A Reflection On Planned to Contain, Forced to Condense: Orlando East and the Making of Urban Black Modernity

A recent article titled: Planned to Contain, Forced to Condense: Orlando East and the Making of Urban Black Modernity penned by Molefi Ndlovu, is yet another astute analysis of a phenomenon which still haunts our precarious lives in the enclaves of social experimentation named townships.

These places still feel like concentration camps where capitalists enterprises could extract cheap labour while securely caging populations through proximity/distance morality.

There was time when I attempted to analyse the “shack” as structural interpretation of what I viewed as “corrugated steel boxes of de-privatised and denuded lives of black folks”.

And as these squatter camps emerged around mining areas in the form of “Baipei”

self-locating households, the powers that be figured that creating a coloured region just before the white areas was deterrent to black urban influx.

This obviously created the animosity we still seem between most black people and their “coloured” brothers and sisters.

And through your text I now understand the extent to which social segregation was entrenched through town planning, enhancing visibility of those deemed “nearly white” to become buffer zones that can neutralise black revolt.

Reading your article now resuscitates some of my bitter sentiments about the continued impact of spatial segregation rationalised as cultured settlement of natives for the sole benefit and access of whites.

Molefi expose how architecture can carry the souls of a people - and suffice to say, the spirit of each place (township or location) was inevitably going to break through the normative grids and spill to overwhelm the infrastructure of poverty that kept black communities in enclosed spaces.

And as is the case with many of your literary works that read issues, objects, practices from an internationalist vantage point, I am now forced to re-evaluate my own analysis, or perhaps bolden and broaden their scope through my audio-visual practice.

“Baipei”, as an epitaph and monicker for various squatter camps seems a residual retaliation to the pre-arranged degradation to be encountered in townships. 

Baipei - Those Who Located Themselves have thus become a new incarnation of illegitimate

residences, which are in turn heavily policed and criminalised and labelled as illegal.

The country is truly grappling with politicised geographies of land dispossession, and the rampant dislocation from locations have left a truly transitory generation, who seem rootless as they cannot fix roots within any of the reinventions of “locations” around apartheid spatial designs and demarcations.

The contested issue of “origins” still haunt me, because I still cannot understand why so many places along the Witwatersrand and the N12, going as far as Lichtenberg, communities trace their origins in “locations” once called Makweteng”.

Imagine the planned and organised rationale behind the dislocation of communities onto environmental landscapes known for mud and inhospitable soil for any cultivation; places like wetlands that are always cold in winter and soggy in summer.

Peter Sloterdijk’s Critic Of Cynical Reason comes to mind when further delving into Molefi’s analysis of ghettoised existence, providing a sweeping diagnosis of our current social decay muddled by naive ideologies based on “false consciousness” manufactured by mainstream think-tanks.

The now unmasked illusion that the township is our heritage forces us to rethink the simple deceptions that went to our collective fetishisation of squalor.

And this article poses sustained arguments reflecting on how our purported modernity at various stage of human evolution can mirror disillusionment and the political fragility of systems that constructed them.

The colonial powers saw it fit to do all manner of experiments on black communities, possibly to sedate their perceived disregard for western modernity.

Molefi views geography, architecture and spatial displacement not as political aftermaths, but as constructs meant to anchor and root social dynamics “into land” which later form political ideological lineages of the dispossessed versus the possessors.

His investigation is both intuitive and interrogative of the historiography of spatial

design in relation to South African township grids, how they influence psychological

imaginings and constraints; a dialogue with his partially Sowetan heritage, that unveils those hidden codes of domination etched into topographies.

***

Planned to Contain, Forced to Condense: Orlando East and the Making of Urban Black Modernity - Molefi Ndlovu

 

Watered Down - A Kokosi Water Saga

The Daniel Morolong Photographic Collection - A Reflection

Modern scholars can only study cases of colonial historical erasure and censure through records rather than remains (of the people) or sites where erasures occurred.

They focus on generalised, popular early documents such as photographs preserved as reminders of an era when fear of blackness intersected with scientific study and cultural appropriation.

