Family Stories of South Africa: Nine Family Histories.

Family Stories of South Africa Nine Family Histories National Cultural History Museum, Pretoria March 31, 2004-March 31, 2005

This is not an art exhibition. Using a mode of display which is more common in historical culture history museums than in art museums, it nevertheless depends almost entirely on visual forms, including "works of art," in its presentation of "history." It subverts any reference to the white cube and, for the most part, subverts the idea that "art" objects are different from other material objects. The formal arrangement of its parts derives from anthropological museum practice and the affiliated form of the cultural village. This is unsurprising in that the curator, Paul Faber, is a director of an anthropological museum, the Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam, which is where the exhibition was first staged. Its present location, the National Culture History Museum in Pretoria, is of like kind: the home of the ethnographic and culture history sections of the old Transvaal Museum, originally a natural history/ethnographic institution. What differentiates this exhibition, though, from historical forms of ethnographic or culture history display is its rejection of the collective, of communal history, in favor of the individual and the familial, in nine family histories traced through three (or more) generations.

As viewers enter the exhibition space, they are confronted by life-size portraits (all by David Goldblatt) of these nine families, posed on their front porches. The central space thus becomes a street onto which the houses of these nine families front, but as a one-way street, it also leads viewers from early history into the present. This path is marked by red circles on the floor chronicling some important dates in South African history, starting with 100,000 BC for the beginnings of human habitation, claiming that: the San arrived in 1000 BC (erroneous), the Dutch in AD 1652, slaves in 1658, and so on through the rise of the Zulu kingdom and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the latter dated to 1990. This history is, however, completely silent about the arrival of the Bantu-speakers in Southern Africa, leaving the viewer with the impression that they have always been here, whereas most historians agree that the San arrived much earlier (ca. 20,000 BC) than the Bantu speakers (ca. AD 200). This omission may speak to the delicacy of historical representation in post-apartheid South Africa, but it does not bode well for our understanding of nationhood because it, by omission, confers a bogus indigeneity on one group and insists on the immigrant status of all others. At the end of this avenue of dates are life-size cut-outs of the nine teenagers on whom the exhibition ostensibly builds its histories, representing the present and near future of South Africa (Fig. 1).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

It is difficult to account for the logic by which the nine families were chosen. In some cases the families appear to have one member who is an icon in South African history, as with Cedric Nunn, whose ancestor, John Dunn, was an Englishman who married forty Zulu wives, or with Tsholo Molefe, whose great uncle was Solomon Plaatje, and Martine Steyn, whose great-great grandfather was one-time president of the Free State. But there are others where there is no icon status. Families from different ethnic communities are represented: Zulu, North Sotho, Hindu Indian, Muslim Indian, Malay, Christian Griqua, and Afrikaner. But descendants of 1820 British settlers--English-speaking South African families--are conspicuous among a number of significant absences. Although the exhibition attempts to steer away from a single master narrative, it is nevertheless not as inclusive as is suggested in the exhibition brochure.

Behind the facade constructed by David Goldblatt's life-size portrait photograph of each family, rendered in slightly washed-out blue tones reminiscent of the harsh light of the highveld or Karoo winters, lies an interior room, or rooms, presenting an idea of the homes or haunts of the individuals in the family. Each of these interiors contains relics, objects associated with their forebears, as well as objects belonging to the living individuals, photographs and video footage of everyday and important events in their lives. Some of the photos were commissioned from professional photographers such as Paul Wienberg, Cedric Nunn, Sean Laurent, and Roger van Wyk, others come from the A. Bailey African Photo Archive (Johannesburg), such as those by Jurgen Schadeberg, and still others from family snapshot albums. Video and film footage in many of these installations adds a further dimension to our understanding of these families' histories. The stories are told through the voices of different generations, youth and adults, in wall texts, photograph captions, and video footage chronicling different world views of individuals who grew up during and after apartheid. It is this variety of voices, these movements away from and rapprochements to traditions, that ultimately denies the master narrative. History here is seen and told in a fragmented view against the master narrative laid down in the paving of the main corridor between the two rows of "homes." But it is also told through photography, whose primacy here attests to the way it has been allowed to function as a representation of reality--as "documentary."

Each family's space functions as a shrine in which a variety of relics, important (or apparently so) because their physical contact with historical figures suffuses them with contagious magic, are set up next to photographs and commentaries by members of the family. In the case of Dolly Rathebe's interior, a living room melts into a shebeen (an illegal liquor bar) in which her movie lira Comes to Town loops endlessly. In the case of the Plaatje/Molefe family, the interior space moves from Sol Plaatje's desk around the room through the generations to the present--represented by different wardrobes of clothing. The strains of Nkosi Sikelel' i Afrika sound endlessly in the background of this interior, while in others, such as the Galada house, sounds of videotaped Christian gospel choirs play constantly, as in the Manuel household does the call of the muezzin. Some the interiors gel more successfully than others--the layout of the Steyn family relics in the opulence of the wood-paneled interior is the most fully integrated of all, followed by the interior of the Manuel's space, where the roof is acknowledged as an over-arching dome. In many of the others, the spaces are divided into segments, more or less corresponding to the different generations.

Within each family's space, commissioned work by a specific artist was used to add another dimension to the interpretation of these histories. Apart from the photographs--also authored by individuals, but apparently viewed as documentary--these works add another interpretative layer to the exhibition, from Andrew Verster's interpretation of Indian material culture, through Penny Siopis's large montage for the Plaatje/Molefe family, to Sam Nhlengethwa's cut-out collages of Dolly Rathebe and Langwa Magwa's mixed media (animal skin, cloth, and paint) Abakwe Mthethwa. These works, commissioned for the show, suggest the openness of history to intervention, but they are so completely unexplained in the context of the exhibition itself (the artists are not acknowledged there at all) that they become an enigmatic afterthought, possibly missed by many who have seen the exhibition.

As history, the exhibition stands in contrast to the verbal narrative offered in the book published as a spin-off from the show. Group Portrait: Nine Family Histories, edited by Paul Faber and Annari van der Merwe, (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2003; R299.00; ISBN 07957-0139-x) has extensive text narratives, and identifies the artists of the works and photographs (along with their potted histories). It is probable that the exhibition would communicate much better to those who had already read the book.