Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

We wanted to see the Ndou brothers, Goldwin and Owen. Mabasa said it was too difficult to explain where they were, and after some cajoling she agreed to come with us. Like Mabasa, Goldwin had earned some money, and he, too, had a “luxurious” concrete house with a battery-operated television. When we arrived, the mother of the Ndou brothers was standing in front of the house. Tall, erect, dignified, she was bare breasted and wore traditional clothes. When she saw the white men coming in their car, she disappeared into her rondavel, next to Goldwin’s house, and emerged wearing the housecoat of a domestic servant.

For fourteen years, Goldwin worked on the railway and lived in a township hostel. Then one day, in Venda, he cut down a mopani tree and saw the hard, dark wood at its center. “I said to my little brother Owen, ‘In Johannesburg they are selling some things from this wood for big money.’ ” Each made a carving, and they took them out to the road to sell, and Goldwin never returned to the railroad. Goldwin speaks slowly, but Owen is anomalously slick. The first time I saw Owen, he was wearing a silk jacket; the second time, he was in tartan trousers and Italian-looking loafers. Three thousand years of history seemed to lie between him and his mother. Unlike other Venda artists, Owen was pretty clued in on current South African politics, but he supported no one. “It’s the good thing in Venda,” he said, “not too much politics, and no one fighting for politics. No violence.” At Owen’s house, I saw a painted wooden sculpture of an angel, wearing a dress Jean Paul Gaultier could not have conceived of, her enormous breasts projecting from green accordion pleats. Another recent work is a six-foot-tall rabbit dressed in plus fours holding a golf club, called Sport for a Gentleman. Owen has never seen a golfer, or anyone wearing plus fours. And why a rabbit?

We sat in Goldwin’s house drinking beer and listened until the sun set to the international news, which came from the mouth of a six-foot monkey he had carved to hold the radio. Though the Ndou brothers’ work, often inspired by their dreams, feels ritual in its strangeness, they are making it to sell and do not weep when a dealer comes and takes it away. They have fixed prices, can negotiate rationally, and have even signed contracts.

The next day, we set off to visit Freddy Ramabulana. In this rural community, Ramabulana is an outsider. He lives in extreme poverty and suffers from a disfiguring skin disease. No one wanted to accompany us to see him. A Johannesburg gallery owner had warned us not to touch the children at Ramabulana’s place or we could get worms. Ramabulana’s carvings are rough, primitive, frightening. His sculptures feature marbles for eyes and glued-on hair and beards. He carves genitals in full detail, then clothes his carvings in children’s dresses, torn pajamas, long, faded shirts. When we arrived, he was kneeling in the dust and gluing the beard on a carving of a man with his hands stretched out in front of him, holding a large rock. We greeted Ramabulana, and he nodded but did not move; we stood for twenty minutes in the hot sun while he finished his work. Then he went inside his hut to retrieve a sculpture of a kneeling man with painted blood pouring over his face and body. He set the figure down, then positioned the new one above it, so that it was bludgeoning the kneeling figure’s head with the rock. Killer and victim both stared blankly ahead. Another piece—an enormous, roughly carved penis—lay on the ground, wrapped in a blanket. When we uncovered it, the children all giggled nervously and scampered around us.

Ramabulana’s English was almost incomprehensible, but one felt that his Venda was also probably mumbled and bewildering. Bailey had brought some invitations to his forthcoming exhibition in Cape Town, and he gave one to Ramabulana, who studied it closely for a good four minutes. The painting was of two dancing men with teapots for bodies. “I can carve this,” he said. We had a hard time explaining that it was just a picture for him to enjoy, that we weren’t commissioning him.