A selection from Sue Williamson's A Few South Africans at the Durban Art Gallery
by Peter Machen
I was just in my teens in the early 80s when Sue Williamson first started producing her seminal body of work A Few South Africans. And it is a mark of how effectively the apartheid propaganda machine worked that I had barely heard of any of the women whose lives Williamson documented, until I started university. Now, many of the women are household names in our country, even while women still bear the weight of our society's pressures.
A Few South Africans was produced with the intention of filling the representational void created by apartheid. It showcased a strong cross-section of South African women, all of whom were either fighting the apartheid system or whose lives had been irrevocably shaped by its forces. Williamson's continuum of female South Africa included such revolutionaries as Annie Silinga, who insistently refused to carry a pass all her life, and Winnie Mandela, whose role as mother of the nation never impinged on her dedication as a freedom fighter. Included too, were women such as domestic worker Maggie Magaba whose compassion and love for her white charges never wavered, despite the fact that it was at the expense of experiencing her own children's childhood.
The Durban Art Gallery is currently showing a selection of works from this series. As well as Silinga, Mandela and Magaba, the selection includes Helen Joseph, Lilian Ngoyi, Elizabeth Paul and Albertina Sisulu. The works consist of diptychs of silk-screened portraits with accompanying texts. The portraits echo the pre-digital cut-and-paste that was a consistent thread through 80s and early 90s protest art and poster design in South Africa, but is far more refined than many of the agitprop designs aimed at mobilising the masses. Williamson places her subject within textured and patterned borders onto which flows iconography, illustrating some of the details of each woman's story.
Reflecting on the lives of these women and all that they fought for - for us now - I can't help but think that gender representativity, both in imagery and politics, has been used in this country to mask a multitude of sins against women. We have one of the world's most nationally representative parliaments and inclusive constitutions, but South Africa is still statistically a dangerous place if you are a woman. Women remain the group that bears the brunt of the country's poverty.
The exhibition of this selection is well timed, perhaps intentionally, in relation to our contemporary politics which is dominated by a particularly masculine intensity, and which is worlds away from Thabo Mbeki's much-vaunted possibility of a woman successor. That vision - if it was ever more than idealistic hot air - is now stalled on the runway. Whatever you might say about Jacob Zuma, he's certainly not what you would call a feminist.
My central response viewing the DAG exhibition was to think about how far removed the broad set of values embodied by these women is from both our politics and our collective social aspirations. This is a recurrent theme at the moment in our national conversations - expressed in the value gulf between the pre- and post-liberation ANC, and, of the handful of people who passed through the gallery while I was there, two others expressed the same sentiment.
I'm not sure whether this gulf is more pronounced because Williamson chose to document only women. I suspect so, but only because the human values of our society - above and beyond all cliché - are most often expressed in action by our country's women. And we could do ourselves a collective favour by reconsidering the values here, values expressed through lives lived more than through ideology, counter-revolutionary or otherwise.
Opens: January 20
Closes: February 25
Durban Art Gallery
2nd Floor City Hall, Anton Lembede St (former Smith St) Durban
Tel: (031) 311 2264
Fax: (031) 311 2273
Email: strettonj@durban.gov.za
