Racial art in South Africa
Richard West
Johannesburg There is a craze just now in Johannesburg for the 'multi-racial' cultural event to demonstrate hostility to the apartheid system. Alas, the wine-tasting put on to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Rand Daily Mail had to be whites only, because of some law about serving drinks to the blacks, but the multi-racial spirit prevailed, and a young man made some kind of a protest by jumping into the swimming pool and taking off his trousers. The Rand Daily Mail's sister paper the Sunday Times (together with the Afrikaner Sunday Rapport) did however succeed in putting on the first multi-racial Miss South Africa contest at the Coliseum Cinema — a weird building decorated to look like a Gothic castle. This multi-racial breakthrough was no doubt designed to prevent a row such as the one that broke out during the talks on Rhodesia at Geneva, when one left-wing faction (that of Mr Mugabe I think) threatened to walk out unless white Miss South Africa was banned from the Miss World contest in London. The new Miss South Africa is again a white, but no racialist; her black runner-up is a friend and business colleague. The new Miss South Africa also has strong views about men, saying she could not fancy one whose bottom was smaller than hers.
The multi-racial spirit prevails in the huge Carlton Centre, a skyscraper shopping and hotel complex owned, like almost everything in Johannesburg, by the Oppenheimers. It boasts a multi-racial restaurant, a multi-racial Olde Englishe Pubbe and, wonder of wonders, up on the fiftieth floor, two multi-racial lavatories. On the ground floor there is a chessboard where people of all races match wits playing with knee-high Pieces. The current champion is an unemployed black boy, Hamon Pooe, who takes on challengers, mostly whites, for the stake of a cigarette or a cup of coffee. He usually plays black because, he told me, he is no good at openings. Why does he not get a book about chess openings? The only book on chess he has ever read was about the Fisher-Spassky match in Reykjavik. Not George Steiner's book, I am glad to say. I had lunch last week in one of the few multi-racial restaurants outside what are called the 'international' hotels. (The word 'international' means much the same as `multi-racial.) This was in the Oriental Plaza, a vile, yellow shopping complex that now accommodates those Asian traders Who have been turned out of the Feitas district in the interest of 'separate development.' Most of them greatly regret the change. 'That shop was part of my life for thirty-four years', I was told by a hardware merchant. 'I got two overseas trips out of that shop. It made 2 lot of bread. We were doing three and a half thousand Rand turnover a month and here only 800. The Department of Community Development are real bastards. Yes, I must use that word. Every time they knock down a bit of that area something in me dies. Quite a lot of the white community tried to fight our case. We had a lot of sympathy from the Afrikaners'. He had lived in 14th Street, the most famous shopping street in old Johannesburg, now deserted except for a few black and coloured squatters. One of these, a sad old man swollen with dropsy, spoke sadly about the good old days when 'King George still ruled Johannesburg'.
It depressed me still more when I realised that exactly the same demolition of old sections of 'cities has taken place in England even without the pretext of creating apartheid. The truth is that planners and property swindlers will use any excuse available to knock down pleasant communities and to replace them with vile shopping 'complexes' and high-rise flats — which here in Johannesburg have a suicide rate even higher than ours in England. It was there fore a pleasure to find that one building, at least in this part of west Johannesburg, has been preserved and restored. This is the old Asian fruit market, built on a three-pin arch back in 1914, and recently the new home of a multi-racial theatre company.
On the first floor of the Market Theatre there is a room used for art exhibits, at present a series of sculptures by Paul Stop forth. These are, to put it mildly, remarkable. Climbing up the stairs to the gallery you find a life-size white figure sprawled head-down with a broken neck in your path. The bar of soap on the top step indicates that this represents the corpse of the Asian political leader who died in Cape Town in the custody of the police after 'slipping and falling down stairs'. The four other sculptures by Paul Stopforth are of a man on tiptoe leaning on finger-tips on a wall; a man slung by the knees from a pole sus pended between two tables; a man strangled by a sheet, and a man tied naked over a bottomless chair to be whipped on the testicles with a fly-swat. This bloodchilling exhibition, which opened shortly before the death in detention of Steve Biko, needs no catalogue to explain itself to South African art lovers, but how can one convey to non-South African readers the character of a country which not only allows the police to torture and murder detainees but allows these crimes to be shown in an art gallery? How can one ever explain what is at once a tyranny and a free country?
The fine playwright Athol Fugard has written and played the lead role in a new film The Guest about an episode in the life of Eugene Marais, the Afrikaner poet, journalist and zoologist, who wrote curious books on baboons and white ants. It describes how Marais, a morphine addict racked with pain and despair, goes to stay with a farming family in the arid, northern Transvaal. He is not successfully cured, indeed later committed suicide, but some how this bleak film conveys something of what is strong, strange and admirable in the Afrikaner soul.
The BBC has recently re-broadcast the film of Fugard's play Siswe Bansi is Dead, on the misery caused by apartheid laws. It is curious that at the same time the British actors union Equity threatens to strike against the extension of Ipi Tombi, a black South African musical. Do these thickheaded people in\ Equity not know or care that apartheid in South Africa was intro duced by white, English trade unionists protecting their jobs against black immigrant labour from the countryside or abroad? An Equity spokesman even said that the cast of Ipi Tombi could well be replaced by black, English (i.e. West Indian) actors. Can he not understand that such a suggestion implying that all black people are just the same, is grossly offensive both to the West Indians and to the Khosas in lpi Tombi? It is thanks to such racists in Equity and many other British trade unions that white South Africans laugh off our anti-apartheid campaign as hypocritical humbug.
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