Reportedly still holding the JAG in high esteem despite having showed in some of the world's premiere exhibition venues, William Kentridge has put his money where his mouth is and installed a magnificent, if tragic show at the gallery this month. A more-than-adequate riposte to Kendell Geers' ridiculously sweeping scolding of SA artists at the same venue last year, Kentridge's show simply oozes persuasive authority and technical and conceptual acuity.

Born out of the Deutsche Bank and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation's commissioning programme for the Deutsche Guggenheim, 'Black Box' reveals the extent to which Kentridge has become one of the major players on the global art stage. And at its heart, the show is an extension of Kentridge's early-career interest in Weimar-era German art and culture, and the parallels it held for an African context.

There is always a sense with Kentridge shows that one has arrived too late for an event. Maybe it's because one would wish to see the development of his animated films as they evolve, rather than gaze at the fait accompli palimpsest-drawings trying to retrace the drawing and animation process. Or maybe it's simply because the main focus of his shows is usually some form of film, and one inevitably arrives in the middle or at the end of a loop. Whichever it is, that sense of being too late has been central to my appreciation of Kentridge's power for as long as I've known about his work.

One of my earliest experiences of Kentridge was poring for hours over a repro of 1986's The Embarkation Triptych in a catalogue my father brought back from the Standard Bank Gallery. Though details, cropped vignettes of half-told stories, abound in this work, the inescapable sensation the drawing presents is one of having missed a momentous, possibly terrible event. 'Black Box' uses a similar device.

The event referred to is the 1904 systematic massacre of the Namibian Herero people by the German occupiers. The event, referred to by some historians as the first genocide of the 20th Century (by 1905, 75% of the Herero population had been killed), is described in the show through the reworking of numerous found documents, which underline that this was more hostile takeover than ethnic cleansing. Ledgers detailing share prices and ownership, lists of workers, and a later death list ('Totenliste') are worked over in variously sparse and dense manners, serving as the formats for the animations that make up the film. In their incompleteness, these lists recall the black box of an aeroplane, the device that records all radio correspondence and which is used to piece together a sequence of events should the 'plane crash.

The dispassionate nature of accounting (the 'Totenliste' calmly divides the dead according to that which caused them to perish: hunger, thirst, etc) parallels the methodical brutality that marked colonialism in Namibia. This sense that by the time the 20th Century rolled around, colonialism was just 'business as usual' for European invaders, pervades the show. Rather than understanding colonialism by unpacking the rhetoric than supported it, Kentridge opts to look at the commerce that drove it. Sometimes this commerce is quaint, as in rudimentary print advertisements for binoculars and breast firming cream; elsewhere, as in the mining share lists, it is altogether more serious.

As one moves on to the production, the theme of measuring and quantification becomes increasingly important. Maps, documents of quantified land, appear and reappear as backdrops for the drama, as do pages from the ledgers. An abject little motorised set of compasses commands sections of the production with spindly arms, and a similarly motorised protractor emerges from the wings of the small stage. One senses a desperate desire to measure, quantify and thus contain a situation, a people, a continent. As the Herero nation grew more and more resistant to German encroachment on to their land, eventually launching a rebellion led by Chief Samuel Mahareru, so German attempts at control grew more and more violent, culminating in the methods of General Lothar von Trotha, the German leader of the genocide.

The production appropriately builds to a kind of climax, aided by the soundtrack which layers (among others) clips of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte a Herero lament and a Herero praise song. Original musical compositions by long time Kentridge collaborator composer Philip Miller are critical in maintaining the power and drama of the piece. Skulls emerge, and a Goya-esque scene of silhouettes beating each other and then a third party with clubs casts the massacre in personal terms.

The avoidance of scenes of mass killing and suffering is underscored by exhibition curator Maria-Christina Villaseñor's statement that the show 'problematizes simplistic constructions of history using binaries of... victim and victimizer, spectacle and spectator'. Instead, presented as we are with the detritus of an event, we are once again left feeling that we have arrived too late to do anything, or even to fully understand; such is one aspect of the legacy of colonialism, and Kentridge is insightful to point it out.

The production opens and closes with the emergence of yet another little motorised figure, this time a loud hailer on wheels bearing the legend 'Trauerarbeit'. This refers to the Freudian concept of 'grief work'; Villaseñor points to Kentridge's interpretation of this concept as 'a labour without end'. The show is in its own way a form of this grief work yet, as Villaseñor points out, 'resist[s] closure'; the task of trying to understand, quantify an calibrate such an atrocity is doomed to be a labour without end.