It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it. — James Baldwin (on Shakespeare)

We long for an easier world. It’s been that sort of year, after all.

War in Ukraine continues, the Middle East conflict remains intractable, fuel prices are skyrocketing. As world leaders meet in Sharm el-Sheikh, we wonder who has the courage to create meaningful progress on climate change? 

As Americans voted in the mid-term elections, we saw former president Barack Obama on the stump. Obama sounded a clarion call, as he repeatedly has since 2016, that “democracy is on the ballot”. After all, his country has seen progressive gains being reversed by its own Supreme Court.

Amid war and general unease, there is also a great deal of shouting going on. Elon Musk has bought Twitter and his ownership is already making that social media platform feel as if it has been bought by Donald Trump. More toxicity and thoughtlessness will doubtless be spewed now, given Musk’s own insecurity and misguided politics.

South African travails

As for our own beleaguered country, we all need a particular gaze to deal with the daily travails of poverty and inequality, all exacerbated by poor leadership, corruption and the fallout of State Capture. 

It often feels as if we move two steps forward and three steps backward in this exacting, unrelenting place. We fumble in the dark, literally and figuratively.

Our multiple crises appear intractable on most days and we wait and watch for (and work towards?) an alternative politics in South Africa. One glance at coalition politics, so beset by opportunism, narcissism and corruption, leaves one wondering how much more chaos can unfold before the 2024 elections.

But there is always more.

The upcoming ANC conference has cowed our president, who himself governs under a cloud of “Phala Phala” corruption allegations. All manner of charlatans hold forth emptily in the public domain, sowing the chaos and confusion so beloved of corrupt populists. Shameful, really, and baleful.

But, aside from the unscrupulous politicians, we, too, need to ask ourselves some serious questions about the language we use in our interactions with one another and how we can find ways to speak with greater care about the things which ail us.

The carelessness of public discourse has been unhelpfully aided and abetted by social media: anyone can spew bile, have an unsubstantiated view and gain traction if their words are packaged in the right way. Hate is a commodity, but so is wading in the shallows by claiming expertise on everything, or, better still, being an “influencer”.

Challenging art

It is in this context that two artists challenge us. 

Amy Sherald’s work, currently being exhibited in London, is simply aesthetically beautiful. But, like all good art, it provides pause for thought. 

Sherald’s work is a clear, if subtle, call to think about blackness differently. Best known for her official portrait of Michelle Obama, Sherald has risen far beyond the trite.

She describes her thinking, depicting black people in her usual grayscale and her portrayal of the quotidian: “I’m not trying to take race out of the work, I was just trying to figure out a way to not make it the most salient thing about it.

“My work doesn’t commit black life to grief. There’s an assumption of a whole black life being inextricably tied to struggle. I think it becomes all-consuming and really can codify our existence and our whole experience.

“I wanted to emulate the quiet presence I saw in those pictures, which were some of the first images where blacks were able to present themselves the way they wanted to be seen.

“Painting images that look like that was really important, not just for ourselves, but for the rest of the world to see us that way, too,” Sherald explained.

Sherald’s work cuts helpfully through the “them and us” paradigm (while ironically employing the very paradigm), presenting black life as ordinary and in some of that ordinariness, reclaiming dignity, humanity and place.

How different the world might be if, while grappling with systemic injustice, we didn’t consign all of black experience to the one-dimensional. There is, after all, joy too. (For a deeper discussion of the portrayal of the black quotidian, see here.)

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This past week chaos ensued after a meeting at Fish Hoek High School in the Western Cape, following a “racist incident”, sadly too familiar now in schools and universities, for they are microcosms of our broader society. 

In this case, the educator was accused of using a racial slur. (“Slur” itself minimises the assault on another’s dignity.) There can be no place for racist language in our constitutional democracy, and so the outrage is justified and consequences should follow.

Unfortunately, as so often happens in schools at this moment we are in, that worn-out South African method to deal with the issue after pupils were rightly aggrieved, was used: we tried to “facilitate the problem away” with a “diversity session”.

In many ways, “transformation” and its double-act, “diversity”, have developed a lucrative lexicon of their own. 

According to accounts, a facilitator, clearly unwise and lacking nuance, sowed further confusion and the programme was suspended. Questions should be asked regarding the appointment of the facilitator as well as who at the Western Cape Education Department signed off on the programme and its content, and what public money was spent?

David Maynier, Western Cape Education MEC, has the matter in hand.

The collapsing of this “teachable moment” is deeply unfortunate. Speaking easily and glibly about important questions of race and class is both damaging and soul-destroying.

We need to find ways to talk about race, especially to the next generation, which are truthful and constructive and which are not simply platforms to transfer the anger and trauma of one generation to the next. As Sherald shows in her work, one can powerfully articulate the black experience in ways that are creative and yet also speak volumes about systemic injustice and past oppression.

Broadened perspectives

“Easy truths” and arguing against “all forms of absolutism” is something William Kentridge eschews.

One grasps this fully when walking through the many rooms hosting the extensive Kentridge exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. 

Kentridge’s body of work encompasses a multiplicity of universal themes of race, privilege, migration and the everyday, constantly erasing and redrawing, and is a lesson in both our own very South African struggle for democracy — but also the global struggle for justice.

As an artist, Kentridge grapples with the complexity and asks us to do the same. His film, which forms part of the exhibition, City Deep (2020), cuts through all the words we might wish to speak and goes to the heart of issues of white privilege, white monopoly capital, migration and loss in South Africa.

How much more enriched might the pupils at Fish Hoek High have been had they been asked to engage with the ambiguity of, let’s say, City Deep?

Zadie Smith reminds us so brilliantly in her essay after the 2016 US elections of the necessary lens of perspective.

‘‘We forget that our particular moment, with all its tribulations and triumphs, is not neatly islanded in the river of time but swept afloat by massive cultural currents that have raged long before it and will rage long after. I have long believed that critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naïveté.”

Asked about the current state of his home country, Kentridge says: “Struggling to rescue itself from the degradations of the last 10 years, in terms of its infrastructure, and also understanding that 300 years of white settler colonialism cannot be undone so quickly. It’s a mess. That’s the quick answer.”

What is pointed in the work of Sherald, Smith and Kentridge is a mordant analysis of the times we are in, yet not one of the three falls into complete despair or cynicism. 

It is what gives their art both meaning and power.

This must surely be the message to the next generation of South Africans – that there are different ways of seeing which bring no less discomfort or complexity, but allow for conversation which broadens our perspective, instead of narrowing it. DM