Protest artists in eSwatini refuse to be erased
A RECENT documentary titled The Unthinkable documents the events of June and July in eSwatini, showing the brutality meted out by the regime’s security forces to unarmed people. Filmed and edited on an iPhone, it has already been screened in the United States, Norway, Taiwan and South Africa. Screenings for Harare, Zimbabwe and other cities are in the pipeline, while it has also been broadcast by the SABC’s investigative programme, Cutting Edge.
The Unthinkable features disturbing accounts of the violence inflicted on people and the unimaginable pain they endured, which is what inspired the title. For example, says producer and director Comfort Ndzinisa, 36, during one protest soldiers placed burning matter on a man’s body, searing his skin.
“I have never seen something like that,” says Ndzinisa. “The soldiers entangled hot tyre wires around his body. This is such an unthinkable act.”
The documentary was produced in partnership with the eSwatini Solidarity Fund, an organisation of local and international volunteers and sympathisers set up to offer financial and psychosocial support to the many who were shot and sustained injuries of varying degrees.
But it was unplanned. Filming began by chance when Ndzinisa, a high school science teacher who usually films for “fun”, was asked by a friend from the fund to edit some footage.
“I asked the friend to do a retake because the initial interview was not filmed (in) landscape (format),” he says. He then joined the fund’s team on the ground to film and “from there the footage got bigger and bigger. There were more people involved, more organisations involved. It was sort of an archive. It was not necessarily meant to reach the magnitude that it did.”
A stark reminder
A university student, Tibusiso Mdluli, 22, one of the fund’s field volunteers, explains that the documentary crucially highlights the brutality of the security forces. For example, she recalls that at the end of 2019, when university students were protesting for allowances, “there were students beaten (by police) while wearing towels, coming from bathing”.
Ndzinisa reminds one that the struggle for freedom and democratic reforms in eSwatini is nothing new.
“It is not the first time the forces have been unleashed on people, it is not the first time there has been unrests, except that it has taken a much more noticeable scale. It is intense.”
Mdluli emphasises that it is important for emaSwati to document their experiences.
“Our struggles have been sort of erased. I get the sense that people in the international community do not know so much about Swaziland.”
Another field volunteer with the fund, Gugulethu Makhanya, 40, who was instrumental in the documentary’s conceptualisation, says the filmmakers hoped to put faces to the injured as well as the families of the many who died.
“We hope people can have an insight into what is exactly happening. It is very important for the outside world to know and see the atrocities,” says Makhanya.
To date, the number of those who died and those injured is still debated, mainly because of censorship and the inability to meet some of the victims. But for Ndzinisa, the vivid reminder of the violence captured in the documentary renders the actual numbers moot.
Finger on the pulse
Fashion designer and artist KhulekaniMsweli, 37, from Vuvulane, a sugar canegrowing region in eSwatini, says the role of artists in the country is undervalued, yet they “play a very critical role in social commentary, in speaking truth to power and … offering a mirror to citizens of any country”.
Msweli has crafted many pieces that comment on the regime. One such artwork is the self-portrait See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, in which Msweli has covered his eyes, ears and mouth, speaking to how it silences radical thoughts and expressions.
“A lot of emaSwati feel gagged. If they speak their truth or speak up to power, they could end up in prison, or they could end up maybe tortured by the police,” Msweli says. “The more we keep on bottling up these issues, we end up being faced with a situation which we are now facing in 2021, where the citizens eventually erupt.”
Those who dare to challenge the regime’s status quo pay a heavy price, he says, but “someone has to say something. We can’t all be silenced (in expressing) our own thoughts through artistic forms”.
Msweli reflected on how silence can end up in death with a 2017 photographic work titledSilence I, in which his face with a wide-open mouth is pressed against a surface.
Quietly speaking out
Another artist who says the population is being silenced is Tutu Mkhabela, 42, who comes from the rural area of kuMalindza. Mkhabela is self-taught, and hisworkis mostly done in graphite and pencil. “I was born in a family of artists. I grew up looking at my elder brothers’ sketches and I was like this is something I’d like to do,” he says.
Like Msweli, he has also done a work that speaks to being muzzled, titled Forced Silence. It was exhibited at the Yebo! Art Gallery in Ezulwini in 2017 under the banner of “eSwatini Now”.
Oppressed on many levels
Another drawing, titled Blood, Sweat and Tears, depicts a woman with a headwrap who has blood on her face. This is in reference to impoverished emaSwati who have been subjected to economic terrorism by the regime and forced to accept exploitative jobs, yet they are the main producers of the country’s wealth — which Mswati claims for himself and his cronies.
Although Mkhabela, Msweli and others make art critical of the regime, they say they have not yet experienced any brutality from it. This is mainly because, says Mkhabela, “artists are not taken very seriously in the country. (The government thinks) it is people playing with pencils. That is how they take art anyway, unless you draw the queen or the king or the prime minister.”
Despite the underwhelming support these artists get, they aren’t about to stop documenting the uncomfortable realities, or showing the viciousness with which the regime treats its own people. This is revolutionary work propelled by being alive and sensitive to injustices, they say. — New Frame.