Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, members of the All Souls College, the university community and guests from near and far.
You all, welcome to today's lecture. Last week, we explored the various ways the work of Gatsby,
Siri and a few of our contemporaries engaged with and responded to the sociopolitical political rupture and transformation caused
by the 1952 Gamal Abdel Nasser military coup that became a full blown revolution with consequential impact on life in Egypt,
as well as on international relations during the early years of the Cold War.
Today I turn to South Africa. During the 1950s and sixties, when Hendrix set foot as prime minister,
interior minister transformed South Africa into what a contemporary newspaper described as his native empire
by a messianic promulgation of racist doctrines that earned him the reputation as the architect of apartheid.
Until his assassination in 1966.
My concern today is how the ideology and political infrastructure of apartheid.
As conceived and propagated by foot, registered in the work of South African artists, but especially that of Jamila Fanny,
whose distinctive artistic imagination and compelling work earned him the moniker Goya of the Townships.
By examining the ways in which the work of white and black artists engaged with, accommodated and sidestepped the political,
ethical and moral questions raised by the ardently racist policies that Food and his circle of Afrikaners carried out,
and also interested in how the specific formal language and subject matter do.
Miller developed staged a particular mode of address that I argue distanced
itself from what was then thought of as good black art and trends in white art,
and emphatically rejected the notion of.
The good patriotic art advocated by four foot.
I dedicate my lecture today to two people who helped me on my writing skills as an art critic, curator and art historian.
First is the poet. According to.
Who I met. While studying art at Soka.
She not only lent me her typewriter and gave me my typing lessons for the first time.
When I began writing our criticism for Nigerian newspapers.
She read and commented on my essays before I turned them to the editors.
Her spare and lyrical poetry serves as beckons.
I looked to while shifting from the studio to the scholarship.
Similarly, the art historian. James Meier, formerly of Emory University,
helped me transition fully into art history writing and provided me my first module of analytical rigour and lexical clarity.
I'm still in their debt for helping me on my journey and career as a critic and art historian.
And with that, I turn to today's lecture.
On August 15, 1995, one year in office, Nelson Mandela as president made one of the most controversial trips of his presidency.
He travelled to Aranya, a small settlement of several hundred residents in the arid and remote northern Cape region.
To meet. Mrs. Betsy.
Fair food in her home. Mrs. Fairford was by far the most famous resident of the settlement that to some represented
everything the new South Africa that Mandela fought for in his life to abolish.
Named for the Dutch born English King Richard of Orange.
Aranya was founded by Mrs. Foot son in law, Dr. Carol Boshoff, in 1991, a year after Mandela's release from prison.
And the banning on the banning of the NC, thus paving the way for dismantling of official apartheid.
It was conceived. That is aranya. As a post-apartheid homeland for Afrikaners, also called boas and Afrikaans word for farmer.
Who had no interest in living in a multiracial nation.
Thus, by the time Mandela visited the town, it had attracted significant national attention to its critics.
It was, and I might add, still is a pathetic and controversial redoubt for unrepentant racists and enemies of the new nation.
To its founders. It represented the last hand for a fearful people whose lifeways and heritage were threatened by a black majority led by Mandela,
but also a living monument to the ideas of Mrs. Foot's husband.
The man most associated with a five decade project of nationalising white racism in South Africa.
During the tightly choreographed visit.
Mandela and Mrs. Foods had tea.
With Cake Sisters. It plated syrupy fried confectionary considered so patently Africana that a monument
dedicated to it stands in Aranya as a proud marker of Dutch derived food culture.
And as the visit rounded up, the 94 year old host declared to Mandela.
I identify myself with the wishes of my people for evokes that Dutch for people state which I believe could be developed in this part of the country.
To which he responded. I want a United States of Africa.
Where we can cease to think in terms of colour and what.
In this rather strange exchange in which Mrs. Foods spoke about how people desire for their own state.
And Mandela, countering with his vision of a post-racial nation, lies the awkwardness and fury around this visit.
