Abstract
My research is located at the heart of the struggle by marginalized black South African women who employ art as a means of dealing with the aftermath of political violence and trauma in post-apartheid South Africa in their pursuit of social justice and transformation. In this chapter, I argue for the significance of contemporary ethnography through an examination of ways in which these women are empowered through visual narrative in giving voice to their experiences of trauma, violence and HIV/AIDS. Focusing on three of the rural art-making projects which have emerged in South Africa since the early 1990s in response to the complex challenges of the post-apartheid era-the Amazwi Abesifazane or “Voices of Women” project in KwaZulu-Natal, the Mapula Embroidery Project in the Winterveld, and the Bambanani Women’s Group in Khayelitsha-this paper examines the role of visual narrative in the process of uncovering the truth through “remember[ing] what one most wants to forget” (Becker, Art J 63(4):117, 2004), in giving voice to the previously voiceless, and the potential offered by visual culture for both social and economic empowerment of women within the context of the complex relationship of marginalization, poverty, and representation. Through their engagement with artistic practices in dealing with historicized harm, I argue that these extraordinary women are enabling narrative expansion to the restrictive testimonial practices of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which has been widely acknowledged as a failure for women because of its narrow focus on individual physical forms of harm.
We were told we were going to make cloths—
to say what had happened to our lives,
so it might help us to forget, to heal . . . it was nice.
We are saying what is on our hearts about everything.
— Gladys Mnyandu, 2008
It is precisely in telling their own stories,
narrating their own histories,
that those oppressed in colonial society can insert
themselves into the postcolonial nation’s history.
— McEachern, 2002, p. xvii
Together these voices demonstrate the miraculous resilience of indigenous women, who, although profoundly conscious of the injustices they have experienced, are able to believe in the possibility of a just society and therefore to anticipate an equitable future that does not yet exist.
— Becker, 2004, p.134
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Notes
- 1.
The TRC hearings began in April 1996.
- 2.
Mapula means ‘Mother of Rain’. See Schmahmann (2006).
- 3.
See Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act 1995 [Act 95-34, 26 July 1995]. http://www.fas.org/irp/world/rsa/act95_034.htm
- 4.
- 5.
See discussion on issues of ‘truth’ in McEwan (2003). She details the four notions of truth in the Commission Final Report as follows: (1) factual or forensic truth based in legal and scientific notions of impartiality and objective procedures; (2) personal or narrative truth, based on subjective stories and multilayered sets of experiences; (3) social or dialogue truth, constructed through debate and collective discussion of facts; (4) healing and restorative truth that places facts in context and acknowledges individual experiences.
- 6.
Ross states: ‘… the mediatization [emphasis added] of the hearings meant that the relative safety of the hearings did not endure. Even where testifiers were able to control their self-representations in one context (e.g. the public hearing), that very process also transformed “experience” into “testimony”/“story” and thence into social fact, open to discussion and disputation’ (2003b, p. 334).
- 7.
Ross adds that so, too, are ‘radicalized patterns of master-slave relations’ (2005, p. 214).
- 8.
See Becker for a discussion on the TRC and ‘victimization’: “The particular emphasis of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on victimization, although very significant, did not include crimes committed out of ignorance, rage, or greed, or constructed by those in power to aggravate township life. In other words, it omitted most of the horrors told by these [Amazwi] women. The commission was not attempting to dissect the apartheid state and its systematic destruction of any semblance of normal life for black South Africans. Instead, it was more concerned with the extreme moments when South Africans were violated by the henchmen of the apartheid regime acting outside the law through murder, torture, and rape” (2004, p. 123).
- 9.
Ross points out that this could have generated on-going debate and discussion as well as effective implementation of social and economic transformation.
- 10.
This fact is underlined in the events of the Zuma trial, which focused attention on sexual violence and women’s rights in South Africa in a manner which could not be accomplished by the TRC. See http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=2996 and also http://www.armsdeal-vpo.co.za/special_items/jacob_zuma_trial/jacob_zuma.html
- 11.
An additional consequence was, therefore, the inability to transform existing gender patterns. For further discussion on patriarchy, see Thenjiwe Mtintso (2006): ‘Patriarchy cannot be eradicated only by government, or one group or organisation. It needs all forces within society. Particularly because it coexists with, and survives even under, the most progressive political systems; because it is articulated in many diverse subtle and hidden or open and crude forms; because it is explained away in many logical-sounding ways ranging from the natural, biological to religious and cultural arguments; because one of its strongest bases is the family, the home, and among loved ones; and because it is the most complex and entrenched system embedded in, and permeating through, all spheres of life, it needs all forms of struggle – persuasion, contestation, compromise, pressure and confrontation’. Mtintso is the former head of the Gender Commission and a member of the ANC Executive.
