Culture Respecting President: Samukelo Gqola

Samukelo Gqola
Culture Respecting President
Watercolor on Paper

Samukelo Gqola
Culture Respecting President
Watercolor on Paper
TLC Student Collection (South Africa, 2020)

Overview:  In a rural landscape, two standing birds of prey, wrapped in striped blankets and carrying fighting sticks, are shown in a line escorted by older men. who also carry sticks. The birds' sticks each hold aloft a protective face mask. Hovering over the figures are small images of the novel coronavirus. The right third of the field is colored in red, covered with dark shapes and more images of the virus. This red shape, reminiscent of a large bloodstained cloth. is separated from the walking figures by a chain-link metal line and padlock, perhaps referencing the state policy of Lockdown and suggesting that the disease is being partly fenced or locked away from the procession, even as individual viruses float above the marchers.

Artist’s Statement: My work is about migration. Culture is respected in the Eastern Cape and the lockdown places our elders who live in rural areas in a challenging dilemma where cultural practices are prohibited. These practices require crowds, which is now regarded as breaking the lockdown laws.

In the work I created; I depict elders wearing masks and two birds wearing blankets as a metaphor of people coming together and moving away from the Corona virus to keep themselves safe from it. The message behind this work is that our culture is showing respect to our president’s call by listening to his request

Mark Auslander: A number of the TLC artists have drawn on initiatory symbolism in their work, perhaps because the Lockdown itself can be conceived of as a liminal period, betwixt and between conventional time and space, awaiting a future stage of reintegration and transformation.  Of the over sixty artists included in the three TLC collections, Gqola has most explicitly incorporated the imagery of initiation into his work, presenting a familiar scene of young male initiates and their older ,ale teachers in the Xhosa rite of male initiation (Ulwaluko), processing across the open veldt following circumcision, albeit with the novel touch of casting the novices as birds of prey.  The two initiates are shown wrapped in blankets,  associated with their newly earned male adult status, carrying the fighting sticks that signify their emergent status as male defenders of the community. Instead of the cloth that sometimes adorn the sticks we see face masks at the apex of each fighting stick, indicating that this vital cultural institution lends its authority to protective measures called for by President Ramaphosa and other governmental leaders. The sticks and their flag-like masks may be repelling the floating viruses from the ritual actors, guardians of the imperiled nation.

It is striking that in the work's title and in the artist's statement,  "culture" is here symbolized by the male rite of passage.  Over the generations. as indigenous institutions have been under assault in multiple quarters in southern Africa, initiation in amaXhosa and other southern African communities has emerged as a privileged repository of sociocultural value, standing in for the entire concept of "culture' itself.

In recent years, initiation schools have been widely critiqued for health risks to young men, including surgical damage to genitals, infection rates, homophobic violence and even death. (The theme of internal homophobic violence within the initiation camp was powerfully explored in the 2017 film The Wound.) Since the emergence of Covid-19, public health restrictions have, as the artist notes, prevented the holding of initiation camps.  Here, the artist seems to argue that initiation can and should be a defender of health at this time of crisis.

Speculatively, the large red field covering the right third of the painting might bear the outline of the national map, showing especially the Western Cape region to which many people have migrated from the Eastern Cape across the generations (returning at times to the Eastern Cape to undergo their passage into adulthood). The metallic chain link fence, evidently outlining the county's Atlantic coastline, might thus point to the national lockdown. The red field,  redolent of blood and pocked with viruses and dark shadows of danger and death, could equally be read as a great curtain being pulled back to reveal the unfolding drama within the rural initiation camp, which for the artist comes to stand for the vast mobilization of the nation's cultural energies in the face of this enormous crisis.

Why are the two central initiates wrapped in colorful blankets depicted as large, standing birds of prey (Ukhozi, in isiXhosa or isiZulu)?  The fact that birds migrate over large distances might speak to the artist's emphasis on human migration from the Eastern Cape to urban centers in Cape Town or Gauteng. Eagles and other large raptors are often celebrated for their far-seeing vision, and it may be these figures are being honored for their wisdom and nobility of spirit.  It may be that the bird depicted is the bateleur eagle (isiXhosa:  ingqanga), which can at time prophesize disaster and calamity, and which is also closely associated with military prowess and male leadership.  Like other raptors the bateleur ndergoes striking transformations in plumage over the course of its maturation and may thus be a fitting avatar for the initiates, who like the nation itself are in the midst of a radical state of becoming, heading towards a fate that none can quite yet envision.

