Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

White discomfort when visiting the townships can distort the understanding of art made in these areas, whether it is “township art” or not. Though the danger of the townships was exaggerated by the apartheid government, and though many whites retain a disproportionate fear of them, township violence is unpredictable and people do get killed. The ritual surrounding a white visit is complex. You are well advised to be accompanied by someone known where you are visiting; it is usually best to meet on neutral ground, then let your guide take the wheel. You are never sure whether you are going to make it into the township on the day you had planned, because often enough your guide may warn you that it’s a “bad day.” Your guide takes responsibility for your safety, and you are dependent on his knowledge, connections, and radar. Sometimes during a visit to someone’s house or studio, the phone will ring and your host, without any real explanation, will say that you have to leave.

The people I met in the townships all understood the effort involved in a visit; I was given a gratifying, perhaps exaggerated, sense of my own courage. Just by coming, they said, I was doing something for them. They knew that someone thought it was worth the trouble to bring me. That decision stood in contrast to their own experience of segregation. “I was excluded from many places during apartheid, and I am still excluded in many places,” the painter Durant Sihlali said to me as we sat in his house in Soweto. “And I am not so eager to include all the whites who say in their casual, offhand way that they want to come here. It’s my territory here, and I don’t bring anyone who I don’t like. It’s an effort for me to come into Johannesburg and pick someone up, think about their safety all the time, entertain them, and drive them home. I am not going to give my life over to doing it.”

Sihlali grew up under apartheid, but he is educated, self-assured, even diffident, with a rich use of the English language. As a young man in the sixties, he once stumbled upon some white art students and their teacher who had come to the township to paint. He watched them for a long time, then walked up to one and silently held out his hand. The art student handed Sihlali a paintbrush, and Sihlali finished the picture. The art teacher was impressed by his skill. Although Sihlali could not enroll at the school, the teacher invited him to model for them. “In this way, though I never lifted a brush during class, I was able to learn everything, just by watching and seeing how the teacher criticized the students.”

For years, Sihlali made a living painting and selling seashell souvenirs and commercial signs; in his free time, he created a series of watercolors depicting local scenes. These figurative watercolors address few of the concerns about the nature of representation that occupy contemporary Western artists. But the work of black South African artists, which often focuses on family, history, and dreams, must be understood on its own terms. Sihlali’s watercolors document a life that the apartheid government wished to conceal. “My interest was not in beautiful things, but in recording our history,” Sihlali explained. “They are not an expression of rage; when you tell the truth, you don’t become angry. I felt I had to do it. Often it was a race against time. I painted against the bulldozers as a mode of protest, and when I finished painting a house before they destroyed it, I felt that I had won.”