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T is commonly held that the hindrance of freedom as a birthright commenced when the native on the shore sighted a giant object on the water. Whether transported as human cargo across the seas or subjected to wars by an unprovoked enemy, Africans have not experienced freedom — its meaning and its practicality — the same way since.

Tsoku Maela is a visual artist working in photography whose latest work, “Be Glad U R Free”, is an in-depth search for true emancipation — an attempt, perhaps, to diagnose or strip away the malaise eating at us.

The series is a mixed-medium body of work comprising photographs, a short film, voice recordings and a telephonic conversation compiled in cassette format.

“As an ironic expression of my own freedom, I’ve also included freestyle recordings of my terrible singing and rapping, which I usually do for fun in between edits and the process of making the works,” says Maela.

The series is structured as a music album. Like songs do, each image narrates a story.

“The cover art is a statement in itself as the photo taken by my father pictures me as a child unaware of the complexities that would befall me as a black male growing up in the world,” he says.

For a nation that has entered the era of reality check, Maela comes to serve us the uncool, paradoxically in a popular format. The work is appealing to the eye, yet discomforting to the soul. It grapples with the slave’s realisation that the master could be both the other and the self.

In Sifelani, a man who has just extracted gold from deep down in the earth’s belly sits on the fruits of his labour. The man’s back is turned, his face obscured. Gold is cheaply cast as a pile of rocks.

“I remember watching the documentary about the Marikana tragedy, Miners Shot

In his new body of work, Tsoku Maela looks the rainbow nation in the eye, says

Down. Seeing diligent workers in adverse conditions trying to gain a sense of equality, nonviolently. How the powers that be were reluctant to have a conversation with them, using other black people as a barrier and eventually using militant force to gun them down like animals. That scene broke me completely. I remember one of the survivors, who is now crippled, thinking back to the ordeal and saying ‘What was I going to die for? Imali? Money?’,” says Maela.

In Sattafrika Our Laaand, Maela stages and captures a seemingly friendly interaction between a farmer and a farm labourer. Two men at opposite ends of the economic spectrum: one owns the land and the other works it. This could be the dream handover or it could be a — good job, Sipho — pat on the back. But Maela flips it. The white character is without a head — is there but not actually there.

“I’d like to make it clear that the headlessness of the white character is not a suggestion of violence, as I’m sure many critics will be quick to leverage, but rather the invisibility of the white individual in the conversation,” says Maela.

While our past is quicksand, it is more difficult today to identify the forces that continue to hinder us. And freedom itself cannot even be defined in one common chorus, but by needs, wants, and desires tailored to fit individuals.

By the universe’s twists and ironies, Maela is labelled a “born-free” in the South African context. But is he free to create? Is he able to put himself in a space where he can freely express himself, away from the constraints of social convention, money, capitalism, and religion?

“My creativity is an expression of a freedom that begins in the mind,” he says. “The title speaks to that. Not a physical enslavement, but a mental condition.”

‘Be Glad U R Free’ opens at Amplified gallery in Cape Town on June 1