Understanding myself, here, at this time

Natasha Norman in conversation with Chris Swift

Natasha Norman: I want to start with the title of your recent exhibition at Commune.1, 'Umlungu'. It was a particularly derogatory term for a white man, but in Cape Town hipster circles it now has a kind of street smartness to it. What is your relationship is to this word?

Chris Swift: Street smartness – interesting you should comment on it like that. Maybe it indicates a loosening up of the power associated with language, and white South Africans embracing the associations that come with being identified in another language. 'Umlungu', the term, has not changed; it’s the perceptions and reactions to it that have. At one point it was felt that being called 'umlungu' was derogatory and now, maybe as white South Africans we’ve become more accepting of being called 'umlungu' – because that’s what we are. Now that those channels and visors have been taken down we’re in this twenty-year process of understanding what we do in this country, coming to terms with our whiteness.

NN: Does that relate to a feeling of insider/outsider for you, or is it just an acceptance of this as 'my whiteness'? 

CS: The objective for me is to understand what I am more fully, what I represent. In my undergraduate work, Trojan Horse (2009), I collected wood that I then delivered to Crossroads, to the site of the Trojan Horse Massacre in 1985. I idealistically conceived a kind of full cycle in the project, from political atrocity to reparation; I came in as a kind of white Superman with this wood that I’d collected and painstakingly taken the nails out of. My gift caused major upset between various factions of the community, and eventually it was burnt. It became the complete antithesis of the goodwill I’d naively intended. Why? All the energy that had gone into that was from a place of good intention. 

I understand now that I have to accept that outcome, that it wasn’t personally aimed at me, but rather a conglomerate of events and interactions with white benefactors stretching back to the early missionaries and colonising European powers, right up until now. This is not just a localised example: it talks to bigger parts of the puzzle, like the world’s monetary federation not understanding a place but offering it first world solutions, and completely messing up the system. 

If I can understand the legacy of my whiteness, and what it represents presently, I will be better equipped to operate in the future and know how to contribute to this country in a way that is not patronising and will have a long-lasting and positive effect. 

NN: The ideas in your exhibition seemed very concerned with European origins. If I look at the titles Trunk Call (slang for a long distance phone call in Commonwealth Countries), The Magic Faraway Tree (a classic English children’s story by Enid Blyton) and the tree hunting-trophy horns in the upstairs exhibition space, there seems to be a big reference to a particular colonial culture. I want to pick at that thread that runs through this exhibition. 

CS: That talks to your original question about 'umlungu'. We didn’t arrive at this meaning overnight; in fact, the meaning is in constant flux. My ownership of being a white African is not limited to my lifetime but forms part of a long history, one that is literally part of the gallery I exhibited in, a 250-year-old colonial relic stripped back to its original stone, plaster and unbaked brick. My exhibition was about my discovery of what it is to be a white African. I need to understand where I come from and what I represent, independent of my liberal personal politics. 

My parents are from Glasgow; I am a first generation South African. When I’ve visited Scotland, I feel 100% South African. How many generations do you have to live in South Africa before you are considered an African? Is it time based, or does it depend on the intention? The metaphor nested in my recurring Stone Pine motif acts as a non-confrontational way of engaging identity politics.

NN: Let’s look at the Stone Pine motif. It is definitely a breadcrumb trail running through this exhibition. Capetonians will know the Stone Pine from the Groote Schuur Estate, and Rhodes Memorial particularly. The Kew Royal Botanical Gardens website describes its timber as 'of poor quality, being course and resinous but used locally in furniture-making'. It is regarded as a mainly decorative tree and useful for its pine nuts. The Groote Schuur National Park pamphlet describes the planting of these trees by the Dutch East India Company as primarily intended to make the landscape aesthetically pleasing to a European sensibility. So it’s quite a fascinating visual metaphor. Can you speak to your appropriation of it in your exhibition?

CS: To be pedantic, the Stone Pine is a native of the African continent, albeit along the Mediterranean coastline – but that’s beside the point. Personally, I think it was planted for use as timber in an area that was notorious for its South Easter, and therefore didn’t have much in the way of tall trees that could be used in industry, for shade, or function as a windbreak. But accepting that they were used simply for aesthetic purposes, that is interesting. 

It makes me think of Cecil John Rhodes, an immensely interesting, if contradictory character. On the one hand he was this amazing benefactor and conservation visionary: he donated vast swathes of land to the University of Cape Town. But, he was also an imperialist: his activities extended as far as Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia. Rhodes’s legacy highlights the duality at the heart of our European heritage. I’m trying not to use the words 'good' or 'bad'. 

Modern South Africa has an infrastructure that – I’ll go out on a limb here – is the product of the projection and thinking of, originally, the Dutch, and subsequently the English, who colonized through engineering, building roads, for example, and also religion. I’m not making a judgment on this being either right or wrong. I’m aware that this country was built by cheap labour, through the sweat of the poor, who were mostly black, Chinese and Indian slaves. South Africa was built on cheap labour. But now, today, we have the infrastructure. In a way that’s what the Stone Pine motif talks about, or to – this ambiguous thing that comes here. I wanted to look at the imposition of a culture on a space and maybe where that culture comes up against another culture. The difficulties and the subtleties of that, and of course the possibilities of that.