Humanity
The grotesque is intriguing. It takes our attention into a warped state of a mind, the majority of us do not wake in. Curiosity killed the cat and when there’s a traffic jam on the highway, it invariably is caused by rubber necking, with the crash off to the side of the road. The malformed and unsightly also magnetises we humans because it shows us for the gross little beings we can be.
I grew up in South Africa. It’s where I learned English and where much of my British protected child educated mannerisms were developed. My childhood was spent trying to make it to the next day, and not because I lived in dangerous country. South Africa is—and was—a beautiful place to grow up. There’s not a day I remember the sun not being out,the weather being pleasant, and my always being outside playing on my own or with random kids. The food I ate tasted divine and when we did take family trips, the places we visited like Durban were majestic. As a child you are not aware of politics unless your parents are political. My father was a doctor and my mother non-existent, so politics wasn’t really in our realm. The first time I got a whiff of something being amiss with South Africa, was the night my father took the family out for dinner and the man at the counter told us we couldn’t eat at the establishment because we drove a Toyota. At the time my little brain asked how did he know we drove a Toyota? That year was 1993. It was nearly a decade later when I realised it was not the make of our car the Afrikaaner did not like, but my family’s genetic make-up. That paired with the vivid memory of thousands, literally tens of thousands of Black people queuing to vote, had me questioning what South Africa was.
Unless you’re a prodigy, you’re not going to understand art or its nuisances at nine years old. If at nine I would have seen The Butcher Boys, I would have had nightmares for a week. Jane Alexander’s mixed media sculpture of three beings waiting on a bench, is not an interpretation of Beckett. Instead, the work is a very direct comment on the evil of Apartheid and what it did—and does--to the enforcer, adherents and victims. Created in the late 1980’s when the effects of Apartheid were beginning to be economically felt, Blacks were not allowed to study art with only White students able to practice. Oddly, White students were given free reign to criticise the regime and that’s what Alexander did for her Master’s thesis. The beings on the bench are white, without genitalia, mouths glued shut, eyes black as night and horns growing from their skulls. But that’s not what gets you; it’s the navel to throat cuts and gaping gashes on their backs that have you zooming in. Orifices like they’ve been through an operation to remove the inner viscera that makes them human; To speak, to breath, to feel. I will not lower an animal to their status; The Butcher Boys are monstrous.
I grew up in Apartheid, but did not know I was living separated. My closest friends were White, my neighbors were White,and except for the Boer headmaster of my primary school I did not find White people to be bad. I’ve returned to South Africa many times since I left and with every trip, I see the population morphing into Alexander’s creatures. The fear and hatred every citizen—Black, White, Indian—lives in is so palpable that the natural beauty you’re surrounded by dissipates. The violence so brutal and justified by the Black population, hurts them in the same way Apartheid destroyed the Whites. Like the Ouroboros, South Africa is eating itself alive with no clear rational reason as to why it is. The supposed truth may have been reconciled, but never practised. As humans we carry the past within us, it’s a psychological inevitability. The trick is not to let posterity become baggage, because once it does we become deformed beyond recognition.
My father died last month. I cannot believe how much I miss him. Over lands and seas his presence was a guiding light for me. A remembrance of how far I’ve come. My father was kind to everyone, Black, White, Indian, whatever. He took the Hippocratic Oath to heart and though he greatly disliked Afrikaaner’s he never let their lack of humanity destroy his. With his passing a chapter of my life closes as I say goodbye to South Africa. For years I yearned for it, but just as he settled elsewhere in the latter part of his life, my heart has to. What was once our beloved nation is no more and it might never be again. It’s hard to say goodbye, but we must let go or be dragged. Currently I do not live in a place I call home, but I know my home is out there. My father never looked back, and now, neither willI.
For Dr. Basele Ali Frederick ‘Freddy’ Benganga.
*Image credit: Hygeia Theoi Greek Mythology website*
