Figure 1.4
Michael Goldberg Hostel monument for the migrant worker 1978
Mixed media installation of found material 138 × 195.5 × 78 cm
Wits Art Museum Collection
William Kentridge’s film, Mine, made from a series of animated drawings, deals with life on the mines and is split between the nameless mineworkers under the surface and the protagonist, capitalist Soho Eksteen, above. He controls their lives and his wealth lying comfortably in his bed, as the miners swarm below in the earth’s underbelly, sleeping in rows in tiny concrete bunks. Mark Rosenthal points out that Kentridge’s approach is not subtle: ‘Here he is a political artist in the traditional sense, depicting the perpetrator of horror as a deeply despicable person.’3 Mine juxtaposes the enormous schisms between lives of wealth and poverty that are so familiar in South Africa, particularly in the city of Johannesburg, where the artist lives and works. The city of Johannesburg was founded on the discovery of gold and today is an economic powerhouse in Africa. The city is part of the province previously known as the Transvaal, renamed Gauteng (Sesotho), meaning ‘place of gold’, after the first democratic elections of 27 April 1994.
Figure 1.5
Installation from the exhibition Ngezinyawo – Migrant Journeys in the Gertrude Posel Core Gallery with Untitled (gold bars) in the foreground.
George Tobias
Untitled (gold bars) 1984
Plaster of Paris, paint Dimensions variable
Wits Art Museum Collection
Work/daily life/transcendence
The Mezzanine Gallery extends beyond the ramp that runs through the Core space. The exhibits in this section look at the notion of resilience and resistance as part of the journey, through an examination of the immense varieties of creative output by men and women, despite their daily hardships.
For young men, the experience of leaving home for the first time was seen as a rite of passage and the act of travelling between these two worlds gave rise to a range of migrant songs. The rhythms that occur in this music often refer to the colliding and collapsing boundaries between time and space. In keeping with this rhythmic structure, these songs often integrate the repetitive sound of people walking. In both the rural and migrant context, musical performance plays a vital role as a primary context for oral histories, social commentary, artistic expression and the ordering of social, cultural and religious realities. A large collection of musical instruments from the ethnographic collection of the Anthropology department at the University of the Witwatersrand are now housed at the Wits Art Museum, including Chopi marimbas (xylophones) from Mozambique. Chopi marimba players were hugely popular in the hostels and sound bytes of their performances, made famous by the work of ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey, and recordings of Sotho migrant songs collected by David Coplan are included here, with photographic images of drums and trumpets, as well as drums made from recycled objects, such as plastic paint tins and rubber from the inner tubes of car tyres.
In Cedric Nunn’s Migrant Worker from the Eastern Cape on a Sugar Farm, Margate, KwaZulu-Natal, a migrant worker with his guitar is photographed against a wide backdrop of hills of sugarcane fields. Mpondo migrant workers from the Eastern Cape found work on sugar farms in KwaZulu-Natal and were forced to work separately from Zulu workers as lowly regarded cane-cutters. Juxtaposed with the photograph of this migrant worker are a number of drums made by Sotho migrant workers in a village in Lesotho and collected by Max Mikula of the Phansi Museum in Durban. The drums were made from recycled materials, such as a 44-gallon steel drum with animal skin stretched over the top for beating and a plastic paint container with rubber tubing stretched across the top to form the drumhead.
Longing for ‘home’ plays a crucial role in the world views of most migrant labourers and, as a result, migrants living in hostels formed urban associations that accommodated their hybrid cultural expressions, such as the Amalaita who created expressions of masculinity and marginalisation that bridged the migrant experience of town and countryside. The Amalaita groups would often march with traditional weapons, such as amawisa (Zulu knobkerries) that would be embellished with coloured plastic telephone wire in tightly woven geometric patterns, identifying the user with a particular geographical region of KwaZulu-Natal.
Figure 1.6
William Kentridge
Miners in tunnel 1991
Still from animated film Mine Charcoal on paper
Dimensions 68 × 110 cm
Durban Art Gallery Collection
Figure 1.7
William Kentridge
Soho Eksteen 1991
Still from animated film Mine 16 mm film transferred to video, 5.50 min
Collection of the artist
In the 1940s, the Johannesburg City Council established a number of men’s hostels, including the Mai Mai hostel, to house migrant workers employed in a variety of industries. Over time, this and other hostel complexes became flourishing markets, where traders sold artefacts, such as meat plates, headrests and beadwork obtained from rural carvers and beadworkers, as well as objects and clothing produced at the markets themselves. The Mezzanine Gallery features a number of embellished garments belonging to workers, perhaps even purchased from Mai Mai or the likes thereof, including items of clothing, such as a Zulu migrant’s waistcoat (intolibhantshi) and a blazer completely covered with strips of beadwork, typical of the style of beadwork found in the Bergville region of KwaZulu-Natal, reaffirming connections to migrant workers’ rural homes.
Figure 1.8
Cedric Nunn
Migrant worker from the Eastern Cape on a sugar farm, Mangete, KwaZulu-Natal 1987
Silver gelatin print 31 × 46.4 cm
Collection of the artist, courtesy of the Bailey Seippel Gallery, Johannesburg
However, over the past century and a half, migrant workers’ everyday art incorporated techniques and materials that reflected the hybrid cultural influences of metropolis and mine. Traditional headrests were also modified into more idiosyncratic forms and carvers incorporated materials reflecting aspects of modernity. Similarly, from about the 1950s onwards, colourful pieces of plastic were cut into geometric shapes before being nailed with fine metal shafts (apparently modified used gramophone record needles) onto circular discs of wood to form iziqhaza (earplugs).
Discarded items of urban Western culture were often recycled. Xhosa workers would return home from the mines with machine gaskets, which would be transformed by women, using coloured glass beads and brightly coloured pink wool, into an ugcambizana (beaded neck ring), commonly worn by men in the Eastern Cape.
Today, forms of plastic are recycled in equally inventive ways. For example, soccer fans transform the plastic hard hats worn by construction workers into dramatic headgear, emblazoned with the colours and advertising logos of their favourite soccer teams, such as Kaizer Chiefs or Orlando Pirates.
Into the early twentieth century, the migrant labour system primarily fed mining industries, but by the 1930s and during the next four decades, an expanding manufacturing sector had afforded itinerant workers new opportunities