Malapa Ga A Lekane: Frans Thoka

Frans Thoka
Malapa Ga A Lekane
Medium: Paint on prison blanket
TLC Student Collection (South Africa 2020)

Overview: On a small chalkboard hanging from a nail, surrounded by a garland of sorts, is written the title phrase "Malapa Ga A Lekane" (sePedi: Families are not of equal status)   A roll of toilet paper hangs on a holder. as it is a trophy. The background is a brown prison blanket, on which a shadow is cast.


Artist's Statement:  Lockdown is the awakening of humanity and realizing that malapa ga a lekane. From the beginning of the lockdown, selo started to matter. Batho ba bantši ga bana mano a go dira tšhelete ya go reka borotho; ga se gore ga ba kgone go nagana. Melapeng e mengwe toilet paper ya lešidi ke bothata. Rena re swanetše ke go thušana mola le mola. Ga se taba ya lockdown fela. Ke nagana gore ge reka tšwela pele ka Botho, reya kgole. Bao ba sa ememego gore maphelo a bona abe kaone, ke
nako ya gore re ithute; re botšiše bao ba kgonago gore ba kgona bjang go reka borotho.

(The artist requests that viewers research how to translate his statement from sePedi.

Mark Auslander:   The title phrase, "Malapa Ga A Lekane" (in sePedi) literally means that families are of different status. It may be used ironically or sarcastically to dismiss those who attempt presumptuously to rise above their station. In this instance, the artist seems to be calling, without irony, for sympathy and aid to those households that are financially on the edge, in need of significant assistance. The chalkboard might be the kind of object that would hang in a classroom (if classrooms were still open), sharing a vital message about economic inequality, revealed and compounded by the Covid-19 crisis.  The toilet tissue roll,  being held as a kind of trophy (like a taxidermy fish) emphasizes how terribly limited resources are being unfairly hoarded. The surrounding garland, perhaps of dried flowers, may be evocative of the legions of dead and dying in this tragic moment.

The surrounding brown background of the prison blanket may signal the fact that under Lockdown the whole nation, especially the impoverished black majority, is in a state of increasingly desperate confinement, a veritable prison. As was true under Apartheid, prisons in modern South Africa remain overwhelmingly associated with impoverishment and precarity; in that sense the low income majority, like the assemblage in the center of Thoka's image, clings to narrow islands as rising threats confront them on every side.