Southern African Artists reflect on Colonialism, Monuments & Memory
Nicola Brandt, Isheanesu Dondo, Raymond Fuyana, Muningandu Hoveka, Tuli Mekondjo, Zenaéca Singh, Gift Uzera
Rhodes House Oxford Opens 19 June 2024
ENTANGLED:
Southern African Artists reflect on Colonialism, Monuments & Memory
Curated by Julie Taylor (Zimbabwe & St Antony’s 2003)
The past decade in southern Africa has borne witness to an unprecedented ideological shift. Three interlinked movements, Rhodes Must Fall, Fees Must Fall and Black Lives Matter, have reframed the ways in which many of us think and speak about our cultural and educational traditions and their symbols, calling on us to recognise the ongoing impact of colonial history on societies around the world. In turn, local and global debates about monuments and memorialisation have multiplied.
Through a selection of artworks produced since Rhodes Must Fall, the exhibition Entangled takes an intimate look at how artists in South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe have grappled with colonial legacies, their material manifestations and visual symbolism, pointing to the possibility of decolonisation.
In South Africa, the 2015 student-led movement Rhodes Must Fall called for the dismantling of institutional racism at the University of Cape Town, symbolised by the removal of the Cecil John Rhodes monument that took pride of place on campus. Fees Must Fall drew on this momentum; student protests against fee increases highlighted slow socio-economic change and ongoing racial inequality. Supporters of the student uprising linked it to the international Black Lives Matter movement (initially a response to police brutality against people of colour in the USA), connecting South Africa’s student activism to an increasing global awareness of race, power and privilege.
As artist-scholar Nicola Brandt writes, “In landscapes marked by trauma, inequality and deprivation, and at the same time constantly in flux... photographers and artists, across a range of media and strategies, are seeking to restore a closer and more intimate connection to place and to their own bodies and histories”. Both Brandt’s own artworks and pieces that have emerged from her collaboration with Gift Uzera and Muningandu Hoveka create a link between Namibia’s colonial past (first as a German colony and later occupied by South Africa), and the spectres of Rhodes that exist in several places in South Africa, Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom. Here the relationship between empire and ecology also comes into view.
Rhodes’ enduring presence is visible in Raymond Fuyana’s painting, which depicts a memorial to the South African War (1899 - 1902). Commissioned by Rhodes and designed by Herbert Baker, the monument is located in the South African town of Kimberley, where Rhodes made his mining fortune. Fuyana’s citation of the monument underscores how a small number of men profoundly influenced the aesthetics of colonial memorialisation across countries and continents.
The aesthetic links between sites of the British Empire are further entrenched by historical practices of looting and appropriation. For instance, the first of the Zimbabwe Bird stone carvings of bateleur eagles, found at the archeological site of Great Zimbabwe, was looted in 1889 and purchased by Rhodes. He so treasured the carving that he is reputed to have travelled with it at times; the bird reappears in the architectural ornamentation of a number of colonial buildings, including Rhodes House. The drawings of Isheanesu Dondo reference the Zimbabwe Bird as a way of pointing to how this symbol was appropriated into the Freemasons’ visual lexicon in both the colonies and the metropole.
Moving away from architectural monuments, the paintings and sculptures of Zenaéca Singh reconsider agricultural landscapes and extraction. Specifically, Singh looks at how sugar farming in South Africa, one of the primary undertakings of the British empire, relied on indentured Indian labour, including women. Singh uses as her medium the very output of that labour sugar. Her work reminds us that these histories are insidiously embedded in our everyday lives, tracing connections between the sugar economy and domestic spaces and conventions.
The presence of collective ancestors resounds in Tuli Mekondjo’s work, which mourns and honours the memory of her Namibian female forebears. Her pieces use transfers of colonial-era archival photographs and postcards, transformed with embroidery, paint, rust and other materials. Mekondjo metaphorically stitches together past and present, connecting the beginnings of life to the soil and reminding us that burial can be followed by resurrection.
As decolonial movements urge us to rethink teaching, learning, knowledge systems and the institutions that uphold them, this exhibition foregrounds the role of contemporary artists in shaping revisionist histories and new ways of knowing.
