The first time I heard of Jackson Hlungwani was years ago when I travelled to the then fragmented homeland of Gazankulu to meet a man called Robert Sadiki. It was also the first time I’d been to that part of the world and I was instantly magnetised by the contradictoriness of the landscape: a green lushness set against a sometimes blood-red, desert-like earth.
There were tropical plantations of citrus fruit, pecan nuts and mangoes as one gradually approached the forested slopes of the Soutpansberg. And then, deeper into Venda, stretches of memory-eradicating nothingness dotted with huge, almost extraterrestrial insects.
The region held a kind of magic I had not encountered before. It was full of tales of ritual appeasements of the ancestral spirits, of sacred pools and a lake that housed the great python god. “But you’ve never been to New Jerusalem?” people of the region asked, as though the place held some great answer. And then, in response to my incredulity: “You have to meet Jackson Hlungwani.”
On that journey I never met Hlungwani, but I did meet Sadiki – a man known throughout the region as a Lemba.
Sadiki is one of the descendants of an ancient North African tribe of black Jewish metal workers and traders. He keeps a frum (kosher) home and doesn’t eat pork, but at the same time goes to church and has a deep respect for his African ancestors.
I remember being confused by how Sadiki could call himself a Christian and a Jew at the same time and still adhere to African traditional practice. It all seemed so contradictory to me then. These days I suspect there is something in that resignation to contradictoriness, an acceptance of equations that simply don’t add up that is integral to my own humanity. And there’s something about being African in all this too. Something about registering the polarities and contradictions as a continuum rather than an insurmountable problem.
Is there perhaps a place in this country, a landmark that enshrines this value? Faced with a Voortrekker Monument, a statue of this conquistador here and that warrior there, contests of ideological separateness at Blood River and a rising tide of dogmatic African essentialism, I wonder if there isn’t a landmark that welcomes any South African. One that resists stamping them this, that or the other in their reading of that site. Or must we rely on Castle Lager adverts to enshrine our plurality?
I have heard Hlungwani described as a visionary, a prophet, a wild eccentric, a charismatic leader and a healer. I have seen his rare and beautiful wooden sculptures and heard about his unique stone sanctuary built on a renovated Stone Age site overlooking the village of Mbokhota. The place is called New Jerusalem and has resonances of Great Zimbabwe.
“Hlungwani’s images cause one to recollect other things seen in other places made at other times; the medieval, the Romanesque, the Oriental, the African and even the modern occidental.
“His images, like flint to the imagination, set off sparks of recognition,” writes Ricky Burnett of the artist who stole the show at his 1984 group exhibition, Tributaries. This watershed exhibition brought long overdue recognition to rural artists working outside the parameters of the “mainstream” South African art scene. Burnett speaks of Hlungwani’s “original African theology … which has at its core experience rather than dogma, vision rather than idea”.
Hence, years later, I find myself on the same freeway heading north and further north in search of Hlungwani’s New Jerusalem. The weird thing is I know that what I will find there will be strangely disappointing.
Burnett has already explained to me that New Jerusalem is not what it used to be. It is no longer the place where Hlungwani preaches and sculpts. Although it was once a community gathering spot, hardly anyone goes there anymore.
According to Burnett, the New Jerusalem used to be a sight to behold. You’d approach up a steepish climb to the entrance and, moving through a cluster of chambers, arrive at the domestic centre and beyond that the two incredible, idiosyncratic altars (the Altar for Christ included a work called Christ Playing Football and the Altar for God, a piece called Cain’s Aeroplane). These altars were then home to some 20 sculptures.
Burnett explains how after a retrospective show of Hlungwani’s work in 1989, the sculptor insisted that the altars be sold. “They had now done their work at Mbokhota, he said, and must continue to proselytise, must continue to claim new space for his vision – must continue, in effect, to colonise the city.”
The larger altar went to the Galleries of the University of the Witwatersrand and the smaller, along with other related pieces, was installed in the Johannesburg Art Gallery.
Burnett presents a moving and profound argument on the failure of the relocation of the altars to the city, in which he speaks of them being “reduced to art” and of a “failure of place-making”.