For here was Mandela breaking bread with the wife of arguably the most hated white political figure among black South Africans.
Even so, it was not necessarily the event or the motivation behind the settlement that riled even some of Mandela's ANC close supporters.
It was the sight of Mandela and boshoff visiting the so-called Monument Hill,
where the president smiling as he inspected the statue of hendrik for food.
The man who from the moment he came into government until his death in 1966,
executed his racist Afrikaner agenda with messianic fervour and deservingly earned a reputation as the architect of apartheid.
At a time when South Africans were hotly debating the fate of monuments of apartheid,
with some suggesting that they be dynamited and others arguing that they be banished to both amusement parks.
What message did mandela send by going to aranya and not demand in the language of south african students two decades later that that food must fall.
In the prickly atmosphere of the visit, it was quite likely that his national audience, black or white,
missed the delicately powerful meaning of Mandela's response to the statue when he turned to Mr. Bush south and said, Well, you made him very small.
What did he mean by pointing to this cultural dimension of apartheid's big man who Mandela
emphasised was the source of a lot of anger and bitterness about the experiences of our people?
I have had in the past. A past like this shaped by food.
What did he mean? In any case,
the heighten controversy around Mandela's visit to Aranya was not only fuelled by the difficult and contentious realities of building
the post-apartheid nation as it was faced by potent collective memories among black South Africans of a man they knew as the face,
heart and power behind the industrial scale traumatisation oppression and disenfranchisement and whose upside edifice?
Outlived him. By several more decades.
In pointing to that 1995 visit and to the existence of Iranian.
Which has since grown into a thriving settlement.
I signal the power of foods presence in the South African imaginary 30 years after his assassination.
In 1966. By the way, the bloodstained carpet of the site of his assassination remained in the House of Congress until the 2000.
I those begin my inquiry today first by examining how he and that is for food the reputation as a deserving member of the club of the African big men.
And second how South African artists including du M.F.A. responded to the apartheid state.
Built by Hendry for food from the early 1950s to the mid 1960s.
In 1937, Hendrik for Food was appointed inaugural editor of the Transvaal,
a newspaper established with the explicit mandate of growing the National Party and
advancing the cause of the resurging Afrikaner nationalism in its original homeland.
The Transvaal. Having established a reputation as a professor of psychology at the University of Stellenbosch
and for his social work among poor white communities that would secure the editorship.
After participating in a high profile protest against Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.
Exploiting anti-British grievance slowly simmering since the Anglo-boer war of the first decades of the 20th century,
led by the Afrikaner, brought a bond secret organisation.
The food built his political capital as a champion of poor rural Afrikaners,
whose condition he argued could not improve without systematic racial segregation.
Executed by a powerful technocratic state.
The elections of 1948, in which only the white populations had a franchise, brought a coalition led by Daniel Mallon's National Party to power.
Given the Dutch descended Afrikaners,
the political platform for the first time to turn the once fringe racial supremacist ideology into a national project.
With the triumph of the Bauhaus in 1948. No small thanks to the newspaper of food founded.
In addition to his wide social welfare campaign,
the triumph of Afrikaner nationalism and state ideology was stamped on a hill overlooking Pretoria, one of the national capitals,
with the inauguration in 1949 of the Voortrekker Monument dedicated to the pioneers who trekked to the Transvaal between 1836 and 1852,
where they founded the Boer Republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State, a symbol.
So late in. With meaning and a structure described by the British art historian Annie Coombs as, quote, some misplaced bakelite radio.
In 1950. Hard right.
Members of the National Party pressed on the Prime Minister to appoint for
foods known for his uncompromising nationalism as Minister of Native Affairs.
In that position. The foods set about transforming the then inchoate ideas of separateness of races,
but the benefits of the boys into an operational system of government based on strictly enforced population management.
In his first year,
he created four racial categories with Population Registration Act reorganised urban and rural space according to races with the Group Areas Act.
