A Place in Time: Mongezi Ncaphayi

by Pamela Allara, Ellen Schattschneider, and Mark Auslander

Day 15 of South Africa's The Lockdown Collection presents an acrylic wash on paper by Mongezi Ncaphayi, titled "A Place in Time" (2020). A light green wash forms a series of roughly circular, overlapping forms in the middle column of the image, surrounded by a darker green background. An intricate yellow green lattice-work is superimposed over the middle zone; a winding black line, red splotches, and white segments that look like torn pieces of paper are interspersed throughout.

Artist's Remarks:  "I worry about the poor during this Lockdown and social distancing. Grandmothers looking after kids; kids having to go to neighbors to borrow some coal for their fire. We are all dependent on each other. But it’s so difficult now.  How will they manage? This is the time when families want to be together, but they can’t travel home. They can’t attend funerals. I just wonder where we are headed?
  
It’s getting cold, the weather is against us but that is a challenge that we will all overcome. I’m doing a lot of thinking about whatever warfare this is that we’re experiencing...Regardless of what happens to harm or destroy people’s lives, there will always be hope and someone to tell the story”

Pamela Allara;  Mongezi Ncaphayi is an artist who works abstractly, but the forms he uses are rooted in his personal experiences. Returning, or stranded as he put it, in the industrial town of Benoni, east of Johannesburg during the outbreak, he found the community fearful, but still able to share resources despite the lockdown. Hence he was able to borrow the materials needed to create the beautiful acrylic wash, “A Place In Time.” The bubbling, grey/green organic forms might be interpreted in numerous ways. Are they indicative of the virus itself as it spreads across the surface? That’s one idea, but I think the work is perhaps less literal than that.  It might be interpreted as an aerial view of the townscape with abstracted huddled figures moving together. If so, are the spots of red referring to blood, the metaphorical wounds of the plague? And the beautiful yellow-green bough that floats over the whole might be a healing balm.

Well, I have warned about getting too literal, but have ended up falling into the trap I was confident I could avoid. At this “Place in Time,” everything seems to be interpreted in terms of the coronavirus. Perhaps it’s best to just enjoy the beauty of the work of art itself as a healing balm.  “There is always hope.” 

Ellen Schattschneider:  My experience of this painting is informed by the work of social anthropologist W.D. Hammond-Tooke, who undertook research among  the Bhaca people of the Transkei, the community from which Mongezi Ncaphayi is descended.  Hammond-Tooke (1960) notes that in Bhaca communities a preeminent ethical responsibility, incumbent on all persons, is participating in the funeral rites of extended kin members. As in other rural Nguni-speaking communities, participation in the funeral process does not only extend emotional support to the principal mourners; ritual action and collective witnessing during the funeral period aids in the processes through which the newly deceased person gradually moves towards ancestorhood, interconnected with her or his living descendants and collateral kin..The mortuary process, involving prayer, song, dance, oratory, and at times the ritual killing of an offered beast, establishes a series of multilayered distinctions and bonds between visible and invisible worlds, enhancing productive relations of exchange and mutual care between the Living and the Dead  (As noted in Huntington and Metcalf 1979, many of these features are shared in death rituals around the world.). Mourners gather together to escort the corpse and the lost soul across a set of thresholds, into the next spiritual stages of existence, moving gradually from a specific identity to generic union with the entire class of ancestral shades, who safeguard the living and who are in turn honored by their descendants.

What happens, then, Mongezi Ncaphayi asks, when, under conditions of the Lockdown, relatives cannot attend funerals? What fate awaits the newly deceased soul, without a wide network of kith and kin to escort her or him along the path?

Mongezi Ncaphay. A Place in Time. 2020

Ncaphayi's image, to my mind, poses this urgent question pointedly.  The amorphous light wash shape may be read as a corpse, recently deceased from Covid-19. At the top of the form, rounded eyes bulge out; a large red splotch describes a mouth, perhaps indicating blood coughed up from the lungs; outstretched arms are hinted at as well. The two intricate yellow green shapes, which Pam reads as leaves or boughs, might, alternately be the virus-infected lungs. The curving black line in the lower zone may signal further danger.

Speculatively, might it be significant that Mongezi Ncaphayi offers us this powerful image on, of all days, Good Friday, Anno Domini 2020? The black line may recall the wound in Jesus' side by the lance of the Roman soldier. The red and white glimpsed throughout the painting may evoke the blood and water that flowed from Jesus' body.  Might we, in effect, be witnessing a latter-day Crucifixion? 

Seen in that light, Ncaphayi's image may not be entirely one of despair; might it serve as a transformative act of witnessing, a gift to the deceased, a promise of hope, to all of us who now shelter in fear?

