Soon after the posters of the smiling politicians came down, an exhibition of altogether more revolutionary posters opened at MuseuMAfricA recently.
Images of Defiance exhibits resistance posters from the 1980s, and the exhibition is part of the City of Johannesburg’s 10 years of democracy celebrations.
Many of these posters were silkscreened and pasted up late at night — and then often ripped down by security forces the following morning. Banning usually followed. A group of activists, the Posterbook Collective, secretly started collecting these images and storing them in safe houses during the 1980s.
The posters powerfully reflect the reform and repression of PW Botha’s ‘total stategy’ in the 1980s. This, in part, took the form of appeasement — the establishment of the Tricameral Parliament which gave Indians and coloureds some representation in government while excluding Africans altogether, and the recognition of African trade unions. At the same time there was increased military spending and thousands of activists were detained and tortured.
The United Democratic Front (UDF), launched in 1983 in protest against PW Botha’s new Constitution, became the leading force in mobilising people against apartheid. It brought together over 500 anti-apartheid organisations under the umbrella of non-racialism. Silkscreened posters were used by many of these organisations to express their messages of defiance of the apartheid state.
Two important silkscreen workshops were set up at this time: the Screen Training Project (STP) in Johannesburg and the Community Arts Project in Cape Town.
Maurice Smithers set up STP in 1983 at the request of the UDF so that people from different organisations would have access to equipment and be trained in making posters.
“It was giving a voice to people — an ordinary organisation could say something to the community they were working in and say something to the state as well. They [the state] saw us as such a threat.”
Smithers said producing posters before computers technology was widely available was difficult. He said they had so little money that all they could afford, on a few occasions, was one set of Letraset, and they “photocopied it up and down until we had the right size of letter”.
“Then we traced letters on the [silk]screen. Everything was done by hand, before DTP publishing, which came in 1985.”
The Community Arts Project (CAP), on the other hand, had its genesis as an arts project in 1977 run by trained artists. The media demands of the mass democratic movement of 1980s created a tension within CAP between producing posters at breakneck speed and developing people as artists.
Trish de Villiers, one of the artists based at CAP, recalls that “we banged our heads against walls because we emphasised training not only artistic competence and literacy, but also technical competence”.
Ironically, Botha’s recognition of the trade unions opened spaces for unions to conduct political protests against the government. This led to the formation of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) in 1985. Posters were widely used by the labour movement to communicate both shop floor demands, as well as broader messages of political protest.
Marlene Powell, a media officer at Cosatu during the 1980s and a member of the poster collective, remembers that in 1989 it was illegal to publish a picture of a prisoner — let alone a picture of Nelson Mandela.
“It was towards the end of his imprisonment and we heard about this journalist who had seen him. He drew the picture [of Mandela] from memory. At that time there were no recent pictures of Mandela — they were all banned — and there had been nothing since he had gone into jail.”
“We decided to publish it and had it printed overnight, and then we delivered it to all the different hotels where the Cosatu delegates were staying for a Cosatu congress. We thought we needed to show what the man looks like. So the next morning there was this convoy of busses, thumping and swaying and carrying the image all the way out to Nasrec.”
As the government sent more and troops to occupy the townships, many white South African men became increasingly uncomfortable with having to perform their military service. Many of these young men found themselves carrying out acts of extreme violence.
The End Conscription Campaign (ECC) was formed in 1983 to oppose the conscription of white men into the defence force, and produced many striking posters. One shows a young cadet — his head replaced by a grenade — about to blow himself up. The poster, produced by CAP in 1985, was put up near to schools in Cape Town and carried the message “Mannetjie — didn’t they tell you? Cadets maak malletjies”.
The Posterbook Collective spent years meeting in secret to produce a book called Images of Defiance: South African Resistance Posters of the 1980s, published in 1991. Only a few thousand copies were produced and the book was out of print within a couple of weeks. Now this extraordinary book is to be reprinted, and a copy placed in every public library throughout South Africa.
“The amazing thing is that the book is going to be sponsored by the City Council — they were the enemy. That’s a measure of change, that a mainstream political structure is funding the production of such a book,” said Smithers.
For graphic designer Kevin Humphries, at another progressive media company called Graphic Equaliser, the emphasis was on “getting things done” during the 1980s.
“A young guy had been killed by cops and someone brought in a photograph of him. It was so indistinct that we couldn’t use it for a photo so Mzwakhe Nhlabatsi drew his face, a likeness, which we used for the poster. We used spears, they looked like Umkonto spears. It was a really nice one. Very graphic.”
“The posters were put up at the DOCC hall in Orlando and it was banned. We used to look in The Weekly Mail every week to see if you were banned, then you knew you were doing your job properly.”
* Images of Defiance, an exhibition of South African resistance posters from the 1980s, will be on display at MuseuMAfrica until the end of July.