“THIS is my country South Africa. My camera will give my country the freedom.”
A quote in bold black font set against white matte paper sits emblazoned on a page of RESIST!, a tome described by the director of the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne, Germany, Nanette Snoep, as a snapshot chronicling the period when an exhibition exploring over 500 years of anti-colonial resistance in the Global South titled RESIST!
The Art of Resistance, was displayed at the venue during the Covid-19 pandemic from April 2021 until January 2022. A publication compiled by Snoep herself, it follows the order of the exhibition’s installations structured into five thematic chapters.
“I did not want to leave the country to find another life. I was going to stay and fight with my camera as a gun,” continued the inscription below a monochromatic image limning schoolchildren rampaging through a road, captioned, The Young Lions, June 16, 1976 – which also happens to adorn the tome’s cover – credited to Peter Magubane. The doyen of South African photojournalism, he is further quoted thus: “I did not want to kill anyone, though. I wanted to kill apartheid!”
The lensman is featured in the tome as one of an eclectic and international mix of curators who contributed to the moving project, with another of his images being one he recorded in 1956 depicting a Black domestic worker tending to the hair of a White young girl whilst both seat on a public bench – intentionally separated by a backrest – clearly displaying a Europeans Only sign!
Augmenting South Africa’s contribution is the Medu Art Ensemble, a collective of South African and international artists from the visual arts, theatre, music and literature formed by the poet Mongane Wally Serote and artist Thami Mnyele in 1978 as a reaction to South Africa’s apartheid policy.
RESIST! feature six of the ensemble’s posters with a particularly striking silkscreen print resembling offset lithograph combining text and images one titled, Don’t Entertain Apartheid – Support the Cultural Boycott, produced in 1982 in response to American singer, Millie Jackson performing in South Africa despite a groundswell of opposition! Dedicatedly carrying out such defiant activities against apartheid whilst exiled in neighbouring Botswana – Mnyele would be killed during an SADF cross border raid in June 1985.
Segueing to another Southern African country, Snoep’s grandiose endeavour also incorporates a heartbreaking Namibian installation title, It’s Yours, co-curated by activists from that country, viz, Esther Utjiua Muinjangue and Ida Hoffmann, intended to raise public awareness of the genocide of the Ovaherero and Nama people committed by colonial Germany between the period 1904 to 1908, and consequently for the German Bundestag’s recognition of the atrocity, and an official apology and reparations from Germany!
Muinjangue and Hoffmann’s long drawn struggle for closure to a 117-year-old crime is set against the backdrop of the Berlin Conference of 1884 (which led to European countries colonizing Africa), one of whose aftermath had the German Empire colonizing the then South West Africa and appropriating land, cattle and natural resources of the Ovaherero community which triggered their uprising, quelled, at the order of Kaiser Wilhelm, by the sadistic Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha who on October 2, 1904, issued an extermination order for the murder by shooting of the tribe’s men, women and children and on April 22, 1905, another regarding the Nama people – which by 1908 had resulted in the wiping out of 80% of the Ovaherero and 50% of the Nama peoples!
Furthermore, Kaiser Wilhelm ordered the installation of concentration camps in which survivors, who looked like walking skeletons, were incarcerated – and worst of all, at which the natives were killed, their bodies decapitated and their skulls shipped to Germany!
Presented in the form of a room, It’s Yours incorporated an autonomous space entitled, Not About Us Without Us (a sort of rallying cry alluding to the co-curators as voices campaigning for justice on behalf of their murdered ancestors – some of whose remains are in the form of skulls displayed in Germany to this very day), featuring, among other multimedia displays, posters containing disturbing content depicting raped dead bodies, naked, hanged Ovaherero women, etcetera – all of that as a continuing quest, which Muinjangue initiated some fifteen years ago, to bring around the German government, which refuses to recognize what occurred as genocide, to acknowledge its role in the crime!
If, in addition to extracting admission of responsibility from Germany for the more than a century genocide, the Namibian ladies also sought the return of their descendants skulls from the European nation – then it follows that they were in likewise company in the form of fellow curator, Nigerian art historian, Peju Layiwola’s crusade for the Restitution of the Benin Court Artworks from European museums including Germany, whose Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum incidentally happened to possess 92 of the artworks.
Originating from the Kingdom of Benin in Nigeria whose royal palace along with other monuments were ransacked and burned to the ground by British troops in 1897 resulting in thousands of objects of ceremonial and ritual value looted and brought to Europe as so-called spoils of war – Layiwola has for more than twenty years been at the forefront of the artefacts’ (referred to as the Benin Bronzes) return to their homeland!
Unlike Muinjangue and Hoffmann’s endeavours, Layiwola – a granddaughter of Oba Akenzua II, King of the Kingdom of Benin – has been able to cover meaningful ground in her ongoing engagement with the Germans which to date resulted in the Cologne City Council approving the transfer of ownership of the RJM’s 92 artworks to the Federal Republic of Nigeria on December 8, 2022.
A significant start per se and hopefully a prelude to more of the collection’s return to its homeland!
A poem titled, I have come to take you home, written as a tribute to Sarah Baartman featured in the snapshot within a space referred to as, I MISS YOU: About Missing, Giving Back and Remembering – possibly offers apt endorsement to both the Namibians and Nigerian’s ongoing efforts towards rectification of the supplanting of the vanquished’s legacies, contextualized by the observations of two Martinique-born intellects, viz, Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, quoted respectively thus: “I look around and wherever there are colonizers and colonized face to face, I see force, brutality, cruelty, sadism, conflict . . . no human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a slave driver”, wrote the former in his 1955 book Discourse on Colonialism – with the latter opining in his 1961 work, The Wretched of the Earth: “When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.”
Two contemporary matters appertaining to the 21st century also feature in the publication, viz, the Rhodes Must Fall movement sparked in 2015 by student, Chumani Maxwele’s protest against the bronze statue of Cecil John Rhodes (a representative of British colonialism and a proponent of apartheid) situated at the University of Cape Town and the Black Lives Matter poser which initially came to prominence in the wake of African-American, George Floyd’s murder by a police officer in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020.
In the former incident, the protest resulted in the toppling of colonial monuments worldwide, per se, a resonance of the removal of the statue of Mouzinho de Albuquerque (one of most prominent figures in the colonial government of Portuguese East Africa) from Lourenco Marques (Maputo) – featured through a pictorial sequence in the publication – instigated by FRELIMO upon Mozambique’s independence in 1975.
Regarding the latter movement, the snapshot displays imagery recorded by Nigerian photographer, Francis Oghuma – who at the time was an artist-in-residence for RESIST! – during a Black Lives Matter demonstration staged in Cologne on June 20, 2020 in the aftermath of Floyd’s killing, at which more than 10 000 people demonstrated the day after Juneteenth – the day commemorating the liberation of enslaved people in the USA – which in that year was marked by worldwide BLM protests against racism and police violence!
RESIST! also probes the tribulations of, et al, the Roma (who for over 600 years have suffered slavery and a holocaust, which accounted for 500 000 victims, across Europe); the Tupac Amaru II’s Revolution; the Liberation Uprising on the Slave ship Amistad; the Mau Mau Uprising, etcetera.
A hardback, RESIST! is published by Thames and Hudson and distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Available at leading bookstores countrywide, it retails for R925.