And he criminalised interracial sex, which he blamed for the degeneration of white folk with the Immorality Amendment Act.
Three years later, he established an internal passport system for non-white people to regulate their movement and enacted the Ban to Education Act,
designed to limit black education to basic academic instruction.
Those making it impossible for them to qualify for bids for political office or administrative positions in state and private businesses.
This Education Act would have direct negative impact on the status and agency of black artists in food.
South Africa. His Native Affairs Ministry was so effective in formalising apartheid that, as one scholar noted, quote,
it increasingly adopted the character of a state within a state as it developed
universal competencies for the administration of the African population,
unquote. Those, by the time he became prime minister in 1958 for food, was already a dominant force in South African politics.
In the peculiarly racist democracy for food's own personal mission to build an apartheid state with the help of the broader Bund,
made him a de facto big man. An autocratic leader of an African nation captured by a white minority group.
Indeed, with the Shock Veil massacre of March 1960 of children protesting the Ban to Education Act and his
withdrawal of South Africa in 1961 from the Commonwealth to pre-empt international sanctions,
Pfeiffer demonstrated his willingness to deploy extreme violence to achieve his personal political vision.
As this caller Dubai has noted about the early 1960s,
the food enjoyed supreme political power in what he called the era of the fruity and high appetite.
Even as prime minister of a supposedly modern Democratic state.
The food presented himself and was perceived as the sovereign big man.
For instance, in his dealings with the chiefs of the controversial homelands.
What in the used car reservations he created for black that he created for black South Africans.
He often referred to himself as the Great Indian.
That is the great chief. And on Goodwill tours through the homelands,
he often brought gifts of cattle to dispense to the chiefs and enjoyed being regaled by native dances and ceremony.
True to this self-indulgent big man by arrogate in the title, which in the past African sovereigns sometimes bestowed on.
Europeans, like the British adventurer such as David Livingstone and Nathaniel Isaacs,
set foot clearly meant to claim the authority sanctioned by indigenous African traditions in order to dominate,
vanquish and expel the same black nations as societies from his white South Africa.
For presenting himself as the great in do now that is the guardian of the black people.
The historian Christophe Marks tells us that the white opposition leaders took to teasing him by calling him.
The White Shaka. In reference to the imperious 19th century Zulu king.
With what has been described as forceful inflexibility.
Inflexibility. In the remarkably ruthless implementation of his apartheid policy,
for which he earned the nickname the Man of Granite for effort all but achieved his goal of
transforming South Africa into what the newspaper Cape Times called Fairfield's native empire.
In my first lecture, while noting the asynchronous histories of post-colonial modernism, I noted that in South Africa,
the oppressive conditions of apartheid ensured that black artists did not participate in debates and discourses about modernism in Africa.
Let me now state that the absence was a direct consequence of Foote's use of education as an ideological
tool for the Bantu Education Act was designed to severely limit black access to higher education.
And I should add that he must have learned something from the early 20th century education program of the British indirect rule,
which proscribed only the teaching of technical subjects.
Concern that arts and humanities education tended to produce troublesome, educated natives.
In apartheid South Africa Ban the Kitchen Act banned young, talented black artists from the art schools.
And without that, they could not like their counterparts in West Africa.
Take the driver's seat in shaping the discourse around modern and contemporary art in the country.
Thus, the only option open to black artists were informal workshops and art centres run by liberal white artists and teachers.
Moreover, the opportunities to represent South Africa in international exhibitions such as Venice and Sao Paulo
biennials during this period were available only to white artists who themselves were either struggling
to connect with their North Atlantic cousins by developing their own interpretations of European and
American post-war stylistic trends or contending with the contradictions of their white Afrikaner.
This is how the art historian Anita Nettleton describes the food era art industry and I quote.
All official South African publications were in Afrikaans or English,
and those concerned with culture such as London and South African panorama covered almost exclusively the arts of the white community.
