Flag: Scats Esterhuyse

by Pamela Allara and Mark Auslander

Day 13 of South Africa's The Lockdown Collection  features an oil painting by Scats Esterhuyse , “Flag” 
 (2019
). An empty house is set in the Klein (Little) Karoo desert as distant storm clouds gather; to the right of the house, along an empty dirty road, a solitary flagpole flies the modern South African six-colored national flag.

Scats Esterhuyse, "Flag" (2019)

The artist's statement: This scene is set halfway between Richmond and Hanover in the Klein Karoo where this deserted house is located. In the background, although a storm appears to be brewing, there is hope of relief approaching the arid land. The lonely flag that is several meters up in the sky sends out a message of unity and healing.

Pam Allara: Appreciating Esterhuyse's painting, especially for non-South African audiences,  requires some initial background on the ecosystem in which it is set.  The Karoo is a semi-desert region in the southern-central area of South Africa, characterized by its sparsely vegetated plains surrounded by low, flat-topped mountains, Karoo Koppies. After windpumps permitted ground water to be tapped in the 1880s, the land could be farmed for the first time. But no sooner was that possibility opened to European settlers than it was fought over, notably during the Second Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1902. The peaceful prospect of Scats Esterhuyse’s “Flag,” nonetheless hints at the Karoo’s fraught history both through the abandoned farmhouse and the threatening thunderstorm, for which the Karoo is famous.

The opening chapters of Olive Schreiner’s The Story of An African Farm provide the iconic description of the Karoo’s landscape. “The dry, sandy earth with its coating of stunted “Karroo” bushes a few inches high, the low hills that skirted the plain…all were touched by a weird and almost oppressive beauty.” (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1890, 18). The story is set in 1862, the year of a great drought, and Waldo, the teenage protagonist, ponders “…the time when the little bushmen lived here, so small and so ugly…Now the Boers have shot them all, so that we never see a little yellow face peeping out among the stones…” (Ibid., 37)

Christine Dixie
Below the Sediments,2019,
digital print onto brush metal
with lazer cutouts.detail.
Collection: The Wits Art Museum)

South African artist Christine Dixie, who lived in the Karoo for nearly a decade, has made this fraught history explicit in a recent artwork, "Below the Sediments' (2019)  The Karoo’s low hills are contrasted with the red underground image sliced by the blue fracturing pipe. As she writes: “The karoo soil depicted on the front panels has literally been cut away to create the scientifically order ‘pipes’ laid below the ground to extract gas from below the surface of the earth.” (www.christineDixie/Acquisitions/WitsArt Museum). But the efforts to extract natural resources has also exhumed the Karoo’s violent history; here, hardly resting in peace, are the corpses described by David Bunn (2007). Never in history has there been a ‘virgin’ landscape, despite the efforts of many landscape artists, including South Africa’s Jacobus Hendrik Pierneef, to convince us otherwise.


Mark Auslander: Although painted before the COVID-19, pandemic and the Lockdown order,  Scats Esterhuyse's painting pointedly speaks to our shared crisis. Like the storm clouds  the approaching virus threatens all the eye can see, potentially even those who might seek shelter in the emptied house. Lightning bolts may ignite devastating fires across the scrub lands. Yet, as the artist notes, all hope is not lost, for the promise remains of new forms of regeneration and rejuvenation, after the rains pass.  In this semi-arid region, devoid of surface waters, thunderstorms bring both destruction and new life in their wake.

A Mystery

To my mind the most fascinating aspect of the painting is the flagpole, from which flies the modern South African flag and a windsock, both whipped in the wind towards the house and traces of an obscured sun. Inevitably, the viewer wonders, if the farmhouse is deserted. just who is tending to the flag, raising it each morning and lowering it each evening? How has it remained fully coherent and untattered, far away from active human settlement?

Whoever secretly tends to it, the horizontal flagpole, alongside the dirt road leading to the horizon  does important "work" in organizing our field of vision. It divides the landscape into two sub-fields. The left zone, comprising the house and road, bears traces of human presence, if only in the past. To the right of the flagpole, which stretches all the way up to the bottom layer of the ominous storm clouds, is a landscape seemingly untouched by the hand of man.

Thinking of early South African history one wonders if the rough, rutted track heads northeast, the direction taken by the Voortrekkers in their wagons as they fled English control over the Cape Colony, in many instances bringing with them enslaved people into the African interior to found the two Afrikaner republics, the Orange Free State and the Zuid-Afrikaanse Republik (the Transvaal), constituted on ostensibly "virgin land," where indigenous African polities were subordinated or expelled.

