Art and politics in a changing South Africa: Bongi Dhlomo in conversation with Michael Godby.

Bongi Dhlomo is an artist, art educator and art administrator. Trained at Rorke's Drift in the 1970s, she worked in a number of community arts projects in the 1980s. In the 1990s she was involved in the administration and direction of the two Johannesburg Biennales. She works currently as an arts consultant. She is married to the artist Pat Mautloa and they have two children. She spoke with Michael Godby in November 2004 about her career and her thoughts on art in South Africa.

MICHAEL GODBY: In this edition of African Arts, we want to reflect on the achievements of ten years of democracy in South Africa, especially the effects of freedom on the practice of art. In this conversation, therefore, I would like you to talk about your career as an artist and arts administrator in terms of both the development of your own interests in art and how your career has related to the changing political environment. At the core of my questions is an interest in your understanding of the art project at different times of your career, what purpose art had for you, and whom you thought you were making art for.

Perhaps you could start by explaining how, coming from a relatively conservative Christian rural background, you were introduced both to politics and to art.

BONGI DHLOMO: On Sunday, June 20, 1976, I bought the Sunday Times newspaper as I had done many Sundays before. On this day I bought the newspaper specifically to catch up on the news of the unfolding students' upheavals in Soweto, Johannesburg. As I opened the newspaper I remember very vividly the shock I experienced from the images spread over more than four pages--all the images were black and white and very graphic in their depiction of what had happened on the 16th of June and the three days thereafter. The news on the radio could not be graphic but there was no elaboration or adequate description of what was happening in Soweto.

I was living in a very small town on the north coast of KwaZulu-Natal. There was very little discussion on the Soweto uprisings. My politicization had happened at irregular intervals during my primary and secondary school days. My family upbringing was both religious and political in what I now think of as bizarre circumstances. My high school, boarding school days in 1973-74 introduced me to some of the real issues of being a black South African. St. Chad's Bantu High School (as it was called) was headed by a white principal with a staff of almost 50% black and white teachers and management.

In 1975 1 did a one-year National Secretarial course. In 1976 I started work in Tongaat as a typist/clerk even though I had trained to become a secretary. Six months into my unchallenging typist/clerk position, the Soweto student uprisings filled the electronic and print media. Nineteen months in my job at the Tongaat Sugar Mill I was acutely aware of the fact that all systems were stacked against me ever moving any further than the first rung of the ladder. By a stroke of luck, as my father took me past the Lutheran Church Center on the way back to my place of employment, I saw a handwritten poster calling for applications from students wishing to study art at Rorke's Drift Art and Craft Center. I took down the details more out of frustration with my job, a wish to explore other avenues, than a calculated decision to study art. I had snippets of information about art--nothing concrete--but anything was better than the prospect of staying in my job. i applied and was accepted to Rorke's Drift. The applicant was required to send samples of artwork they had done as well as an essay of motivation on why they wanted to study art. I am convinced that I was accepted to the art school on the strength of my essay.

MG At Rorke's Drift you probably had the example of Azaria Mbatha and other former students before you. Is this how you came to use religious subject matter? Did you feel that you could communicate a biblical morality through your work, as they appear to have done? Were you translating the Bible into South African terms?

BD Rorke's Drift Art and Craft Center was a project of the Lutheran Church. My eldest sister had studied home economics in the late sixties. There was no direct association in my mind between what I had embarked on and what my sister had done at the center. Our family received unusual black-and-white Christmas cards amongst the typical snow-covered, reindeer-sleigh, Santa Claus, Christmas-tree-near-the-fireplace cards. I gravitated toward the black-and-white cards because the others all looked the same even though they came from different people. The cards were reproductions of religious themes of Azaria Mbatha's linocut prints. When I got to Rorke's Drift I soon connected all the loose ends of my artistic snippets.

The school did not dictate what themes had to be followed or depicted. Assignments were usually open-ended. The center was a Lutheran foundation and funded by the church and so may have felt obliged to encourage religious subject matter. In my case it was that as well as my upbringing. The religious theme therefore came from the center's origins, former artists and, in my case, my own religious upbringing. At this time I was not consciously thinking of art as a tool of communication.

MG But your art quickly became J political, did it not?

