ECHOES OF HISTORY BETRAYED

 

ECHOES OF HISTORY BETRAYED

The 1980s was a decade which became a turning point in South African history. Popular protest by masses of ordinary South Africans against the apartheid regime reached its height in the 1980s, and the government responded with extreme brutality and repression.

On July 20, 1985, faced with the collapse of its authority in the townships, the continuing prospect of spreading violence, and an increasingly uneasy white population, the government responded with its first state of emergency over many parts of the country. 

The State Of Emergency was re-introduced in 1986 when the elimination of people who were considered the enemies of the apartheid state was deemed of confidential importance.

At no time had apartheid been resisted by as large and united a constituency as in the 1984-1986 period, in spite of PW Botha’s vicious and repressive reign.

It was during this time that a number of activists disappeared under suspicious circumstances, many of whom were never found. Boikie Tlhapi, was one among the many voices that continue to haunt the present from the unresolved past.

The story of Boikie Tlhapi is undeniably full of contradictions, and those emerge with all recollections about the man and his activism from those who were closely related to him, either through the struggle or familial relations.

His death in the hands of the apartheid police continues to haunt the community, more so, those who were once incarcerated with him and those who were part of the protestation he spearheaded within the community of Ikageng.

These unsung heroes and now persons relegated to obscurity are people who are memory-keepers of how the struggle transpired in the late 1980’s.

As protagonists, they speak about their experience and motivation for joining the resistance, and their stories and memories that continue to build an incredible narrative of the history of resistance against oppression as expressed by activists in Ikageng and the Western Transvaal during those time of the infamous State Of Emergency of 1986.

The documentary thus unearths some living activists of yesteryear, who have unfortunately been overlooked by the current democratic dispensation and its beneficiaries. 

Nduduzo Makhathini

 

 

Nduduzo Makhathini’s music has always intrigued me since my first encounter with his sound at The Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2015, when he, together with Tumi Mogorosi, Mthunzi Mvubu, Robin Fasciae Kock, Ariel Zamonsky mesmerised music loveers with compositions and renditions which reinvigorated by belief in the hauntingly unrequited quality of South African Jazz. 

Over the course of the following years, I witnessed a serene evolution that embraced spirituality in all its sonic metaphors that linger to soften even the staunch hearts of those who denigrate African virtuosity. 

Read more: https://anirrationaldiary.blogspot.com/search?q=JAG

And in the tradition of sounds that merges the uneasy traumas of our collective past with the present, the IKHAMBI sessions at The Pan African Station in 2017 struck a chord in my soul that left me bereft of breath. It conjured up a a pervasive sense of interrupted transmissions from the spiritual, navigating the plane of the flesh.

 

Music that brings the mystical into the suspended space of memory, perfectly crafted yet imperfectly translated through nuanced flaws, broken scales irregular in form, with proportions that lend an uncanny effect of improvisation and mishaps.

What is spirituality in this case, because often this seance with the unknowable is relegated into realms of mystery, but here I infer to the living soul of a song that knows a language forgotten, melodies that seem like chords struck from primordial keys embedded in genes of current listeners.

I recall an artist inferring that we enter the world through our eyes, and it enters our inner worlds through our ears, and listening to Nduduzo’s Ikhambi felt akin to a reawakening, whence my inner contemplation is invaded by a foreign entity pent on inducing visions and memories buried with a thousand murdered ancestors. 

Compelled to the unthinkable splendours of imagined utopias of the soul, the song in its compositional complexity is unwoven by The Cure cCollective in ways that can only be deemed ingeniously mature for these young musos at play.

And though obscuring their intended catharsis, they narrow their improvisational excursion to a minimum, allowing for each instrumentalist to reinterpret and invigorate new meanings to the composition, guided by Makhathini’s pianistic elegance cognisant of the gravity of the proverb in their song.

Ikhambi left me amused by its eccentricity which roused my personal dissonance of feelings suspended between two worlds,  furthered through and located in the disorienting headspace between the two, hence I found myself intreating its essence through video art.

Paul Zisiwe

 

Video Art - Khahliso Matela Portfolio

Planet Past

Someone once said that the past is place you can’t visit. 

He said that “planet past” does exit. Hence it can’t be visited by even out most expedient time travelling scientists. 

But is the past truly a phantasm and an enigma that cannot be fully “perceived”? 

Can the past be perceived without computational decoding of substrate memories cleaved from those discarded in dreams? 

Are those dreamscapes, realities that should not be understood by the waking mind?

