Erasure and exposure: two sides of a stalled debate on identity
The combined malice, arrogance and incompetence of the Gupta-Zuma patronage network has many consequences. Although they have taken us to the brink, their overreaching idiocy exposes and weakens them. But because everything they touch is so corrupted, some important and difficult “national conversations” have become stymied and tainted.
Debates about race and redress, in particular, have been stalled. We know “white monopoly capital” is a Zuma faction weasel phrase. We know Andile Mngxitama and his Black First Land First stooges are paid Gupta henchmen. Will I, as a white South African, stand up for white journalists who are threatened by these thugs?
You’re damn right I will. I will suppress my views about media ownership and the whiteness of discourse in the public sphere because now there is a more immediate priority: media freedom. But do you see what happens in this process? We don’t tackle the problems we should be tackling.
For example, when Bell Pottinger is (rightly) accused of “stoking racial tensions” in SA, it can have the effect of endorsing race denialism and rainbowism. As Scott Burnett asked on Twitter, “Are we now making ‘racial tensions’ the fault of some suit in London? Like without Bell Pottinger we’d be singing Shosholoza/Kumbaya medleys? Race in SA is a nextlevel disaster, without foreign public relations firms.”
Best-case scenario: the Guptas go and leech off another state, Jacob Zuma and his allies disappear and the ANC is voted out of power.
What then? We will still be a society in which only a few have a name and a face; only a few are comfortable and safe; only a few enjoy the full rights of citizenship. And race will remain a crucial component of this privilege.
The clash between anonymity and identity is acutely manifested in a twin exhibition at Lizamore & Associates (155 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood): Robert A Hamblin’s InterseXion and Lekau Matsena’s Us and Them.
In Matsena’s mixed-media works, the subjects are explicitly marked as anonymous. In What Makes You?, historical faces peer from the background (Steve Biko, Joseph Stalin, Mahatma Gandhi, Paul Kruger) but the central figure – the “you” of the title – is faceless. The two female figures burdened by the baggage of violent masculinity in #MENARETRASH have their faces turned away.
La Dolce Vita emphasises black anonymity and white identity: faceless nannies looking after a white child are compared to dated photographs of white women tanning. Small wonder, then, that the artist should bitterly invoke a US segregationist poster asking, “Nigger don’t you wish you were white?”.
Matsena alludes to campus clashes between students and police and to the Marikana massacre; again, faces are empty or covered in balaclavas. The white male portrayed in Lefatshe, Umhlaba, Land has half-a-face, but remains eyeless — is he wilfully blind to the land question?
By contrast, the premise of Hamblin’s work is an affirmation of his subjects’ sense of self. InterseXion is a series of hazy photographic portraits of transgender sex workers from Cape Town and Kimberley. The race, class and gender dynamics implicit in the images are made explicit via audio installations in which the women talk about themselves.
It is interesting to note that while they describe their clients stumbling over clumsy labels – transvestite, intersex, “chick with a dick” – these women appear via Hamblin’s lens only as themselves.
Their names are Liberty, Eunice, Luanda, Sasha, Leigh. That is all we need to know.