Jo Ractliffe | David Goldblatt :: Preoccupied Terrain

Should photography draw attention to a specific space and time or is seeking to capture universality a more venerable undertaking? A conversation between esteemed South African photographers Jo Ractliffe and David Goldblatt (held at the National Gallery in Cape Town on Wednesday 25 February 09) was inadvertently hinged on this question. Goldblatt played the role of interlocutor and described the discussion as a “regression.” The process saw him interrogating the trajectory of Ractliffe’s career from past to present and culminated in an introduction to her recently published book.

Entitled Terreno Ocupado, Ractliffe’s most recent body of work assembles emblematic photographs of contemporary Luanda. Nevertheless, she explained that the images aspire to something transcendental. By way of example, she drew a connection between the overalls she photographed on an Angolan roadside and T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.” In contrast, Goldblatt was more concerned with the work’s response to the particular social reality it depicted. The sample of work exhibited at the event (which included the ironically-named “Shack on the Boa Vista Cliff”) portrayed crumbling makeshift dwellings in Luanda’s slums.

What makes Ractliffe’s work interesting is the fact that both hard reality as well as universal aesthetics are at play. What’s more, given the subject matter of her recent work, this dichotomy is fiercely conflictive and far more profound than the difference of opinions that was at the centre of the conversation. Ractliffe’s slumscapes are framed in a way that brings aesthetic balance to what in reality is a horrific environment. From a distance, these black and white images are beautifully textured while up close we can identify offensive piles of rubbish. The experience raises the more significant question of how misery can be pleasing to the eye.

Barrack Obama :: Get Ahead Man

As the world grows more accustomed to the face at the helm of the United States, the phrase “first black president” is being less frequently tagged to the name Barack Obama. Given the history of discrimination in the United States, Obama’s achievement lent itself to being branded as symbolic of America’s progressive attitude towards race. The media, however, has all but exhausted this angle, providing an opportunity for free thinkers to reflect on what has really happened.

Naturally, President Obama’s physical appearance does have historical significance. In this respect, Obama’s inauguration provided an opportunity to reflect on America’s extraordinary Civil Rights Movement and the contributions of key African American figures to shifting the consciousness of the Unites States.

Nevertheless, by blindly dubbing Obama as “black,” the media has brought into play an old-school method of considering the slippery notion of race. Barack Obama is a person of dark-skinned Kenyan and light-skinned Hawaiian parentage. Describing him as “black” reflects a strain of binary mentality that harks back to America’s One-Drop Rule or South Africa’s profound Pencil Test.

What makes Barack Obama a really progressive choice from the perspective of race is that the fact that he is a figure who resists a simple racial tag. Ambiguity does a good job of dismantling categorical thinking. In reality, the concentration of melanin in Obama’s skin had as much to do with his success in the elections as the fact that his first name rhymes with Osama and his middle name is Hussein. For starters, he put together a much stronger campaign.

If American liberals insist on patting themselves on the back for breaking the mould, let them take pride in contributing to bringing about neoconservative regime change. As for the world’s most significant “first black president,” this title belongs to South Africa. Nevertheless, South Africa’s new national consciousness has yet to deal with prospect of a presidential candidate with a light complexion. Inconceivable? As a person of light-skinned Scottish and dark-skinned Jamaican parentage once said, “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery.”

Spud Part 2 :: Safe House

The Kwazulu-Natal Midlands is where John van de Ruit’s Spud novels are set. The “Kwazulu” part, however, was absent when the events in the books took place. Nevertheless, van de Ruit conceived a profoundly South African setting for his upmarket boys boarding school. He took a lesson from the old adage that “truth is stranger fiction” but names were changed to obscure the identity of the people and places involved.

Van de Ruit’s Spud novels are a South African publishing phenomenon. Despite our demographic penchant for not buying fiction, heads have popped up, ears are pricked, and hands are digging into pockets. Penguin has swept modesty aside and the first instalment’s cover now heralds the fact that not 60 000, not 70 000, but over 80 000 copies have been sold. Their logic is implicit. If Spud is flying off the shelves, you should buy it too.

True, the Spud novels do have a lot going for them. Moreover, the beauty of their formula lies in its simplicity. Van de Ruit takes the familiar framework of school diary and inserts local content. For South African readers bearing the yolk of a private boarding school background, the experience is akin to watching a True Hollywood Story of your adolescence. For the great unwashed, it’s a window onto the codes and rites of a Masonic fraternity.

In spite of his nickname, the central character of the books has enormous appeal. A stranger in a strange land, Spud has entered an upper-class enclave on the back of a middle-class upbringing. The world filtered through his diary is engaging and his naivety (as the publisher puts it) is “wickedly funny.” It’s an easy read and the pages turn quickly. To top it off, van de Ruit has done an exemplary job of promoting himself and mobilising South Africa’s book-selling community.

Nevertheless, there is a bigger picture to the success of Spud and its sequel. What really sets them apart from other South African novels set in the 90s is the way they interrogate South Africa’s wobbly transition to democracy. In short, the “interrogation” part is absent. Spud’s boarding school diaries marginalize the realities of his bipolar country. Despite a handful of nuggets that provide social and political context, Spud’s world renders the outside one virtually inconsequential.

