When art refuses to confront truth, it serves as an agent of destruction and neglects the role of a medium of expression that summons action. Within the Anti-Black Rainbow Nation, the art that rejects truth to sow and sustain ignorance is highly exalted because it advances the nation's mission of African degeneration and destruction. Only a few artists persist in the struggle to plant seeds of critical thought through their work, carefully guiding us toward the anticipated revolution. Slovo Mamphaga, a visual artist, designer and futurist stands among them by offering works that affirm truth and prepare us for the restoration of the African nation.
The 1994 settlement of the 'new South Africa' manufactured a hollow culture of art to evade confrontation with the truth of its injustice. The so-called 'peaceful' transition of 1994 diverted a necessary revolution by handing representational power to the African National Congress (ANC) and offering natives little more than freedom of movement within the new settler Union of South Africa.
The most celebrated artists were those whose works not only silenced their supposed inter-actors but also acted as an anaesthetic to their pain and suffering, delivered through the enjoyment and consumption of frivolous art. Through the imposition of Euro-cultural values and systems, art was employed to promote the adoption of political ideology, particularly non-racial liberalism, rather than truthfully reflecting the realities and spirito-cultural visions of the people it concerned.
Mandela's Legacy: Landlessness as the Penalty
Mandela's Legacy by Slovo Mamphaga reminds us that there was never a nation to build without the restoration of native land but only an injustice to preserve white settlers. This offering does not seek to shock its inter-actors but reflect the lived reality of natives amidst the romanticisation of Mandela and his so-called anti-Apartheid struggle.
A historical reading of the ANC makes clear that the 1994 settlement was not betrayal, but a fidelity to its founding principles and mission. The ANC began in 1912 as the South African National Native Congress (SANNC), formed by Black elites shaped through missionary education and assimilation into British liberal culture.
When Mamphaga exhibits Mandela's Legacy, he exposes how, under the anti-African National Congress, foreign invaders were able to retain all the land they had looted; while natives remain confined to dumpsites. Mamphaga underscores how Mandela's legacy is deadly to the native by placing a skull on the shack to symbolise death as the enlivening foundation of the new Union South of Africa.
White Communist Mantra: Land First, Blacks Second
Before the slow death of Africans could be signed and systematised, the anti-African National Congress embraced white communists as its intellectual guides through the adoption of the 'Freedom Charter.' Steve Biko formulated the Black Consciousness Philosophy and Movement between 1968 and 1972, deliberately excluding white liberals on the grounds that they carried inherent racism, revealed through paternalism toward natives.
In 1959, M'Afrika Robert Sobukwe spearheaded the formation of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), intended as a refuge for those who rejected the Freedom Charter. The PAC was highly motivated and dedicated to the restoration of Izwe Lethu. The march against the pass laws tragically culminated in the Sharpeville massacre on 21 March 1960.
Born on March 21st, twenty-eight years after the Sharpeville massacre; Master Artist Slovo Mamphaga was destined to remain unsettled with "Mandela's Legacy." Through his selected works, Mamphaga confronts the harsh truths of the betrayed freedom of 1994. He rejects the idea that art should obscure truth or serve merely as entertainment by channelling critical thought into works that summon people to work towards the realisation of their justice.
Stage Six: The Genetically Engineered Natives
The final destination of the anti-African National Congress is to fully underdevelop Africans into Genetically Engineered Natives (GEN); Africans who have consciously or unconsciously rejected their African identity, agency, society and culture in order to serve foreign power; becoming servants of their own destruction.
The Medu Art Ensemble was an arts and cultural movement founded in 1979 by artists from the anti-African National Congress who were exiled in Botswana. The movement tasked itself with using art as a "weapon of struggle," though it miscommunicated the ideas of freedom and revolution.
After 1994, the nature of art was further reduced to celebrating a cheated freedom, designed to provoke and then maintain native ignorance. Modern artists who fail to comply with these standards face the same exclusion, silencing or elimination that was faced once by the PAC and BCM organisations.
Coda
The "elephant in the room" implies that we have an outstanding duty to confront centuries of injustice that continue to this day, despite the false moment of freedom engineered for many to accept. The room is suffocating because we remain landless and bound to Mandela's shack which is a physical representation of Frantz Fanon's zone of non-being.
As Africans, we can either settle for survival in the peripheries of our own land and concede to racial suicide, or we can confront the elephant in the room through the expulsion of white invaders by walking to the peak to re-occupy it then begin the process of a Generational Rebirth after restoring the land of our ancestors.