In this regard, it seems significant that the painting's setting, between Richmond and Hanover in the Northern Cape, more or less marks the geographical center of modern South Africa. There may even be an allusion here to a famous inscription in the Afrikaans language monument in Paarl, by
C.J. Langenhoven, champion of the Afrikaans language and author of the words of the old South African national anthem, Die Stem (The Call), which referenced  the Great Trek, "Through our far-deserted plains/With the groan of ox-wagon –" consistent with the winding rough roadway across the empty veld in the painting. In the lines inscribed at the Language Monument, Langenhoven envisioned a straight line of poles growing ever higher, marking the ascent of the Afrikaans language, so that their tops describe the flight of a great arrow, shot from Paarl, rising to the skies high above Bloemfontein, capital of the Free State. It possible to read this flagpole as one of Langenhoven’s poles, and imagine the arrow arcing precisely over this patch of sky, intermediate between the settled Cape and the outer frontier.
 

The contrast between the left and right fields of the landscape, organized around the flagpole, is equivalent to this contrast, between the "civilized" agrarian Cape and the historically "unsettled" interior. This contrast is all the more evocative in the Karoo, where for over 100,000 years indigenous Khoisan communities and their progenitors, hunters and gatherers, resided without settled population densities, until they too were annihilated or absorbed within successive European-dominated colonial formations.

The National Colors

Flag, South Africa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_South_Africa

At the focal center of Esterhuyse's composition, mediating and transcending these deep historical contradictions, flies the modern national flag itself, a compromise formation negotiated on the eve of the 1994 elections, the nation's first truly democratic poll.  The flag itself embodies the complex history of the nation in its six colors. the three pan-African colors are the colors of the African National Congress, black, green and gold. "Black symbolises the native people of South Africa, green represents the land and gold represents the mineral and other natural wealth of South Africa."  The other colors, red, white, and blue, recall the Union Jack, and the Anglo-African colonies of the Cape and Natal; as well as the old flags of the two Afrikaaner republics. The sideways "Y,"  read, left to right, signals the convergence of difference into national unity.  Seen through our eyes in the era of the  Lockdown, Esterhuyse's "Flag," then, summarizes our current moment, evocative of a remarkably complicated history of violence, domination, resistance, compromise and transformation. 


Bodies in the Landscape? 

David Bunn, theorist of South African landscape, has observed there are no landscapes without bodies  (1999; 2007).  These bodies, in some instances, are not consciously placed by the artist (as they are in the Karoo work of Christine Dixie, referenced above by Pamela). They may, at certain moments of history, be collectively read into the landscape by viewers, informed by the specific historical circumstances in which they find themselves.

In this instance, amidst the mounting pandemic, I suggest we apprehend, consciously or otherwise,  two kinds of bodies permeating Esterhuyse's beautiful, windswept landscape. The darkening,  billowing clouds have become ominously evocative of the spherical novel coronavirus, advancing towards us inexorably, even as we shelter in place. Then there is a different kind of implicit body,  the fragile elongated flagpole, atop which flies the delicate signifier of the national body, the flag itself. 

This is the very flag that embodies in six hues the nation's tormented history, while also, even as it reaches upwards into the approaching deluge and braves the lighting bolts, reminding us of our better angels--committed to principles of multi-racialism, equal justice under law, and the common promise of shared national patrimony. The flag, and the covenant for which it stands, may be storm-tossed by the disappointments of the past quarter century, but its founding ideals remain the best to which humanity might aspire.

The Mystery, Solved

Thus, Scats Esterhause's canvas offers, I suggest, a solution to the very mystery he initially poses. Who tends for this flag in this seemingly deserted landscape, as the tempest approaches? The answer, of course, is every single one of us. For all our differences, for all our struggles, at this moment of national and global peril we are invited to safeguard this beautiful, fragile, battered national body, reaching up into the heavens, to stand with one another through the storm, and hold true, against the odds, till the dawn lifts once again. 



References

Bunn, David. 1999. “Morbid Curiosities: Mutilation, Exhumation, and the Fate of Colonial Painting.” In Alan Feldman, ed. States of Violence (American Anthropological Association).

Bunn, David. 2007. “A Sidelong Glance: Christine Dixie’s Thresholds.”  In Corporeal Prospects. Catalogue, Standard Bank Gallery, July.

Schreiner, Olive. The Story of An African Farm. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1890