/ 26 August 2022

Zakes Mda’s latest exhibition Uza Nemvula celebrates ordinary people

Zakes Mdaimage7
Zakes Mda's depictions of Mgcineni Noki — the man in the green blanket — who was gunned down in the Marikana massacre.

Buried deep amongst the bushes of a mountainous region in a village on the border of the Eastern Cape and Lesotho is a cave where ancient San rock art merges with the childhood drawings of Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda, better known as prolific artist Zakes Mda. The renowned author and his friends encountered these drawings during the December holidays of his youth when he would visit from his home in Soweto where his parents worked. Though the drawings were inadvertently vandalistic acts of an adventurous child, they also come to represent the modus operandi of one of South Africa’s most acclaimed and beloved authors. 

We know Mda as a literary artist. His works of fiction, which total up to 31, often dive into the deeper terrains of historical events by magnifying the lives of ordinary characters who are otherwise swept under the rug of massive cultural shifts in the world. At the same time, they explore and celebrate cultural hybridity by providing harmony to a pluralistic world, dense with cultural diversity and clashes. And, even as the worlds of his characters crumble, shift and change around them, Mda’s characters become emblematic of humanity’s capacity for transformation, adaptation and the ability to forge new ways of living. Just as Mda and his childhood friends discovered the rock art drawings of the San and made their own drawings to compete and complement the art they drew over, so too does his work converge ancient and modern beliefs, values, traditions, cultural products and styles. 

Zakes Mda’s depictions of Mgcineni Noki — the man in the green blanket — who was gunned down in the Marikana massacre.

“I’m a writer of historical fiction. I’m not a historian,” says Mda, sitting comfortably in his modest Joburg apartment, thousands of kilometres away from his home in Ohio, USA, where he recently worked as an English professor at the local university. c, leaders and generals. They focus on what wars these people fought, what treaties they wrote, and how they interacted with countries. For me, I look at the small people in that story. I look at the micro, while historians look at the macro. I’m interested in the people who were affected by the big decisions or the wars and how they deal with them.”

One of his most prominent characters, Toloki, who first appears in his critically acclaimed novel, Ways of Dying, is an example of this. As a way to adapt to the ever-increasing climate of violence and death that plagues South Africa’s townships in the country’s transitional phase into democracy, Toloki goes from being a boerewors salesman to taking on the imaginative and unique occupation of being a professional mourner. Toloki’s statement that “Death lives with us every day” and that “Indeed our ways of dying are our ways of living”, encapsulates the severing of boundaries and the conflux of divergent ways of being that come to represent his novels. In his novel, The Heart of Redness, a community of villagers contend with their opposing ideologies of Western and traditional Xhosa values as South Africa transitions and develops post-1994. When the plans for the erection of a casino establishment in the village are brought up, the tension between these values and the people who hold them arises and the metropolitan protagonist and former exile from America, Camagu finds himself as an intermediary between the two factions. In the end, the novel embraces an ideology of traditionalism, but one that incorporates “a development that transcends this binary division of progress and tradition”, as stated by writer Mike Nicol.

Though Mda is mostly known by South African fans and followers as a literary artist, it would be very remiss to box him into this one category. Annicia Manyaapelo, an international luxury and trends writer, speaker and art agent to Mda emphasises Mda’s multifaceted relationship with art over a phone call: “He says to me all the time that he’s a storyteller. So it doesn’t matter what medium he chooses to tell his story, One day he wakes up and he feels like composing a song, another day he wakes up and he feels like he wants to write a book and another he feels drawn to painting. For him, all of these things are just mediums. At his core, he’s a storyteller. His draw towards painting has been there for a long time and he’s been painting for many years.”

Indeed, Mda’s first love has always been painting and was ignited for the first time when he drew over the rock art in his home village. His father A. P. Mda, who was a lawyer, teacher and co-founder of the ANC Youth League, also influenced his son’s passion. As Mda notes, his father took on portrait painting as a hobby and “was quite well-known for the accuracy of his portraits and for drawing people exactly as they are.” Later, Mda pursued and obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the International Academy of Arts and Letters. 

“I was a painter long before I was a writer and I’ve always been painting. I still have collectors in Europe who have some of my earlier works and that was long before I became a published author, ” says Mda, who soon shows me an example of these older paintings. The image he shows seems to share a likeness in style with the paintings of Godfrey Ndaba, whose paintings depicted solemn, round-faced and -bodied black figures. They often have their eyes closed while engaged in the playing of musical instruments or intimately embracing a loved one.

‘Jazz in Sepia, Song of Hughie’, depicting Mda’s friend the late jazz musician Hugh Masekela

As Mda introduces his latest exhibition, Uza Nemvula, at this year’s FNB Art Joburg Fair, his hybridised style endures. Uza Nemvula, which garnered much success in his New York solo exhibition last year, is a series of paintings presented in collage form. They are multitextured works which combine acrylics on canvas, and various three-dimensional objects such as fabrics, newsprint, mirrors, washboards and others. Mda borrows from other stylistic elements, including the European expressionist mode of Braque-inspired Cubism which adopts styles from African art and shares a similar affinity for geometric patterns that the Basotho traditional murals known as litema do (another artistic style also incorporated in his works). In addition, he draws inspiration from South African township art in this collection.

