That extraordinarily imaginative artist and agile satirist, Beezy Bailey, recently had a letter published in a Cape Town newspaper. He complained that, as a white artist, he had effectively been excluded from submitting work to be considered for acquisition by the new International Convention Centre in Cape Town. The registration form for those
who would submit works stipulated that priority would be given to the work of so-called “PDIs” (Previously Disadvantaged Individuals).
The qualifying phrase ran: “It is incumbent on [applicant] individuals to demonstrate their claim to be categorised into such population groups on the basis of identification, association with and recognition by members of such groups.” That rings a loud bell, doesn’t it? It’s a close paraphrase of stipulations once published in a founding masterwork of apartheid legislation, the Population Registration Act; its intention to make sure that only “genuine” whites applied to be categorised as such.
In his letter Beezy Bailey argued that the Convention Centre’s stipulation was in flagrant violation of the Constitution, the provisions of which were being suffocated by leery socio-political expediency.
Beezy Bailey, himself, has always despised bullshit, and in the past has taken great delight in lampooning its purveyors. On a memorable occasion he was to ridicule the gamesmanship practised by the creepy hangers-on of South African “culture”. For those who might not have heard of Beezy’s most delectable exposé, let me tell the story again.
About 10 years ago anxious dialogue was being heard between members of the South African arts community. A polysyllabic bogey-man called Eurocentricity had begun haunting white consciences. Advance copies of Eurocentric guilt had been sent to South African “art critics” from places like Canada and New York. These art critics eagerly clambered onto the Eurocentric bandwagon and started publishing articles condemning the dominance in South African artistic enterprise of the influences of the dreaded DWEM or Dead White European Male: Picasso, Beethoven, Shakespeare … that lot.
The arguments for and against Eurocentricity squalled on and Beezy Bailey got heavily pissed off with it all. He devised a credibility test. One afternoon he fitted a new blade into his Exacto-Knife and sliced out three quick lino-cuts. They depicted the drudgery of a black domestic servant’s life and were entitled Go Home; Go To Sleep and Go To Work.
Beezy printed these lino-cuts in sad brown ink and submitted them to a prestigious Cape Town commercial art gallery, but not under his own name. Instead he used the name of his girlfriend’s Xhosa housemaid, Joyce Ntobe. It might be noted here that the actual Joyce Ntobe’s only previous contact with lino of any kind was on her knees scrubbing it. Beezy’s hope was that the lino-cuts, submitted under Joyce’s unmistakably African name, would be identified as the artistic expression of the diametric opposite of a Dead White European Male. Joyce Ntobe was an Alive Black African Female, an ABAF – from which, of course, springs the familiar railway station term, ABAFAZI.
The response to Joyce Ntobe’s lino-cuts was beyond Beezy’s wildest dreams. The prestigious art gallery snapped them up and Cape Town’s art critics homed in on them like flies to a coffin. Their reviews trembled with phrases like “intrinsic social primitivism” and “endogenously conflated African vision” and “agonised screamings from under a cruel ethic of suppression”.
Shortly afterwards the lino-cuts were once again snapped up, this time by the South African National Gallery. Its director, a rod-like ex-ramp model called Marilyn Martin, had experienced what more charitable minds identified as a rush of enthusiasm for Bargain-Buy Affirmative Action – Authentic Ethnic Graphics and Curios Division. Marilyn is reported as having murmured that she’d “been waiting all her life” for something like the Joyce Ntobe pieces.
Perhaps Beezy Bailey went a bit over the top, but once the lino-cuts were up and hanging proudly among other ethnic art-bounty in the National Gallery, he decided he’d reveal his zigzag hustle. He did this by getting right into the office of a Cape Town newspaper’s arts editor to announce himself as the true Joyce Ntobe. Brandishing a feather-duster, dust-pan and broom, Beezy had dressed himself in a bona fide Cape Union Mart female domestic servant’s uniform – Avocado and White XL. His revelation got one inch and no photograph on page seven. The same morning it was published, Joyce Ntobe’s lino-cuts vanished from the wall of the National Gallery and have not been seen there since.
If nothing else what Beezy Bailey complains about in his letter shows that, despite things like the Joyce Ntobe exercise, nothing has changed when it comes to the shameless exploitation of anything at hand for political ends. The convention centre’s submission rules are racial discrimination in its purest form. It is no surprise, therefore, that in the background of this brutal inanity, the African National Congress profile is clearly visible. On the letterhead of the Cape Convention Centre, the ANC leader in the Western Cape, Ebrahim Rasool, appears as a director – as does the well-known NNP suckalong, Kent Morkel.
That ghastly old DWAM, Henk Verwoerd, would have been proud of them.
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