The aim of Group Portrait: South African Family Stories was to make an exhibition about South Africa that Dutch people would understand. They would appreciate and become affected by South African society on a broad scale. We wanted to deal with the present and with the past in a way that would fit contemporary relations.
I really wanted to avoid making an exhibition that looked like the struggle exhibitions of the Eighties, or a middle-of-the-road historical exhibition. I wanted to make an exhibition that would be capable of connecting the so-called big history with a small micro-history. I wanted to find an angle that would connect all people in South Africa — not only a few categories.
I thought that with family histories, one has something that everyone can identify with. All family members are affected by major movements in history. At the same time family stories always incorporate day-to-day life, which can be big and important — but also very trivial.
This combination really attracts me. I think that most readers of the book, Group Portrait South Africa: Nine Family Histories (Kwela), or visitors to the exhibition, will identify with it because they can recognise the combination of the trivial and the big: the major impacts on family life and also the small pleasures of daily life.
It can be found in the way we use private snapshots alongside specially made and commissioned art works. So you have this continuous combination. I think this technique is effective because it brings life closer to people. They can have a greater empathy with the society behind the work, and a society is a very abstract thing.
People can relate easily when they hear a story told through the life of an individual. You can explain apartheid in a theoretical way —how the laws were involved — but if you tell it through a private person’s experience, its effects are brought closer to home. But the exhibition is not only the story of apartheid. There are also the major topics of 20th-century South African history, such as migrant labour and the Boer War — but it’s always about how individuals are affected by these events.
Through the exhibition you “meet” people from different backgrounds who lived through similar experiences. You have Marthinus Theunis Steyn being part of the Boer War as the last president of the Republic of the Orange Free State, and you also have Sol Plaatje, who was in Mafikeng during the Siege and who kept a diary.
Among visitors to the exhibition, there are those who try to get through it quickly — they consume four or five exhibitions a weekend and are not really touched by it. And there are people who have taken the time and let themselves be seduced by the stories. They really get close to the subjects. I think this is a metaphor for how people deal with each other in life. You have to take time to get to know someone and to become touched by details.
In the beginning I had to think about whether the exhibition made its subjects look exotic. Take the old sangoma, Zizwezonke “Khekhekhe” Mthethwa, for example. I had to establish a network of people who could inform me. I told them what I had in mind for the exhibition and they gave me suggestions. There was, indeed, someone who knew Mthethwa quite well.
When I got a better picture of the rest of his family, the combinations in his life became powerful. His son is a bus driver in Durban — that was an interesting twist. And the sangoma is well known, but he only dresses up [in traditional garb] on one day a year. The rest of the time he walks around in old jeans and a T-shirt, sitting in his red van, being consulted. He also runs a taxi service. The layers are interesting.
One of my major aims was to fight clichés. Every preconceived idea people bring to the exhibition I would like to counteract.
Every family is complex in itself. Even within one family there are always contradictions. If you realise that even in one family you cannot define people as an entity, how can you possibly make a complete category out of one culture? But exoticism is a very complex topic. You need a certain exoticism to make people curious.
The work is really a product of the many South Africans who produced it. What will happen with the exhibition here, I think, is that people will recognise characteristics in two or three families. But locals will be as surprised as any Dutch visitor by many of the aspects that are revealed.
As for the Dutch connection, there is a mutual interest through our shared history, and through our business involvement — 100 000 Dutch tourists come to South Africa every year. Many have family connections here. I think this is the reason why the Dutch government is still supportive of this kind of exchange project. How long it will go on for I don’t know.
When South African society has completely reinvented itself — and it’s not an economically weak partner in Africa — the need to help rebuild situations and institutions will probably change.
The details
The exhibition is on view at the National Cultural History Museum, 149 Visagie Street, Pretoria. Tel: (012) 324 6082. Website: www.nfi.co.za