While Spud shows adequate disapproval for his family’s old-school take on South Africa, it is the ins and outs of his immediate surroundings that really count. As such, Spud’s diaries reflect an adolescent experience of the old South Africa where politics hover on the periphery of the playground. He’s a kid with nothing to feel guilty about. In fact, for many book-buying South Africans in their thirties, Spud may very well be the first South African novel that legitimises their Apartheid experience. Could this be its best-selling ingredient?

► Spud Part 1 :: Apple of the Earth

Spud Part 1 :: Apple of the Earth

Way back in the 1440s, the word “spud” described a digging instrument used to inter the seedling of a plant that yielded a starchy tuber. By 1845, the word was used to describe the starchy tuber itself. And so began a word’s etymological journey through the mysteries of language, at least until a meddlesome polyglot by the name of Mario Pei came along. Author of The Story of Language (1949), Pei attributed the origin of the word “spud” to the acronym of a league of potato-fearing Englishmen called “The Society for the Prevention of Unwholesome Diet.”

Although linguists sniggered and pointed fingers, Pei’s assertion was founded on a subterranean history of British potato suspicion. It started with the concern among Scottish clerics in the Seventeenth Century that potatoes weren’t mentioned in the Bible. When the first Great Irish Famine (1740-1741) saw infected potato crops decimate the population of Scotland’s neighbour, the Holy Order had a field day. To top things off, the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (published in Edinburgh in 1768) referred to the potato as a “demoralizing esculent.”

Things settled down and potatoes lay dormant in the Scottish psyche until Spud returned in the form of a bespectacled and emaciated heroine addict slinging brown slime across the breakfast table. It was 1996 and the film was Trainspotting. Democratic South Africa was two. Ten years later a South African would write a novel entitled Spud. The book would tell the story of a boy in a boarding school in South Africa in 1990.

►  Spud Part 2 :: Safe House

Michel Foucault :: The Unequal Gaze

It’s the mid-70s and a French philosopher and historian by the name of Michel Foucault (15 October 1926-25 June 1984) has just hammered out a book concerning the birth of the prison system. The work tracks the evolution of the social and technological mechanisms used to entrench discipline in Western Society. His ideas serve up an effective theoretical means of understanding the dystopian world conceived by George Orwell in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Moreover, Foucault has devised a philosophical matrix through which the existence of Big Brother can be perceived in familiar contemporary contexts.

Discipline and Punish asserts that we live in a state of perpetual imprisonment, drawing connections between the mechanisms of law enforcement in modern society and the panopticon. A type of prison building dreamed up in the Eighteenth Century, the central characteristic of the panopticon was that the guards could observe prisoners while prisoners were unable to see the guards. The bottom line was that the prisoners never knew when the guards were looking. Fewer guards were needed, costing taxpayers less money. Everybody was happy.

Needless to say, Foucault would have drawn profound conclusions concerning the evolution of enforcing the speed limit on South African roads. Once upon a time, traffic cops crouched behind bushes and cables were intermittently stretched across roads in unexpected locations. When it was discovered that the income generated by speeding fines was not commensurate with the cost of conducting these stealth operations, the government turned to the panopticon method, slapping up signs like the one above.

As there were no cameras to go with the signs, people quickly realised that there weren’t any guards on duty. Big Brother was caught napping and all the mice came out to play. When the cameras arrived, the farmer’s wife raised her carving knife and speeding vehicles broke wildly to avoid persecution. However, they remembered where the cameras were located and formulated a strategy of slowing down in all the right places. In a flash, the intuition of South African drivers sped to the lofty philosophical heights of Foucault.

Kurt Vonnegut :: Honorary Citizen

A profoundly South African sign that commuters pass as they shuffle onto Metrorail trains. Kurt Vonnegut (11 November 1922-11 April 2007) would have approved. The American novelist and social commentator contemplated the mess that dangerous weapons make during his involvement in the Second World War. Held as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Vonnegut took shelter in a meat factory during the infamous bombing of the German city in 1945. He emerged to find piles of rubble and death.

Vonnegut later drew on his experience in Germany to create a novel entitled Slaughterhouse-Five. An exploded narrative that skips backwards and forwards in time, the book is laced with science fiction and provides a gloomy picture of war. Published in 1969, it was embraced by readers who were puzzled and drained by America’s Vietnam blundering. Around the time it hit the shelves, polls in the United States indicated that only 33% of the nation supported pursuing a complete military victory.

Vonnegut concocted a distinctive brand of hopeful pessimism in his literary contributions to Planet Earth. His final work, an exhortation of the Bush administration entitled Man Without a Country, sees him soaring the lofty peaks of intelligent insubordination. “What can be said to our young people,” he writes, “now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?”

Zinedine Zidane :: Head of God

Only the World Cup is capable of arousing authentic global collective consciousness. It’s an event that every media-consuming entity is sucked into. Every four years, for just one month, the World Cup infiltrates the broadest possible sweep of hearts and minds on the planet. It conjures South African football experts from thin air and elicits football commentary from the least likely sources.

