Artist makes heroes of South
Zakes Mda’s latest exhibition celebrates ordinary figures, healing, performance and his late great friend Hugh Masekela
Buried deep in the bush in a mountainous region on the border of Eastern Cape and Lesotho is a cave where ancient San rock art merges with the childhood drawings of Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda, better known as Zakes Mda, prolific artist and author.
Mda and his friends encountered these drawings during the December holidays in his youth when he would visit from his home in Soweto.
Although the drawings were the inadvertently vandalistic acts of an adventurous child, they also come to represent the modus operandi of one of South Africa’s most acclaimed and beloved authors.
We know Mda as a literary artist. His works of fiction, 31 in total, often dive into the deeper terrain of historical events by magnifying the lives of ordinary characters who are swept under the rug of the massive cultural shifts in the world. At the same time, they explore and celebrate cultural hybridity by providing harmony in a pluralistic world, dense with cultural diversity and clashes.
And, even as the worlds of his characters crumble, shift and change around them, they become emblematic of humanity’s capacity for transformation, adaptation and the ability to forge new ways of living.
Just as Mda and his childhood friends discovered the rock art drawings of the San, and made their own drawings to compete and complement the art they drew over, so too does his work converge ancient and modern beliefs, values, traditions, cultural products and styles.
“I’m a writer of historical fiction. I’m not a historian,” says Mda, sitting comfortably in his modest Joburg apartment, thousands of kilometres away from his home in Ohio, in the US, where he recently worked as an English university professor.
“The difference between me and a historian is historians write or look at history from the perspective of kings, leaders and generals. They focus on what wars these people fought, what treaties they wrote and how they interacted with countries.
“I look at the small people in that story. I look at the micro, while historians look at the macro. I’m interested in the people who were affected by the big decisions, or the wars, and how they deal with them.”
One of Mda’s most prominent characters, Toloki, who first appears in his critically acclaimed novel Ways of Dying, is an example of this. As a way to adapt to the ever-increasing climate of violence and death that plagues South Africa’s townships in the transition to democracy, Toloki goes from being a boerewors salesman to taking on the imaginative and unique occupation of being a professional mourner.
Toloki’s statements that “death lives with us every day” and “indeed our ways of dying are our ways of living”, encapsulate the severing of boundaries and the conflux of divergent ways of being that come to represent his novels.
In The Heart of Redness, a community of villagers contend with opposing Western and traditional Xhosa values as South Africa develops post1994. When there are plans to build a casino in the village, tension arises. The metropolitan protagonist, and former exile from America, Camagu, finds himself as an intermediary between the two factions.
In the end, the novel embraces an ideology of traditionalism, but one that incorporates “a development that transcends this binary division of progress and tradition”, as writer Mike Nicol puts it.
Although Mda is mostly known by South Africans as a literary artist, it would be very remiss to box him into this one category.
Annicia Manyaapelo, an international luxury and trends writer and speaker, as well as art agent to Mda, emphasises his multifaceted relationship with art in a phone call: “He says to me all the time that he’s a storyteller. So, it doesn’t matter what medium he chooses to tell his story.
“One day, he wakes up and he feels like composing a song, another day he wakes up and he feels like he wants to write a book and another he feels drawn to painting. For him, all of these things are just mediums.
“At his core, he’s a storyteller. His draw towards painting has been there for a long time and he’s been painting for many years.”
Indeed, Mda’s first love has always been painting — ignited when he drew over the rock art in his home village. His father AP Mda, who was a lawyer, teacher and co-founder of the ANC Youth League, also influenced his son’s passion. As Mda notes, his father took up painting as a hobby and “was quite well known for the accuracy of his portraits and for drawing people exactly as they are”.
Later, Mda obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the International Academy of Arts and Letters.
“I was a painter long before I was a writer and I’ve always been painting. I still have collectors in Europe who have some of my earlier works and that was long before I became a published author, ” says Mda.
He shows me an example of these older paintings. The image is similar in style to Godfrey Ndaba, whose paintings depicted solemn, roundfaced and bodied black figures. They often have their eyes closed, while playing musical instruments or intimately embracing a loved one.
As Mda introduces his latest exhibition, Uza Nemvula, The Art of Zakes Mda, his hybridised style endures. The exhibition is a continuation of his Mirrors and Washboards collection, which garnered much success in his New York solo exhibition last year.
Mda borrows stylistic elements, including from European expressionist, Braque-inspired Cubism, which in turn borrowed from African art. It shows an affinity with the geometric patterns of Basotho traditional murals, known as litema. In addition, he draws inspiration from South African township art in this collection.
