Figure 1.9
Artist unrecorded Zulu, KwaZulu-Natal intolibhantshi (waistcoat)
Date unrecorded Textile, beads 64 × 41 cm
Standard Bank African Art Collection (Wits Art Museum)
Figure 1.10
Artist unrecorded Zulu, KwaZulu-Natal Ibhantshi (beaded suit jacket)
Date unrecorded Textile, beads 110 × 83.5 cm
Standard Bank African Art Collection (Wits Art Museum)
Figure 1.11
Artist unrecorded Zulu, KwaZulu-Natal Isigqiki (headrest)
Date unrecorded Wood, plastic, metal studs 17 × 65 × 5.5 cm
Standard Bank African Art Collection (Wits Art Museum)
With the easing of influx control in the mid-1980s, unprecedented numbers of people from rural communities flooded into informal settlements on the outskirts of cities, struggling to sustain both an urban existence and a rural abode. In 1983, David Goldblatt participated in the Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty Alleviation. He made a photographic essay about public transport, focusing on workers who travelled early every morning from the bus depot in KwaNdebele to Pretoria to their day jobs. Their daily journeys took eight hours. The blurry image shown here, taken by the artist on a moving bus, shows exhausted passengers hunched over, sleeping upright, in extremely cramped conditions.
As the twentieth century progressed, growing numbers of women travelled to town. Dora Ntlansana by Keith Dietrich is a life-size portrait drawn in pastels of a female domestic worker from Lesotho. This dual identity is clearly indicated by the typical lilac domestic worker’s overall and the ‘traditional’, woollen, factory-printed Sotho blanket wrapped around her waist. Such designs are typically favoured by both male and female Sesotho speakers. The artist has employed tropes of colonial photography, such as the woman’s carrying a burden on her head, characterising her as the domestic Other, although the object, a box of oats, clearly situates her in a contemporary urban setting.
Figure 1.12
Artist unrecorded
Mpondo, Eastern Cape Ugcazimbana (beaded neck ring)
Date unrecorded Rubber found object, wool, beads 24.6 × 24.9 cm
Standard Bank African Art Collection (Wits Art Museum)
Figure 1.13
Artist unrecorded,
Xhosa, Eastern Cape Nursing necklace
Date unrecorded
Plastic found objects, beads 67 × 5.8 cm
Standard Bank African Art Collection (Wits Art Museum)
Mary Sibande, a contemporary Johannesburg artist, has created a series of works that explore the fantasy world of a fictitious domestic worker called Sophie, who dreams of other lives and believes she can transcend her mundane daily life as a domestic worker. In I Put a Spell on Me, Sophie is dressed in what looks like an enormous nineteenth-century bustle dress, in colours worn by the local Zionist Christian churchgoers, who are often seen in the Johannesburg surrounds on weekends, worshipping in parks and open spaces. Her arms are outstretched in a gesture of reverence or surrender. She holds a Zionist staff in her left hand and it seems as if she is deep in some sort of spiritual communication.
Figure 1.14
David Goldblatt
The transported of KwaNdebele, Wolwekraal to Marabastad bus 1984
David Goldblatt, courtesy of the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town
By the middle of the twentieth century, professional photographers on the Witwatersrand had set up studios that catered to migrant workers who wanted to sit for their portraits. In the same way that the pair of early migrants greet the viewer at the entrance to the museum, life-size images taken in the mid-1950s from one such studio in the Pretoria area here show male migrants with an eclectic mix of beadwork and other accoutrements. The beadwork panels integrate long-standing indigenous art forms with the sartorial splendour commonly aspired to by black middle-class men, attesting both to the inventive ways in which migrants negotiated their daily experiences and the critical value they attached to their evolving notions of beauty.
Conclusion
While many ties developed between migrant workers and more permanently urbanised communities, there were also often deep tensions and divisions, which, on a number of occasions – sometimes with more than a little encouragement from shadowy agents of the state – spilled over into open conflict. This violence highlights the complexities of migrancy and warns against a simple juxtaposition between imposed controls and the resilience and creativity of the migrants. The elements of personal agency that migrants maintained were also implicated in forms of patriarchy and chilling violence.
The exhibition comes at a time of particular relevance to the plight of migrants, considering the upheavals in the mining sector (culminating in the Marikana massacre), providing a window on to the structural and personal violence that have long disfigured the system and coloured wider South African society. The broad expanse of the themes covered in this rich and diverse exhibition bring together extraordinarily varied creations of material culture, showcasing the heritage of many of the southern African language groups. The exhibition reaffirms the ways in which migrants sought to express and protect their humanity, despite the hardships and humiliations of their journeys.
Notes
1.For a detailed discussion, see P Hobbs and E Ranking, Printmaking in a Transforming South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 1997), 44.
2.See Julia Charlton’s Chapter 13 in this volume on the decorated envelopes and letters of Tito Zungu.
3.M Rosenthal (ed.), William Kentridge: Five Themes (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; West Palm Beach: Norton Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 41.
Figure