The ideology through which power of all kinds that vested in white hands within the apartheid state, denied Africans any history,
denigrated the ability to make art as primitive, and referred to their aesthetic expression as Bantu art, unquote.
In other words,
for Food's Bantu Education Act had the direct effect of banishing black artists from the spaces of critical discourse or intellectual debate.
And not only did the group areas act and the Natives Rate Settlement Act of
1954 remove black populations to the so-called Bantustans that also segregated
black artists into the pedagogic homelands of peripatetic semi-formal arts centres and to a categorical no man's land they called township art.
I'll return to this a bit a bit later. But for the moment, let me paint a broad picture of white elite art and artists in its era,
as it will frame and inform our understanding of the work of the Miller family and his circle of black artists of the same period.
Recent scholarship has pointed to a major tension in the white South African world during the 1950s and sixties, defined largely as a struggle.
On the one hand,
between the figurative impulse and legacies of supposedly conservative artists such as the Afrikaner nationalist painter Judge Pierre Dave,
known for his uninhabited romantic landscapes that conveyed ideas one might call Afrikaner Manifest Destiny.
And the fantastic Primitivist compositions of Alexis Preller.
On the other hand, where the abstract confections of younger artists such as Erich Laubscher and Eduardo Vela,
who are keenly attuned to the styles redolent of European post cubism and American abstract expressionism.
Yet it is impossible to not see the widespread avoidance of political subject matter and social commentary.
That is some expression of our awareness of, not to mention engagement with the radical transformations of the South African Democrat fic,
cultural and political space by fifth foods.
Many official acts that by 1952 led to the massive nationwide defiance campaign against passed laws, or the 1955 rally at Kliptown.
Soweto,
during which the ANC led South African Congress Alliance released the Freedom Charter that laid down the democratic principles of future South Africa,
which led in the wake of mass arrests of the organisers to the treason trials of 1958 to 61.
The banning of the ANC and the imprisonment of several of their several leaders, many of them white men and women.
I should mention that the lead counsel for the defence.
In that infamous trial was the Exeter College alumnus Sidney Kentridge, whose son William,
in the 1980s emerged as a key figure in the anti-apartheid resistance movement.
And that's Mr. Kentridge right there.
The point here is that by driving his racist apartheid laws as minister of Native Affairs and Prime Minister,
Seifert gave political and legal support for government sponsored exhibitions and publications
and patronage for the exclusive benefit of the country's elite white artists who in their work,
apparently ignored the unjust system that funded the privileges.
Put differently, what I might have called the Cultural Group Areas Act had the effect of denying black artists
the possibility of competing for and lay at least equal claims to the contemporary art industry,
as did their post-colonial modernist counterparts elsewhere on the continent, where they actively shaped the art world of the independent nations.
But what is the politics that informed the struggle between figuration and abstraction among white artists in five foot high apartheid era?
This caller, Federico Freshly has offered an insight.
With which I agreed. In a chapter.
On Afrikaner nationalism and changing canons of high art published in the important four volume visual century South African art.
In context,
he notes that despite the triumph of figurative and non-objective abstraction in the West since the Parisian avant garde of the early 20th century,
this mode of image making failed to take hold in South Africa's elite art circles until
the full entrenchment of Afrikaner political nationalism during the 1950s and sixties.
He shows that the shift from illustrated work by artists like Penny needed to create Africana national mythologies
and revisionist histories from the 1930s to figure dependent abstraction of Walter Battis and others in the 1950s.
And finally, the dominance of semantic abstraction.
By the mid 1960s. But he also argues that the political impetus for this shift had everything to do with the fact that the apartheid
government promoted illustrative work first to consolidate Afrikaner nationalism and once firmly in power,
could afford to, quote, shift to a celebration of the nation's objective modernity, unquote.
In other words, it is. Misleading.
To read as some have. They turn to narrative from narrative, not naturalism to non-objective abstraction.
In the mid 1960s, in officially sponsored art and artists are signalling the rise of supposedly
liberal artists critical of the toxic nationalism of the apartheid government.
