The exhibition When Rain Clouds Gather: Black South African Women Artists, 1940–2000 featured the works of forty Black women artists, many of whom were previously unknown to the South African public. The co-curators Portia Malatjie and Nontobeko Ntombela explained that the show afforded a moment to ‘pause’ and contemplate why the omission of Black women artists from the canon has been so pervasive. The accompanying three-day symposium was convened by Pumla Dineo Gqola, the SARchi Chair in Sexualities, Gender and Identity at the University of Fort Hare, in collaboration with the exhibition’s curators. It brought together feminist scholars, visual artists, curators and arts practitioners. The conversations that emerged were rich and dynamic and they facilitated a deep engagement with Black women’s artistic traditions. By developing analytic methodologies through which to make sense of Black women’s artistic practices in the post-apartheid landscape, the conversations also articulated the future possibilities for African feminism in South Africa.
The programme borrows its title from author Bessie Head’s novel When Rain Clouds Gather (1968) which offers a stirring account of rural life in Botswana. It evokes the image of a barren landscape tasked with supporting and sustaining life. The novel describes the ecology of the village of Galema Medi by highlighting the difficulties that women must overcome in the semi-arid landscape of a patriarchal community. Reflecting on the institutional violence that suspends Black people in the wake of slavery and colonialism, writer and professor of English literature Christina Sharpe uses the term ‘weather’ to describe ‘the totality of environments in which we struggle’.1 The weather can be erratic, tumultuous, unyielding, subjecting entire populations to hazardous storms or debilitating droughts. As such, weather operates as a metaphor to describe the various institutional obstacles that confine Black people in particular ways – ways that often lead to civil unrest or create ‘arid’ conditions, void of opportunities for self-determination. In the context of South Africa, ‘weather’ refers to the legacies of apartheid and the institutional obstacles Black women artists continue to face today.
The symposium began with a keynote address from artist and curator Bongi Dhlomo whose career in South Africa spans over five decades. In her speech, Ma Dhlomo pointed to the limited institutional support and opportunities for mentorship and economic advancement for Black women artists.2 She articulated the symbolic weight carried by the image of gathering rain clouds by explaining that, in a barren landscape, these rain clouds promise a reprieve from harsh conditions. Within the African feminist literary imagination, gathering clouds signal hope and anticipation. Importantly, writers such as Yvonne Vera, Assia Djebar and Mariama Bâ, and artists such as Gladys Mgudlandlu, have often used the landscape to articulate the oppression faced by Black women. For example, Yvonne Vera’s novel Butterfly Burning (1998) initiates the reader into the protagonist Phephelaphi’s world barren of opportunity through a rhythmic depiction of men working a parched and unyielding terrain. Gladys Mgudlandlu works in the same symbolic register, depicting landscapes which, although somewhat whimsical, are laden with the colour and language of aridity. In an untitled work simply signed ‘Gladys Mgudlandlu 1971’, the artist’s characteristic slanting houses are juxtaposed with a harsh surrounding, saturated with ochre and tan tones emblematic of an infertile and infecund soil. Ma Dhlomo’s talk brilliantly depicted how African women creators, whether working in a literary or visual arts tradition, utilise the landscape to describe the harsh political and social conditions in which their work is produced and accessed by other Black women.
Valerie Desmore, Self-Portrait, 1995
The discussion was followed by a tour of the exhibition When Rain Clouds Gather which articulated an expanded definition of what constitutes Black visual art practices. The exhibition featured a range of works including paintings by Helen Sebidi, Sophie Peters and Valerie Desmore, sculptures by Noria Mabasa and Josephine Ghesa, photographic works by Ruth Motau as well as tapestries by Regina Buthelezi and Alina Ndebele, to name a few. In doing so, the curators highlighted the ways in which certain artistic practices have historically been deemed unworthy of institutional and academic attention. As a result, the inclusion of literature in the exhibition was particularly prominent. Ntombela described it as an attempt to compensate for art history’s shortcomings. Importantly, the exhibition also highlighted the networks of exchange and inspiration that have long existed between the visual and literary arts.
