Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Sihlali’s house was in Jabulani—or, as he called it, “deepest Soweto.” Houses in the township all have metal grilles over their windows, and Sihlali had made art even of these bars at his house, working them as narrative scenes, one showing a mother and child. We left that area and went to see Vincent Baloyi, a sculptor, and Charles Nkosi in the Chiawelo Extension section of Soweto. There we sent some children off to get us beer and sat in the front room talking. In the townships, you do not in general close your door to your neighbors except when you perceive a threat. It doesn’t matter if they are drunk or tiresome or if you just don’t like them; the house is open to all, and everyone stops to talk. “So you are in Soweto!” people would say as soon as they saw me. “You’re afraid now?” And everyone would laugh. “Tell them it’s not so bad, not so bad, not so bad,” they would say. Many wanted to know why I was interested in art. Art is the basis of a proud and almost sovereign dialogue that is rare and precious in the townships, that exceeds in its meanings anything you could adduce from the appearance of the work. “All this about equality and working with white artists,” said Charles Nkosi. “It’s going to take a lot of time. It’s like when you get a new hat. For the first time you have it, it’s really a nuisance. You just keep leaving it everywhere, you can never remember you have it, and when it’s on your head, you feel the weight of it all the time. Even if you used to be cold, the new hat’s not easy to start having.”

The painter Sam Nhlengethwa said, “People look at my work and they ask me, ‘How can you do such happy pieces out of the township?’ In the townships, it’s not just war. We have music, weddings, parties, even though people are dying in the next street. When there is violence, people from outside look only at that. That’s wrong. I try for a ratio in my art that reflects the reality: thirty percent violent pictures, and seventy percent happy, festive gatherings. The other day I woke up and walked out my door and almost fell over a corpse. So that’s a part of my reality, and it goes into my art. But I went out to where I was planning to go anyway. That’s how my life is balanced.”

I traveled to the Durban township of Umlazi with Alois Cele, a commercial painter who has in the last five years built up a trade in T-shirts, signs, and billboard advertisements. Now he is expanding (curiously) into the juice trade. Cele is a bit of a Zulu hotshot; he teaches voluntary workshops in his township and has been approached by people from other townships who would like him to expand that program. His success and swagger have given him an air of authority. People come to him for T-shirts and other goods, and he tells those people, who often belong to different political parties, when to come back. “I tell the PAC guys and the ANC guys and the Inkatha guys, all of them, that I’ll have the shirts on Wednesday around four o’clock,” he said, “and then I keep them waiting so that they’ll have to talk to one another. They sit there fuming, but they see one another as people, too. You can do everything through the art business.” Cele’s ambitions extend well beyond the art world: “I’ll teach people to think for themselves. Zulu people are dangerous because they are illiterate and believe the first thing they’re told. They don’t want to think for themselves. Zulus always work together; when they cause trouble, they do it together. I want to teach them to be independent! That’s the only way.”

Apartheid had four categories: white, black, Indian, and colored. In Cape Town, I went to the colored township of Mitchells Plain with Willie Bester, who is perhaps the most highly regarded urban, nonwhite artist in South Africa. Bester was the son of a colored mother and a black father; he was classed with the colored rather than with the black population, thanks to letters from his school saying that his behavior was of a high standard and that he was therefore not really black. Bester joined the police as a young man, “to fight crime—and so no one would steal my bicycle.” As a colored policeman, he was supposed to fight the ANC, but when he read ANC literature, he found it moving. “These weren’t the people for me to be attacking. These were my people. If they were the Communist enemy, then I knew I was also the Communist enemy.” Assigned to riot duty, he arrived at the station one day to find a floor-to-ceiling stack of slaughtered black youths. “One of the officers told me to get rid of the blood that was pouring all over the station, and while I was standing there, stunned, someone else grabbed a fire hose and began washing the blood away, because they thought it would look bad if the media showed up. All these policemen were congratulating one another on how many people they’d killed. I went home that night so sick I couldn’t move for days.”