BD My first linocut assignment was for the first-year students to depict the story of Adam and Eve. I set out to do the print and got positive feedback from Jules van der Vyver on my grasp of technique. I was excited until I discussed my work with Sam Nhlengethwa, who was a second-year student. He, like other Transvaal-based students, had experienced the brutality of the 1976 uprisings. He looked at my work and in a very gentle manner he said, "You know Bongi, it is not necessary to make Adam and Eve white." I knew what he meant and understood that Jules had complimented me on the execution of the technique, not the treatment of the subject. This was my first political art lesson. Following my discussion with Sam, and drawing on the political situation in the country, I felt the need for my work to take a certain direction. Some class assignments allowed for this, others were restrictive. I actively started to look for statements that could be derived from assignments over and above simple technical execution. As soon as I grappled with this, I was able to reconcile all the facets of my experience and found ways to communicate these through art.

MG At the time you were at Rorke's Drift, the Western-orientated South African art world was largely committed to one or another form of abstraction. Did the students discuss achieving in this art world? Did you as a group feel that you could communicate meaningfully in anything other than a representational style?

BD The saying "Starting on a clean slate" applied to me more than it did any of my fellow students, who had had contact with art, art trends, and artists in the big cities. I had no prior contact or knowledge of art trends, South African or otherwise, except maybe the Azaria Mbatha Christmas cards. There were group discussions by students, 85% of whom came from Johannesburg and surrounds and the 15% from Natal townships and rural areas. It was during these sometimes very heated debates that the Bill Ainslie Studios would be discussed, artists that had studied at Polly Street would be referenced, and township art centers and formations would also be discussed. There was a strong feeling even at that time that we needed to use art to empower ourselves as well as the black communities we came from. To be able to do this effectively we concluded that representational style was more accessible even though many dabbled in abstraction outside of class assignment work. We were at Rorke's Drift and the art of former students acted as a benchmark for our studies and our own art production.

MG You have dismissed the terms "art" and "craft" as "useless categories," yet they were surely relevant to your studies at Rorke's Drift? How did the fine art students relate to these terms?

BD The name Rorke' s Drift Art and Craft Center indicates that the two art forms were treated separately. My eldest sister had studied home economics, which fell under the craft side of the center. I went to Rorke's Drift to study art and I did not consider my sister's qualification as equal to mine. When I worked at the African Art Center in Durban I was again confronted by the division between art and craft. It was at this point that I challenged myself to start seeing art as a direct offspring of craft, especially in the black community. I have often heard artists credit their grandparents or parents who were potters or carvers, muralists or weavers, traditional healers, praise singers or storytellers. These art forms are integral to our upbringing and they contribute in shaping our career choices, as, for a long time, the education system precluded black people from formal study in the arts. The debates at Rorke's Drift tended to go towards the future we were going into--more about who would recognize our art in the big white art world--than on the artificial division between art and craft.

Rorke's Drift was a unique institution. When I hear success stories of Fort Hare University I cannot help but feel that Rorke's Drift's achievements in the fine art field are similar to those of Fort Hare. I walk through group exhibitions and am astounded by the number of Rorke's Drift graduates who are now household names locally and even internationally.

MG In the 1980s you, like many other artists, used your art as a weapon of struggle. But was your art a weapon in the sense that it attacked a repressive regime? Or was it a weapon in the sense that it articulated the concerns of the oppressed majority? I make the distinction in order to ask whom you expected to see or buy the art you made at that time.

BD I told my children that if I had not become an artist I am convinced I would have been a good writer. On second thoughts I feel as a writer I may not have been able to do with books what I am able to do through art. I told them that I want to record our history the same way as a writer. I have seen my art communicating faster than any book could have. I did not agree when I was labeled a "struggle artist" in the 1980s because I did not hear that term used for writers and musicians. I feel that I am documenting history, and if it is seen by people during the time of struggle it talks to them then, but if the same work is seen by people during the ten years of democracy celebrations, it should be able to communicate something else to them, like, "Never, never, never again...."

When you write a book you raise issues and those issues are recordings of some lived lives whether fictional or true. As an artist I used visual art to raise the same issues and to articulate in a visual form something that should be seen, interrogated, interpreted, and used or rejected by the viewer as they do with a book. I did not expect any particular section of the South African population to buy my art: I hoped that everyone would be able to see my art, respond to it in any manner they felt, and buy it if I was lucky.

MG In his comments on the state of South African art which were prompted by the occasion of your exhibition at the Botswana National Museum and Art Gallery in 1982, Thami Mnyele wrote that "the actual act of creating the visual imagery is informed by the community and nourished by it, consciously or unconsciously, and ... it is the community which will or must act as audience" (Mnyele 1988:298). How far were such sentiments really compatible with a career as a fine artist in the 1980s? And are such sentiments still relevant today?

