Zwelithini ka Mvelase
Uncompromising winter’s sun blasts its ultraviolet rays into my eyes as we swing into the Hector Petersen Square, Orlando West, for a presentation to Soweto of an art work titled Hector Petersen Mosaic, by the late activist/artist Theo Gerber’s wife, Susie.
It’s Sunday in Soweto, Donny Hathaway’s soul classic Children of the Ghetto competes for my ears’s and perhaps my soul’s attention with Tupac Shakur’s I Wonder if Heaven Have a Ghetto booming from a taxi flying into town for another load.
Susie Gerber has flown to South Africa to present a mosaic work made up of 190 small paintings to Soweto, “where it really belongs”. Present were politicians and members of families who lost children in the titanic anti- apartheid crusade.
Chief among the attendents was Sylvia Dlomo, mother of well-known Eighties student activist and later township martyr Sicelo Dlomo. The most visible and felt absence, however, was that of Hector Petersen’s mother Dorothy Molefe.
The 1976 student revolt’s first victim, Zolile Hector Petersen – whose name is synonymous with the tragedies of the apartheid struggle – became the central character in the mosaic, initiated by Gerber and created by artists all over the world. Molefe’s absence caused an air of discomfort and became an embarrasment to the Ministry of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology which, last week, announced that it would be receiving the work “on behalf of the government and the people of South Africa”.
A story in City Press quoted Molefe as saying: “If I could help it, I would not even allow the politicians to utter my son’s name.” Deputy minister Bridgette Mabandla was fuming at the report and later said that “the handing over of the art works is an inappropriate place to air such personal and bad politics. If she is unhappy with her lot, there are avenues where she can deal with this problem, as well as a reparation committee dealing with cases of her nature”.
The argument surrounding the art work is in sharp contrast to its late creator’s intentions. As Susie Gerber put it, her husband had wished that the work be returned to its “rightful destination”, given the fact that it was originally dedicated to “children who died, were harrassed, tortured, abducted, downtrodden, went missing and were jailed”.
These were the pure intentions of the artist Theo Gerber, whose travels in West Africa half a century ago inspired his life and work. As novelist Zakes Mda wrote in an obituary: “He was a unique artist with surrealist overtones.”
A Swiss native, Gerber, who felt his indigenous country becoming increasingly conservative, relocated to the artistic paradise that was Paris in the creative, challenging Fifties. He later settled in a castle in Provence, in the south of France, where he was enchanted and touched by the plight of what he later described as “my black brothers in Africa, and more the children of the South African ghettoes”.
Prior to his illness, in February last year, Gerber was overjoyed when his painting, titled Soweto, was handed to Nelson Mandela, during the president’s state visit to Switzerland in support of South Africa’s Olympic bid.
The artist’s fraternal link to South Africa was born after Gerber’s friend, the late Matsemela Manaka, staged his haunting play, Gore – a tribute to West Africa’s slave gateway – in his castle in Provence. In fact, the collective work began in the Eighties as a collaborative effort between Gerber and Manaka’s group Soweto Action.
“Theo developed a spiritual and political connection, not only with artists, but with all South African activists,” says his widow. Thus, in 1989, Gerber canvassed the support of artists in Europe, the Americas, India and other countries to which he travelled, requesting small paintings as contributions to a tribute to South Africa’s children, then called People of Azania. Each painting would be dedicated to a specific child, with the name inscribed on each. The painting dedicated to Petersen would be done by the maestro himself.
On Sunday August 16, the day of the dedication, inside the humid Anglican church, Mabandla seized the opportunity to urge the township community to “rise up and confront this life with an aim to make a difference”. In a speech that bordered on rhetoric, she urged the community to “see this gesture by the Gerbers as one of the milestones by which South Africans – more so those in the townships – need to be inspired to … reclaim and reconstruct their lives, their souls”.
Mabandla challenged the audience to go out there and discover the finest, the most excellent within their midst, to help the goverment recognise the country’s heroes. Not bad for a Sunday sermon.
I stumbled outside into a Soweto with a greying skyline, with wrecked cars jostling with sports cars for space on the donga-lined tar. The unsaid urgent message, in the dusty air, was that the struggle continues, even though Monday might be another working day.