World Cup interactions are hinged on TV sets. From the belligerent outbursts of friends in bars with big screens to the distracted eyes of shop assistants with small ones, the World Cup assembles every variety of media congregation. When the immediacy of the events has passed, the Internet steps in to archive memorable moments.

This brings me to what must surely be the most powerful stream of images from the 2006 World Cup Final. The streamlined arc of Zidane’s cranium as it sailed through the air, his body bent behind the shiny orb as it found its mark on Materazzi’s chest. The limp body of the Italian defender dropping to the ground, the mouth that had spat an insult at the French captain twisted into a different shape.

The most extraordinary aspect of the Zidane’s rage was the manner in which he chose to vent it. Of all the appendages available to the football legend, he chose to use his head. Somehow a fist would have been a crass substitute, the very essence of football being hinged on the rule that you can’t use your hands. Moreover, Zidane’s skull mercifully targeted Materazzi’s impact-resistant ribcage. It would have been ungentlemanly to pit his bulbous rock against the Italian’s eggshell noggin.

Some may say that Zidane’s final act as an international footballer besmirched his otherwise glorious career. I beg to differ. Zidane’s headbutt was a contained physical response to Materazzi’s hostile invective. It could have been an ugly act if Zidane had sought to elicit pain, but this wasn’t the case. Zidane’s was simply a demonstrative gesture that turned out to be a swan song that defied the expected Hollywood ending.

In three years’ time, the nexus of World Cup media will shift to South Africa. Despite soapbox mutterings about 2010, Sepp Blatter recently assured us that “the only thing that will stop us from holding the World Cup in South Africa would be a natural disaster.” In four years’ times, a scattering of video clips and a handful of World Cup stadiums will be all that remains. No doubt our World Cup’s Internet footprint will include profoundly South African signs of divine intervention.

Miriam Makeba :: Speaking in Tongues

It’s September in the year 1979. Five months have past since the Last King of Scotland fled Kampala and Emperor Bokassa has just been extracted from the Central African Republic. The President of Equatorial Guinea is being tried for genocide and Nigeria is weeks away from its Second Republic. South Africa is currently suspected of conducting a nuclear test with Israel in the Southern Atlantic Ocean. In seven month’s time, Zimbabwe will be born.

It’s September in the year 1979. Three years have past since hundreds of Sowetan kids were killed by South African police during protests against legislation that enforced the use of English and Afrikaans as languages of instruction in “black schools.” Right now, a profoundly South African woman is introducing a song to a Dutch audience at Varra TV Studios. “It’s a Xhosa wedding song,” she explains, taking her time.

“Everywhere we go, people often ask me, ‘How do you make that noise?’ It used to offend me because it isn’t a noise, it’s my language. But I came to understand that they didn’t understand that Xhosa is my language and that it’s a written language. We use the same Roman alphabet in writing it. The only difference is that we pronounce certain letters differently.”

47-year-old Miriam Makeba is still on top of her game. She discharges a volley of crackling Xhosa vocabulary to the delight of the crowd. She finds humour in the sombre subject of South Africa and its languages: “Now, I’m sure everyone here knows that we in South Africa are still colonised. The colonisers of my country call this song ‘The Click Song,’ simply because they find it rather difficult saying ‘Qongqothwane.’”

► Miriam Makeba at Varra TV Studios (September 1979)

Koos Kombuis :: Sweet Fanny Adams

Profoundly South African singer-songwriter Koos Kombuis stirred up a storm in 2006 with a whimsical tune entitled “Fokkol.” The free download sapped the width of thousands of broadbands from Worcester to Wollongong. The song paints a bleak picture of South Africa. A tour guide’s monologue from the year 2010, the lyrics lament the plight of a fallen country and fanatically expose its ruins. Smug ex-pats were thrilled. Homecoming revolutionaries were indignant.

The song also appeared on a YouTube offering entitled “The New South Africa.” It was given English subtitles and accompanied by a montage of dystopian imagery showcasing the hack Movie Maker skills of a certain “sweetlove3ten.” While the song is described as “hilarious,” it should have been given the tag satire rather than parody. Nevertheless, most of the 314 comments generated by the video’s 58,860 views (circa the date of this post) push the idea of humour aside and vent an even direr glimpse of the state of the nation.

“Fokkol” has been embraced with enthusiasm by those seeking to confirm their pessimism about South Africa. Those in denial want to pillory Koos Kombuis for being unpatriotic. Few seem to realise that they are responding to a work of science fiction. The monologue, after all, performs an imaginative time warp that gives the song its satirical edge. The lyrics simply suggest that tour guides in 2010 will have lots to talk about what little the country has to offer.

Nevertheless, satire is also directed at the tour guide’s bleak and critical eye. Will South Africa’s poor self-esteem go so far as to infect those whose task it is to take visitors to our places of national pride? Has seeking signs of failure become a South African fetish? Mind you, the guide in question speaks in Afrikaans, which suggests that he must be addressing a group of South African ex-pats. Perhaps they’ve returned from exile to indulge in what they expect to be a World Cup disaster. Perhaps their tour guide is telling them exactly what they want to hear.