The cultural legacy of Daniel Morolong’s long forgotten studio photography remains yet another of South Africa’s overlooked treasures, which often appears sporadically on websites that purport to be preserving lost troves from renowned artists and photographers of yesteryear.

Born and raised in Tsolo, East London, during the formative years of apartheid, Daniel matured to become a double bassist for the famed Havana Swingsters, a fifteen-piece band led by the legendary Eric Nomvete, co-founder of the Quavers in the late 1940’s.

Daniel Morolong’s lasting legacy and influence is underscored by his pictorial exploration of memory and identity, identity through memory and a depiction of black joy beyond confines of stereotypes.

Perhaps, his radiant air of jovial fame and musicality endeared him to the many people he eventually photographed as a freelance photographer for various publications like the Daily Dispatch’s African Edition; but when one looks at his images, the uncanny eye stand to show a vivid shape of reality beyond papers.

And through his journalistic flair, Ntate Kgomo was well positioned therefore to document some of South Africa’s musical icons, producing images during a period of social upheaval and repression; capturing some important social portraits that black history has produced.

Photographing dancers, and musicians like Johnny Dyani, immortalising his peers through captivating depictions of their crafts; his images could somehow insert or insinuate the spectator’s gaze into each frame, to feel that measured presences of people who have otherwise ceased to be “present” as they were presented.

This invites the viewer to confront the presence of these shadows and ghosts, the souls impulsed into emulsion shaping an new agency in a place of absence.

Capturing his subjects with a compositional integrity that is haloed by florescent floods of light, with intentional over-exposure of their fashionable garments; he frames an unfamiliar innocence into view, freezing pride written on well groomed hairstyles, clasped hands in dignified contrition signalling a reverence fir the art form, even by those he captured.

Sadly, when confronted by stereotypes of impoverishment depicted by many canonical photographers, white society's psychological interactions with black persons (even in images) was then primed to trends determined by exploitative financial outlooks; and this obsessive betrayal of authenticity spelled doom for artists’ of Daniel’s generation.

 

An exhibition of some of Daniel Morolong’s photographic work was held at Everard Read Gallery in Cape Town, where some of his images were exhibited alongside works by artists Nandipha Mntambo, Boemo Diale and Mongezi Gum.

And as debates rage across the country’s leading art journals and pages of embedded mainstream media, about how art is curtailed and co-opted to suite political agenda; what is the future for fragile archives such as Daniel Morolong’s

Photographic Archives and those housed in redacted vaults of western patronage?

As art collectors innocuously “supports the arts” from the barbaric creativity of natives, only to keep their hold of these cultural assets and totems for personal gratification, it is therefore given that profit-haunted art puritans and collectors will continue to exploit the archival value of the Daniel Morolong Photographic Collection in a time when art is more relic than representative.

And while his work became pivotal in global discourse around archiving black lives and experiences under apartheid, Morolong’s photographic work seemed to respond to a lack of social document among people who were being systematically erased.

Staged processes, choreographed gestures, human interactions with objects, both as subjects foregrounded against a background of common human splendour disguising poverty; these images are archives of dreams, what people wanted to see of themselves in the absence of validating social standing.

Living during a profoundly marked period of political repression and economic segregation of black people, his work emerged fascinated by humanistic views of social conditions of townships, participating in moments of black familial reflection and joy, moments of tragedy and upheavals that rocked and often displaced lives.

Yet, in their eyes we find and inexplicable presentness, a refusal to remain dead and past.

There is an expectant air tracing on their faces without no apparent motive, they seem unknowing of what is happening as they pose obstinately against backdrops that create magic worlds that would be frozen as part of their memories.

Stylishly fashionable ladies snapped unawares during moments of giggled frolicking with the photographer; and yet there remains something appealingly romantic about these scenes, something glamorous in morose township dwellings and gatherings constipated by poverty and oppression.

Morolong was a man possessed by an unwavering devotion to black beauty, creating renewed perspectives in moments of stillness (rare moments of quiet in an otherwise violent life), immortalising lived experiences of black creative communities in song, ritual, jubilation and disarray.