Physical Energy (Cape Town)
Nicola Brandt (b. 1983, Namibia)
By sheer coincidence, the artist Nicola Brandt was photographing G.F. Watts’ bronze monument Physical Energy at the Rhodes Memorial site on the foothills of Table Mountain when the first plumes of smoke began to rise from the devastating fire that took place in Cape Town in April 2021. Concerned with the persistence of Rhodes’ legacy and others like him in the present, Physical Energy and the Cape Town fires together propelled Brandt towards her rigorous research about colonialism, extractive capitalism, and ongoing struggles along class and race lines.
Watts’ sculpture is a celebration of the legacy of British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes (1853–1902), and exists in two other locations: London and Harare. With Physical Energy, Watts wanted to embody the dynamic force of ambition driving European imperial exploits, describing his monument as a “symbol of the restless Physical impulse to seek the still unachieved in the domain of material things.”
Rhodes’ ambition secured his infamy as a mining magnate. The structure and economic basis of the extractive industries of gold and diamond mining, which formed the base of his wealth, has led to extreme economic and social inequalities for generations in southern Africa.
The deep irony of the Table Mountain fires is that the colonial-era pine trees that encircled Rhodes’s former estate and the University of Cape Town’s main campus contributed to the partial destruction of several of the university’s buildings, including the Jagger Library. Kept underground and salvaged in the blaze was part of a collection of rare antiques, as well as documentation relating to the original Khoe-San / Khoisan, the original inhabitants of the area.
Brandt’s photographs prompt us to reflect on crimes committed in pursuit of material gain, as well as on how networks of wealth and power are tied up across countries and continents.
Nicola Brandt
Physical Energy. London, Harare, Cape Town
2020 and 2021
Archival pigment ink on Baryta paper
Triptych
Edition 1/5 + 1AP
40 x 60 cm
Physical Energy (Harare)
Physical Energy (London)
Nightfall. Cape Town, 18 April 2021
Archival pigment ink on Baryta paper
Edition 1/3 + 1AP
40 x 60 cm
Nicola Brandt
Molteno Reservoir. Cape Town
20 April 2021
Edition 1/3 + 1AP
40 x 60 cm
Nicola Brandt
Archival pigment ink on Baryta paper
Nicola Brandt
As the Library Burns. Devil’s Peak and University of Cape Town Campus, Cape Town 18 April 2021
Archival pigment ink on Baryta paper
Edition 1/3 + 1AP
120 × 80 cm
Isheanesu Dondo (b.1985, Zimbabwe)
Characterised by a precise approach to line and colour, Isheanesu Dondo’s drawings explore the relationship between ornamentation, esotericism and political ideology in historic Zimbabwe. In particular, Dondo brings to light the influence of Freemasonry on architecture and building in Zimbabwean towns. Both Cecil John Rhodes and the renowned colonial-era British architect Sir Herbert Baker - whose express role in the British Empire was to give “the colonies” a visual uniformity through architecture - are believed to have been associated with the Freemasons. Masonic symbols can be seen in the Baker-designed Anglican Cathedral in Harare, and in other sites around the city that followed the imperial visual language mandated by Baker.
Dondo observes that circles and triangles, which are important sacred forms in the Masonic tradition, also often appear on traditional Bantu pottery created by Zimbabwe’s precolonial inhabitants. This visual common ground leads Dondo to speculate not only that the Freemasons and the Bantu people might have shared and exchanged esoteric symbologies, but that there might be innate spiritual resonances between these philosophies as well.
Delving into the world of symbolism and hermeticism, Dondo employs his own system of symbols in his drawings, creating poetic rather than prescriptive associations between forms. He often references the chapungu, or Zimbabwe Bird, through highly stylised bird imagery. The chapungu is a symbol that has been strongly associated with Zimbabwean identity and tradition. Thought of as a good omen, the chapungu is based on the soapstone carvings of bateleur eagles found at the Great Zimbabwe archeological site. Although Rhodes appropriated the symbol as part of the official iconography of Rhodesia (the colonial name for Zimbabwe), it has remained an important signifier of national, pre-colonial identity to the present day.
Dondo also references the Matobo hills (Matopos) - a place in southern Zimbabwe of great spiritual importance to the Ndebele people, as well as the resting place of African leaders such as Mzilikazi. Another of Rhodes’ intrusions and appropriations was to controversially determine his own burial among them in this grand and sacred landscape. Rhodes’ grave remains there today.
Inspired The Zimbirds?
