Читать книгу A Long Way Home - Deborah James - Страница 8

CHAPTER 1

Ngezinyawo — Migrant Journeys

Fiona Rankin-Smith

In 2004, I participated as one of the curators in an important exhibition entitled ‘Democracy X: Marking the Present – Re-Presenting the Past’, held in the Castle galleries of Iziko Museums in Cape Town.

The flagship exhibition formed part of the celebrations to mark a decade of democracy in South Africa. The exhibition covered the long sweep of South African history – from the first traces of human past, in ochre fragments with engraved lines, found at the Blombos caves in the Eastern Cape and dating back 70 000 years to the present. The exhibition used significant objects pertaining to migrancy, documents and other forms of archive that explored the history, politics and culture of South Africa from past to present. Curator Sandra Klopper and I were assigned to source objects and items that best exemplified migrancy and migrant culture. Although it was only a small part of the ‘Democracy X’ exhibition, I discussed with Peter Delius, a historian on the curatorial team, the desirability of staging a comprehensive exhibition about migrant labour. Responsible for multiple transformations wrought in our society over 200 years and across southern and central Africa, the richness of this subject seemed worthy of much more serious interrogation for a future exhibition.

‘Ngezinyawo — Migrant Journeys’ takes that seed of an idea and extends across disciplines to include film, photography, artworks, artefacts from ethnographic collections, archival documents, interviews and other forms, such as performance, music and dance, in ways that explore the rich and diverse ramifications of the migrant labour system that has built South Africa’s economy. The exhibition takes place in three levels of the Wits Art Museum at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg: in the Street and Core Galleries on the ground level, the Strip space, which is half way to the basement space, and the Mezzanine, which is the upper level of the Wits Art Museum display areas.

Journey/transformation

The theme of journeying is threaded metaphorically throughout the exhibition, constantly referring to travelling between spaces, on foot originally. The journeys made by men from rural to urban spaces in search of labour were often very long and full of danger and hardships. The roots of the migrant labour system stretch back to ancient trading networks and forms of mobility within African societies. By the 1860s, thousands of young men from Lesotho, the Transvaal and Mozambique tramped to the Cape and Natal in search of work and the prized commodities – especially firearms – that wages enabled them to secure. The experience of travelling between the rural homestead and the mines and urban centres in search of work was a defining experience for migrant workers, separating and connecting various emotional universes.

This exhibition is centred on the concept of journeys across and between different worlds, journeys that both unite and overlap the differences, creating linkages between objects. The objects’ significance resonates within multiple categories of the exhibition, symbolic of the journeys travelled between the rural and the urban, from home to places of work that were often dehumanising and foreign. Thus the placement of the objects and images in the exhibition are not organised according to a specific historical timeline. Instead, the exhibition progresses along the routes of a migrant journey, where fine art objects are sometimes juxtaposed with other objects, the original intent of which would not have been as works of art. The curatorial intention here is to include the kinds of linkages mentioned above, as well as archival documents, to expand their meanings and bring a multiperspectival aspect to understanding the complexities of migrancy.

Figure 1.1

Photographer unrecorded

Migrant workers bound for the gold fields Date unrecorded

Courtesy of Museum Africa, Johannesburg

Rural/urban

The exhibition begins at the entrance to the museum in the Street space and looks at the divide between the rural spaces that early migrants would have left in order to find work and the cities and towns they arrived in. A life-size black and white photograph from the nineteenth century of two male migrants, beckons the viewer into the exhibition. Both men, dressed in long coats and hats, are barefoot, carrying their belongings on their backs, each clutching a tin and a handful of carved wooden sticks and a knotted cloth bag filled with meagre belongings. They look directly towards the camera. Standing on a dusty road in a rural landscape, devoid of any other human life or dwelling, they appear to have been on a long trek on foot. They introduce a leitmotif of the exhibition: the long journeys travelled and the daily hardships faced by migrants. Close to the photograph of the walking miners, in glass cabinets, are a range of carved walking sticks and a number of nineteenth-century headrests, all from southern Africa. The juxtaposition of ethnographic items and the photograph indicate a curatorial device repeated throughout the exhibition, which is a means of providing a context to assist the viewer in understanding the links between art and ethnography.

In the 1860s in Natal and later in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, the British South African Company agents of the colonial government imposed taxes on black Africans on a per-hut basis. Colonial administrators, aiming to generate revenue, forced people off their land in search of jobs, in order to pay their taxes. A collection of 12 Rhodesian hut tax tokens, from the beginning of the twentieth century, are placed near the beginning of the exhibition and exemplify a key element of what necessitated the early part of the migrant journey.