BD Calls from exiled cultural workers and artists were loud and clear but realities inside the country were louder and clearer. We were faced by huge challenges and, like other popular formations--workers, churches, education groups, and so on--we as artists were called upon to utilize our skills in the fight against apartheid. Thami Mnyele, killed in the 1985 raid on Botswana, said in the same posthumous article:

   Apartheid is huge and ruthless. We
   must employ equally huge graphic
   methods to complement the efforts
   of our people; work big in size and
   concept, organize around unsentimental
   principles. There can never
   be artistic freedom or freedom of
   expression from a people in captivity
   (Mnyele 1988:301).

Responses to artwork produced at that time were amazing. I ceased to think of my art as a source of revenue because I did not expect my "recordings/documentaries" to be bought. I worked in community art projects in order to augment my income. This work provided both a stimulus and revenue for me so I was happy to work in the "democratic" medium of printmaking, confident that I could reach a large audience. I have been fortunate in that work I have given away has been understood and appreciated. Mnyele was right when he says that artists draw from their community and should in effect work for them. This does not necessarily translate to sales and money in the bank but it confirms the continued relationship the artist has with their community.

MG In your interview with Brenda Atkinson in Grey Areas (Atkinson and Breitz 1999), you seem to suggest that the nature of black political art has changed since liberation, roughly from the explicitly political work of the seventies and eighties to a less overtly political statement now. You say, "There are many situations that need to be articulated, and these issues are the same as they were before the 1994 elections, but a new vocabulary is required to articulate them." Can you explain and expand on this idea? Might not this "new vocabulary" take art beyond the reach of communities it once served, financially and conceptually?

BD I always wondered what happens to soldiers at the end of a war. I have read and heard that the soldiers suffer postwar traumas. The vocabulary used by artists during the struggle for liberation does not have to change completely because the situation is not completely changed. From 1989--the release of the political leaders from Robben Island and the events that followed--there was euphoria and celebrations and artists naturally joined in. It was the end of the war. I know that we fought and won the war but as an artist I am now faced with the many battles that confront me in South Africa. The role of the artist has not changed: The circumstances have altered. The tools are still the same but the call is to utilize our art as a building block for reconstruction. In wars and battles there are casualties and as such the new vocabulary that the artist is utilizing now may just leave out scores of people. The digital age is leaving out not only communities but even artists themselves. National art institutions are having to reinvent themselves in order to be relevant to the new audiences. They need to undergo training in order to carry their regular audiences into the twenty-first century.

MG From the mid-seventies into the eighties, many community art centers were established in black townships in South Africa, and you played an active role in developing the programs of some of them. These centers were founded chiefly to make up for the appalling lack of art teaching in the conventional curriculum of black schools at that time. How did you define the purpose of teaching art in those turbulent times?

BD I have rubbed many people the wrong way by saying that the black artist is a reality in South Africa because of the sheer will to exist. When attempts were made to pave the way for Rorke's Drift fine art graduates to enroll at the University of Natal for further studies, these were flatly rejected on as many grounds as could be fabricated: ministerial approval would be required; the students lacked appropriate school qualifications; the applicants would find the theory too difficult; and so on. Applications were unsuccessful even at the time of the forced closure of Rorke's Drift Fine Art in 1982.

Faced with no prospect for employment but bursting with enthusiasm to impart what little knowledge they had received from a very spasmodic set of teachers--four sets in two years--we were ready to get involved with the establishment of alternative spaces for art teaching. We did not have the best grounding for real teaching methodologies in the field but we knew what we had been taught and with continuous workshops we found ourselves taking active roles in the establishment of many community art centers. In each situation, the call was the same: Learn the skill and use it to empower yourself and your community. Sympathetic foreign embassies joined the struggle to educate students by offering them scholarships to France, the USA, the Netherlands, and Britain and elsewhere. Today we are able to boast a Johannesburg Art Foundation graduate, Rudzani Nemasetoni, who is a household name in New York, USA; Johannes Phokela, a FUBA [Federated Union of Black Artists] graduate under the mentorship of the late Durant Sihlali, now a prolific artist living in London; and there are many others in all the other disciplines.

