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.

Despite his decades of internal exile, the memory of Mandela—the lawyer, the activist organizer of civil disobedience campaigns, the militant leader of the armed struggle, the imprisoned martyr—lived on in South Africans’ imaginations.  Upon his release, the political platform that those decades of memories provided helped to lift Mandela into the negotiations to establish democracy in South Africa—and, eventually, into the presidency.

Upon his retirement from the presidency, Mandela took up drawing in charcoal, crayon, and pastel, in part as a personal means of reflecting upon his tumultuous and consequential life.  This drawing, created upon a return visit to Robben Island after leaving power in 1999, is part of a series of 22 sketches from 2002 that reflect upon scenes of his homeland and memories of the struggle that transformed it.

· Born to Xhosa-speaking parents in the Thembu royal family, Mandela took it upon himself to study law at university. He and Oliver Tambo established a law firm in Johannesburg in 1952 offering free or low-cost counsel to Black South Africans. 


· Mandela helped organize the African National Congress (ANC) Youth League, which advocated for nationwide civil disobedience campaigns aimed to highlight the iniquities of apartheid. His growing profile led to arrests and harassment from the state.

· After the Sharpeville Massacre (1960), Mandela was convinced that only armed struggle could end apartheid. He cofounded the ANC’s militant wing. 


· Arrested and tried for treason and sabotage, Mandela was sentenced to life in prison in 1963. While subjected to brutal treatment inside prison walls, Mandela became a global symbol of both oppression and hope for those outside.  

· Upon his release from prison in 1990, Mandela negotiated with President F.W. de Klerk to organize free and fair elections. He had to strike a balance between keeping dialogue open while maintaining political pressure through the ANC. Mandela and de Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.


· As South Africa’s first Black president (1994–99), Mandela worked to assure passage of a new constitution—based on majority rule, but guaranteeing minority rights and freedom of expression.

Nearly 20 million everyday South Africans shape their country’s future.

Kay Hassan used scraps from a billboard located near his studio to create this image of citizens of all colors and creeds anxiously waiting in line in April 1994 to cast their first vote. After the last of the apartheid laws were repealed South African citizens created a democratic national government charged with writing a new constitution.

The African National Congress (ANC) won 62 percent of the vote and formed a government of national unity with the Inkhata Freedom Party and the former ruling National Party.

Hassan’s use of everyday recycled materials recalls South Africa’s tradition of graffiti and poster arts, which afforded artists an inexpensive means for artistic creativity and for protesting the government's oppressive policies during apartheid. 

                 First Time Voters actually embodies the principle of collective action in its very form. Through the metaphor of collage and the incorporation of reused banners and advertisements, Hassan literalizes the idea that it would take many distinct voices, harmonized toward a shared end, to build the new democratic nation.

All of my life had been spent in the shadow of apartheid. And when South Africa went through its extraordinary change in 1994, it was like having spent a lifetime in a boxing ring with an opponent and suddenly finding yourself in that boxing ring with nobody else and realizing you’ve got to take the gloves off and get out, and reinvent yourself.
—Athol Fugard, South African playwright, The Guardian, March 18, 2002

The ability to understand and share the feelings of another may be the most challenging heroic power.

                   South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) offered a radically new approach to human rights violations, promoting restorative justice in the form of reconciliation over retribution. To achieve the amnesty offered to those who confessed their crimes and sought forgiveness, however, the TRC first had to unearth some truly chilling evils.

This assemblage refers to two cases brought before the TRC. Using images taken from newspapers, South African artist and activist Sue Williamson intended the prints to appear “as they might perhaps be displayed in a courtroom for the information of the jury.”

Eugene de Kock, a police commander known as “Prime Evil,” was reputed to be the apartheid state’s most efficient killer, responsible for the death of numerous activists. De Kock asked to testify before the TRC in the hope that he would be pardoned. Instead, he spoke without shame. 

Images of a pig’s head in the second line symbolize the victim of a bombing for which de Kock was responsible. 

In an experiment, a bomb placed in a cassette recorder blew up a pig’s head; a similar bomb killed human rights lawyer Bheki Mlangeni. Failing to demonstrate remorse, De Kock was convicted on 89 charges and sentenced to 212 years in prison.

There are different kinds of justice. Retributive justice is largely Western. The African understanding is far more restorative—not so much to punish as to redress or restore a balance that been knocked askew.
—Desmond Tutu, 1996 


Without forgiveness there can be no future for a relationship between individuals or within and between nations.
—Desmond Tutu, 2000 

Photograph by Benny Gool, Feb. 11, 2004 

· Ordained an Anglican priest in 1961, Tutu rose through the church hierarchy to become general secretary of the South African Council of Churches—a position in which he gained global prominence as an advocate for nonviolent resistance to apartheid. 



· Desmond Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. 

