South Africa after Apartheid: introduction

An American observer might be somewhat bemused by the number of events (not excluding the present) issue of African Arts) that celebrate South Africa's ten years of democracy--and more surprised, perhaps, to learn that most of them, including the present issue of African Arts, feature the idea of art: The exhibitions reviewed in these pages represent only a fraction of the events dedicated to this anniversary. From the standpoint of Western democracies, ten years must appear a very short time to celebrate, and when momentous anniversaries are celebrated in the West, a broad range of national institutions participate, buoyed on a tide of popular support. So, an outsider might ask, is ten years a sufficient achievement to celebrate? Is art a fitting medium to lead the celebrations? What really is being expressed in these exhibitions?

Anniversaries, like birthdays (especially as one gets older), represent both occasions and opportunities: occasions for reflection and taking stock and, more attractively, opportunities to have the spotlight turned on oneself, to indulge for a moment in being the center of attention. As far as assessment of the South African democracy is concerned, this country enjoys a curiously ambivalent position. In the eyes of the world, South Africa is a modern miracle, enjoying a model constitution and guided to freedom by perhaps the major international icon of our time, Nelson Mandela. But in the eyes of the majority of South Africa's citizens, while democracy is obviously a fundamental achievement, there remains a huge amount of work to be done: on poverty relief, housing, land redistribution, HIV/AIDS, black economic empowerment, corruption, etc. Significantly, few of the exhibitions reviewed in these pages address these issues, and few of the exhibitions explore the meaning of democracy in a developing economy at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

But if few exhibitions seized the occasion to question how the country arrived at where it is today or look at any aspect of the past, barely celebrating South Africa's rich heritage, most took the opportunity of celebrating the anniversary of freedom simply by exercising freedom of their own. Some curators, building on the foundations of the eighties, represented the work of a new generation of black artists. Others showcased avant-garde works from their permanent collections. Others again commissioned cutting-edge work to show off to the world. And there is the rub. Who is the intended audience for these shows? In a country where the gap between rich and poor is greater than almost anywhere else on Earth (and has continued to grow since 1994), the audience for art is necessarily amongst the rich. The truth of the matter is that the art world in this country has more in common with the international art world than with the majority of South Africa's own citizens. While this is no doubt true for any country, certainly any developing country anywhere in the world, this country's achievement as a democracy and the example of its constitution should probably put an obligation on its art establishment to incorporate into its projects the complex nature of the society in which it is working. This is not to say, for example, that public collections in South Africa should not participate in the global art network: On the contrary, these contacts are essential for the healthy development of South Africa's own cultural debates and they provide lucrative employment for the country's leading artists. But there is surely a responsibility for the South African art establishment, on the one hand, to make the fruits of this participation accessible to a local population and, on the other, to somehow relate local practice to this involvement. The coexistence of several distinct traditions represents an extraordinary strength in South African art. It is important that this art establishment keeps reminding itself that the diversity of this country's population represents both a challenge for communication and a unique cultural resource.

Evidently, then, some celebrations of South Africa's ten years of democracy appear to have been inward-turning--addressing the country's own population on its own history, the achievements of the past decade, and the challenges that lie ahead. Rather more appear to have been orientated outward, to an international audience. In this foreign arena the celebrations appear to depend on and, in turn, reinforce the myth of the South African miracle, the fact that democracy appears to flourish at the bottom tip of Africa. This myth speaks to the international community's need for South Africa, its desire to see its values reflected in this part of the world. And it explains something of the global, especially American, acceptance of an extraordinarily large number of anniversary celebrations. From a South African point of view, however, the myth of the South African miracle tends to obscure the fact that the professional art establishment, unlike other cultural sectors, has not really confronted the challenge of transformation. Thus, while the celebrations of South Africa's tenth year of democracy no doubt constitute expressions of legitimate pride in this country's achievements, in art as in other spheres, the very number of the events, like the swagger of ordinary birthday celebrations, seems designed in part to reassure the participants themselves that we are doing just fine and to assure our friends at a distance that we are, indeed, still waving not drowning.

American readers might also be surprised to learn that not everyone in South Africa is caught up in the general euphoria of democracy celebrations. Thus Hermann Giliomee, a professor emeritus of history, could write in all seriousness in a recent Sunday newspaper that "Char democracy has been seriously eroded over the past ten years." In this extraordinary claim, Giliomee appears to be speaking for the large number of white South Africans who are still struggling to accept the reality of a democracy with a substantial black majority--and undoubtedly, by extension, for the apartheid mentality that could not accept the validity of black cultural expression. For generations in South Africa, the concept of "black art" was simply a contradiction in terms. Thus, with similar unthinking arrogance, as recently as 1954 C. de Bosdari could title his book on the German artist who immigrated to the Cape in 1777 Anton Anreith: Africa's First Sculptor.

Most of the articles in our collection allude in some way or other to this shocking disregard for African art and artists in the historiography of South African art. While Sandra highlights the scant interest, certainly at official levels, in indigenous carving traditions until very recently, others, such as Bongi, point out that as late as the 1970s and 1980s most arbiters of taste held that "white artists were producing art, while their black counterparts were producing black art." Likewise, Pitika Ntuli draws attention to the fact that artists such as Cyprian Shilakoe (1946-72), whose career was commemorated in African Arts (1973 7:1), were locally "not deemed to be artists at all." This prejudice was challenged by Steven in his 1989 publication The Neglected Tradition, which brought to light a host of black artists that had been either ignored or forgotten. Together with Ricky Burnett's Tributaries exhibition of 1985 which, among other things, showcased the extraordinary creativity of contemporary black rural art, and the Johannesburg Biennales of 1995 and 1997, which put South African art in a contemporary international context, Sack's exhibition and catalogue effectively reframed the terrain of South African art and accorded black artists serious critical respect for the first time. On an international level, the contribution of African curators such as Salah, Olu, Okwni and Simon can hardly be overestimated, not only because they promoted the art of black South African artists alongside their white counterparts, but also because they rigorously theorized the practices and concerns of these artists.

In these circumstances it was almost inevitable that artists such as Berni, whose complex vision is mapped in this issue by Liese, should rise to international prominence in the 1990s, and that South Africa's photographers who had been committed to document the "struggle" in the 1980s should turn to the exploration of a richer sense of humanity as South Africa's democracy took hold, as Michael essay maintains. The momentous curatorial interventions of the eighties and nineties may be seen to have borne fruit in the wonderfully creative exhibitions in Boston and New York that are discussed in Vicky article, and in Cape Town as mentioned briefly by Lize, as well as in the works celebrated in the landmark publication 10 Years, 100 Artists: Art in a Democratic South Africa edited by Sophie (Cape Town: Bell Roberts, 2004). Other essays in this collection explore traditionalist cultural forms and changes in the ways they have been understood over the past few decades, while two further biographies, on Thami Mnyele and Paul Stopforth, consider the costs to politically committed black and white artists in the realization of the democracy that is now being celebrated.