Indeed, author Bessie Head’s work was also featured in the presentations by Portia Maltajie and Dee Marco. They both referenced A Woman Alone (1990) a collection of essays, letters and short stories in which Head offers a critique of painter Gladys Mgudlandlu, one of the first Black women to exhibit in South Africa. She famously described the artist’s pastoral scenes, which depict ‘calm green valleys through which half-naked tribal women wind their peaceful way homeward in the late African sunset’.3 Head deemed Mgudlandlu’s work ‘escapist’ at a time when she believed artists should be making directly political work. For Head, art should concern itself with the condition of man; it had to labour in service of man’s liberation from oppressive political and social constraints. Mgudlandlu’s leaning houses, so imbued with the feeling of leisure, negated the dire political climate in which they were produced. Thus, Head perceived Mgudlandlu’s practice as a refusal to engage with the perilous political world created by apartheid, which indelibly marked her as an inferior artist. For Malatjie, Head’s appraisal of Mgudlandlu offers a pointed example of how inadequate the readings of Black women’s artistic practices often are. In an essay titled ‘Gladys Mgudlandlu Painted Land(e)scapes that Bent the Genre to Her Will’, art historian Zamansele Nsele defends Mgudlandlu, suggesting that the figurative gesture utilised by Mgudlandlu escapes many critics because it refuses to pander to popular ideas of what politically engaged art is.4 Nsele rightly points out that Mgudlandlu’s use of landscape is an inadvertent invocation of the colonial and apartheid infrastructures that systematically disposed Black Africans of their land. Malatjie reminds us that a Black woman even contemplating establishing an artistic practice during apartheid was inherently political, a pointed disavowal of the political conditions that mandated their exclusion from the artistic milieu at the time. Marco’s presentation pointed to the multi-layered nature of Mgudlandlu’s practice and its reception. Describing the excavation of a mural in the Mgudlandlu’s Gugulethu house in Cape Town, which was discovered under layers of paint in her old house by artist Kemang Wa Lehulere, Marco uncovered a painstaking process of historical retrieval – a gesture I read as an allegory for the excavating work that must be done when reading Mgudlandlu’s palimpsestic artistic renderings.
This nuanced position was also expressed by the curators during their tour of the exhibition, as participants were led through the rich field of Black women’s creative practices. The curators discussed the dynamic histories of the artists involved and explained their curatorial decision-making. The curation of this exhibition proved to be an act of imaginative and figurative world-making; it invited the audience to look in specific ways, while also calling on them to take part in collaborative meaning-making. The space allowed for visitors to position the artists’ works in relation to their own experiences of being in the world. The rooms in the Norval were organised thematically, including, for example, a room dedicated to ‘Spiritual and Religious Conjurings’.
The sheer number of works included in the exhibition spoke overwhelmingly to the extent of institutional practices that have kept them from view. Nevertheless, the curators took great care to point out and remind us of the many artists whose work could not be retrieved from the annals of a biased art history. As critical theorist Michel-Rolph Trouillot explains, ‘silences’ are woven into the fabric of history, whether inadvertently or by design.5 To this effect, the constitution of the archive, and of history-making itself, oscillates around whose stories get to be told. As such, the exhibition When Rain Clouds Gather offers a profound instance of redressing those erasures. It works as a reparative measure that brings to the fore the omissions that were sanctioned by apartheid’s social, political and aesthetic sensibilities.
The curators sought to write alternative narratives of Black women’s creative practices in South Africa, to find the names of artists that went unknown and to correct those that had been misrepresented. As a result, Bongi Dhlomo, Valerie Desmore and Helen Sibidi’s works were presented in more multifaceted ways, allowing us to glimpse the huge variety of responses to the situations in which the works were created. In addition, works that had previously been considered erotic, such as that of Ruth Motau’s figure of a woman reclining topless on a hostel bed (A woman relaxing on a bed after a long day, Alexander Hostel, 1991), were repositioned through the lens of ‘rest’. Through this reading, we come to recognise the ways in which these works are inherently political. The exhibition articulated how Black women are often denied rest and how depictions of Black women’s bodies at rest are subjected to unwarranted sexualisation.
