Shiny heads with no names
EMOTIONS: GOING DOWN MEMORY LANE IN INNER CITY
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 feel them out. This week, she’s delighted that our city does have a wooden heart.
It’s Newtown and I remember that wet-eyed happy awe I felt in 2001 when I saw the hundreds of wooden sculptures on plinths. They were human heads, all different and I had never seen anything like them in any other city. It was pride at that first sight.
I have loved them ever since, wondering who created them, stroking their faces, feeling personal loss every time I noticed an empty plinth. Interestingly, not too many have been wantonly damaged or removed over 17 inner city years but the wood of many original heads has not survived nearly 20 years of Highveld sun.
It is my dream coming true as I meet Americo Guambe in his khaki cricket hat, the quiet-eyed, gently spoken man behind the wooden heads. Shaking his hand, I feel that 2001 emotion all over again.
Eighty shiny new brown heads stretch into the distance across Mary Fitzgerald Square, towards what I call the jazz path.
Americo leads Heather and I alongside the parades of heads: heads of Hindus and Muslims, elders, youth, heads of us South Africans and of Africa, representing diverse people who find ourselves in this city. They are carved, quite symbolically I think, from railway sleepers, disused, mostly of ironwood and Rhodesian teak.
“They’re like my children,” he says softly, gazing into the wooden distance. He led the three-man team that sculpted the original heads but this restoration and addition project is his. Americo, like so many Johannesburg people, is originally from somewhere else, in his case Mozambique.
We stop next to a wooden woman with a ponytail. Americo says she is his favourite though she doesn’t represent anyone he knows and has no name. She “just came out well”. She is one of nearly 600 individually handmade heads within this part of the city.
He describes his full figures outside the Constitutional Court in Braamfontein. We see the dancers he created outside the Dance Umbrella. There are some older heads outside the refurbishment area, one in grey, sequinned tulle, dressed by designer Foodbabysoul. Americo has recently sculpted 200 miniature heads too, possibly to be sold at galleries.
Across from the Market Theatre in Newtown, on steel head profiles displaying the project legend, Americo gently peels off advertiser’s stickers, this man who has put together our differences with his artists’ hands and heart.