Walls tell of the great and small
MESSAGES AND MURALS Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about, even though we live here. We like to travel our own cities and their surrounds, curious to
woman appears twice in different outfits.
We meet the media manager at the Fort Office, who gives us a map of almost all the outer wall murals, but doesn’t know about the one at the reception. Of the row of the heads of previous inmates, she suggests that the mural was commissioned by the public works department. She doesn’t know who Smith is either.
Heather and I traipse along the Rea Vaya road, Joubert, which features most of the murals, starting with a green stencilling of a girl holding her mouth under a tap: “water is a human right”, on to the late Hugh Masekela, all blue, his hat jammed low with his Send Me lyrics alongside, courtesy of Learn & Teach at Wits. Our late poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile follows, reading his Festive Heart advisory poem.
My favourite is Dada Khanyise’s comic Afropolitan Teaparty, in which the women seem absorbed in taking selfies and phone shots of the cakes and macaroons. The conversation? It’s “Let’s Put Our Leaders in Rice”. Before walking around to Queen Street, we pass Mr FuzzySlipperz’ mural of a woman arrayed in a flurry of leaves and fruit, with Archbishop Emeritus Tutu’s saying about doing our little bit of good.
There’s a guard at Nardstar’s purples and blue mural on Queen of great female activist prisoners. Whatever they’re saying to us, all seven are doing it with their eyes.