Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Later that day we set out to find Albert Mbudzeni Munyai, rumored to be mad; the last time his Johannesburg dealer had come to see him, Munyai chased him off the property with a panga, a blade like a machete. He lives in the northern part of Venda, and it took us an hour or so to get to the area. “Munyai? You must go down the hill and past the Zimbabwe Supermarket,” said the woman we asked for directions. “Then you cross the river, and after the third big tree on the right, you will see him, sitting in the middle of his orchard and singing.” We found Munyai sitting under a metal awning on the far side of the orchard, intent on his carving. When we drew near, he jumped up and welcomed us as though we were the friends of his childhood, embracing first Bailey and then me. He was good-looking and muscular and wore only a pair of shorts, his hair in tiny dreadlocks, his eyes sparkling. “You are from America?” he asked me, shaking his head with wonder. “You have come by flying?”

I said that I had.

“Look at you!” He leaned back. “Like a butterfly!”

Munyai was first encouraged to make art by the Afrikaans sculptor David Rossouw, the first white artist to befriend his counterparts in Venda. Munyai was the gardener of a friend of Rossouw’s. At first they smoked hash together, then created art together; you can see each of them reflected in the other’s work. As we talked, Munyai’s wife sat beside him, sanding the sort of large spoon found in local curio shops. Munyai was driving scales into the sides of a wooden fish; we carried on a five-way conversation, with Munyai addressing at least as many comments to the fish as to his wife or to us. “I have to make the sculpture,” he said, “so the wood won’t be burned. It’s so beautiful, the wood! My God! I am saving these pieces of wood from the fire.”

I asked him how he felt about selling his work.

“Oh, my dear. It makes me so sad that you ask me this question. My dear, it breaks my heart every time. But I must have some tools for working. The children play more games with three pebbles than with two. But, my dear, these men coming for buying: this money talk is ugly talk.” Later, when we were looking at his work, which combines wood and metal, he said, “I cannot live with all my work. Thanks to God that these people come and take it away from me! It’s too strong for me, too powerful. If I live with it all the time, I am made weak by it.” We wanted to see his sculptures more clearly, but he hesitated to bring them out into the sun: “You don’t know what they can do.”

Munyai sent his wife to fetch a sheaf of papers. “Can you tell me, please, what is in these papers?” Munyai had won an Honorable Mention in a pan-African competition for indigenous art. The judges declared that this artist, by melding postmodern influences with a traditional African spirit, had successfully synthesized separate schools of art and was therefore a voice of a rising Africa, at once a guardian of tradition and an avowed modernist. Munyai’s work was chosen over that of hundreds of other artists. “It’s really?” he asked. “My God, my dear, it’s wonderful!” He looked at me, his head to one side. “You will go and write about my work for the people in America?” I nodded. He burst out in a long, wonderful laugh. “Everyone must see it!” he said. Then, serious: “They must understand it. It’s magic work.” He walked us back to the car. He looked at it for a long moment. “Go on, then, and fly along the ground.”

Our last day in the region, we went down to the neighboring area of Gazankulu to see Jackson Hlungwani, often identified as the greatest black artist in South Africa. Until two years ago, Hlungwani lived in an Iron Age site on top of a hill, among the great stone circles that mark the site of an ancient citadel. God came to Hlungwani and told him to live there, to make great carvings to His glory, and Hlungwani laid out a sacred ground filled with giant monuments, some of them as high as trees, surrounding a crucifix twenty feet high. Hlungwani became famous all over Venda and Gazankulu for his preaching and his life in “the New Jerusalem,” and for his personal iconography; his strange four-eyed faces, as eerie and intimidating as the heads on Easter Island, seem alive, as though Hlungwani has set free something organic in the trees.