"From the bottom of our hearts": making art in a time of struggle.

Thamsanga (Thami) Mnyele (1948-1985) devoted his short life as an artist to two politically charged goals, pursuing each with heartfelt sincerity. In the 1970s he depicted the emotional consequences of being dominated. In the 1980s he produced images celebrating popular strength and unity. He made these visual statements in conjunction with his involvement in the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) and the African National Congress (ANC).

Mnyele's background prepared him to be both a dreamer and a fighter. Born in the same year apartheid officially began, Mnyele grew up in Alexandra township, a dirty and crime-ridden square mile within Johannesburg, sizzling with political debate and action. His father became a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and his mother worked as a domestic servant. His mother sent him away at the age of eight to a school in a village northwest of Pretoria, where he witnessed the government's "homeland" policies intensifying the already fractious quality of rural political life. (1) Estrangement between his parents furthered his sense that the world was full of quarrels.

He withdrew from the conflicts arising in daily life and sought solace in drawing. His interest in design led to his hiring as a graphic artist by the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency and by SACHED (the South African Council on Higher Education). It also afforded him an opportunity to study during the first half of 1973 at Rorke's Drift, the respected art center run by Swedish Lutherans in Natal. His greatest joy came from his comradeship with other young men in arts troupes inspired by the ideas of Black Consciousness. They gave him a sense of purpose and hope. In the 1970s, their fight for equality took the form of staging dramas, singing militant songs, and putting up art exhibits, all with the aim of instilling racial pride.

In 1979 Mnyele moved to the capital of Botswana to join his friend the exiled poet Wally Serote, who was helping to found an art troupe, Medu Art Ensemble. Medu broadened the tactics for heightening political consciousness and solidarity by publishing a newsletter and staging in 1982 a mammoth conference called "Culture and Resistance." The newsletters usually contained posters, many designed by Mnyele, and he was one of the key organizers of the 1982 festival, the largest nonracial gathering of artists in South Africa's history. Meanwhile, he had a clandestine working life. Shortly after his arrival in Botswana, Mnyele had joined the ANC, and in 1983 he studied guerrilla tactics briefly at an ANC camp in Caxito, Angola. In June 1985 the exiles knew an invasion by South African forces was imminent and they were unprotected. Mnyele waited too long to leave. In the early hours of June 14, he was shot to death by South African commandos.

Art and Action

Mnyele's early work articulated his own yearning and striving at a time when African nationalism appeared defeated, so it is perhaps not surprising that his drawings display conflicting emotions. In 1971, for example, he sketched a young man extending his arm in a sign of victory while his head lolls on his shoulder. This drawing, one of his first, exudes an unusual mix of defiance and defeat. In 1977 he drew a mother safely delivering a baby next to a strand of barbed wire. These drawings convey the fraught combination of fear and hope which characterized the decade when the BCM came to prominence and was repressed. They show Mnyele's full emotional participation in the movement. He is expressing its moods from the perspective of an insider, someone who had experienced the movement's development every step of the way, rather than adopting an ideology worked out by others. Perhaps because the BCM was comprised mainly of middle-class African students like himself, he was in a position to record their psychological reaction to the peculiar plight of having more hope of material success than other black people, while experiencing the systematic indignities endured by all "non-whites."

Artists within the BCM often adopted the symbolism of birth and motherhood to express the pregnant mood of the 1970s. Wally Serote conveyed this sentiment so powerfully in poetry that he could safely be called Mnyele's muse. Serote returned the compliment by commissioning Mnyele to design the cover for his first book, Yakhal Inkomo, published in 1972. The book's title translates as "the cry of cattle at the slaughter house," and Mnyele seems initially to have tried to depict that cry in the form of a gaping black shape against a red ground. The final cover instead featured a pregnant figure with a baby on her back (Fig. 1). She has bowed her head, and her eyes are sightless. Lines from "Mother and Child" likely inspired him. Serote opens that poem by conveying the intimate relationship between creation and pain--"There's pain at birth I'm told, / An upheaval"--and he closes by noting, "The world comes/To the world of Mother and Child, / From history with love and hatred." (2) Both mother and child resemble fetuses, or lives not yet fully realized. They match the mood of a time prior to the 1976 youth revolt when the energies of young, urban black South Africans were coalescing.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Around 1975 Mnyele was shaken when the police hauled him into a Johannesburg station and interrogated him about his activities with the BCM-affiliated art troupes. Soon after his release, he began to refine his style by depicting solitary figures in greater detail, and he began hinting at violence. He drew, for example, a lone figure in a piece titled remember me/i am going/time calls me who presents his back to the viewer (Fig. 3). His body is already disintegrating into pebbly components and he no longer has a head; a slash of red shoe polish down the center of the paper balances another red slash to the right, hinting that the departure entailed bloodshed or, at least, suffering. He also began distressing the surface of his paper, incorporating the tears into his design. In his depiction of the mother giving birth, he has punctured the paper in the precise area where he concentrates the energy of birthing (Fig. 4).

