Art Against Apartheid

Before Nelson Mandela, there was Albert Luthuli. A majestic figure, ahereditary Chief of the Zulus, Luthuli was clearly the most inspirational figureof his generation in South Africa, and his untimely death at the age of 69 incircumstances that can only be described as suspicious robbed South Africa ofits most creative exponent of nonviolent resistance to apartheid. Luthuli hadjoined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1945, and he rose to becomepresident of the provincial Natal branch of the ANC in 1951; the following year,Luthuli was among those who orchestrated resistance to the notorious pass laws.His part in the Defiance Campaign earned him the opprobrium of the government,and he was offered the choice of renouncing his membership in the ANC or beingstripped of his Chieftainship. Luthuli, characteristically, was never in doubtabout his decision – but even as the South African government sought to demotehim in the eyes of his people, he was elevated to the Presidency of the ANC.Many honours were to come Luthuli’s way, including the Nobel Prize, the firstever awarded to an African, for Peace: but the most lasting testimony of thisgentle colossus’s fortitude and valour is the fact that the apartheid regime‘banned’ him for much of the last fifteen years of his life, restricting hismovements and preventing any mention of his name in public. Luthuli nonethelessremained President of the ANC until his death, allegedly an accident on a traintrack close to his home, on 21 July 1967.

It is under Luthuli that Mandela, who was his deputy and president of the ANCbranch in Transvaal, attained political maturity. Though robbed of hisChieftainship, Luthuli clearly remained Chief to all his people – not onlyblack South Africans, but all the oppressed of his nation. Among those whoviewed Luthuli as their political and spiritual mentor is the Capetown-basedartist, Ronald Harrison, who was born in 1940 and grew into adolescence asLuthuli was coming into his own as one of the principal architects of theanti-apartheid movement. Harrison was nearly fifteen years old whenapartheid’s enforcers arrived at Sophiatown, near Johannesburg, and dismantledthe entire black township within a few hours. Later that summer, in 1955, theANC adopted the Freedom Charter, whose Preamble stated that "South Africabelongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government canjustly claim authority unless it is based upon the will of the people". Twentythousand women – African, coloured, Indian, white – marched the followingyear to demand an end to injustices against African women. The government’sresponse to the rising tide of resistance appears to have been to unleash moreoppression: at Sharpeville, nearly 60 peaceful demonstrators were killed in apolice firing.

Harrison, meanwhile, had been gravitating towards art, and he has describedhimself as having the feelings of an angry young man as oppressive politicalevents unfolded around him. His "role model", Chief Luthuli, had been exiledfrom the political world, and the ascendancy of Hendrik Verwoerd, described inLuthuli’s autobiography as "the author of our destruction", to the PrimeMinistership of South Africa in 1958 signaled to apartheid’s opponents thatthe regime would step up its repression. In his inaugural speech, Verwoerddeclared himself as "absolutely convinced that integration in a country likeSouth Africa cannot possibly succeed". Where the US Supreme Court, in itsfamous 1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education, had signified that itwas prepared to overturn the century-old dogma of ‘separate but equal’, inSouth Africa Verwoerd was reaffirming precisely that discredited view: "Thepolicy of separate development is designed for the happiness, security andstability provided by their home language and administration for the Bantu aswell as the whites." Verwoerd appointed as his Minister of Justice and PoliceB. J. Vorster, who lost little time in introducing the notorious DetentionWithout Trial Act: though it conferred on the state the right to hold detaineeswithout any right to legal representation for a period of 90 days, in actualityit was designed to permit detention for indefinite periods of time. Verwoerd haddescribed himself as a seeker "of justice for all groups"; similarly,Vorster characterized himself as a believer "in the right of free speech, inthe right of people to assemble, and protest," adding only that "theserights are not without qualification."

Faced by apartheid’s onslaught on humanity, Harrison pondered whether he,as an artist, could somehow contribute to the liberation movement. As aChristian, Harrison felt immensely troubled that the apartheid regime claimedthe mantle of Christianity; however, Luthuli, himself a man of intense if quietreligious conviction, represented the other, more ennobling and emancipatory,face of their faith. Late in 1961, Harrison writes, he was struck by somethingof an epiphany: what if he were to signify the suffering of South Africa’sblack people by equating it with the crucifixion of Christ, rendering Luthuli asa modern-day Christ and apartheid’s ideologues, Verwoerd and Vorster, as Romancenturions, "the tormentors of Christ" (p. 26)? An Asian St. John and acoloured Madonna, Harrison surmised, would complete the picture. So came aboutthe birth of "The Black Christ", the painting around which revolvesHarrison’s multi-layered narrative of the struggle against apartheid, theterror tactics of the South African state, the relation of art to politics, hisown troubled life until the dismantling of apartheid, and the fate of "TheBlack Christ" itself. Though Harrison does not reflect on the history ofrepresentations of Christ, we might say that with "The Black Christ" he wasalso returning Christianity to its true origins in black Egypt, in defiance ofEurope’s attempts to escape the Afro-Asiatic roots of Western civilization.

