Neil Fraser
April 28, 2004
OUR Decade of Democracy is proving to be a platform for a wide range of initiatives and opportunities. The City has planned a variety of unique celebrations and the Central Johannesburg Partnership (CJP) are partnering in some of these. I know that I have written about one of them previously, but next week the first phase of JOBURGARTCITY 2004, the larger-than-life art project, kicks off with a unique exhibition to be held at MuseuMAfricA in Newtown and is a must-see for all Joburgers (and others), so here is some more to whet your appetite.
The project's two phases address, firstly, the struggle towards democracy and, secondly, the achievement of freedom and democratic rights. The latter phase, 'Images of Freedom', will mark the culmination of a national art competition when 20 works will be selected from the entries received for enlarging and mounting on city building walls probably by early September. In some instances, they will replace works that are still being exhibited from JOBURGARTCITY 2002. But more about that some time later.
It is the first phase, 'Images of Defiance', that will be open to the public at MuseuMAfricA in Newtown from Monday, 26 April. This is a major exhibition of South African resistance posters that were produced during the 1980s, many of them banned upon first appearance, many of them never seen. The exhibition of some 400 posters celebrates the way ordinary people voiced their resistance during the times of oppression. Although focusing principally on the 1980s, a time of mass mobilisation against the apartheid regime, the exhibition also embraces earlier and later images of defiance and shows that, even after the advent of democracy, people continue to be vigilant about perceived injustices, and posters continue to be a principal means of protest.
Apart from their important place in the history of SA artmaking, resistance posters are also key witnesses (and agents) in the history of this country, in that they gave a voice to the silenced in the last years of apartheid and helped accelerate the end of an oppressive regime.
I have had the privilege of working over these past few weeks with a few of the activists who were involved in producing resistance posters. Theirs are stories that need to be heard, collected and preserved. Some 12 posters have been selected and produced in A3 size sets and the publishers, ironically, were also responsible for printing many of the original posters during the '80s. Reedwan Vally and Kevin Humphrey ran a printing shop - Graphic Equaliser - in Melle Street in Braamfontein during that time and were totally immersed in the "subversive" activities of design and printing of "seditious material". Reedwan recalls that struggle organisations and churches were unable to even acquire printing materials but Graphic Equaliser could - and often did -from Afrikaner companies always willing to sell for cash! Often the posters were banned the very next day. "These were heady days," muses Vally, "a time when everything was unruly; in fact, anarchy prevailed - one never knew what was round the corner, but they were amongst the best years of my life." Graphic Equaliser "died" when they got involved in a very large campaign calling for the release of Govan Mbeki, a campaign that included posters, t-shirts, caps, etc. Raided by the security police who thought they had actually landed the ANC propaganda machine, Humphrey left the country and Vally went underground for two years. The campaign organisers were arrested (they included Peter Mokaba and the current Gauteng Provincial MEC for Education, Ignatius Jacobs), all were incarcerated and later went on a hunger strike before being released.
A group of activists, the Posterbook Collective - Emilia Potenza, Marlene Powell, Charlotte Schaer, Judy Seidman and Maurice Smithers - secretly started collecting the banned images and storing them in safe houses. After the release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the ANC, the Posterbook Collective presented the posters to the South African History Archive (SAHA) and published a watershed book, "Images of Defiance: South African resistance posters of the 1980s". The book, launched by Nelson Mandela in November 1991, marked the first time the underground poster movement of the 1980s - a major era in the history of South African art - was recorded and presented to the South African public. The book has been long out of print, and the posters have only been displayed occasionally and in small numbers in the intervening years.
Now, in this year celebrating a decade of democracy, this major exhibition of resistance posters is to be shown to the public, and the 1991 book is to be re-printed with the intention of placing a copy in every public library throughout South Africa.
The posters will be displayed in groupings highlighting such aspects as Human Rights, Heroes and Heroines of the Struggle, Campaigns for Freedom, the End Conscription Campaign, People's Culture, Liberation Culture, etc etc. The curator of the exhibition is Jillian Carman, an art historian and museologist with an interest in the history of museums and public art collections in South Africa. She has done a wonderful job and this is an exhibition that you must not miss.
