Art is meant to provoke some kind of response in a viewer. South Africa has a long and rich history of resistance art, some of which managed to capture the reality of the oppression of the Apartheid regime when other mediums of expression were censored or shut down.

While freedom of expression, especially in the arts, is something worth protecting, there is the question of how far is too far, especially when it comes to shock tactics.

I’d like to start by saying that I don’t believe that anything is off limits when it comes to critiquing a country, its politics, its leaders or its policies. That said, an argument can be made for the difference between critique and spectacle.

Ayanda Mabulu is known for his controversial art. His painting of Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma in a very compromising position garnered indignation and disgust from the ANC Women’s League, for example.

Not that they have the moral high ground, sending out death threats and such.

Perhaps more relevant to the painting we’re about to discuss is his depiction of former presidents Jacob Zuma and Nelson Mandela in what we’ll call an intimate position, wherein Mandela is the ‘bottom’, so to speak.

In defence of his artwork, Mabulu said the following:

“Nelson Mandela is me, Nelson Mandela is you, Nelson Mandela is your neighbour. Nelson Mandela is everyone.

“He was hope, back in 1994, something to hold onto. The dreams of hope, everything Mandela and the people fought for were thrown into the rubbish by these people who did not care”…

He said the country was in the situation it was in because of people who do not have a conscience.

Keeping in mind that Mabulu made this statement as recently as last year, his latest work seems to be a violent departure from these, apparently previously held, sentiments.

The Citizen reports that Mabulu’s latest artwork was “showcased at the Joburg Art Fair which ended on Sunday”.

In the painting, a smiling Mandela is superimposed on the Nazi flag, his hand raised in a Nazi salute, with the words “Unmasked Piece of Sh*t” printed boldly across the bottom of the painting.

The artwork invites a number of analyses.

The first references the links between the Apartheid government and Nazi Germany. Many Apartheid officials studied in Germany, learning a lot from the fascist regime and bringing it back to South Africa to implement in the systematic oppression of Black South Africans.

The artwork could be suggesting that Nelson Mandela’s choice of the lesser of two evils, in the form of deal with the Apartheid government under FW De Klerk which led to the first democratic election, made him a Nazi sympathiser in a sense – especially in light of the fact that many nationalist and radical discourses of late that have decided to stop treating him like an icon, and start using him as a scapegoat.

If this is the case, the artwork misses the nuances of what has been cemented in public memory as a simple case of a political transition, but what was, in fact, a vastly complicated and politically intricate negotiation to free the country from a fascist regime.

While Nelson Mandela certainly had his flaws, the idea that a single president acts alone in his decisions is an easy assumption to make when you need someone to blame. But as the hearings that are currently happening regarding state capture should tell us, it takes a village to raise a country to the ground.

With the rise of the alt-right in Europe and the US, we’ve been seeing the swastika disturbingly often, and all too frequently tossed about with an abandon that forgets its original place at the gates of death camps. It’s a shock tactic that is being used to scare the opponents of racism, of freedom, of the caging of children who are also immigrants.

Associating it with Nelson Mandela is just another shock tactic and a tasteless one that doesn’t do its history homework.

[source:citizen]