Exploring freedom’s reach through texts and images
Even if’our country wasn t marking 30 years of democracy in April or going to the polls for a national election in May, South Africans would be doing lots of soulsearching in 2024. It feels like we’ve been searching for a couple of decades. Where did things go wrong? Are they really that bad? (Answer: yes, they are — but then again, no, not as bad as all that.)
Maybe “things as they are” is about the best we could have hoped for, considering where SA was in, say, 1984. Could anyone have confidently predicted then that the apartheid juggernaut would grind to a halt within 10 years? It is salutary to be reminded that we are living now in the future that was imagined, longed for, fought for — though, obviously, it is not the future that could have been.
In 1985, the Algerian-French philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote a short essay for the catalogue of Art Against Apartheid, a travelling exhibition that had been initiated a few years previously by an association (based in France) called Artists of the World against Apartheid. Dozens of celebrated artists donated works for a collection that, it was envisaged, would “form the basis of a future museum” to be presented “as a gift to the first free and democratic government of SA”.
Derrida’s essay describes apartheid as “racism’s last word”, simultaneously representing the apogee and the end of this ugly aspect of human history. Apartheid is “the unique appellation for the ultimate racism in the world, the last of many”, and the author looks forward to the day when “it will only be for the memory of man” because “the thing it names today will no longer be”.
It was a bold declaration, echoing the desires of millions but, as Derrida would later admit (in 1996, when the collection finally arrived in postapartheid SA), the international community’s confident assertions about “the end of apartheid” did not “take the risk of calculating how much time still separated us from it”: “I must confess I did not think it possible”, Derrida writes in response to his earlier essay, to have “the good fortune of witnessing such a revolution in our lifetime”.
Derrida’s words form part of a rich archive of texts and images assembled by Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti for Past Disquiet, displayed at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa. The exhibition links Art Against Apartheid to other “seed collections” intended as “museums in exile” from the 1960s onwards. These include international exhibitions in solidarity with the oppressed peoples of Palestine, Chile and Nicaragua.
Viewing this material in 2024 suggests that Derrida was wrong on various counts, not least in the comfort he took from the future perfect tense: that is, being able to talk about how tyranny will have been defeated, about when freedom will have come. Apartheid was not the last word. Freedom — in SA and elsewhere — remains elusive. Perhaps freedom is never fully attained, never complete, always a work in progress. Freedom is the future that never arrives but towards which we must nonetheless strive.
Of course, there is no place for such hedging in the language of political and artistic manifestoes, as demonstrated in another remarkable body of work being shown alongside Past Disquiet. This is Seismography of Struggle, curated by Zahia Rahmani, a treasure trove for bibliophiles and art lovers alike. The exhibition is part of a larger research project on the history of critical and cultural journals, and the liberatory impulses they generated and sustained, over two centuries — from the Haitian Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Visitors who are familiar with 20th-century SA literary history will find it very gratifying to consider how contributors to periodicals such as Drum, Staffrider, The Bloody Horse, Kronos and Zonk! may be situated within a global network of freedom-seeking writers, editors and publishers.
The key criterion applied by Rahmani and her team in building their archive was that the journals had to include a founding manifesto. A multichannel video installation presents these publications as art objects in their own right, along with the texts of many of the manifestos they contained. Through this project, an enormous history of print has been brought into the digital age, creating not only a visually impressive display but also a hugely valuable resource that recalls an international tradition of emancipatory struggle.
● Past Disquiet and Seismography of Struggle are at Zeitz MOCAA (Cape Town Waterfront) until March 24.