Rather, the rise of abstraction signified in fact.
The arrival of hi appetite, a moment when the foot government secured supreme political power,
assured of the future of Afrikaner Nationalist Project and thus open to any manner of art so long as they had no implied communist sympathies.
One way to think about this scenario is to juxtapose it to the contemporary politics of the Cold War,
art and culture patronage that saw the CIA acting on behalf of the US and Native Powers funding.
Even radical work by artists and writers in Decolonising Africa.
And even South Africa with a simple objective of keeping them busy to avoid the temptation of siding with communism and the Soviet bloc.
In other words, the food's triumphant.
Apartheid regime and its cultural agencies seem to not mind the rise of abstraction to the extent that it provided white artists
the excuse not to meddle with the politics of what it called terrorists and communists of the ANC and other anti-apartheid groups.
But does the picture I paint here about the white artists response to the food's apathy?
I mean that none of them deploy their work to comment on the regime's violent suppression of the black population,
or that the authorities ignored what it perceived as unabashedly critical art.
Not necessarily. In 19, a 1962 exhibition at Gallery 101 in Johannesburg.
Perhaps inadvertently tested the limits of the regime's accommodative posture when
the show was shut down by the authorities for including two works by Harold Rubin,
who was Jewish, and Ronald Harrison, who was classified as coloured.
Rubin showed a naked, crudely drawn black Jesus screaming with an erection.
As he hangs on the cross. For this offensive work.
Rubin was arrested and charged by the board of Censors under the anti blasphemy law.
Acquitted. A year later, he left the country, settling in Israel.
Harrison's case was a bit more serious.
His painting depicted what was supposed to be the canonical crucifixion scene.
But His Christ was not simply black. He had the face of Purefoods arch enemy, the ANC leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Chief Albert Luthuli.
I was standing beside the Christ His crucify us for food.
And his right hand man, Justice Minister John Foster.
For this painting, Harrison was detained and serially tortured, sustaining life long injuries.
When he received a U.S. scholarship, the authorities in South Africa threatened his family, forcing him to remain in the country.
And like Darius Shafiq, if you remember in this, as Egypt refrained from presenting his work in public for years.
Not only that. The painting itself was smuggled to the to London,
where for a time it was displayed at St Paul's Cathedral and circulated in Britain among anti-apartheid networks.
Two conclusions we may draw from Rubin and Harrison's experience in the hands of the food censors
are one that the anodyne themes and abstract formalism of the era's leading white artists,
including Eban van Dam, Mother and Bessie, silly as bananas,
who are motivated as much by a desire for expression of artistic freedom and bond with their European cousins as it was about finding.
In such work a refuge from the terrors of the regime.
The man of Granite Leader had declared. In his 1962 public and advisory Republican advisory speech.
That the determination to survive as a white nation had become absolute.
The second conclusion is that for all its unapologetic domination of national politics and no internal opposition for food,
South Africa remained paranoid and wary of its real or imagined enemies and demonstrated the willingness,
as in Sharpeville and with the imprisonment of Harrison and Rubin,
the capacity to suppress such art that it perceived as undermining its white supremacist ideology.
Much as the food desired through his upper side laws and acts to separate white and non-white South Africans as much as he was at the vanguard of
Afrikaners who ridiculed those among them that argued the necessity of black labour in the maintenance of a successful white nation and its economy.
The reality of a minority white population compelled reliance on cheap non-white labour and ensured the uncomfortable proximity of races.
Though a few black artists emerged in the pre upper five years, the most promising among them like Ernest Manqoba.
Uh oh.
Well, Jeras, Akoto and S manqoba with no clear path to good education or independently successful career at home, went into lifelong exile in Europe.
But what about the black artists like DeMille of the apartheid generation?
I had noted earlier the immediate impact of the Ban to Education Act,
which made it virtually impossible for black artists to attend formal art schools inside South Africa and
that their only options for any art instruction were government funded or private semi-formal arts centres.