[FIGURES 3-4 OMITTED]

After his interrogation, Mnyele became interested not only in showing violence, but also in trying to express the process of transformation itself. The departing man disintegrates. A planet turns into liquid and its droplets fall on a landscape. A pot falls from a woman's hand and shoots toward the earth where it will soon smash. Mnyele struggled to capture a moment on the cusp of change, in contrast to his earliest efforts to give form to deep-seated feelings such as fear, sadness, silence.

Mnyele made public this transitional phase of his work in September 1977, in a landmark show at the Dube YWCA, Soweto. Titled "A New Day," the exhibit featured ten of his pieces along with drawings by Fikile and sculpture by Ben Arnold. "A New Day" was inspired by the 1976 student revolt and was held despite the murder of Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko only days before the opening. For these political reasons, and also because young Sowetans were hungry to see depictions of life as they actually lived it, the show was an electrifying success. The artists had often expressed their anger at "township art," a genre which made Africans into pitiable or adorable children for white consumers to use in decorating their homes. This show was their reply. Further, the artists took pains to show a reality counter to the billboard images of happy Africans drinking, for example, Castle beer; they wanted to thwart the government's effort to maintain the status quo by creating and seducing a black middle class. Thus, three of Mnyele's "New Day" drawings--a man sitting on the floor of a jail cell, a pair of men engaged in intense discussion, a man meditating--present imagery of Africans not often seen in the press or in township art.

During his first year in self-imposed exile, Mnyele made art similar to what he had been attempting in South Africa. He continued to depict the emotional consequences of injustice, but he was in the process of jettisoning his desire to depict damage. For one year, he continued to fashion dreamlike representations of the essence of a feeling or a process, while ensuring that the political resonance was clear. In "Consequences," he drew his friend Tim Williams gazing downward and inward as he leaned on a barbed wire fence. In Zimbabwe (Fig. 5), he showed the naked back of a man rising from a landscape marked by barbed wire, bones, and a stone wall. This fine drawing pointed toward the inspirational purposes that would soon come to dominate his art.

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

His use of symbols--hands, guns, flowers--suggests how his loyalties and intentions were shifting. Through 1980 his figures pose limply, as when Tim Williams leans over the fence, his hands hanging in air, grasping nothing. He drew a more gruesome version of this mood, also in 1980, when he depicted a headless human carcass chained to a bar of wood; the cadaver's hand falls limply, and it holds a drooping flower.

After Mnyele began to adopt poster motifs drawn in the Soviet style, the hand no longer hangs, but grasps tools, weapons, and sometimes flowers (Fig. 2). His use of the spear, the quintessential African weapon, underwent a parallel change as Mnyele became an increasingly stalwart member of the ANC. In 1972 he had drawn a spear piercing the mouth and breast of a highly stylized African female figure, while in 1982 he drew that weapon held valiantly aloft by a guerrilla. The message was blunt: The weapon had been wrested from the state and was now wielded by the people. Even his language on posters fell into line with the exhortative tone on Soviet posters when they urged, "Let us all fulfill the plan of the great projects." (3)

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Medu and Mnyele were engaged in a battle of values, explicitly contradicting South African propaganda with their own. The regime looked invulnerable. In December 1982, it had killed forty-two members of a similar exile community in Maseru, Lesotho. In 1984, it signed the Nkomati Accord, obliging Mozambique to expel the ANC. Particularly in light of these setbacks, the ANC needed to show that the government was in fact vulnerable to the will of the majority and that the people deserved dignity and respect.