29.7 x 21 cm
Isheanesu Dondo What
Acrylic and ink on paper
What Inspired The Zimbirds? (detail)
Isheanesu Dondo
Zimbabwe Bird 2024
Pen and ink on paper
74 x 26.4 cm
Zimbabwe Bird (detail)
Isheanesu Dondo
Bantu Women Discussing The Constellations
2024
Acrylic, pen and ink on paper
70 x 50 cm
Bantu Women Discussing The Constellations (detail)
70 x 50 cm
Isheanesu Dondo Matopos 2024
Acrylic, pen and ink on paper
Matopos (detail)
Pen and ink on paper
29.7 x 21 cm
Isheanesu Dondo Masons Talking Geometry 2024
Masons Talking Geometry (detail)
Raymond Fuyana (b. 1995, Zimbabwe)
As a deaf person, Raymond Fuyana’s (b. 1995, Zimbabwe) experience of the world is charged by how meaning is conveyed through the visual. Fuyana is trained as a printmaker and is a self-taught painter. He cites Surrealism as an important influence on his practice, particularly in his method of juxtaposing imagery from disparate sources, including his own imagination. His paintings are marked by a fundamental curiosity and depict both the iconic sites of the ancient world and places that he has visited himself. In Fuyana’s abundant and futuristic imaginary universe, there are no limitations on time, space or other dimensions.
In this exhibition, Fuyana depicts the Honoured Dead Memorial, which is a monument to the British soldiers who died defending the South African town of Kimberley at the beginning of the South African War (1899 - 1902) (also called the Anglo-Boer War). Although the siege was lifted in early 1900, the war continued, and a concentration camp was built at Kimberley to intern Boer (Afrikaner) women and children, as well as black African refugees. Hundreds died in Kimberley and over forty thousand died in deplorable conditions in camps across the country.
The monument was commissioned by Cecil John Rhodes, who made his mining fortune from Kimberley’s diamond mines and was a protagonist in the outbreak of the South African War. It was designed by imperial architect Herbert Baker, who also designed Rhodes House. Inspired by the Greek Nereid Monument, the Honoured Dead Memorial is built from stone quarried in Zimbabwe’s Matobo (Matopos) hills, a piece of which is also laid here in Rhodes House. It is inscribed with a commissioned poem by Rudyard Kipling, a close associate and great admirer of Rhodes. It begins: “This for a charge to our children in sign of the price we paid; The price we paid for the freedom that comes unsoiled to your hand…”.
Today, those who have inherited the bitter fruits of Empire might interpret Kipling’s words quite differently. Together with the history of Kimberley, the Honoured Dead Memorial reminds us of how extraction, capitalism, conflict and inequality forged society in 20th century southern Africa. The monument also underscores how a small number of men profoundly influenced the aesthetics of colonial memorialisation across countries and continents.
Creators propel other creators, whether to inspire, question or protest. In Fuyana’s painting, the insertion of a mysterious, beckoning door in front of the monument, and the floating house alongside it, suggest a porousness that speaks of dislocation and reinterpretation. We have a sense of displacement, but also of the potential for renewal. Through Fuyana’s playful ‘deconstruction’ of the Honoured Dead Memorial, the artist’s rich imaginary world perhaps prompts us to ask how we envisage future memorialisation in a postcolonial world. Who and what will we publicly remember, and how?
Regular Time: Kimberley
Raymond Fuyana
Regular Time: Kimberley (detail)
Gift Uzera (b. 1993), Muningandu Hoveka (b. 1995) and Nicola Brandt (b. 1983) (Namibia)
Across southern Africa in recent years, artists have intervened in spaces of power, often through photography, video and performance. MAN OF WAR: LEAVE MY HOUSE (2023) is part of a new wave of decolonial art and intersectional activism in Namibia. Consisting of a series of photographs and a video, Man of War aims to highlight questions related to history and memory, and is a counterpoint to state-sanctioned memorialization.
All born in Namibia, of Herero and German backgrounds respectively, Gift Uzera, Muningandu Hoveka and Nicola Brandt invite us to consider how to respond to problematic monuments. The artists symbolically confront the colonial monument of Curt von François in Windhoek on the day of its removal, 23 November 2022, reading their letters of farewell to the statue of the man regarded as Windhoek’s founder. Von François was a colonial officer of German South West Africa, from 1889 to 1893, during which time he waged war against the Herero and Nama people, resulting in huge civilian casualties.