Faced with a life unfolding within a restrictive system that view black lives as subservient and less cultured, he carved a space for both his passion for music and photography, a space that he populated with common and uncommon faces that would otherwise be relegated to the obscurity of the past.

Homes are depicted as spaces where fleeting memories are occurred and captured, bodies resonating their stories concealed or exhibited; sportsmen and glamour queens in performative physicality, responding to a lens curating how the future perceives them.

These forms of personal resilience, embodied in the anonymity of persons, are detailed in a poetic, finely attuned and at times playfully contemplative way.

Discounted men lingering at train stations, women in their dreamt splendor paraded at funerals and weddings, baring their inherent selves and exposing their being human; all these people became more than subjects within Morolong’s frames, as they spoke of something wonderful beyond the confines of a traumatic political climate.

Through these monochromatic images, Ntate Kgomo’s lens captured the ruptures of our history, where experiences marked black people’s lives in a contradictory, polarised and repressive social system such as apartheid.

His images at all stages of his career challenged established stereotypes of black folk, keeping a close eye on the realities of life on different personae - a dancer, a musician, a boxer - that embody inner contradictions with historical realities of the times.

His tenure at the Morale Ideal Studios in East London, which he shared with his fashion designer wife burnt down during the Gqozo coup in 1990, and his equipment and life’s work perished beside the fragments that were later discovered through collectors and publication archives.

Daniel’s work is not an isolated case of obscuration occurring within a profiteering art world, because a vast number of black photographers such as Tladi Khuele, Mbuzeni Zulu also remain unknown by bourgeoning generations of lens based artists.

Across generations there are a select group exemplary photographers who “made a living” through their art, (Ernest Cole, Alf Khumalo, Omar Badsha and Peter Magubane come to mind); and invariably, merchants of culture punt their successes as exemplary of their efforts as “liberators of antiquities”.

Galleries as custodians of cultural opacity, therefore must direct trains of discourse around art and its monetary value, not as privileged owners of our intangible heritage.

In a country whose cultural institutions are threatened by systematic fracture, where hope for the betterment of the arts oscillates between tested certainty and untested assurances, artists will forever inhabit a tense space where their practices are constantly probed for capitalist value.

And in this unsettling terrain primed for survivalist instincts, many artists (and photographers) will content with advanced technologies that have displaced and replaced their craft, surrendering its mystic to all and sundry.

Now treated as high-value cultural objects, Daniel Morolong’s collection becomes a site for exploring questions of commodification without consent, history of reverence and the shifting meaning of historical records.

The ruthless materialism and liberal culturalism displayed by white elites liberal continues to strip African artists of their worth, embodied in works executed under duress and political tyranny of the same white elite class.

When (and if) these images are finally made visible again in new contexts, there is a required reinforcement of their foundational importance that is essential, where communities that were photographed are given exhibitions to see these collections.

Writing Past The Present

Writing about art, about writers and their literary works, and even writing about musicians within treacherous social, artistic and literary circles can be a dire choice of a vocation without patronage of the traditional support from established enclaves of power.

Reviled by criticism, many contemporary black artists disregard or shy away from any literary exploration of their works, in the vain hope that their artistic “indulgences” are beyond social scrutiny, whereas the same works are steeped in analysis of the same society.

But how can writers dread being vocal or actually writing about their living peers, as opposed to crafting posthumous laudatory articles for more patronised mainstream publications?

Does appreciating other artists, questioning and analysing their craft, and often comparing their work to others, seem threatening to many practitioners within the current South African artistic milieu?

I recall Jack Kerouac’s ragtime beat poetry infused with Jazz at its purest improvisational metamorphosis, Amiri Baraka’s recitals drenched in sound and unburdened rhythm; and many other poets who wrote about paintings and sculpture, scatting on music; their words naming and strengthening all forms of creation.

Many foundational writers have jotted poems, prose and essays dedicated to their compatriots; take for an example Mongane Wally Serote’s CHILD OF SONG (written for poet James Matthews). Mothobi Motloatse edited an incredible monograph on the photography of Bob Gosani accompanied by an eclectic array of notes and essays that celebrated the vibrantly lucid depth of the images.