Completed in June 1962, "The Black Christ" could be exhibited in publiconly briefly before the state pounced upon Harrison. The Dutch Reformed Church,to which apartheid’s proponents belonged, asked Luthuli to repudiate publiclythis representation of him as a crucified ‘Black Saviour’, little realizingthat, as Luthuli was under banning and gagging orders, it was strictly illegalfor any newspaper or other media to even mention his name, much less reproduceanything attributed to him (p. 31). Summoned to appear at a police station toexplain his conduct, Harrison issued a statement describing Luthuli as a man ofpeace, someone in whom the artist had found his "perfect image of Christ" inthe here and now. Urging everyone to recognize the "predominant spiritualatmosphere of the painting", Harrison felt that the painting showed that"racial discrimination should not be practiced, for we are all united in onebond with Christ" (p. 35). Harrison was not only let go, but shortlythereafter informed that he could hang the painting in any church of his choice– one of those gestures through which a totalitarian state lulls its subjectsand even opponents into a false sense of security. Apartheid’s "two mainicons" had been ridiculed, and Harrison never supposed that his offence wouldbe overlooked. Sure enough, only a week or two after it appeared that Harrisonhad been granted a reprieve, the Ministry of Interior issued orders prohibitingany further display of "The Black Christ" until the Board of Censors hadcertified that the painting was not calculated to offend the religioussentiments of a section of the public (p. 39). Harrison himself was brieflytaken into custody and roughed up: this may have sufficed to persuade him toheed the advice of friends and activists, who were keen that the painting besmuggled into London where funds obtained from its public displays would bechanneled to the political victims of apartheid (p. 41).

Even as "The Black Christ" found its way to Britain, Harrison’s owncrucifixion commenced. Over the following year, he would be hauled into torturechambers on several occasions. His interrogators sought to know at whoseinstigation he had painted "The Black Christ": they wanted an account of aconspiracy to humiliate Verwoerd and South African whites when there was none.Harrison describes the merciless beatings, the constant abuse, the nights indark cold cells huddled up in the nude (pp. 47-60). There is a chilling accountof a doctor brought to ‘heal’ Harrison’s wounds: as two men held Harrisondown, the doctor yanked out the nail of his right foot’s infected big toe witha huge pair of pliers (p. 57). After several days of confinement, Harrison wasreleased; but several months later, he was again hauled into custody andruthlessly beaten up into a piece of pulp (pp. 71-85). Enveloped by darkness,Harrison might well have become a statistic were it not for the unexpectedkindness of two jailors, in particular an African woman whose gentle touchbrought him back to life (pp. 79, 83-84).

Though Harrison never disappears from the narrative, the second half of thebook moves in considerable measure from the travails of his own life to theturmoil in the nation and the history of resistance to apartheid. Harrisonrecalls major landmarks, from the trial and conviction of Mandela, Walter Sisuluand others to the Sharpeville Massacre, from the Soweto Uprising and the deathin police custody of Steve Biko, ideologue of ‘Black Consciousness’, to theisolation of South Africa in the international realm and the eventualdismantling of apartheid. The odious nature of apartheid is recalled in suchbarbarisms as the Group Areas Act (1950), which entailed large-scale uprootingof coloreds, blacks, and Indians and decimated entire communities, among themthe famous District Six in Cape Town. The forcible removal of people deemed notonly inferior but as incapable of making ‘productive’ use of their land haslong been one of the ways in which colonial powers sought to leave their imprinton colonized peoples, and the apartheid regime’s land and settlement policiesshould also be viewed as having a family resemblance to the doctrine of terranullis, whereby European colonizers justified their occupation of land withthe declaration that they were merely filling up ‘empty’ space or‘waste’ land. Harrison, even as his narrative moves to the early 1990s, tothe period when Mandela and ANC leaders were released from jail, and Mandela waselected to the office of the President of South Africa, recalls the long-termeffects of apartheid. He notes with sadness how a majority of coloured people inmany Western Cape communities, who had doubtless imbibed some of the racistrhetoric about the unworthiness of black people, voted for their formeroppressors rather than the ANC, declaring that they would not consent to beruled by ‘kaffirs’ (p. 157).

At long last, the book returns to its ostensible subject, "The BlackChrist". Over a period of 35 years, Harrison’s painting had found shelter inthe basement of an English home, and Harrison movingly recounts the painting’striumphant return home and its eventual acquisition by the South AfricanNational Gallery. But what is perhaps even more moving is that there is not atouch of hatred against his former oppressors, and even the assassination inSeptember 1966 of apartheid’s chief architect, Hendrik Verwoerd, elicits fromHarrison the remark that he could not share in the jubilation experienced byapartheid’s victims: "Verwoerd had been a monster; he had been a tormentor.But he had also been a loving husband, a caring father, someone’s friend, thebeloved son of proud parents." As he cautions us, we must ever endeavor not tobecome like those whom we despise (p. 96). The author’s generosity is presentthroughout, in his celebration of somewhat lesser known heroes of the strugglesuch as Barney Desai, who was instrumental in having the UN declare apartheid a‘crime against humanity’ (p. 147), and equally in his willingness to acceptthe most elevated thoughts, whether their source be the Quran, the teachings ofChrist, or the life of Gandhi. The Black Christ is palpable proof of howfortitude, equanimity, and a simple faith in the goodness of people might yetprevail amidst crushing adversity.