Meeting of Two Cultures, a linocut by the Eastern Cape artist Sandile Goje, exemplifies the significance of walking across diverse landscapes. The work is based on the subject of reconciliation a year before South Africa’s first democratic election, in which Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress candidate, was elected president. The title and imagery reflect the artist’s optimism about reconciliation between black and white South Africans, as well as the comparison of rural versus urban existence.¹ This is represented by a handshake between a circular thatched Xhosa rural dwelling and a Western-style suburban brick house. The symbolism of these anthropomorphised buildings, placed in an inhospitable and uninhabited landscape, represents the coming together of two separate worlds and the journeys of men and women who vacate rural homesteads to find work in the cities. They also represent the differences in lifestyles between black and white, the rectangular ‘modern’ house is dressed in smart pants and has good shoes, while the rural house’s legs are thin and its feet bare.

Being away from home also meant a lack of communication with the homestead and letter writing formed an important link between the two worlds. Wits Art Museum has a collection of 46 illustrated envelopes containing letters written to and from the Zulu artist Tito Zungu. The contents of the letters refer to domestic matters, such as financial requests and information about loved ones. Examples of his imaginative aspirational images of aeroplanes and of transistor radios drawn on the envelopes, embellished in coloured ballpoint pens, can be seen in display cases in the Street Gallery.²

Simon Stone’s Figure in a Landscape is an image of a migrant worker straddling a series of railway lines in a cityscape. What seems a naturalistic of portrayal of the cityscape south of the Johannesburg Art Gallery is unnerved by the intrusion of a large zombie-like figure, a migrant in a white vest holding a beaded iwisa, a fighting stick. Looming large at the front of the picture, his face has morphed into an African mask reminiscent of Picasso’s primitivist painting, Les Demoiselles D’Avignon. The migrant creature seems uncomfortable as he straddles and hovers above the railway lines, almost as if he had been inserted into the city from another place. The journey metaphor is alluded to by the labyrinth of railway lines that connect the city to the townships and further to the rural edges of the country.

Figure 1.2

Sandile Goje Meeting of two cultures 1993

Linocut 34.4 × 50 cm

Wits Art Museum Collection

Figure 1.3

Simon Stone

Figure in a landscape 1981

Oil on canvas 108 × 108 cm

Collection of Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler, Handspring Puppet Company

Life in the hostels

When migrants first began to work on the diamond and gold mines towards the end of the nineteenth century, they usually took with them treasured artefacts, such as blankets and fighting sticks. The mining compounds, to which they were confined during their prolonged absence from their families, provided only a concrete bed and bare walls. This led to a reaffirmation of strong connections to their homes in the rural areas and they quickly developed a deep nostalgia for domestic artefacts, garments, rituals and songs. Throughout the exhibition, richly diverse objects and items of dress made by migrants and/or their wives have been selected to exemplify the resilience and interconnectedness between the worlds of loved ones left at home and the rural identities that were lost in the city existence.

The central space in the Wits Art Museum, the Gertrude Posel Core Gallery, is the focus of artworks that deal with injustice and the harsh conditions faced by migrant workers. Poignant and powerful sculptures, paintings and photographs that cut to the core of the migrant’s plight are given centre stage here, as the space allows for dramatic views from the sweeping ramp that leads to the Mezzanine Gallery and looks back down into the Core space.

Michael Goldberg’s seminal installation sculpture, Hostel Monument for the Migrant Worker, is a construction of three metal bed frames, welded closely above one another into a tiered bunk. At one end of the bunk are bundles of deliberately harvested materials: thatching grass, ox horns and sticks of wattle, each bound with leather handles, that serve as echoes of the rural life left behind. At the foot of each level of the bunk are thin miners’ blankets, neatly folded, each with a faceless, black wind-up clock. A thin electric cord with a naked light bulb hangs above the centre of the top bunk, representing the regimentation of work and sleep shifts. The banality and simplicity of this sculpture provides a powerful evocation of the abject daily existence of the single-sex hostels that men were forced to live in while at work in the cities.