The literary documentary work that Phehello Mofokeng published in memory of SANKOMOTA is among the few that still carry the tradition of commemorating legacies, and these efforts and many others have given contemporary researchers and scholars a compendium of critical analysis of black artists by black writers, rooted in a collective memorialisation and celebration of our socio-cultural identities.

Eugene Skeef, is another poet writing archives that celebrates his peers in a way that is both admirably documentarian, as it is premised on the concept of immortalising their craft contemporaneously, using words as a form of sculpting the souls of each artists, writers, musicians encountered as living entities in the process of being deified by the sacred human condition.

As such, writers are archivists in a three part tale steeped in the past, recalled in the present to set in motion guide posts for future explorations of the meaning of life; each story becoming an accumulation of losses steeped in the undying past, with which writers as memory-keepers grapple.

Writers therefore untangle the hidden meanings that lie between the alphabets, the words that form complex emotional portraits of univocal memories and emotions.

And through a language not bound by the language of writers of antiquity, can we unmask letters and their sounds as they tremble in our throats and pens.

Artist Thokozani Mthiyane often writes poems about his paintings and sculptural installations - an uncanny transposition of self-excavated meanings, more so as the text and the canvases purport to enter a chaotic dialogue, a dialogue full of varied and subtle echoes of things not represented in neither words nor oils.

These artists have realised that “a poetic line can be a cry, like a saxophone playing a line, riffing on…”, as Joy Hard once put it. They embody our only organic archives of the past and present memory; these writers and poets are documenting an uncertain future faced with technological erasure and obfuscation.

These art writers must consistently provide unsparing examinations of literature, art, cinema, music and performance; subtly bringing these mirrors in whose gaze we see versions of ourselves, where artworks are treated as mirrors of that which we would rather deny or leave unseen.

Their stumbling awkwardness in search for new meaning seems futile at times, but as writers weaving words around other art forms, new meanings can be threaded into being.

And as we watch the obsolete machinery of colonial literary alliances and allegiances grind to a slow trample, when heritage becomes a prison of the mind, when writers cling to forms and protocols determined by colonial puritanism, the quality and substance of local literary art comes into disrepute.

As society lives on the verge of an evaporated substance of truth, even though truth is a subjective perspective, we watch the obsolete machinery of colonial literary alliances and allegiances grind to a slow trample, and a new breed of writers not bound by colonial linguistic architecture needs come to the fore and created a new kind of urgency of reform.

A disruption of the formalistic reverence to all traditional forms of criticism is the first step in an art world built on secrecy and hypocrisy, considering that this art world is full of contradictions, from glorification to demonisation of artists and frauds.

The performed success enjoyed by most young black writers also leaves them vulnerable to reflexive self-immolation on the alters of patronage and unrequited self-censorship, responding to demands of patrons and trendsetters within a business-like climate of cultural plunder.

Armoured against the rotten edifice of civilised society, writers as critiques need confront white privileged art markets, literary critiques and classicism with secure knowledge researched and practiced to conserve and preserve the present for the unknown.

And walking hand in hand with ghosts of African literature, are white writers within South African literary landscape who receive continued critical analyses and reviews in mainstream publications, which in turn supports their unprecedented exposure and reader engagements.

These writers in essence have formed a sustained culture of collective appreciation of white cultural output, attending music festivals and art exhibitions, operas and orchestral performances and writing (archiving) about these collective cultural experiences, while patronising museums that preserve white history for posterity.

Although excluded from mainstream legitimacy, black literary and art critics/writers must continue to carve a space for free and unobstructed critiques of society, analysing varied disciplines in a multidimensional dialogue that is rooted in historical continuity.

Especially poignant at this moment in the development of an Afrocentric aesthetic, are these reflections and cultural analyses, engaging the tensions between the acts of creating and somnolence of a consumerist society.