Ellen Schattschneider: Initiation rests upon a series of paradoxes.  It is oriented towards the sublimation of physical violence into the realm of the symbolic yet often threatens to explode into actual (desublimated) violence. In the Old Testament, the horrific spectacle of human sacrifice, the near sacrifice by Abraham of his son Isaac, is redirected to the sacrifice of a beast and then to the symbolic sacrifice among the Israelites of every sons' foreskin in the rite of circumcision that establishes the lineage of all males of the nation. Yet the shadow of the fathers' sacrifice of their sons looms over ever generation, as  young men are periodically sent off to battle to shed their own blood and that of others in defense of the patriarchal order.  Even within initiation camps, as the 2017 film The Wound reminds us, actual violence among men can erupt at any moment. Similarly, Victor Turner reports that during the Ndembu Mukanda rite of circumcision, fathers routinely threaten to kill circumcisers if their blade slips and damages their sons' organs of generation. The line between sublimated (culturally represented) and desublimated (uncontrollable and beyond symbolic) violence is fluid and unpredictable.

Part of the problem is that while the elder generation in principle controls the junior cohort during initiation, relations of power on the ground are less than clear. The older cohort needs the juniors, not only to replenish the ranks of the cult of masculinity (or femininity) but because the libidinal energy of the young, which is infused with the ever present potential of violence, is necessary for the continuation of society itself. The game of social reproduction requires activating and appropriating the creative and violent energies of youth, in such a way as to maintain the overall social order, even as those energies threaten to overturn the whole apple cart.

These dynamics are analyzed in Comaroff 1985, in reference to Tswana initiation, and generalized by Nancy Jay 1992's in her comparative study of ritual sacrifice.   Men cannot menstruate (that is to say, they cannot emulate women's ability to involuntarily shed blood) nor can they physically give birth. Yet through the intentional shedding of blood, in hunting, warfare, and most importantly sacrifice (and the emulated sacrifice of circumcision and initiation) they can redirect flows of blood to create the vital social fiction of male lineage, of male bloodlines that flow through the generations in perpetuity.  This process depends on the continuous appropriation of the reproductive capacities and wisdom of women and the vital libidinal embodied energies of young males, whose pooled blood fuses them into the masculine collective. 

In Sherry Ortner's (1974)  terms such institutional practices are mystified as the triumph of male-dominated "culture" over female-coded "nature."  To shed blood at will, through the edge of the knife or the point of the assegai, especially the blood of one's sons, is to nurture the reproduction of (male dominated) society itself. As Jean Comaroff notes in reference to the precolonial Tswana, male initiation was thus mythologically understood as violently stolen by men from women, who initially held the secret of initiation until the original female initiator was murdered by the community of males (Comaroff 1985: 85-87).

Yet the strength of youth, whose energies must be extracted for these purposes, is never easily subdued. This is the classic argument presented by Freud (1913) in Totem and Taboo; the primal horde of young men commit parricide against the Father, whom they then deify; such is the work of civilization, which disguises from ourselves our own murderous impulses. The scenario of initiation reenacts this classic sequence:  elders shed blood from the youth, who emerge as a strong and potentially violent fighting cohort, even as the youth honor their elders as avatars of the sacred ancestral shades.

The lurking danger of this emergent cohort is potently communicated by Gqola's two blanket wrapped initiates, figured as proud and dangerous birds of prey. We sense they might lunge at any moment; their violent energies are not easily contained. The second bird, it should be noted, looks directly at the viewer. He has us in his sights.

This, for the artist, seems to be the point of "culture," the organized sublimation of the creativity of power, the appropriation of violent energies that are channeled for vital social ends. Only those energies, we gather, can hold back the approaching storm, imaged as an advancing red cloud, of the Covid-19 national pandemic.  The young, especially the "Born Free" urban black poor of the townships, may have been betrayed again and again by the promise of the new South Africa; yet any hope for a productive future,  especially at these times of unconstrained crisis, ultimately rests with this emergent generation. 

References

Comaroff, Jean. 1985. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People  Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Freud, Sigmund. 1913.  "The Return of Totemism in Childhood" Chapter Four of Totem and Taboo.

Jay, Nancy.  1992. Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 

Ortner, Sherry, 1974. Is Female to Male as Nature to Culture in.Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo; Louise Lamphere eds. Women, Culture, And Society. Stanford University Press.