Figure 1.1
Photographer unrecorded
Migrant workers bound for the gold fields Date unrecorded
Courtesy of Museum Africa, Johannesburg
Rural/urban
The exhibition begins at the entrance to the museum in the Street space and looks at the divide between the rural spaces that early migrants would have left in order to find work and the cities and towns they arrived in. A life-size black and white photograph from the nineteenth century of two male migrants, beckons the viewer into the exhibition. Both men, dressed in long coats and hats, are barefoot, carrying their belongings on their backs, each clutching a tin and a handful of carved wooden sticks and a knotted cloth bag filled with meagre belongings. They look directly towards the camera. Standing on a dusty road in a rural landscape, devoid of any other human life or dwelling, they appear to have been on a long trek on foot. They introduce a leitmotif of the exhibition: the long journeys travelled and the daily hardships faced by migrants. Close to the photograph of the walking miners, in glass cabinets, are a range of carved walking sticks and a number of nineteenth-century headrests, all from southern Africa. The juxtaposition of ethnographic items and the photograph indicate a curatorial device repeated throughout the exhibition, which is a means of providing a context to assist the viewer in understanding the links between art and ethnography.
In the 1860s in Natal and later in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, the British South African Company agents of the colonial government imposed taxes on black Africans on a per-hut basis. Colonial administrators, aiming to generate revenue, forced people off their land in search of jobs, in order to pay their taxes. A collection of 12 Rhodesian hut tax tokens, from the beginning of the twentieth century, are placed near the beginning of the exhibition and exemplify a key element of what necessitated the early part of the migrant journey.
Meeting of Two Cultures, a linocut by the Eastern Cape artist Sandile Goje, exemplifies the significance of walking across diverse landscapes. The work is based on the subject of reconciliation a year before South Africa’s first democratic election, in which Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress candidate, was elected president. The title and imagery reflect the artist’s optimism about reconciliation between black and white South Africans, as well as the comparison of rural versus urban existence.1 This is represented by a handshake between a circular thatched Xhosa rural dwelling and a Western-style suburban brick house. The symbolism of these anthropomorphised buildings, placed in an inhospitable and uninhabited landscape, represents the coming together of two separate worlds and the journeys of men and women who vacate rural homesteads to find work in the cities. They also represent the differences in lifestyles between black and white, the rectangular ‘modern’ house is dressed in smart pants and has good shoes, while the rural house’s legs are thin and its feet bare.
Being away from home also meant a lack of communication with the homestead and letter writing formed an important link between the two worlds. Wits Art Museum has a collection of 46 illustrated envelopes containing letters written to and from the Zulu artist Tito Zungu. The contents of the letters refer to domestic matters, such as financial requests and information about loved ones. Examples of his imaginative aspirational images of aeroplanes and of transistor radios drawn on the envelopes, embellished in coloured ballpoint pens, can be seen in display cases in the Street Gallery.2
Simon Stone’s Figure in a Landscape is an image of a migrant worker straddling a series of railway lines in a cityscape. What seems a naturalistic of portrayal of the cityscape south of the Johannesburg Art Gallery is unnerved by the intrusion of a large zombie-like figure, a migrant in a white vest holding a beaded iwisa, a fighting stick. Looming large at the front of the picture, his face has morphed into an African mask reminiscent of Picasso’s primitivist painting, Les Demoiselles D’Avignon. The migrant creature seems uncomfortable as he straddles and hovers above the railway lines, almost as if he had been inserted into the city from another place. The journey metaphor is alluded to by the labyrinth of railway lines that connect the city to the townships and further to the rural edges of the country.
Figure 1.2
Sandile Goje Meeting of two cultures 1993
Linocut 34.4 × 50 cm
Wits Art Museum Collection
Figure 1.3
Simon Stone
Figure in a landscape 1981
Oil on canvas 108 × 108 cm
Collection of Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler, Handspring Puppet Company
Life in the hostels
When migrants first began to work on the diamond and gold mines towards the end of the nineteenth century, they usually took with them treasured artefacts, such as blankets and fighting sticks. The mining compounds, to which they were confined during their prolonged absence from their families, provided only a concrete bed and bare walls. This led to a reaffirmation of strong connections to their homes in the rural areas and they quickly developed a deep nostalgia for domestic artefacts, garments, rituals and songs. Throughout the exhibition, richly diverse objects and items of dress made by migrants and/or their wives have been selected to exemplify the resilience and interconnectedness between the worlds of loved ones left at home and the rural identities that were lost in the city existence.
The central space in the Wits Art Museum, the Gertrude Posel Core Gallery, is the focus of artworks that deal with injustice and the harsh conditions faced by migrant workers. Poignant and powerful sculptures, paintings and photographs that cut to the core of the migrant’s plight are given centre stage here, as the space allows for dramatic views from the sweeping ramp that leads to the Mezzanine Gallery and looks back down into the Core space.
Michael Goldberg’s seminal installation sculpture, Hostel Monument for the Migrant Worker, is a construction of three metal bed frames, welded closely above one another into a tiered bunk. At one end of the bunk are bundles of deliberately harvested materials: thatching grass, ox horns and sticks of wattle, each bound with leather handles, that serve as echoes of the rural life left behind. At the foot of each level of the bunk are thin miners’ blankets, neatly folded, each with a faceless, black wind-up clock. A thin electric cord with a naked light bulb hangs above the centre of the top bunk, representing the regimentation of work and sleep shifts. The banality and simplicity of this sculpture provides a powerful evocation of the abject daily existence of the single-sex hostels that men were forced to live in while at work in the cities.
George Tobias’s Untitled, a plaster of Paris sculpture, pays homage to the thousands of migrants who toiled underground for the benefit of mine-owners. The work, which consists of hundreds of ‘gold bars’, each topped with a figure of a helmeted worker lying prostrate, evokes the idea of cheap labour as integral to building the economy. The ‘gold bars’ are layered into a pyramid shape, invoking the shapes of the mine dumps that were part of the Johannesburg skyline for years, but have recently either been eroded or removed and sifted through for traces of gold dust.
The exhibition extends to the Strip, a narrow space that runs alongside a staircase leading to the basement gallery. This section of the gallery allows for smaller works to be exhibited. The Strip space is below ground level and this is where works that concern mining and mineworkers are exhibited. There are a number of archival documents and images from the Wits Historical Papers, including a ‘Register of Native Accidents’