George Tobias’s Untitled, a plaster of Paris sculpture, pays homage to the thousands of migrants who toiled underground for the benefit of mine-owners. The work, which consists of hundreds of ‘gold bars’, each topped with a figure of a helmeted worker lying prostrate, evokes the idea of cheap labour as integral to building the economy. The ‘gold bars’ are layered into a pyramid shape, invoking the shapes of the mine dumps that were part of the Johannesburg skyline for years, but have recently either been eroded or removed and sifted through for traces of gold dust.

The exhibition extends to the Strip, a narrow space that runs alongside a staircase leading to the basement gallery. This section of the gallery allows for smaller works to be exhibited. The Strip space is below ground level and this is where works that concern mining and mineworkers are exhibited. There are a number of archival documents and images from the Wits Historical Papers, including a ‘Register of Native Accidents’ from the Simmer and Jack Mines and postcards of Chinese miners from c.1900–1910.

Figure 1.4

Michael Goldberg Hostel monument for the migrant worker 1978

Mixed media installation of found material 138 × 195.5 × 78 cm

Wits Art Museum Collection

William Kentridge’s film, Mine, made from a series of animated drawings, deals with life on the mines and is split between the nameless mineworkers under the surface and the protagonist, capitalist Soho Eksteen, above. He controls their lives and his wealth lying comfortably in his bed, as the miners swarm below in the earth’s underbelly, sleeping in rows in tiny concrete bunks. Mark Rosenthal points out that Kentridge’s approach is not subtle: ‘Here he is a political artist in the traditional sense, depicting the perpetrator of horror as a deeply despicable person.’³ Mine juxtaposes the enormous schisms between lives of wealth and poverty that are so familiar in South Africa, particularly in the city of Johannesburg, where the artist lives and works. The city of Johannesburg was founded on the discovery of gold and today is an economic powerhouse in Africa. The city is part of the province previously known as the Transvaal, renamed Gauteng (Sesotho), meaning ‘place of gold’, after the first democratic elections of 27 April 1994.

Figure 1.5

Installation from the exhibition Ngezinyawo – Migrant Journeys in the Gertrude Posel Core Gallery with Untitled (gold bars) in the foreground.

George Tobias

Untitled (gold bars) 1984

Plaster of Paris, paint Dimensions variable

Wits Art Museum Collection

Work/daily life/transcendence

The Mezzanine Gallery extends beyond the ramp that runs through the Core space. The exhibits in this section look at the notion of resilience and resistance as part of the journey, through an examination of the immense varieties of creative output by men and women, despite their daily hardships.

For young men, the experience of leaving home for the first time was seen as a rite of passage and the act of travelling between these two worlds gave rise to a range of migrant songs. The rhythms that occur in this music often refer to the colliding and collapsing boundaries between time and space. In keeping with this rhythmic structure, these songs often integrate the repetitive sound of people walking. In both the rural and migrant context, musical performance plays a vital role as a primary context for oral histories, social commentary, artistic expression and the ordering of social, cultural and religious realities. A large collection of musical instruments from the ethnographic collection of the Anthropology department at the University of the Witwatersrand are now housed at the Wits Art Museum, including Chopi marimbas (xylophones) from Mozambique. Chopi marimba players were hugely popular in the hostels and sound bytes of their performances, made famous by the work of ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey, and recordings of Sotho migrant songs collected by David Coplan are included here, with photographic images of drums and trumpets, as well as drums made from recycled objects, such as plastic paint tins and rubber from the inner tubes of car tyres.

In Cedric Nunn’s Migrant Worker from the Eastern Cape on a Sugar Farm, Margate, KwaZulu-Natal, a migrant worker with his guitar is photographed against a wide backdrop of hills of sugarcane fields. Mpondo migrant workers from the Eastern Cape found work on sugar farms in KwaZulu-Natal and were forced to work separately from Zulu workers as lowly regarded cane-cutters. Juxtaposed with the photograph of this migrant worker are a number of drums made by Sotho migrant workers in a village in Lesotho and collected by Max Mikula of the Phansi Museum in Durban. The drums were made from recycled materials, such as a 44-gallon steel drum with animal skin stretched over the top for beating and a plastic paint container with rubber tubing stretched across the top to form the drumhead.

Longing for ‘home’ plays a crucial role in the world views of most migrant labourers and, as a result, migrants living in hostels formed urban associations that accommodated their hybrid cultural expressions, such as the Amalaita who created expressions of masculinity and marginalisation that bridged the migrant experience of town and countryside. The Amalaita groups would often march with traditional weapons, such as amawisa (Zulu knobkerries) that would be embellished with coloured plastic telephone wire in tightly woven geometric patterns, identifying the user with a particular geographical region of KwaZulu-Natal.