The rest of the symposium focused on collaborative discussions with feminist theorists and cultural producers who have taken up the question of Black women’s aesthetic practices in multiple ways. Artist Sharlene Khan’s talk, entitled ‘Brown Girl, Black Stones, Black Girl Brown Stones: Lalitha Jawahirilal’s Notion of Flooding as Spaces of In-Between’, unearthed the riotous power of the artist’s creative and scholarly practices. Khan argued that artists such as Jawahirilal are custodians of women’s performative and aesthetic acts of resistance. A lecturer at the University of Durban-Westville from 1994 to 2000, Jawahirilal responded to the stifling conditions of the time through her art and her position in the artistic community. She provided much needed cultural, pedagogical and artistic expertise to students, encouraging them to address pressing socio-political issues such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the 1990s and environmental justice. Jawahirilal was fundamental in the creation of a public art culture in her hometown of Ladysmith in KwaZulu Natal Province and she created a series of mural projects such as at the Ladysmith Provincial Hospital in 1997, designed to engage the Black, Indian and Coloured residents that were barred from museums under apartheid.6 She centred the younger generation of students, encouraging creative practices that spoke to the social and political restrictions of the day.
In ‘The Rootedness of Displacement in the Works of Artist Faiza Galdhari’, Nalini Naidoo offered an illuminating discussion on belonging, womanhood and faith, and reflected on the precarious notions of identity in the South African political landscape preoccupied with othering non-white subjects. Through a depiction of the artist’s life, as well as her print works, Naidoo described Galdhari’s desire for a break from the socially isolating spatial frameworks of apartheid. Her family was forcibly removed from an Indian community to a Coloured area by the Group Areas Act of 1950, owing to Galdhari’s mixed ancestry.7 The screenprint Purdah (1994), shown in the exhibition, depicts a pair of eyes looking through a veil. In it, Galdhari conceals and reveals aspects of herself and simultaneously positions her religious life as a space of spiritual and artistic fulfillment. She alludes to the ways Islam is misconstrued within the Western imagination and to how Muslim women are seen as complicit in their own oppression as a result of choosing to take up purdah. Purdah also shrouds the Muslim woman in a cloud of mystery, making her unknown and illegible to the ways of Western meaning making. Galdhari shuns such notions by illuminating the spiritual cover that purdah affords, highlighting that the veil allows the Muslim woman to construct a sense of her external world without being objectified by that world.
The final segment of the symposium also referred to Bessie Head’s pioneering literary work through Ilze Wolff’s discussion of her project Bessie Head’s Sound Garden (2022). An architect and arts practitioner, Wolff presented a series of interviews such as a brief clip of author Dambudzo Marechera citing Head as a figure whose writing has shaped the literary landscape, as well as discussions and readings of Head’s work, such as cultural worker Nombuso Mathibela’s reading of a Zulu translation of Head’s writing. This multivocal collage highlighted Head’s contribution to the arts canon and reaffirmed that the relationships between Black women cultural practitioners of various disciplines and artistic inclinations remain strong.
Transcending cultural and linguistic barriers, Black women artists in South Africa continue to share with each other, working through networks of kinship and friendship, mentorship and rivalry. They read each other’s work, and teach, critique and compel each other to push boundaries in a landscape that continues to sideline them. This exhibition and symposium drew on Bessie Head’s cross-cultural and cross-medium influence, centring her work When Rain Clouds Gather as a figurative portrayal of the patriarchal conditions under which Black women labour, and using Head’s critique of Gladys Mgudlandlu’s work as an example of the ways Black women remain concerned with one another’s intellectual and cultural output.
When Rain Clouds Gather was a historical exhibition that emerged from a desire to fill the vast gap in the South African art history canon. It was an ambitious undertaking and an indictment on the various institutions that have been silent about Black women artists. It sensitively worked through the analogy of an arid landscape to speak about a context in which Black women’s creative practices have historically been obscured. Nevertheless, the gathering of clouds in the distance, signalling the promise of rain, might right the injustices of the past.