“The sculptures’ eminent place-making energies are neither released nor used,” he says. “The altar becomes a shadow of its former self. It acts as a reminder of another place and indeed of another time. It becomes a memento.”
But what about Mbokhota? What about Hlungwani? How have they felt that loss?
Driving up the dust road that we hope leads to Hlungwani’s homestead we are greeted by a group of about five children who shout out in unison: “Jack-son Hlung-wan-i!” quickly wiping away doubt.
There is the sound of metal on wood and in moments we are standing before the man himself. Propped up on an old car seat in the dust yard sits Hlungwani, sculpting away as if he’s always been there. He greets us as if he knows us – no great ceremony – and motions us inside. We must look at the sculptures first, he says, and then he will explain some things to us. He continues sculpting.
In the room Hlungwani’s wooden masterpieces lie humbly stacked against one wall opposite posters of the pope, President Nelson Mandela and snapshots of the artist. In one he stands above a vast valley holding a Kit Kat.
In moments we are gathered at Hlungwani’s knees with a bunch of children and he is paging through a huge technicolour book entitled Revelation: Art of the Apocalypse.
At some point I lose track of time. Is it two hours that elapse or three? All I know is that Hlungwani will not be silenced. He will not be diverted. And his voice is like some strange mantra: “The devil he moshe (destroys/eats) … Here Christa … Here Magdelena … Here Eva … Genesis … Omega … Seven heads eat people … John I, verse I … the New Country … Look, my angel! The devil can’t do nothing … Woman is the New Country’s strength and power … Romans II …”
For every strange medieval or gothic image on every page, Hlungwani has his own interpretation. One moment God and Christa triumph, the next the devil is “moshing” everything in sight. The devil comes in strange disguises: animals, birds, women, men and whatever he does elicits laughter from Hlungwani.
“Why do you laugh when the devil is moshing?” I ask. And, with deeper laughter, comes the response: “Because the devil is my uncle and you too. He eats black and white.” Nobody is insulated from the influences of evil. The world is in a constant state of change, ever vulnerable to the bizarre forces of a three- tiered universe: “up, down, underdown” (heaven/earth/hell).
I try to ask Hlungwani about New Jerusalem, about why he wanted the altars moved. But there’s always another picture in another book. The great universal battle between good and evil is bigger than my petty questions it seems, and we must return.
The next day we find Hlungwani in the same spot, sculpting. He asks a young boy called Khani Raffiek to take us to New Jerusalem. Up there I can’t help feeling very sad and even disappointed in Hlungwani for allowing this beautiful sacred site he built to be destroyed.
The child shows us the place where Hlungwani used to sculpt: now just a rusted old car seat covered in plants. The old stone confession box is covered over in green and butterflies settle above what used to be the entrance to the place of baptism.
It’s indescribably peaceful up here and the view of green hills speckled with thatched huts stretches on and on. But it’s all a big tangle of stones, spiders, flowers and plants. Not a single sculpture remains. Only walls of stone.
I think of that altar in the silent, disinfected halls of the Johannesburg Art Gallery and wonder why Hlungwani’s sanctioned this. How could such a wise and wonderful man allow this to happen, I think. There must be more to it.
Back at his homestead, Hlungwani begins paging through another art book. But today it is I who won’t shut up. “Why?” I keep asking him. “Why did you leave New Jerusalem? Why did you let that place die?”
“No!” he insists, “I did not leave,” but at first I don’t understand. “Come,” he says standing up for the first time on his legendary afflicted leg through which he received his first vision to heal. “I will show you God!”
We walk towards the valley alongside which his ancestors lie. And there lies one of the hugest tree trunks I have ever seen, shaped loosely in the form of a human being or a crucifix. “This is God! I come rest here on the right hand of God and see all country. Come stand on God!” he says to me, “Come play on God!”
It took two bulldozers to move the wood here from the riverside where Hlungwani discovered it. The carving has already begun and will, in Hlungwani’s vision, form the centre point of Kanana: the “church for woman” – as he describes it, a great and beautiful African basilica.
Once Kanana is complete Hlungwani will return to restore the New Jerusalem: the “church for man”. Together they will form “one church” and Hlungwani’s New Country will be complete. “All nations, black and white, will find happy here! This is my work really. This is my life. Heart is one place now.”