Through its very title, the painting named Favela Love, from Mirrors and Washboards, suggests a collision of two differing realities.
The concept of a favela, with its negative connotations of poverty, crime and degradation, dominates
the scenery. A dreary mustard, muddied with darker shades, is used to portray a huddle of shacks tightly packed against each other to show the overcrowded conditions.
As murky as this depiction of an informal settlement is, the two lovers placed in the foreground, at the right edge of the painting, offer a lightness that allows the viewer to escape the gloominess and humdrum features of the background.
The flirtatious rise of the woman’s leg and the man’s demonstration of love through a playing card showing a throbbing heart confutes the gloomy existence that the informal settlement may imply.
It is a celebration of human souls burgeoning from the situation they’ve been placed in and defying the existence of reality.
Although this romantic analysis is a simplistic understanding of Mda’s painting, it also stays true to part of his aim in his work which is to uncover the ordinariness and beauty of lives masked by historical events or cultural phenomena.
“For me, the most important history-makers are the ordinary people, rather than the generals or the kings,” says Mda.
It’s no wonder then, why Mda chooses to spotlight Mgcineni Noki in a series of paintings which stand out in Uza Nemvula. Noki, who was a mineworker for Lonmin, with no official rank, became an inspiring figurehead for the Marikana mineworkers who were demanding a salary hike in 2012. Noki was among the protesters gunned down by police during their protest. He died after being shot 14 times.
“Like everybody else, I was touched by that event, but I was touched even more by him, an informal leader who emerges among the people.
“He was not one of the trade union leaders. He was just one of the workers, but because he was singing, chanting and encouraging people, he suddenly emerged as a leader who is later killed. He dies for those people and he becomes a symbol,” says Mda.
The lives of the families of those who died were marred to the extent that the majority can only remember them through the brutality of the Marikana massacre. However, as Mda states, Noki is able to transcend the tragic events which prematurely stripped him of his life through the series of paintings titled Man in a Green Blanket.
In these paintings, where he is distinguished by his famous green blanket, he can be seen traversing the land with fellow travellers who are holding up flowers and bouquets against a surreal background.
In the grey, bland background of another painting, he is huddled with other colourless figures around what seems to be a fire producing bright yellow smoke, which goes beyond the borders of the canvas.
Mda produced another painting, which hangs in his living room among other, newer works which he plans to add to the collection. In this one, Mda shows the man in the green blanket chasing a cow with multicoloured spots on its body. There is grace in the way that he’s portrayed, which complements the metaphysical atmosphere of this series.
“He has evolved into other incarnations which go beyond his identity on Earth before he was killed.
“He now features in my work in different ways as different things. He has transcended Marikana. He was produced by this event but has now lived beyond the event. He has become bigger than it.
“That’s why I see him as a transcendent figure. He becomes anything that I want him to be,” says the artist.
Mda’s way of humanising people and characters — even assigning divinity to them — is also present in his portrayal of his late friend, musician
‘I was a painter long before I was a writer and I’ve always been painting’
and composer Hugh Masekela in a series of paintings in the collection.
In Jazz in Sepia — Song of Hughie, Masekela appears as an imposing figure emanating from the heavens, playing his trumpet.
Although it’s a celebratory homage to Masekela, the harsh, coarse and gloomy colours and textures seem overwhelmingly dolorous and filled with grief.
Masekela is also surrounded by multiple fabrics of South African origin, perhaps to help sound the song of the trumpet he’s holding, which used to blast out music inspired by various South African ethnic backgrounds and was used as a weapon against apartheid injustices..
The chilly tone of the painting is offered salvation by Masekela’s horn and its glaring circular light, reflecting against the large body of water below it, perhaps an ocean.
This imagery conjures up the long-standing impact of Masekela’s music and his legacy as one of the first South African musicians to gain international acclaim.
Masekela, being the divine figure he is in this painting, is merely a visitor in what seems to be an earthly setting. Even as the dark colours might symbolise Mda’s grief, one can’t help but think they also speak to the dire circumstances of the living — of the legacy of apartheid and its massacres and the way these events continue to mirror relatively recent events, such as the Marikana massacre, for which no justice has been garnered.
Mda’s Uza Nemvula, The Art of Zakes Mda is being shown as part of a month-long exhibition at Nichluxe POPUP gallery at the Keyes Art Mile part of Open City from 30 August to 25 September.