In a world where routinely sanitised analysis isn’t scarce, where art appreciation seems ceremonial rather than lived, there seems to be a prearranged lack of public debate about the role of contemporary art in socio-cultural cohesion.

But from an archival perspective, this art oriented writing is significant because it documents transitional moments in contemporary history, events articulated as mysteries inherited for future contemplation.

And as we observe how elitist art consumers are relying of simplistic and reductive analyses of African artistic expression, writers must, however, remain alert to cultural biases that inform art consumption and its effects on creative practices.

Whites love art that panders their own convictions and labour to ratify imperialist tastes driving the art world today, they cannot escape their euro-typical outlook that is sustained by their macabre and snobbish assumptions about black art.

Those common tropes of “the starving and tortured artist” are instrumental in gaining trust from artists who would otherwise never submit to the asset oriented market appreciation of their art.

Spelling a potential disaster for African art and its relevance to black collective memory, lies in the lack of deep thought around technique, compositions and motifs that are cultivated by artists working of different mediums.

Although the “art scene” employs concerted distractions and juvenile trends, the lack of art education and visual literacy among spectators often leaves them prey to curatorial “dumbing down” for purposes of palatability.

The confessional intensity of black art, the entanglements of black art and spiritual practice, encouraging the role of the recluse as mediator and all elements of introspective reflection must resonate in all writing about art, to counter the chasm between the observed and the imagined, when censorship erodes independence of artists and their work.

Approaching their practice as a social score, artists therefore face more backlash when their unfiltered opinions about social conditions rub the powers that be, wryly and uncomfortably.

And with the onslaught of modern social media and ChatGPT, authentic writing about art is becoming non-immersive and devoid of the spiritual dimensions imbued into each work.

In a political climate of continued division, where the multiculturalist dreams of a nation in denial are shredded on the alters of consumerism and commodification of art; the isolation and desperation it produces among artists leaves many with mental dysfunctions that imperils their continued influence on the future of artistic expression in South Africa.

I am therefore calling for the urgency to reclaim narratives that re-conceptualize black artistic output with critical intimacy, that functions and takes practicality at the intersection of art, theory and politics; literary works that pose new ways of engaging with emerging approaches emerging through creative expression beyond boundaries of specific disciplines.

Kasie Gallerised

Galleries are repositories of contemporary social memory, identity, and spiritual continuity. Although galleries have been traditionally enclaves of white privileged artists, and some of those artists of colour deemed palatable by the art market speculators, their character is finally facing transformation from outside.

Activating infrastructural change within under-resourced spaces like South Africa’s townships means a commitment to reshaping the structures of cultural institutions, where galleries and other heritage sites must advocate for reparative methodologies in the face of dispossession.

But how can artists explore and contend with the interplay between contemporary democratic erosion of free expression and post-truth aesthetics, while presenting these “unpolished” narratives through which not only objects but also emotions, memories, and ideas circulate?

Artist Lesego Moncho has pioneered the trend of bringing overlooked art to the people by establishing The Lesego MONCHO Art Gallery in Taung, a historic and politically important township on the outskirt of the North West Province, a town that is home to a rich legacy of artistic and literary activism.

His work as a gallerist is born from a desire for reciprocity of living artists, not to reduce artists to mere producers of objects, and as artist in his own right, Lesego recognises the hidden burdens of artistic labor, the stress and lack of financial support that often derails many artistic practices as they erode attentiveness and dedication.

The monumental work that goes into establishing an art gallery in a township must take resilience and dedication, that is why it was essential to engage the galleries on his theoretical approach to curating exhibition for audiences that were excluded from “cultural appreciation”.

When the art world is shifting with contemporary capitalist rivalries, the military-industrial machinery continues ravaging various symbols of heritage, artworks and painting will disappear from public access, and this will affect places where conditions for scarcity are entrenched into the social super-structure.

Black communities fall within the strata of social demographics with less access to cultural institutions, and this absence can and has create a form of an avoidance of the preservation of such institution, especially by people of colour.

Although there is a prolific history of resistance artists who created spaces for artistic expression within the confines of politically charged and monitored townships, South Africa has observed a decline of such collectives and movements.

