By Sean O’Toole
Fucked up. That about summarises the degradation. Let me do a partial reckoning. In the same week that South African athlete Oscar Pistorius allegedly shot and killed his 29-year-old model girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, an unemployed man, reportedly desperate to remedy his lot, beheaded his wife and mother of three, Phumeza Modikane, at their family home east of Johannesburg. Elsewhere, in a rural village in the Eastern Cape, a partially blind and deaf 69-year-old grandmother was raped, her attacker later falling asleep in her bed, leaving the old woman to hobble away in terror. It was, by certain markers, an unexceptional week. A week or so before the Pistorius case made news, a 17-year-old working girl, Anene Booysen, was gang-raped and disembowelled at a construction site in a town east of Cape Town. Her attackers further slit her throat and broke all her fingers and both legs.
Like Goya’s Colossus, something huge and naked and murderous roams South Africa. It is a man with a perpetually balled fist. He will rape many women, 65,000 if we go by one official tally, the intervals of his pleasure corresponding with the arrival of subway trains during peak hour in New York. Bearing witness to this in words, there is the temptation to dress the unlovely facts of life in contemporary South Africa with the finery of adjectival outrage, to describe these things as abject and vulgar and inexplicable. But adjectives will not revive the dead, nor will they undo the violations of mothers and sisters, of strangers and friends.
If the gilded resources and chromed equipment of language fail here, what consolation does art, of any sort, offer to a brutish and brutalised society? Lucy Valerie Graham asked herself this question. A literary scholar, Graham has just published a study looking at the entangled history of race and rape in South African literature. When she began the project, she writes in State of Peril (2012), ‘I had no idea how historically wide-ranging it would become, nor how a focus on stories of sexual violence would illuminate many aspects of South Africa’s national and literary history.’ This is perhaps the first lesson: violence against women is not new in South Africa; it is as old as the colonial encounter. Unavoidably, it has coloured perspectives of the country.
In 1950, tells Graham in an earlier 2003 essay, author Doris Lessing’s New York publisher, Alfred Knopf, told Lessing they would consider publishing The Grass is Singing (1950) if she changed it to accommodate an explicit rape of the white female protagonist by Moses, a black man, ‘in accordance with the mores of the country,’ as the publishers put it. Lessing refused. The publication of JM Coetzee’s novel Disgrace (1999), which includes two rapes, one explicit, the other buried (‘rape, not quite that,’ protests David Lurie, the book’s central protagonist), appeared at a time when the South African media were reporting on high levels of sexual violence. The government of then president Thabo Mbeki protested, both the ‘racist journalism’ and Coetzee’s brutal portrayal of ‘white people’s perception of the post-apartheid black man’.
But race is a cheap subterfuge: women of all ages, ethnicities and sexual orientations are being cruelly brutalised. Black artists have not shied from this fact. Zanele Muholi, the garrulous portrait photographer and gay rights activist whose archive of black lesbian women was shown on dOCUMENTA 13 last year, has determinedly – and often at great risk – documented the frail intimacies and real world assaults experienced by black lesbians. ‘I feel that it is my responsibility as a citizen of the “democratic” South Africa to historicise our harsh realities, so that our faces and skin are part of our country’s national collective memory, and as a form of existence and resistance,’ writes Muholi in an essay appearing in a recent book on art and social trauma that I co-edited, über(W)unden: Art in Troubled Times (2012).
Muholi, like the country’s president, Jacob Zuma, is Zulu. Her life choices sit awkwardly with this fiercely proud and patriarchal culture, a culture that is in some senses also cowed by tradition and custom. Painter Trevor Makhoba deeply understood the complexities and nuances of Zulu culture, in particular the way it was and is being refigured by a precarious urbanity. His paintings repeatedly describe rape, incest and wife-beatings. Skeletons copulate on graves. There is sexual shame. Men in business suits and plump old women in traditional skirts partake alike in cannibalism.
But Makhoba, who painted in an acute graphic style, was not some kind of South African Hieronymus Bosch. There is also levity in his paintings: the joy of birth, music and community, also the consolation of traditional Zulu custom. His work, much of it painted between 1987 and 2003, when he died aged 47, records a mixed-up place, where sexual avarice and servitude comingle. It is a place of ‘excess’, as art historian Juliette Leeb-du Toit has noted, where displays of male pride, authority and dignity confront the circumstances of a ‘disintegrating patriarchy’.
The successive histories of colonialism and apartheid contributed to this disintegration. You get this sense negotiating the flimsy biographical writings recalling the career of sculptor Nelson Mukhuba. Born in 1925 in the Tshakhuma area, in the country’s far north, like Makhoba, Mukhuba was an able musician. While living in Johannesburg he formed various dance bands, establishing himself in the 1960s with collectives known as The Zoutpansberg Merry Makers, Nelson and the Phiri Boys, and The Music Men. But the reality of being a guest labourer in the city required earning wages doing menial jobs.
By the 1980s Mukhuba was living in his rural birthplace. Like many of the gifted wood carvers from this region, Mukhuba worked in a grammar that melded abstraction with figuration, animist myths with biblical themes, tourist kitsch with genuine expression. Mukhuba was by all accounts aware of the contradictions. In 1987, in a now familiar act of patriarchal dominion, he killed first his wife and two of his daughters, then himself. Ascension, an undated and fire-scarred wood figure retrieved from his torched studio is currently on show at the Standard Bank Art Gallery in Johannesburg.
But Mukhuba’s work can seem far removed from the current malaise, which, thinking backwards, was prefaced by a gory pageant of masculinity. In July last year, a month or so after the outrage prompted by the display of Brett Murray’s The Spear, a figurative painting that portrayed Jacob Zuma in a famous Leninist pose with his penis exposed, Kendell Geers held a solo exhibition at the same gallery. Titled ‘Songs of Innocence and of Experience’, the show included a sculpted bronze phallus flanked by a two-page text, a kind of jaunty history lesson on the role of Christian dogma in shaming the penis. While congruent with Geers’ recent practice, the snarky essay, which indulged in phallic euphemisms and wordplay, was fundamentally misdirected. ‘Rather than remembering the pain of past generations in order to further subjugate our nature, it’s time to now re-member [sic] our bodies, restoring our selves in nature, with respect?’ What utter rubbish. The question has nothing to do with ennobling some lost phallic culture. Read Coetzee, listen to David Lurie: ‘The question is, does he have it in him to be the woman?’