What of the nature of layers one excavates within this “self”, the intuitive and “deconditioned,” or unhinged bodily flow of experiments on a world that transcend verbal and societal categorization?

Any commitment to the principle that reality is to some degree constructed and contextual, that this world is more various than any one system of knowledge can account for; that this world contains many worlds, is indisputable.

CREATIVE COLLABORATION - An Exhibition

 

The Potchefstroom Museum Gallery has over the years dedicated its efforts towards exposing unknown and experimental artists from various under-resourced communities, and recently an exhibition  was held to celebrate current voices in the art scene within the region.

The gallery continues to cultivate an environment conducive to focused creativity and communal reflection, exploring shared spaces that foster creative encounters and collaborations.

The exhibition is a constellation of innovative and alternative artistic practices that might shed light on our own unsettled present.

In staging representations of contemporary perspectives on cultural identities — the CREATIVE COLLABORATION exhibition presents and opens a space for new examinations of a diverse range of artists whose expressive natures are characterised by their traumas and methods of reconstructing the shattered. 

Through photography, Andile Mayekiso explores an ever more intimate glimpses into the hidden yet explicit lives of others, a welcome reminder that while material wealth and inherited privilege have shaped the country’s turbulent modern history, survival amid ruins remains a reality with which we constant contend.

Daniel Tladi, through his landscape painting, he produces a poetic visibility that reveals relations of power and injustices, but at the same time conveys tenderness and dignity. His art affirms that we are surrounded by other worlds hidden in backwater country spaces characterised by abandoned farms, dispossessed farm labourers and peri-urban realities.

The works therefore begs the question of restitution of land for the indigenous people who were displaced and dispossessed, and turned into menial labour on the farmlands of their ancestry.

Rethabile Weevirs is yet another voice that was exposed through this exhibition, and one of her works, reminiscent of Miles Davis’ Filles De Kilimanjaro album cover art, evokes a nostalgia for both the past and the future. Her work thus appears serene at first glance but conveys an overwhelming sense of a haunting vision of the eye as a reflective mirror into which souls are etched and stained.

The exhibition focuses on the inseparable relationship between humans and their immediate surroundings, places where they find comfort and security, and humanity’s capacity for renewal.

Revealing both optimism and analysis of social conditions, the artists exhibited here grapple with ideas of identity, land and poverty, while also celebrating the impact of time on all objects held dear by humans. 

There are intimate portraits by Marrak Art, where each portrait reveals subtle characteristics of elegance and personal freedom, flamboyant expressions unique to each subject’s ways of sensing the world and thinking about the self.

In a fractured world there is beauty in the ways that decays consumes artefacts of human significance. The automobile rendered obsolete by the power of time, consumed by climes and their treacherous changes, but that which remains are remnants, broken, yet signifying a life past and relegated to memory. 

Discarded by aggressive and hostile consumerism, these remnants become surreal images that populate Andre Austin’s work. The rusted enamel mugs, the decaying wall and the absurd rendition of Salvardo Dali’s Persistence Of Memory leave the viewer glancing into often overlooked and uncomfortable awareness of decay and impermanence.

Through this exhibition visitors will discover beauty and hopeful messages through the artists’ eyes and experience the transformative journey from rural landscapes to cityscapes and imaginative spaces that celebrate historical figures, the under privileged as well as the forgotten. 

Paul Zisiwe 2025

Untitled #25

In any familiar image lingers a latent yearning for alternative ways in which meaning can be subtly altered and pushed into abstraction. 

Abstractions are articulated in this video poem as conditions of becoming rather than a fixed state, forcing us to contemplate and look at anew.

And even if figures appear in some parts of this continuous flow of images, they are pushed into an abstract and strangely disembodied state.

But when interwoven with archival audio, the juxtaposition lays bare links between colonial infrastructure rooted in the dispossession of indigenous land and contemporary conditions of inequality obscured by the illusion of progressive motion towards modernity.

The lucid monologues by stalwarts such as Dr. Nthato Motlana and Dr. Mangosuthu Buthelezi, by undermining established patterns of thought ascribed to visuals, invite viewers to explore alternative modes of recalling, a sonic mapping of our present through voices from the past.

The past is by no means silent; it is full of sounds that can be rediscovered through research, and these sounds, voices, slogans and hymns simulate the archetypal sounds of revolution, and reveal their psychoacoustic potential for rousing activism in the contemporary mind.

UNTITLED #25 thus explores colonial archives, retrieves erased narratives, and proposes new languages of struggle, a grammar of dissidence, which is characterised the struggle for freedmen South Africa.