This work forms part of a broader effort to process traumatic legacies connected to German colonialism and apartheid, and intersectional violence which is tied to contemporary patriarchy and identity politics. Recalling the day of the artists’ intervention, Uzera writes, “I can…hear whispers from hostile men, some wearing official uniforms; others cloaked in something invisible. Muni gets up on the ladder and begins her work…I am holding the ladder for stability. The man yells at her in Otjiherero demanding she gets off the ladder and to stop parading around in ‘his’ dress. ‘It’s a false representation of our nation. You are insulting us...’ He gets closer and shakes the ladder…‘If you don’t get down, I will push you off.’ Fearing for her well-being, Muni slowly starts to get off the ladder. After all power is power. Some of the onlookers are angered by the actions of this man…This is another assault at a site where we had come [to] dismantle a symbol of white supremacy.”
In these settings, queer and feminist approaches not only challenge the status quo but provide a departure point for this embodied memory work, in an attempt to go beyond colonial and tribal legacies and nationalised identity politics. The artists also point to collaborative modes of working to envisage new rituals and public spaces. This body of work had its debut at the Goethe Institute in Windhoek, Namibia in 2023. This is the first time it has been shown in the UK.
Man of War: Leave My House
2023
Single channel video Edition 3 plus 2AP
Edited by Jannous Aukema
0h 8m 35s
Viewing on request
Gift Uzera, Muningandu Hoveka, and Nicola Brandt
Gift Uzera, Muningandu Hoveka, and Nicola Brandt
Released. The Day Curt Fell (I)
2022
Pigment ink on True Fibre Matte Triptych
Edition 1 of 3 plus 2AP
30 x 45 cm
Released. The Day Curt Fell (I) (detail)
Released. The Day Curt Fell (I) (detail)
Released. The Day Curt Fell (I)
Edition of 1 of 3 plus 2AP
30 x 45 cm
Gift Uzera, Muningandu Hoveka, and Nicola Brandt
Wrapped 2022
Pigment ink on True Fibre Matte
90 x 60 cm
Gift Uzera, Muningandu Hoveka, and Nicola Brandt
New Dawn
2022
Pigment ink on True Fibre Matte
Edition 1 of 3 plus 2AP
New Dawn (detail)
Tuli Mekondjo (b.1982,
Namibia)
Tuli Mekondjo is a self-taught artist whose work explores identity construction in the shadow of Namibia’s violent past. She uses a variety of media including natural silks, embroidery, photo-transfer, soil, paint, resin and mahangu (millet) grain, a staple food in Namibia, to reframe imagery from historical photographs. These images come from both the German colonial period (1884-1919) and subsequent decades of illegal occupation by South Africa (1965-1990). Mekondjo’s multilayered works result from a process of both literal and figurative burial and retrieval, and draw heavily on photographic representations of indigenous Namibian people from multiple ethnic groups. She integrates these images with embroidery related to fertility, life cycles, birth and death.
As art historian Paul Wilson writes about the photographic postcards used in this series, “[Mekondjo] bought some from an antique shop in Swakopmund steeped in controversy for selling Nazi memorabilia, and others from a German-Namibian man who sells them to European tourists in Windhoek. Her uncomfortable experiences while buying the postcards reminded her that these images were never meant for her. As an Omuwambo woman, she was supposed to be the product, not the buyer.”
“The subjects that, at first glance, may seem mundane: mothers with children, women in indigenous dress, and scenes of daily life in Aawambo homesteads. By withholding the spectacle of colonial violence, Mekondjo asks viewers to look …[at] what is always present but never visible in the actual postcards, namely the ‘hovering shadows’ of the ‘colonial masters’...and assumed white viewers, all of whom pin the subjects under a controlling, objectifying gaze.”
The presence of female ancestors is particularly important for Mekondjo, whose connection to her mother, whom she lost when she was 12 years old, and grandmother, are the beginning of a cycle of connections to female ancestors stretching back in time. By embroidering her artworks with images of wombs and foetuses, she metaphorically connects the beginnings of life to the soil and to women.
“For the artist”, continues Wilson, “the embroidered imagery represents traumas that are passed down from one generation to the next, but the vibrant anatomical forms also pulsate with life, resilient and indomitable, which emerges even amid oppression and death. The alien blastocytes and zygotes where life begins and the bleached bones and skulls where it ends all share an unsettling beauty. This tension between life and death is embedded in the very making of the artworks. They begin, after all, with a burial followed by ‘a type of resurrection’.”