A large number of these art collectives and hubs are now based in high end suburbs of metropolitan cities, where the creative market is lucrative and the purchasing power and palates for new art is further growing.

Contemporary galleries and artists alike are now embroiled in postcolonial and neocolonial dynamics that challenge authority and ownership, and for galleries like the Lesego MONCHO Art Gallery, restitution and decolonisation debates require rethinking collection policies and custodianship.

For artists from marginalised or formerly colonised social groups, galleries must move from ownership to stewardship, from possession to relation; this way artists will not imagine galleries as abstract machines of validation and instant monetary gratification.

These galleries must confront the ever morphing yet constant exclusion of these artists from dominant categories of value while avoiding the risk of being instruments appropriated by traditional cultural institutions seeking diversity optics.

And in a cultural climate where both galleries and artists adapt to chronic instability by normalising self-exploitation, and exhaustion, galleries like MONCHO Art Gallery represent a change of guard.

When new artists often slip into tokenism when they cultivate their social, gender, or cultural background for personal success, galleries like MONCHO can either exploit that trait or reimagine it.

And the Lesego MONCHO Art Gallery, it appears is determined to keep relations between artists open and transparent, ensuring that collaboration remains a civic practice rather than a bureaucratic procedure.

This art haven is a testament that unless artists orient their methods towards self-sustained expression and making accessibility to a broad audience a priority, they need robust ideas and the willingness to face the hardships of navigating an unequal terrain of the global art world.

***

Images from the artist's online profiles.

Secret Messages of Flowers - On Pieter Robert Uitlander's Art

 

Algorithms tend to throw flowers at a flower child, and this I encountered when researching botanical depictions in arts, resulting in those obviously lusty snaps of framed canvases simulating impressionistic depiction of artists of past centuries.

As I probed further the impact of these ornamental flora, I became entranced by their language, as it became wildly popular within the domain of human romance and rituals associated with births and deaths.

So flowers, it seemed, situated the natural within human emotion, they adorned graves as symbols of remembrance, as nourishment for departed souls.

This imposed power is evident in Pieter Robert Uitlander’s PIENK HIBISCUS IN BLOU VAAS, a mournful portrait of a flower that seems to observe moments of death; like a companion for those about to depart the land of the living.

There’s a rich quietness in flowers he oils to canvas, that seem to reckon with the present, because they are always in a state of decay, wilting with each breath, a story laid out in colours that morph within eyes that glance and contemplate their transient beauty.

From the inception of Western painting, artists have depicted plants, flowers, and trees in images ranging widely in subject and purpose. And the use of botanical imagery in painting proliferated especially in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as artists became increasingly interested in the realistic depiction of objects from nature.

Robert’s flowers, on the other hand, are anguished, as if held captive in vases meant to savor their beauty. these bursting bouquets demonstrate how through his art he has honed an ability to freeze time and grant flowers eternal yet still life.

The flowers, spread across the table at a market place, for example, sinuously stare and punctuate the presence in the most of bustling pedestrians, who could be lovers vying for reciprocation of their sentiments.

A vase of flowers placed in front of portraits, flowers in a market where florists seems in frozen conversations, and many other radical renderings of flowers, including the personal, the decorative, the scientific, the painterly, the deliberately amateur yet un-witnessed in their splendour.

Although flowers have a simple purpose in nature: reproduction, their lure relies heavily on harmonious colors, soft curves, and symmetrical forms.

And standing among the best floral daubers of our time, his work chronicles unintended or unattended still lifes, that remind viewers of the fleeting nature of “Beauty”; the beauty of wilting flowers, the beauty of time itself; time which observed with invisible lenses of memory entwined with emotion.

Traced in the atmospheric floral patterns are remnants of memories of lived moments immortalized in petals, blooms gathering for their intensely allergenic qualities, moments that beckon one to ash: where, for what, and by whom these flowers were cultivated.
 
And there are lone flowers, lingering forlornly as symbolic motifs to process, expressing complex emotions tied to significant life events of beginnings and endings.

Images From The Artist's Online Profiles