Sitting opposite Nina Romm is like looking at one of her paintings. Filled with bright colours, the image seems to vibrate with energy and burst with life. ”Everyone always asks me [to describe my paintings], but I never know what to say,” she says, her eyes sparkling behind cat’s-eye spectacles. I’m having the same trouble describing this artist, ”creativity consultant” and one-time politician.
A decade ago Romm had a high media profile as head of the Women’s Rights Peace Party, which campaigned aggressively for votes in the 1994 election. It failed to win any seats and dissolved. She attributes its failure to society not being ready for women’s issues. Then she laughs, saying she has been ahead of her time most of her life.
At least, she says, ”the notion of women’s rights was put on the table”. Even at the time, she says, she knew that women’s issues would be secondary to other concerns. ”In 1994 people were not ready to look at sexism.”
Romm remembers parliamentary Speaker Frene Ginwala saying: ”You can ask for anything now — you are free to ask for anything.” There was a unique window of opportunity. But, says Romm, the unfortunate paradox was that the majority of the women Ginwala was addressing were part of the African National Congress, and so had what she sees as dual loyalties. ”Those loyalties are an issue, which impacted on this society very negatively. It is a tragedy.”
Well-known for her paintings of cats, Romm flares up when asked about this: ”I don’t only paint cats!”
Her paintings (in private and public collections all over the world) include women, men and animals other than cats, and have a strong African feel. Her art is not for realists, she says, but for those who wish to escape the harshness of life. They are almost childlike in their execution. Today Romm runs workshops for creative thinking through art and movement. ”The training is on how to use the skill of innovative thinking so that one can be more flexible and thus have more options in your personal, social and work life.” She said the workshops move people beyond the rigid thinking patterns to more ”generous” and inventive ways of addressing challenges. ”So you become more creative [to build] a creative society.”
She describes herself as ”celebrity artist, educator, social activist”.
It was easy to spot Romm in the coffee shop where we met. Her hair is coloured in shades from blonde to red and is teamed with a blood-red top and red lips. I wondered what effect she would have had on the conservative politicians of Parliament had she got there.
”What star sign are you?” she asked when I requested an interview. Virgo, I said. She said she felt we’d have a great flow of energy between us, and I was given the thumbs-up. We spent the first hour of the interview on my astrological chart, roughly sketched in my notepad by Romm.
She has no regrets that she did not formally enter the political arena, but politics is still a keen interest. Now, she says, would be a good time for a strong women’s party to enter the elections. There are still gender issues to be tackled. But she’s not up for campaigning herself, and won’t be voting. The reason for that, perhaps, lies in the ceramic plate she brought with her to our meeting. It is inscribed with these words: ”A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular.” Romm and her husband bought the plate in 1995, and it sums up her views on South Africa a decade after apartheid. ”This message is forgotten,” she said, doodling on a piece of paper.
As a lecturer in fine arts for a decade before her flirtation with politics, Romm has failed to suppress her natural instinct to teach through visual images. She draws to explain her views of the country to me. ”At the moment the major propaganda is that everything that is South African is wonderful,” she says.
Being ”proudly South African” has become distorted: if you are not celebrating this country you are made to feel guilty. There is no space to talk about ”unpopular” issues. ”One of the tragedies that has happened in the past decade is that the discourse about what a new society should be has stopped.” She says the success of the 1994 election does not mean ”that the society has been formed. You got rid of something you did not like. The next phase is to start imagining what you would like.”
The mistake I made was trying to put Romm in a box. Was she, at heart, just an eccentric kugel? A decorative, popular artist? A hard-line feminist fighting for women’s rights? When we met, Romm set me straight: ”Historically we lived in the box, but now it’s about getting out of the box.”
The key to the future of our country, she says, lies in our ability to tap into creativity. ”Where art and politics meet is at the point where you are sculpting or picturing a new social reality.”