Heroes: Principles of African Greatness Part 6— South Africa's Long Walk to Freedom

Every hero story needs a villain. Apartheid-era South Africa standardized a villainous logic.

This is a space in which to imagine ourselves—as technician or as subject.

“I am sometimes tempted to go to the seaside and to paint beautiful things from nature,” Willie Bester has said. “But I do not do it because my art has to be taken as a nasty medicine for awakening consciousness.” 

Filled with sharp edges and menacing contraptions, Apartheid Laboratory appears to be a vision of a particularly “nasty medicine,” indeed. 

Bester’s focus is on apartheid-era South Africa and its systems of racial classifications and their unfounded claims to scientific legitimacy and racial superiority. The work centers on seven small dolls, labeled with the seven racial categories recognized by South Africa’s government at the time—“White,” “Cape Coloured,” “Malay,” “Griqua,” “Chinese,” “Indian,” and “Other Asian.” 

Black South Africans were legally excluded and instead designated residents of “Bantustans,” territorial reservations—convenient political fictions—that were politically designed to remove Black claims to full citizenship. 

Apartheid in South Africa ended in 1994. Yet, as a stage set upon which anyone may seemingly enter, Bester cautions us through this work to remain awake to how menacingly present such pretensions to difference can continue to be. 

Oppressive systems, he notes, can be built from the most mundane, and ugly, of materials. In so doing, Bester sets the stage for the consideration of Heroes’ one outright, unredeemed villain.

 . . . your Government, after receiving a mandate from a section of the European population, decided to proclaim a Republic on 31 May . . . Your Government, which represents only a minority of the population in this country, is not entitled to take such a decision without first seeking the views and obtaining the express consent of the African people . . . Under this proposed Republic [it is feared] your Government, which is already notorious the world over for its obnoxious policies, would continue to make even more savage attacks on the rights and living conditions of the African people.

—Nelson Mandela to Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, April 20, 1961

· After becoming prime minister in 1958, Verwoerd moved to consolidate the apartheid state. He oversaw the invention of Bantustans, reservations justified as homelands for the country’s African majority to which they were to be exiled and legally bound. Through these, he was able to fully disenfranchise Black South Africans. 

 · Growing in power throughout his premiership, Verwoerd narrowly won a referendum to turn South Africa into a republic in 1961. Ever more isolated on the international stage, Verwoerd’s government built a military police state and banned all Black political organizations.

· Assassinated on Sept. 6, 1966, Verwoerd was stabbed on the floor of the South African Parliament. 

“A people without a positive history is like a vehicle without an engine.”—Steve Biko

Imprisoned under apartheid for loitering, the artist Willie Bester memorializes the history of harassment and oppression in South Africa’s Black settlements. The Notorious Green Car’s mesh window screen recalls police vehicles used to patrol and terrorize Black residents. Bester created this large-scale, bright conceptual work to keep the memory of such oppression alive.

At an early age, Bester made metal toy cars (draadkar), a relatively typical practice for boys of his background, though Bester’s cars were covered in metal and expressively painted. He began experimenting with painting at age 7, but soon quit to support his family.

In his late teens, Bester was conscripted into military service, which served to reinforce his experience of the country’s systematized racism. 

In 1986, he attended classes at the Community Arts Project (CAP) in District Six, in Cape Town. Working alongside other artists actively involved in the anti-apartheid struggle, Bester quickly began to shift his artistic practice (which had initially consisted of photography and painted landscapes) to align with his sharpening political consciousness.

Soon the artist was creating works largely of found materials, first in comparatively two-dimensions like The Notorious Green Car.

Black Consciousness is an attitude of the mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the Black world for a long time. 
 —Steve Biko, 1977 

The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. 
—Steve Biko, speech in Cape Town, 1971

· Frustrated by the lack of Black voices in the anti-apartheid groups he observed while a student at university, Biko founded the South African Students Organization (SASO) in 1968 to resist apartheid through political action. 

 · Biko and SASO promoted the Black Consciousness Movement, which promoted Black self-empowerment and pride in the face of both the localized racism of the apartheid state and global postcolonial realities. Biko was placed under a government banning order in 1973.

· Following the 1976 Soweto uprising—in which the police brutally suppressed over 20,000 students protesting laws restricting education to the use of the Afrikaans language—Biko was arrested. While in police custody, Biko was severely tortured and beaten, causing his death. Those responsible were never tried.


· In death, Steve Biko became a global symbol of the apartheid state’s amoral violence, but also of resilience, dignity, and pride.

They gave the best years of their life to the struggle.

Prison Sentences reflects upon the marking and passing of time—here, the jail time served by some of South Africa’s most notable apartheid-era political prisoners. Each tablet is inscribed with the days, weeks, months, and years served by Nelson Mandela and seven other political prisoners who were initially sentenced to life imprisonment at the close of the Rivonia Trial held in June 1964.

The names and sentences completed by the Rivonia prisoners are inscribed on each tablet (left to right):  


 Nelson Mandela: 11 Jun 1964–11 Feb 1990 (9,377 days) 
 Ahmed Kathrada: 11 Jun 1964–15 Oct 1989 (9,269 days) 
 Walter Sisulu: 11 Jun 1964–15 Oct 1989 (9, 269 days) 

Raymond Mhlaba: 11 Jun 1964–15 Oct 1989 (9,269 days) 
 Elias Motsoaledi: 11 Jun 1964–15 Oct 1989 (9,269 days) 
 Andrew Mlangeni: 11 Jun 1964–15 Oct 1989 (9,269 days) 

Govan Mbeki: 11 Jun 1964–5 Nov 1987 (8,548 days)
Dennis Goldberg: 11 Jun 1964–28 Feb 1985 (7568 days)

During my lifetime I have dedicated my life to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against White domination, and I have fought against Black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony… 

…and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to see realized. But, my Lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.
—Nelson Mandela, Rivonia Trial, April 20, 1964

He changed it all.