Mekondjo Kemeni! Ounona voluhepo! / Wail! Children of poverty! 2021
Image transfer, gold marker on canvas, cotton embroidery thread, crochet yarn, silk fabrics 106 x 93 cm
Tuli
Kemeni! Ounona voluhepo! / Wail! Children of poverty! (detail)
/ In the river, we will lay on our backs
2021
Image transfer on canvas, cotton embroidery thread, crochet yarn, silk fabrics
94 x 162 cm
Tuli Mekondjo
Momulonga ohatu ka nangala ongali
Momulonga ohatu ka nangala ongali / In the river, we will lay on our backs (detail)
Zenaéca
Singh (b. 2000, South Africa)
Zenaéca Singh’s work explores the complex history of the sugar economy in South Africa and its entanglement with migration, colonialism, labour exploitation, and the dynamics of the domestic sphere. Working across painting, sculpture and installation, she investigates archives of images and text related to indentured South African Indians in the period 1860–1911. The lack of memorialisation of this history perpetuates an ongoing sense of loss and exclusion for the Indian community.
In Singh’s works, using mixtures of melted sugar and molasses on cotton, she paints figures in landscapes based on the sugar plantations of KwaZulu Natal, where the South African Indian population originated as indentured labourers under British colonial rule. Her silhouetted female figures are poised in the landscape while at work, harvesting sugarcane or winding through the thickets of the sugarcane fields. These paintings reference archival photographs, but depart from the documentary tradition by effacing the figures’ identities: Singh invites us to wonder who the subjects of her works might be, to empathise with them and imagine ourselves in their worlds. She writes that “The molasses on cotton materially speaks to the nuances between the violence of indentureship and slavery. The figures have been made into silhouettes, to deal with the ethical implication of perceiving a colonised subject whose consent we cannot get.”
The found vintage frames in which Singh has mounted these paintings would historically have been used in a domestic setting, probably for photographic portraits of family or loved ones. Together with sugar-coated teacups, she creates this domestic reference in order to trace connections between the sugar economy and its impacts on domestic culture and conventions in South Africa. She acknowledges the gendered history of the home space, as well as the ongoing marginalisation of histories of indentureship, situating her own making and identity in relation to this history.
Five Generations 2023
25 x 27 x 26 cm
Zenaéca Singh
Sugar, Plaster of Paris and Resin
The Beginning 2022
13.5 x 21 x 9 cm
Zenaéca Singh
Sugar, Plaster of Paris and Resin
Zenaéca Singh
Three Ships
2022
Sugar, Plaster of Paris and Resin
13.5 x 21 x 9 cm
Five Generations,The Beginning and Three Ships Installation View
2024
Zenaéca Singh their roots grew deeper and their roots touched the sky
Molasses on cotton and found vintage frame
16.5 x 24 cm
their roots grew deeper and their roots touched the sky (detail)
Zenaéca Singh they came with sweetness not of sugarcane or cotton, but of air
2024
Molasses on cotton and found vintage frame
16 x 12.5 cm
they came with sweetness not of sugarcane or cotton, but of air (detail)
Zenaéca Singh the Stare 2024
Molasses on cotton, found vintage frame 15.5 x 11 cm
the Stare (detail)
Zenaéca Singh
Making Everyday Sweeter 2024
Sugar and clay
Sugar Doily: 16 x 16cm each
Teacup size: 9 x 9 cm each
Installation: 20 x 70 cm (approximate dimensions)
Making Everyday Sweeter Installation View
Making Everyday Sweeter with they came with sweetness not of sugarcane or cotton, but of air, the Stare and their roots grew deeper and their roots touched the sky
Installation View
Special Thanks & Bibliography
We would like to thank all the many people who have helped make this exhibition possible, including through loans of artworks.
We also acknowledge the writing and publications of the Iziko South African Museum and Nicola Brandt.
Iziko South African Museum in collaboration with Orms. 2019. The People’s Art: Chapungu – The Day Rhodes Fell. https://www.iziko.org.za/news/peoples-art-chapungu-day-rhodes-fell/
Nicola Brandt. 2020. Landscapes between Then and Now: Recent Histories in Southern African Photography, Performance and Video Art. London: Bloomsbury
Nicola Brandt and Frances Whorrall-Campbell. 2021. Conversations Across Place, Vol. 1. Reckoning With An Entangled World. Berlin: The Green Box.
Nicola Brandt. (2023). ‘Practices of self’: Embodied memory work, performance art, and intersectional activism in Namibia. Memory Studies, 16(3), 533-545. https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980231162331