Mnyele rejected the idea that all "political propaganda" was undesirable or lacking in artistry. On the contrary, he wrote, "Our communities will restore to us the respect we have lost, the moment we utilize every form of art at our disposal, along with the political poster. We shall need to do it from the bottom of our hearts, with purpose, technical skill, and intelligence." He felt that the times required him to adopt a bare-bones definition of culture, one in which art was not divorced from function or from society. "For me as craftsman, the act of creating art should complement the act of creating shelter for my family or liberating the country for my people. This is culture." He believed in community reverently, almost religiously, as if he had found his own version of his father's church. "It is ... basic that the artist is a sensitive being moved by this national grief and [the] struggle of the community ... [which is] the river that feeds and nourishes the work of art." As a result, the artist had to be humble, so "as to heed the people's word." In language reminiscent of the Soviet poster-makers, he wrote, "With our brushes and paints we shall need to visualize the beauty of the country we would like our people to live in." (4)

ANC membership diminished his desire to depict the emotional impact of damage, probably because that subject could be strategically dispiriting. From 1981 he produced didactic art on posters--rarely depicting material poverty--to be sent back into South Africa to give heart to grassroots movements which would become in 1983 the United Democratic Front. (5) It is difficult to assess the impact these posters had, as they were tucked inside newsletters that the government banned before they could be sold inside South Africa. Maybe the posters gained their greatest exposure in 1982 during the Culture and Resistance festival, where perhaps 800 South African "cultural workers" saw them displayed. When Mnyele illustrated articles for Staffrider magazine and the Medu Newsletter, he did sometimes show the conditions of poor people's lives, as when in "Fragments" he drew attention to impoverished schools and hungry children. These efforts frequently included guns, though Medu members debated how provocative they should allow their pictures to be. The unarmed crowd in "No to Resettlement" seems stalwart because of their numbers and upright posture (Fig. 6). He liked to soften a gun's impact by inserting tools and flowers around it (Fig. 7).

[FIGURES 6-7 OMITTED]

The title of Mnyele's one-man show, "Statements in Spring," suggests that shortly after his arrival in exile he began losing interest in ambiguity and transformation; it was time to make "statements." His fascination with the interrelatedness of destruction and rebirth gave way to narrative; his art became illustrative. His use of photographs as templates for his drawings increased. They overwhelmed imagery drawn from his imagination. He seemed, for the time being, to have lost the desire to explore essences. Perhaps predictably, because he was deeply engaged in a political movement and personally under threat, he focused on figures that were neither ambiguous nor in transition. Mnyele's art brings us face to face with the life-or-death pressures and attitudes generated by a hard historical moment.

An artist's precise contribution to the world of public affairs is hard to assess, even when his art is frankly political. Can we ever know if an image moved large numbers of people to action, or changed the ways they look at, think about, and do things? Mnyele would probably not have appreciated the latent vanity in this question. While ambitious to develop his own gifts, he belonged to two political movements celebrating the identity and achievement of the black community, rather than of the individual. They presented him with the chance to sacrifice himself his vision and his life--for the idea of the greater good. Mnyele's art thus opens a window on the mind of a man as he moved toward the prospect of martyrdom.

[This article was accepted for publication in June 2004.]

(1.) Politieke en ander Organisasies, African National Congress, BAO 107/4/29, South African National Archives. The homelands were dependent internal states, staffed mainly by African bureaucrats; they were intended to obviate African nationalism by satisfying African political aspirations on an ethnic or "tribal" basis. Africans were meant to migrate from the homelands to labor as foreign guest workers in the cities of white South Africa.

(2.) Mongane Wally Serote, "Mother and Child." In Yakhal Inkomo, Johannesburg: Renoster Books, 1972, p. 37.

(3.) These words come from a poster by Gustav Klutsis. Medu had no Soviet posters to study, so the likely route of influence was via posters from Mozambique.

(4.) Thami Mnyele, "Observations on the State of the Contemporary Visual Arts in South Africa" (unpublished article, 1982).

(5.) The United Democratic Front (1983-91) was an alliance of grassroots organizations that strove for a democratic South Africa and rejected official reforms giving benefits to selected racial groups.