Usually run by white teachers. The most influential of these was Polish Street Art Centre in Johannesburg,
established in 1949 as part of a recreational centre for the city's overworked black labour.
It flourished between 1952 and 1957 on the directorship of.
The modernist printmaker and painter Cecil Courtney's producing arguably the first cohort of modern black artists such as Sidney Khumalo,
Efrain Gartner and Ezra miller High.
At the helm of Polly St Courtney's and his circle of white and ardently modernists,
artist friends and art dealers played a determinative role in shaping the aesthetics and the politics of black art in this period.
Moreover, in 1961, Courtney joined his friends Cecily Sash.
Eduardo Villa. Guiseppe Cattaneo. And Khumalo, too, found the Ammad Loza group,
which advocated for a South African modernism supposedly founded on the art of the country's African ancestors, the Armadillo Z.
Never mind that. Like the much admired Parisian avant garde,
they said their eyes on the formal qualities of West African and Central African
sculpture rather than on the more geopolitically appropriate and goodness,
culture, traditions of Southern Africa.
Apart from this precious enterprise of white artists reclaiming the supposedly African identity at a time when being African,
as Anita Nettleton has argued, was a contested terrain.
Katniss and the influential gallerist, Egan Goode,
that encouraged the black Watts to look to modernists for more abstractions based on both European traditions and African forms.
In other words, just as leading white artists found comfort and refuge in abstraction,
Scottishness and his friends who use their privileged position to implant what
they imagined to be an authentic Bantu modernism stripped of political content.
This inchoate native modernism. A paradoxical mix of abstract and illustrative work was promoted by the white art industry as township art.
As if to bind it to the impoverished, segregated black townships invented by foot and his Afrikaner nationalists.
It is in this murky context of white artists avoidance of political commentary, either out of fear of censors or because.
Of their dependence on state patronage.
That I see the imposition of Bantu Education Act to limit black access to higher education and the knowledge power associated with it,
and the encouragement of non-political work at Palace Street and elsewhere as having the desired impact on the work of black artists of the period.
It is not surprising. I believe that it is in the drawing that is these black artists that they found
the tool and voice with which to respond to apartheid's extreme politics.
And this is what brings me to the Miller family,
who in a few years developed a mode of drawing with incomparable complexity and ambition and thematic density.
Moreover, unlike many of the leading black artists of the sixties,
he was not a product of Polish streets or the Jubilee and more follow art centres that succeeded.
And yet it is in his work. I argue that we see one of the first consistent,
yet powerfully coded response to the politics and psychological subjection of black South Africans under apartheid.
Born in 1942 in Worchester in the Western Cape Dominion, moved to Johannesburg as a teenager and for a while worked in a sculpture foundry.
His first documented encounter with Artmaking was in 1963 when he received odd materials while hospitalised with tobacco losses.
This early work clearly shows a young artist with a rudimentary technical facility with picture making.
But after meeting Sidney Khumalo and is wrongly hired, he developed his cultural language similar to the Polish street modernism.
But he also made friends with Bill Ainslie, a young white artist and activist whose Johannesburg studio was open to artists of all
racial backgrounds and whose work often depicting black subjects with unusual sensitivity.
Must have impressed De Mille. In any case, it is through his drawing that in 1966, the same year the food was assassinated,
that De Mille erupted into the national scene with a travelling exhibition of works that was much discussed in the print media.
Critics in English and Afrikaans media declared him a new star, but invariably identified him by his Sosa ethnicity or as a Bantu artist.
As if to emphasise in the context of apartheid the separateness of his identity.
And despite gaining substantial patronage,
especially among the non Afrikaner networks and his anxiety about the impact of life outside South Africa might have on his work.
He went into exile in 1968 and died in New York in 1992, on the eve of his planned return home.
During that four year period of intense productivity, Miller made interpretative, difficult work,
whether it contains single or multiple figures engaged in mundane activity or involved in esoteric action or depicts important contemporary events.