· Tutu was elected archbishop of Cape Town in 1986, making him the highest Anglican authority in the country. Not known for holding back his opinions, Tutu earned a reputation for his incisive, wry, and often humorous insights. He also promoted the vision of a democratic South Africa as the “Rainbow Nation.”

· President Nelson Mandela asked Tutu to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Commission from 1996 to 1998. Promoting a vision of restorative justice and determined to hear from the “little people” whose suffering had been ignored, Tutu was sometimes openly overwhelmed with the emotion of the painful testimony. The commission took over 22,000 statements.

· Approaching retirement, Archbishop Tutu was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.

How could the “Mother of the Nation” have done that?

An activist in her own right—and the global face of resistance to apartheid during her then-husband Nelson Mandela’s 27 years in prison—Winnie Mandela’s reputation never recovered from the stories that arose about her through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). 

In the words of the South African artist, Sue Williamson, “although [the TRC] was undeniably an essential process in beginning the healing of the country, the ‘truth’ proved elusive. One of the most poignant hearings involved that of Winnie Mandela...

...The killing of a young teen [Stompie Seipei] in December 1988 at the hands of the Mandela United Football Club [her bodyguards] brought her reputation into disrepute.

Dr. Abu Baker Asvat was a beloved Soweto doctor who was assassinated by two men in his office in January 1989. 

Many believed he was killed because he refused to supply false medical records clearing Winnie Mandela of involvement in the death of Seipei, whom Mandela accused of being a police informer.” The lithograph depicts the confusing and sometimes contradictory testimonies surrounding Winnie Mandela.

To those who oppose us, we say, “Strike the woman, and you strike the rock.”  —Winnie Mandela, 1966

Together, hand in hand, with our matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country. —Winnie Mandela, 1986 (alluding to the notorious practice of lighting a gasoline-soaked tire placed around an opponent’s head)

· Trained as a social worker, Winnie Madikizela met Nelson Mandela in 1956 and became his second wife two years later. 

· During the 27 years of Mandela’s imprisonment, Madikizela-Mandela was continually harassed by the government, facing banning orders, travel restrictions, internal exile, and 17 months in jail.

· Throughout her husband’s long imprisonment, she remained a resilient symbol of resistance, keeping his memory and message alive in South Africa and beyond. 
 
· The kidnapping and beating of four young activists and the murder of Stompie Seipei in 1988 forever damaged her reputation. She was convicted of kidnapping in 1991, though the sentence was later reduced. The Mandelas officially separated in 1992 and divorced in 1996.

· Later in life, Madikizela-Mandela swung between moments of achievement and disrepute. She was a deputy minister in the first democratic government but resigned under corruption charges. Elected then as a member of Parliament, she was convicted of theft and fraud. She was reportedly at Mandela’s side with his third wife, Graça Machel, as he lay dying in 2013, but later sued (and lost) his estate for control of his home.

She sees you—and celebrates you—for bringing your best self.

Through Lolo Veleko’s lens, we see “sartorial success” stories about stylish young people fashioning themselves, and their looks, in a nation experimenting with new possibilities. Veleko’s series, entitled Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder (2005–ongoing), presents compelling photographic portraits that document the innovative street fashion scene among the young people of South Africa’s cities.

The creative individual styles sported by her subjects demonstrate a confident sense of beauty and optimism that counter perceptions, persisting deep into the post-apartheid moment, of South Africa’s urban neighborhoods being beset solely by crime and poverty.

I’m a shocker. I like to create controversy. It’s my trademark.
—Brenda Fassie, 1998 [source]
 
I’m going to become the Pope next year. Nothing is impossible.
— Brenda Fassie, upon winning the Kora Award as best female artist, 1999

· A precocious and talented singer from a young age, Fassie rose to stardom with the hit single “Weekend Special” at the age of 19, propelling her next album to multiplatinum status. In the 1990s, she was affiliated with kwaito, a genre of house music that sampled African sounds.

· She was celebrated as a voice of South Africa’s disenfranchised—during and after apartheid.

· Fassie was often compared to the American pop singer Madonna for the fearlessness with which she promoted her image, but also for the controversy that followed her. Fassie struggled with drug addiction and endured turbulent relationships with men and women in the public spotlight. 

· Fassie publicly came out as a lesbian in 2003.

· In addition to her music, Fassie is remembered as a pioneering fashion and style icon who died tragically young. She delighted in breaking taboos and innovating new trends.

#instagood #nofilter #instamood

· Ditsie and Nkoli are activists who had an important role in creating legal and cultural space for LGBT people in South Africa in the early 1990s. They were among the activists who founded GLOW (Gay and Lesbian Organization of the Witwatersrand), the first national Black LGBT rights organization in South Africa.

· A committed activist, Ditsie was the first out lesbian to address the United Nations onLGBT rights, speaking at the Beijing Women’s Conference in 1995.