Alex Sudheim On show in Durban
Around 10 years ago in Pretoria, architect William Raats was looking at an Australian magazine which featured modern buildings decorated with beautiful Aboriginal art works. He thought to himself: “If only we had something like that here,” upon which he promptly realised that of course we do – and then some.
Thus began Raats’s passion for collecting indigenous artefacts and traditional objects of artistic beauty. While still in Pretoria, he began his collection with Venda clay pots and Ndebele beadwork, but after moving to Pietermaritzburg a few years ago, he quickly woke up to the fact that he was a mere hour’s drive from the heart of the Zulu homelands.
So he started gathering Zulu relics such as headrests and milkpails, building up the impressive catalogue of these sensual, history-laden objects that form the Siyabaza (Zulu for “we are carving wood”) exhibition currently on show at the Bat Centre’s Menzi Mcunu gallery.
“If we don’t save them, they’ll be gone forever,” says Raats of the wooden headrests he collects. “Nobody uses them anymore because pillows are much softer,” he explains. In the past, these decoratively carved wooden blocks upon little legs were traditional gifts to newlywed couples to lay their heads upon while they slept. The raised headrest prevented insects crawling into the ear and kept the spine straight.
Yet this tradition has fallen by the way as the conveniences of modern life permeate even the remotest rural communities. “These days most of them simply get turned into firewood, get left outside to rot or are used as chopping blocks,” says Raats.
It is thus more from a conviction that it would be tragic for a part of our history to disappear forever than out of any selfish desire to possess rare indigenous artefacts that Raats’s project is motivated.
For the last couple of years, he and his assistant, Innocent Mkhize, have spent every second weekend visiting isolated settlements in the Masinga and Tugela Ferry areas, seeking out these derelicted objects of Zulu culture and adding them to Raats’s growing historical preserve.
But Raats is no Charles Saatchi, snapping up works of art for their material value. Instead, this self- confessed boertjie is spurred by an historian’s passion for preventing the past from slipping into undocumented obscurity. “Our past is fast vanishing before our eyes and we must decide to do something about it,” he says.
“We need to treasure our cultural heritage by collecting, exhibiting, and by educating our children and ourselves.” Inherent in Raats is also the anthropologist’s anxiety about modern life and its tendency to swallow up fragile histories.
He bemoans Western culture’s celebration of “only what is new, mass- produced and disposable” and its neglect of indigenous traditions and artefacts. And, above all, it is simply a matter of the joy derived from a beautiful, wooden, hand-crafted object resonating with rich personal, cultural and historical significance that informs Raats’s restless desire to preserve as many tiny fragments of the past as he possibly can.
“There is no denying the artistic and aesthetic beauty of these items,” he says. When gazing upon an elegantly sculpted, time-worn double-headrest that’s over a hundred years old, in one is evoked a wondering as to what young pair of blissful, newly-wed heads might have rested upon them each night in a Masinga kraal, asleep beneath the stars, their spines straight, their ears insect-free. And suddenly, for a moment, it becomes easy to share William Raats’s wistful zeal.
Siyabaza, an exhibition of a collection of rare Zulu headrests, from the private collection of William Raat, is on at the Menzi Mcunu Gallery, Bat Centre until the end of August. Tel: (031) 332-0451