Through its very title, the painting named Favela Love, suggests a collision of two differing realities. The concept of a favela, with its negative connotations of poverty, crime and degradation dominates the scenery of the painting. A dreary coloured yellow, or mustard, muddied with darker shades is used to portray a huddle of shacks which seem tightly packed against each other to demonstrate overcrowded conditions. As dreary and murky as this depiction of informal settlements is, the two lovers placed upfront, at the right edge of the painting offer a lightness that allows the viewer to escape the gloominess and humdrum of the background. The flirtatious rise of the female figure’s leg and the male figure’s demonstration of love through a playing card showing a throbbing heart confutes the gloomy existence that the informal settlement may imply. It is a celebration of human souls burgeoning out from the situations they’ve been placed in and defying the existence of what reality may imply. Although this romantic analysis is a simplistic understanding of Mda’s painting, it also stays true to part of Mda’s project in his works which is to uncover the ordinariness and beauty of lives masked by historical events or cultural phenomena.

‘The Man in the Green Blanket, Broken Umbrella’

“For me, the most important history-makers are the ordinary people, rather than the generals or the kings,” says Mda. It’s no wonder then, why Mda chooses to spotlight Mgcineni Noki in a series of paintings from this collection. Noki, who was a mineworker for Lonmin with no official rank, became the inspiring figurehead for the Marikana mineworkers who were demanding a R 12,500 salary hike in 2012. Noki was among the protesters who were gunned down by police during their protest. He suffered 14 shots in his head, neck, thighs, legs, elbow, calf and buttock and succumbed to his death.

“Like everybody else, I was touched by that event, but I was touched even more by him, an informal leader who emerges amongst the people. He was not one of the trade union leaders. He was just one of the workers, but because he was singing, chanting and encouraging people. He suddenly emerged as a leader who is later killed. He dies for those people and he becomes a symbol,” says Mda.

The lives of these men and their families are marred by the fatal shootings of those men to the extent that the majority of the population can only remember them through the brutality of the Marikana massacres. However, as Mda states, Noki is able to transcend the tragic events of the massacre that prematurely stripped him of his life through the series of paintings titled Man in a Green Blanket. 

In these paintings, where he is distinguished by his famous green blanket, he can be seen traversing the land with fellow travellers who are merrily holding up flowers and bouquets with a background that represents the landscape in surrealistic style and colouring. In a grey, bland background of another painting, he is huddled up with other colourless figures around what seems to be a fire producing a bright yellow smoke, which seemingly goes beyond the borders of the canvas. Mda also produced another painting, which is currently in his living room among other newer works which he plans to add to the collection. In this one, Mda shows the man in a green blanket chasing a cow with multi-coloured spots on its body. There is grace in the way that he’s portrayed, which complements the metaphysical atmosphere of this series.

‘Bees of Excelsior’

“He has evolved into other incarnations which go beyond his identity on Earth before he was killed. He now features in my work in different ways as different things. He has transcended Marikana. He was produced by this event but has now lived beyond the event. He has become bigger than it. That’s why I see him as a transcendent figure. He becomes anything that I want him to be,” says the artist.

Mda’s courtesy of humanising people and characters – or even assigning them with divinity – is also offered to his late friend, musician and composer Hugh Masekela in a series of paintings from the collection. In, Jazz in Sepia – Song of Hughie, Masekela appears as an imposing figure emanating from the heavens, playing his trumpet. Even though it’s a celebratory homage to Masekela, the harsh, coarse and gloomy colours and textures seem overwhelmingly dolorous and filled with grief. Masekela is also surrounded by multiple fabrics of South African origin, perhaps to help sound the song of the trumpet he’s holding, which used to blast out music inspired by various South African ethnic backgrounds and was used as a weapon against Apartheid injustices..

The chilling, doleful tone of the painting is offered salvation by Masekela’s horn and its glaring circular light reflecting against a large body of water below it, perhaps an ocean. This imagery proffers up the longstanding impact of Masekela’s music, and his legacy as one of the first league of South African musicians to gain international acclaim and popularity. Masekela, being the divine figure that he is in this painting, is merely a visitor in what seems to be an earthly setting. Even as the dark colours may symbolise Mda’s grief, one can’t help but think they also speak to the dire circumstances of the living — of the legacy of apartheid and its massacres and the way that these events continue to mirror relatively recent events such as the Marikana massacre, for which no justice has been garnered.

  • Mda’s Uza Nemvula, The Art of Zakes Mda is being shown as part of a month-long exhibition at NichLuxe POPUP gallery at the Keyes Art Mile part of Open City from 30 August to 25 September. 

WIN!

We’re giving away two double tickets to the opening night of Zakes Mda’s Uza Nemvula, The Art of Zakes Mda, with a performance by Vusi Mahlasela on the 30th of August.  All you have to do to qualify is follow us on all our social media platforms and tag the friend you’ll be taking with you and add the hashtag #FridayArtZakesMda2022.