An Artist as the 'righter' of the wrongs

An artist as the ‘righter’ of the wrongs

Sabata-mpho Mokae

When a nation emerges from an era of repression, it has to go through the process of correcting that which had gone wrong and create a new programme for a better future. In 2017, the post-apartheid South Africa is merely twenty-three years old. It is a new nation, crawling out of the clutches of what the United Nations had termed “a crime against humanity”. Any major political programme, apartheid included, relies on the arts to get into the nation’s DNA. The arts give such political programme wings to fly. Paintings are painted and exhibited, music created and played, books written and read and films produced and watched. The programme to negotiate a new order, rebuild a broken people, will need the arts to give it impetus and be its lifeblood.

One could ask a question: what is the role of the arts in a transition?

Writing in Mohlomi: Journal of Southern African Historical Studies in Lesotho in 1990, South Africa-based Nigerian writer and academic, Bankole Omotoso points to the Western critic who wishes “to see African writing in the light of concerns of Western writing – the pursuit of the psyche of the individual torn from the community”. May I suggest that we paraphrase Omotoso and replace “writing” with “art in general”?

The argument here is that the post-colonial, and indeed post-apartheid, artist is expected to ‘right’ that which had gone wrong and produce the kind of art in which there would be no doubt that the artist himself shares common humanity with those he tells the story about. This argument holds water because it is common knowledge that there was a way in which the oppressed were depicted, through art and literature, and that the optical value of that was that the devaluation of these people made its way into the DNA of both the oppressed and the oppressor.

One ends up agreeing with Omotoso that the African writer, as well as the African artist, needs to have a political commitment to the rebuilding of what was once called “the dark continent”. Omotoso asks a question that he suggest we, the creators of the art intended for public consumption, need to ask ourselves: “how has your political commitment helped … to create viable and stable institutions for the achievement of the dreams of your people?”

Perhaps an artist in a nation that is negotiating a new order is, in Omotoso’s words, “a ‘righter’ of the wrongs that foreign domination and exploitation have inflicted” on his nation.

He also urges us to create “the basis on which later generations could consume”. This means that at the time of creating art, the artist is paying a debt to the future. In this instance, an artist is serving future generations. He is indebted to those who are yet to be born.

In the poem I Will Keep Broken Things, African-American poet and activist Alice Walker talks about keeping – and also owning - “broken things” as well as painful memories. She says “their beauty is they need not ever be fixed”. In creating art about the past, as uncomfortably honestly as possible, the artist helps us to accept a past that got us where we are. The oil-on-canvas visual narrative of Sol Plaatje by Giorgie Bhunu helps and leads us to accept the iconic Sol Plaatje the achiever as well as Sol Plaatje the broken man. It also facilitates our acceptance of the history of the South African liberation struggle that is so intertwined with Sol Plaatje’s personal history and individual struggles. It leads us into the past that we can draw lessons and inspiration from.

In an attempt to answer the question I asked about the role of the artist, let me quote what Holly Daffurn wrote in Times Have Changed: the Evolving Role of an Artist: “Art can be an escape from reality, art can be used as a chronicle of the times, art can be something we all can relate to, it can be a catalyst for change, art can be instinctive, it can feed our culture, it can reflect nature, it can soothe the soul. It can be an absolute indulgence and luxury, it can be anything you want it to be. The role of an artist is as mercurial as the artist’s inspiration and ideas, it changes constantly, evolving as the years churn by and adapting with the same frenetic pace as society.”

In Noble Existence: an oil-on-canvas visual narrative of Sol Plaatje, Bhunu is narrating the story of one of Africa’s most dedicated servants, a literary and journalism pioneer, the promoter of sobriety, a family man, a political activist, singer and stage actor. In this case Bhunu is joining the band of troubadours who wrote biographies of Sol Plaatje, from Modiri Molema in the 1960s to Brian Willan in the 1980s. Only in this instance he used a different art form to write a biography of Sol Plaatje, visual art. He assumes the role of an artist as the teller of tales, a chronicler of the nation’s stories.

But Sol Plaatje did not fall from the sky, nor was he an island surrounded by nothingness. He came from a people and his life and work became part of a people’s conversation that has been going on long before he was born and continued long after he was buried. It is perhaps worth noting that Bhunu has included, among works on Sol Plaatje, those who lived and worked with Plaatje. These include Plaatje’s father Kushumane, his wife Elizabeth, his children, his protégé Modiri Molema, his comrades in the South African Native National Congress and others. By so doing he has created a context, a Plaatje context. This exhibition’s importance cannot be over-emphasized. 

Thank you, Giorgie Bhunu for this important and timely work. Those of us who appreciate the work that Plaatje did and the lesson drawn from his life, will be forever indebted to you. 

(Mokae delivered this speech at the occasion of the opening of the ‘Noble Existence’ art exhibition by Giorgie Bhunu at the William Humphreys Art Gallery in Kimberley on October 4, 2017. The exhibition is on until the beginning of November)