- 12.
See Goldblatt and Meintjes’ statement on gender: ‘In South Africa, as in most societies in the world, women have been accorded identities which cast them in particular social roles which have restricted their civil and political status. Intersecting with gender are also race, class and other identities, such as ethnic and religious allegiances. These form the basis of the ‘public-private divide, which has given to men the role of civil and political representative of the household, to the exclusion of women. Patriarchy refers to the social, political and economic system which provides men with unequal power and authority in relation to women in society. Patriarchy existed in pre-colonial societies, and interacted with colonialism to create specific forms of gender subordination in South Africa. Interlaced with the racial and class development of our country, patriarchy has wound its bonds around South African women. As with other forms of social and political control, dominance of women has often been enforced by violence. While apartheid defined blacks as secondary political and civil subjects, women were given an even further diminished social and legal status through both the customary and the common law and other social mechanisms. It is this social imbalance which has enabled men to devalue women and which can be linked to the prevalence of abusive and oppressive treatment of women and girls in our society… Failure to approach the experience of human rights abuses through a gendered lens will lead to the neglect of women’s experience of abuse and torture, for these are often seen as a male preserve’ (1996, p. 4).
- 13.
I acknowledge, too, the significance of alternative forms of contemporary South African visual and/or oral storytelling media including theatre and literature, as traces and fragments, in filling in the ‘gaps and silences’ of the past. (For discussions on theatre, see Coplan 2008; for literature, see, specifically, discussions on South African women’s life writing, such as Coullie, 2004, and Farr, 2002. See also Driver, 1996; McGregor & Nuttall, 2007).
- 14.
After the closure of the KwaZulu Development Organisation where Gambushe had worked for 8 years, she decided to teach sewing and beading to local women at her home, free of charge. She owned two sewing machines at that time. Within a year she had amassed a stock of 22 machines and moved her Zamukuziphilisa Community Project to an outbuilding on her property which was subsequently burned down in 1994. Gambushe’s cloth (Fig. 7) tells of the burning down of her sewing establishment called the Zamukuziphilisa Community Project in J Section of Umlazi. In 2004, she represented the Amazwi Abesifazane project and travelled to Portugal for an exhibition of the memory cloths at the Culturgest in Lisbon (See Stott, 2006, pp. 86–89).
- 15.
See Becker (2004, pp. 119, 131).
- 16.
Cibane writes: ‘The President was released from prison on 11 February 1990. There was a lot of dizziness after the violence had started and a lot of people were killed at Kwazini. With his release fighting commenced between the I.F.P and the ANC. We did not know what they were fighting for. We initially heard about this from a distance but it finally came to our area. Unaware of anything and just sleeping with my children in a traditional round hut, we heard someone at the door. It was the victimizers. We heard gunshots and they demanded that we open the door. We asked who it was. In the other modern house my one other child was sleeping. I hesitated to call to him to run away. The victimizers poured petrol on that house and burned it to ashes. Seventeen cows were stolen’.
- 17.
The project originated as a communal sewing group, part of an educational and health program offered by the Sisters of Mercy with assistance from the Pretoria branch of Soroptomists International.
- 18.
‘[The stories] come straight from the gut…straightforward’ (Janine Zagel 2008).
- 19.
In some cases, women have also written short texts, which complement the artworks and offer further insight into their life histories.
- 20.
Personal interview by author in Grahamstown, South Africa, July 2008.
- 21.
An example of such a group focus is Nelson Mandela’s inauguration (see Schmahmann’s discussion on Maepa’s embroideries, 2006, pp. 66–67).
- 22.
Janétjie van der Merwe, who had been working in the department of marketing and corporate communications; van der Merwe now handles the marketing of the Mapula works and has been involved in managing the project since the beginning.
- 23.
Van der Merwe has, on occasion, actively stepped in and prevented women from producing works with certain subject matter—such as domestic violence—since these works would not be readily marketable.
Schmahmann told me that the audience do not want it. ‘They will not buy works which show domestic violence. She’s had to say to the women in the project: “look, they won’t want unhappy subject matter”. That’s why they often show happy subject matter’ (Schmahmann, 2008).
- 24.
Oralism, or oral theory. See Conolly on “Transmission of indigenous knowledge” at http://www.aeel.gov.sk.ca/fnti-workshop-prof-conolly
- 25.
See Coombes (2003).
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Blum, A. (2014). Amazwi Abesifazane and Mapula: Alternative Spaces of Narrative, Disclosure and Empowerment in Post-apartheid South Africa. In: Rinehart, R., Barbour, K., Pope, C. (eds) Ethnographic Worldviews. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6916-8_3
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