My thinking here is partly informed  by the long iconographic history of Christian painting, in which the image of the Crucifixion, paradoxically,  conveys to the faithful a tangible promise of Life Everlasting.  I am also influenced by my own research as an anthropologist on mourning in Japan. Buddhist  memorialization  (kuyō) of the Dead is understand as a fundamental obligation shared by the Living, to help guide the deceased towards Buddhahood. Crucial to this process are a series of representational acts, centered on images of human and sacred bodies,  that create tangible visible models of the dead's hoped-for movement through cycles of creation.

These representational offerings may include paintings, photographs, or sculptures, or even foodstuffs and alcohol that nurture the Dead, and which may in turn be consumed by the living in acts of commensality that bind together, if only briefly, this world and the other world.  In northern Tōkoku (northeastern Honshu, Japan) the journey of unquiet souls, especially those who died before marriage, may be eased through a special ritual figurine, a bride doll, to which the dead person is "married" to in the other world. (Schattschneider 2001, 2004). Throughout Japan, moving the soul through cycles of creation depends on mimetic acts of representation (migawari) by the living, in which the soul may in sequence be attached to, and detached from, human-shaped figurines. 

Might something comparable be happening in "A Place in Time"?  Is the artist's act of representation, capturing the Dead's fluid transition between life and afterlive, a kind of symbolic equivalent to a conventional rural funeral, in which the extended family gathers to bear witness, say farewell, and escort the honored lost one onward?  Might Ncaphayi, in effect, be "emplacing" the Dead, in a re-balanced space and time, restoring, at this strange, unsettled moment in history,  the Dead and the Living to a mutual sustaining continuum that triumphs over mere physical death?  Might he be signaling, on this somber Good Friday, the shared promise of Resurrection, just over the horizon?

Mark Auslander; Building on Ellen's reading, I speculate that in this work, Mongezi Ncaphayi may be taking on the heavy burden carried by the diviner (isangoma) in Bhaca society and cosmology (Hammond-Tooke 1955, 1962). The calling of the diviner is to mediate between visible and invisible orders of existence, to address ruptures and discontinuities between mortals and shades, and to restore the proper circulations of energy and care between different orders of existence. Under prolonged conditions of rural-urban migration, the isangoma also mediates between the worlds of the city, mine, and village homestead, recalibrating social and spiritual relations within and between different forms of "home."

To attain these special capacities, the novice isangoma must herself embody a high degree of permeability between the moral and spirit world, undergoing a form of spirit possession during initiation into the status of diviner  (Hammond-Tooke 1955). Once proper relations between the Living and the Dead are restored, the ancestral shade may visit the diviner and others descendants in dreams, visions that guide and bless the living in navigating life's challenges (Hammond-Tooke 1960).

In "A Place in Time" the artist would seem to be calling forth, out of the wash of overlapping colors. a dreamlike apparition, rather as an isangoma would. The flakes of white glimpsed throughout the painting may be evocative of the white beads and other white coloration deployed in divination (and perhaps even the white goat sacrificed during the diviner's initiation)  through which darker forces, perhaps glimpsed in the snakelike black line in the lower part of the image, may be neutralized, as light is shone on previous troublesome mysteries.  (This reading does not contradict Ellen's Christological interpretation, for as Hammond-Tooke notes,  Bhaca isangoma have long integrated Christian and indigenous cosmological frames of reference.)  The range of hues, in turn, might erecall the multicolored scarves worn by a practicing Bhaca diviners, as in the chiffon scarves, from the Richmond area, held in the Killie Campbell Africana Library.

Diviners do not shy away from engaging with life's hardest truths, and the painting is unflinching in witnessing the terrors of the present moment. The virus that cuts across the shadowy figure's midsection is terrifying, and seems to be proliferating outwards, suggestive of mounting danger to the whole community.

The flecks of blood signal not only internal lesions within an individual body (reminiscent, as Ellen suggests, of Jesus' wounds on the cross)  but also wounds to the body politic, as normal social bonds are torn asunder by the pandemic and the Lockdown.  The painting may perhaps be best approached as a prophetic dream, which evokes both the agonies of this particular disorienting "place in time," while also offering those who behold it a glimpse of what it might be like, once again, to be properly placed within time, reunited in the great continuum of existence, for now and for all time.



References

Hammond-Tooke W.D. 1962.  Bhaca Society; A People of the Transkein Uplands, South Africa. Cape Town: Oxford University Press.
__________________1955. The Initiation of a Bhaca Isangoma Diviner. African Studies 14: 17-21.
__________________1960. Some Bhaca Religious Categories. African Studies, 19: 1-13

Richard Huntington and Peter Metcalf. 1979. Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual.  Cambridge University Press.

Schattschneider, Ellen. 2001.  “Buy Me a Bride: Death and Exchange in Northern Japanese Bride Doll Marriage.” American Ethnologist volume 28 (4: 854-880) November.
__________________.  2004 “Family Resemblances: Memorial Images and the Face of Kinship.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. 30 (1-2) Spring.