And I argue that he adopted allegorical coded speech to allow the space of critical reflection on the condition of black life caused by state racism.
Consider, for instance, his massive train accident of 1966 that seems to depict the derailment near the city of Durban in 1965,
or that of an overcrowded train carrying black labourers.
Leading to the death of about 150 people.
And the retaliatory killing of the white signalman by an irate black crowd.
Yet the military does not so much show us dead bodies as present the accident victims in frozen theatrical gestures of terror and anger.
Or is suggesting that even the black dead are still in solidarity with the living in their
expression of outrage over the impoverished and precarious existence under apartheid.
Most of his drawings from this period are rendered in frenetic or pen and ink marks,
his fingers distorted, as if to convey disease conditions and states of existential hardship.
Yet the difficulty of the resultant drawings lies not so much in the fact that they are not pleasant to look at.
As in that thematic opacity.
Consider, for instance, filling a hole that supposedly showed a quotidian moment in black life in the townships.
In it, a couple set in a barren landscape appears to pour stones into a deep, irregular crevice,
but they mend in the broken and damaged earth, lay the foundations for a new township shot or buried in a secret.
Similarly, the classroom, a work of remarkably compositional complexity, features what we must believe to be a classroom scene.
At the top, right. A woman, perhaps a teacher, reads a book to two naked children who pay no attention.
Below them is a chaotic scene of twisted, despondent,
frightened figures and further down upturned clusters of double headed woman clutching an emaciated child and a man forcibly lifting a woman's dress.
Is this Daimler's meditation on the value of the foods vital to education,
the right designed to deprive black people resources for self enlightenment and of flip
ment from the infernal conditions to which white supremacist ideology condemned them.
Here as elsewhere, there is a powerful,
ineluctable thematic opacity that suggests his preference for what I might call oracular expression and reluctance,
or even a lack of desire for direct visual speech.
And this brings me finally to arguably the Miller's greatest work, the mural sized African goanna car of 1966.
No one, as far as I know, has giving a definitive account of the subject of this drawing.
However, many scholars are reading the work through Picasso's Guernica have seen it as a damning
statement on the oppressive conditions under which apathy subjected black people.
But I'm not so sure about this.
And it is not just because it was produced at the time of or more likely soon after the Foods assassination, the news of which,
according to his close friend Omar Badshah, the celebrated with crowds at bashes neighbourhood in Durban till the police dispersed them.
Moreover, in this go, any case, there are no clear suggestions of violence or scenes of subjection.
Rather, we have a layered montage of two naked men wielding clubs, one riding a bull,
the other with three legs pass, falling off a child suckling the teeth of an inattentive cow.
A formally dressed man seated at table, pointing to a saxophonist in the shadows.
A woman in a mini dress. Attending to it.
Diana and a couple.
In tomorrow's end race, not to mention the dogs and goats quietly feeding in the in the foreground and many more scenes they can identify.
Why did the media make this supposedly protest work right after the assassination of the invisible
apartheid architect by a non-white communist anarchist who claimed insanity to escape capital punishment?
Ah, the manic gesticulations of the three legged figure and his bull riding partner and the disturbing
child cow intimacy indicative only of apartheid's disorientation and dehumanisation of black life.
If so, what do we make of the inclusive scenes of rural and urban black culture and society?
Whatever the meaning of this and other of the Millers work from this period.
Here's what I'm certain about. The furthest mark,
making the deformed and animated figures and clues in darkness and the desolate
scenes contradict one of the oft repeated arguments for food made for apartheid.
That is, that it assured and Afrikaner led Republic in which white and black and coloured lived separately yet prosperous and happy.
More than any artist of his time, Miller deployed the figural style and dark allegorical subject matter against fur foods,
greatest desire expressed in one of his last public speeches before his assassination.
And that was for a beautiful, patriotic art that extolled the success and glory of his racist ideology.
An Apartheid republic. Maybe the censors didn't understand to Miller's parables.
Thank you.