Teaching art during the seventies and eighties, turbulent as these times were, was to say to the black child: You are a child of the universe and you can be what you want to be. Most have fulfilled their dreams of excelling in their chosen fields. Community art centers filled the void created by the system of government that decided that creative expression was a preserve for the white minority. We proved the government wrong, but the price was and continues to be high. The current debates are on transformation. The major question in the arts is on how you transform national arts institutions when there are no personnel, black or white, that are being trained to take over from the largely self-trained, retiring-age directors and managers. The introduction of art in school curricula is a welcome development, but without trained art teachers, without localized reference material and so on, these changes can have little effect until the art community responds to these challenges.

MG You were involved in the Thupelo Workshops, first as a participant between 1985 and 1987, and then as an organizer from 1988 to 1992, that is, at the precise time that Thupelo was being attacked for promoting abstract, nonpolitical art. How did you personally respond to these criticisms? And, notwithstanding the racist dimension in the critique, do you think that Thupelo was promoting an elitist rather than community-based art?

BD The advent of the Triangle Artists Workshops in Mashomack, upstate New York, and the inclusion of South African artists in the program were well received by the beneficiaries who at the time were mainly black artists. Personally I saw the Thupelo project as an extension of what black artists had been doing all the time: working on the fringes of the white art world. It was therefore very infuriating when, in 1987, elements in the white art world attacked Bill Ainslie and Graham Peacock for what one participant called "Americanizing our black artists." I spoke out, not in Bill or Graham's defense, but my own. For me Thupelo provided an opportunity to develop my art and break out of the stereotype that had been created for black artists. In South Africa, white artists were producing art while their black counterparts were producing black art. My move to administer the Thupelo Art Project was a calculated decision and I am glad because I know that period gave exposure to black artists that would not have happened otherwise.

MG Jacqui Nolte has written that your creative activity "has shifted over the years, from one based on ideas of accessibility and communication of sociopolitical 'truths,' to one defending the right to be subjective and experimental" (Nolte 2001). Do you agree with this assessment? And would you relate this shift to the massive political changes in South Africa?

BD The exposure of the black community to information through technology, television, etc., has partly released the black artist from the art of the eighties that was at times overt propaganda for the liberation struggle. I am not saying that I feel my role has changed but the manner of execution has changed. In 1999, on the exhibition "'Rewind' Fast Forward. ZA," I created a work that talked about the same politics of space that I had addressed in my early linocuts, but I was using photographic installation (Rabie and Bless 1999). The work is accessible, but also advanced from my Forced Removals series even though both are dealing with a similar subject. I think shifts in art-making are responses to a myriad of stimuli and circumstances that the artist gets confronted by at different times.

MG You were centrally involved in the Johannesburg Biennales of 1995 and 1997. Strong feelings were expressed at the time that such events were not accessible to the South African people as a whole, that the money could have been better spent on essential social services. Do you think there is a place for such art in developing countries like South Africa?

BD The advent of rejoining the international communities at political levels meant that all facets of the South African society had to find niches and inroads to make their own reintegration into the global community effective. The Johannesburg Biennale in 1995 did just that. It was not a great or sophisticated art exhibition--it was a milestone and an important gesture of opening ourselves to the world. It worked. There were many criticisms of and towards the project but I believe as a tool for exposure both biennales did a world of good for South African art.

MG Finally, what do you consider the most important role of art to be today, as the New South Africa celebrates ten years of democracy?

BD In 2001, with reference to the artworks program of the South African Constitutional Court in the Old Fort complex in Johannesburg, I said that artists "are (or we should be) barometers of our nation's conscience. We tease society's mind--we keep it busy--we create release valves for ourselves and our society." I believe that if you think about this in relation to both subject matter and form, this is a very important role for artists to play.

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

Atkinson, B., and C. Breitz, eds. 1999. Grey Areas: Representation, Identity and Politics in Contemporary South African Art. Johannesburg: Chalkham Press.

Mnyele, Thamsanqa. 1988. "Thoughts on Bongiwe and the Role of Revolutionary Art." The Years of Staffrider, edited by Andries Olifant and Ivan Vladislavic, pp. 297-302. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Essay first published in 1986.

Nolte, Jacqueline. 2001. Locations and Dis-locations of Personal, Public, and Imaginary Space in the Visual Production often Women Artists Working in South Africa. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Cape Town.

Rabie, B. and F. Bless. 1999. "Rewind" Fast Forward. ZA: New Work from South Africa. Appeldoorn: Van Reekum Museum.