Figure 1.6

William Kentridge

Miners in tunnel 1991

Still from animated film Mine Charcoal on paper

Dimensions 68 × 110 cm

Durban Art Gallery Collection

Figure 1.7

William Kentridge

Soho Eksteen 1991

Still from animated film Mine 16 mm film transferred to video, 5.50 min

Collection of the artist

In the 1940s, the Johannesburg City Council established a number of men’s hostels, including the Mai Mai hostel, to house migrant workers employed in a variety of industries. Over time, this and other hostel complexes became flourishing markets, where traders sold artefacts, such as meat plates, headrests and beadwork obtained from rural carvers and beadworkers, as well as objects and clothing produced at the markets themselves. The Mezzanine Gallery features a number of embellished garments belonging to workers, perhaps even purchased from Mai Mai or the likes thereof, including items of clothing, such as a Zulu migrant’s waistcoat (intolibhantshi) and a blazer completely covered with strips of beadwork, typical of the style of beadwork found in the Bergville region of KwaZulu-Natal, reaffirming connections to migrant workers’ rural homes.

Figure 1.8

Cedric Nunn

Migrant worker from the Eastern Cape on a sugar farm, Mangete, KwaZulu-Natal 1987

Silver gelatin print 31 × 46.4 cm

Collection of the artist, courtesy of the Bailey Seippel Gallery, Johannesburg

However, over the past century and a half, migrant workers’ everyday art incorporated techniques and materials that reflected the hybrid cultural influences of metropolis and mine. Traditional headrests were also modified into more idiosyncratic forms and carvers incorporated materials reflecting aspects of modernity. Similarly, from about the 1950s onwards, colourful pieces of plastic were cut into geometric shapes before being nailed with fine metal shafts (apparently modified used gramophone record needles) onto circular discs of wood to form iziqhaza (earplugs).

Discarded items of urban Western culture were often recycled. Xhosa workers would return home from the mines with machine gaskets, which would be transformed by women, using coloured glass beads and brightly coloured pink wool, into an ugcambizana (beaded neck ring), commonly worn by men in the Eastern Cape.

Today, forms of plastic are recycled in equally inventive ways. For example, soccer fans transform the plastic hard hats worn by construction workers into dramatic headgear, emblazoned with the colours and advertising logos of their favourite soccer teams, such as Kaizer Chiefs or Orlando Pirates.

Into the early twentieth century, the migrant labour system primarily fed mining industries, but by the 1930s and during the next four decades, an expanding manufacturing sector had afforded itinerant workers new opportunities for employment as messengers and factory hands. At the same time, with stricter pass laws, these migrants found it difficult to settle permanently in urban centres. Despite intensifying influx control, men continued to secure work as domestics in the white households of Pretoria and Johannesburg, while more and more women trickled into cities in search of jobs, usually against the wishes of their elders, husbands, brothers and chiefs. With strong patriarchal constraints restricting female movement in the traditional countryside, however, the majority of women remained in their rural homesteads, looking after the very young and the old, as well as crafting beautiful apparel and adornments. Many African communities found modern equivalents for traditional items. Glass beads are generally imported from Europe and are expensive to purchase and women crafters have found cheaper and more readily available replacements that have been thoroughly integrated into traditional forms. When Xhosa women are nursing, they sometimes wear necklaces to identify their breastfeeding status. Necklaces incorporate objects such as plastic baby formula spoons and plastic curlers demonstrating this, as well as providing soft surfaces for babies as they begin teething.

Figure 1.9

Artist unrecorded Zulu, KwaZulu-Natal intolibhantshi (waistcoat)

Date unrecorded Textile, beads 64 × 41 cm

Standard Bank African Art Collection (Wits Art Museum)

Figure 1.10

Artist unrecorded Zulu, KwaZulu-Natal Ibhantshi (beaded suit jacket)

Date unrecorded Textile, beads 110 × 83.5 cm

Standard Bank African Art Collection (Wits Art Museum)

Figure 1.11

Artist unrecorded Zulu, KwaZulu-Natal Isigqiki (headrest)

Date unrecorded Wood, plastic, metal studs 17 × 65 × 5.5 cm

Standard Bank African Art Collection (Wits Art Museum)

With the easing of influx control in the mid-1980s, unprecedented numbers of people from rural communities flooded into informal settlements on the outskirts of cities, struggling to sustain both an urban existence and a rural abode. In 1983, David Goldblatt participated in the Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty Alleviation. He made a photographic essay about public transport, focusing on workers who travelled early every morning from the bus depot in KwaNdebele to Pretoria to their day jobs. Their daily journeys took eight hours. The blurry image shown here, taken by the artist on a moving bus, shows exhausted passengers hunched over, sleeping upright, in extremely cramped conditions.

