined the inner horror of the scenes they described. Words are incapable of this. That is why Mason’s paintings are so important. When the newspaper files have grown yellow and the commission’s reports are stored away and forgotten, these canvases will still touch a sensitive nerve.
Mason lived with them a long time; months of work and rejection of canvases that groped towards her vision. Looking at them one is aware of layer within layer of controlled anger. It would have been easy, she said, to paint the obvious -the man heroically singing.
European painting of the past would have shown clenched fists and head-up defiance. Think of Goya’s etchings of the patriots before the firing squads in Spain. It would have been easy for a skilled artist to show a naked black woman crouched at the feet of some brute with a truncheon or an electrode in his hand, her nakedness covered only by a scrap of blue plastic out of which she had fashioned a pair of panties. Mason rejected the easy impression.
She was after a lasting impression of an evil that puts the object of contempt (in this case the people under torture) into a place of fear and pain. But it could not subdue their dignity. Let’s look at The Woman Who Kept Silent. In the text accompanying the painting, we read Krog’s account of the commissioner’s reaction to photographs of the exhumation: “The skull has a bullet hole right through the top. She must have been kneeling.”
“We kept her naked,” remembers the applicant for amnesty. “After 10 days she made herself this pantie.” He sniggers. “God, she was brave.”
In Mason’s painting the dark African face is blurred in a sombre background. It is resolute, distant, as if withdrawn from all pain and indignity. Superimposed on the eviscerated torso is a shooting range- target. Cut-out of a head and trunk with numbers in sections to indicate the score. Beneath the emptiness of the viscera is this wisp of blue plastic.
In her tribute to the unnamed African woman, Mason has understood how, for this woman, her weapons were silence and a piece of plastic rubbish that restored her femininity. “At some level you shamed your captors and they did not compound their abuse by stripping you a second time. Yet they killed you. We only know your story because a sniggering man remembered how brave you were. The material you used to cover your nakedness blows about the streets and drifts on the tide and clings to thorn bushes.”
Mason used some to make a blue dress. It hangs by itself with the story of her pain inscribed on its folds. In a related canvas this dress seems to float free of a cage of net-wire.
In The Man Who Sang, the artist has rejected the obvious depiction of the hideous cruelties inflicted on Sefola by electrocution. The killer, Paul van Vuuren, told the commissioners this was regarded as a “quiet and clean way of killing. He was a strong man and had to be given five to 10 shocks.”
Mason did not portray the instrument of death, or suggest the faces of those intent on applying pain to obtain information. Nor could she show us how Sefola asked permission to sing Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika before the final shock. No, she painted a symbolic representation of an unquenchable spirit. Some flaming torch, perhaps? No. It is a simple tea mug lit with such an extraordinary inner light that it seems incandescent. Around it are five glowing braziers used by nightwatchmen. The whole concept is on a field of blood, yet it gives no impression of violence. As she puts it: “Only an energy which increases the longer one looks at them.” Inextinguishable.
One does not know where Mason’s paintings will end up. One can only hope that, wherever it is, their inner compulsion to tell the truth will be recognised. It is too easy to bury it all now the commission has done its work and the perpetrators are rejoicing in the knowledge that “a person who has been tortured cannot bring a damages claim against the perpetrator to whom amnesty has been granted”.
The pardon-or-punish debate will soon die out. The dead will not recover to protest – neither will the living who remember. Feelings evaporate and records are filed away. The deep, inner-most secrets of the spiritual strength of those who resisted and perished should not be forgotten. Thank you, Judith Mason.
Where, by the way, are those instruments of torture today? In the police museum of crimes?