As the twentieth century progressed, growing numbers of women travelled to town. Dora Ntlansana by Keith Dietrich is a life-size portrait drawn in pastels of a female domestic worker from Lesotho. This dual identity is clearly indicated by the typical lilac domestic worker’s overall and the ‘traditional’, woollen, factory-printed Sotho blanket wrapped around her waist. Such designs are typically favoured by both male and female Sesotho speakers. The artist has employed tropes of colonial photography, such as the woman’s carrying a burden on her head, characterising her as the domestic Other, although the object, a box of oats, clearly situates her in a contemporary urban setting.

Figure 1.12

Artist unrecorded

Mpondo, Eastern Cape Ugcazimbana (beaded neck ring)

Date unrecorded Rubber found object, wool, beads 24.6 × 24.9 cm

Standard Bank African Art Collection (Wits Art Museum)

Figure 1.13

Artist unrecorded,

Xhosa, Eastern Cape Nursing necklace

Date unrecorded

Plastic found objects, beads 67 × 5.8 cm

Standard Bank African Art Collection (Wits Art Museum)

Mary Sibande, a contemporary Johannesburg artist, has created a series of works that explore the fantasy world of a fictitious domestic worker called Sophie, who dreams of other lives and believes she can transcend her mundane daily life as a domestic worker. In I Put a Spell on Me, Sophie is dressed in what looks like an enormous nineteenth-century bustle dress, in colours worn by the local Zionist Christian churchgoers, who are often seen in the Johannesburg surrounds on weekends, worshipping in parks and open spaces. Her arms are outstretched in a gesture of reverence or surrender. She holds a Zionist staff in her left hand and it seems as if she is deep in some sort of spiritual communication.

Figure 1.14

David Goldblatt

The transported of KwaNdebele, Wolwekraal to Marabastad bus 1984

David Goldblatt, courtesy of the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town

By the middle of the twentieth century, professional photographers on the Witwatersrand had set up studios that catered to migrant workers who wanted to sit for their portraits. In the same way that the pair of early migrants greet the viewer at the entrance to the museum, life-size images taken in the mid-1950s from one such studio in the Pretoria area here show male migrants with an eclectic mix of beadwork and other accoutrements. The beadwork panels integrate long-standing indigenous art forms with the sartorial splendour commonly aspired to by black middle-class men, attesting both to the inventive ways in which migrants negotiated their daily experiences and the critical value they attached to their evolving notions of beauty.

Conclusion

While many ties developed between migrant workers and more permanently urbanised communities, there were also often deep tensions and divisions, which, on a number of occasions – sometimes with more than a little encouragement from shadowy agents of the state – spilled over into open conflict. This violence highlights the complexities of migrancy and warns against a simple juxtaposition between imposed controls and the resilience and creativity of the migrants. The elements of personal agency that migrants maintained were also implicated in forms of patriarchy and chilling violence.

The exhibition comes at a time of particular relevance to the plight of migrants, considering the upheavals in the mining sector (culminating in the Marikana massacre), providing a window on to the structural and personal violence that have long disfigured the system and coloured wider South African society. The broad expanse of the themes covered in this rich and diverse exhibition bring together extraordinarily varied creations of material culture, showcasing the heritage of many of the southern African language groups. The exhibition reaffirms the ways in which migrants sought to express and protect their humanity, despite the hardships and humiliations of their journeys.

Notes

1.For a detailed discussion, see P Hobbs and E Ranking, Printmaking in a Transforming South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 1997), 44.

2.See Julia Charlton’s Chapter 13 in this volume on the decorated envelopes and letters of Tito Zungu.

3.M Rosenthal (ed.), William Kentridge: Five Themes (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; West Palm Beach: Norton Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 41.

Figure 1.15

Keith Dietrich Dora Ntlansana 1985

Pastel on paper 188.5 × 66.3 cm

Wits Art Museum Collection

Figure 1.16

Photographer unrecorded Zulu male migrant worker c.1956

Photographic studio in Marabastad, Pretoria Private Collection