Dr. Martin spent most of the 1990s in South Africa, where he witnessed the inauguration of Nelson Mandela and worked on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In June 2009 he revisited the country with a group of Christian scholars and recorded these images of the church.
Central Methodist and J.L. Zwane churches demonstrate the transforming power of the gospel in how they embrace the outcast. But what of South Africa outside the church? Can we discern God’s claim in so-called “secular space”?
Apartheid-era South Africa was a place of homogeneous conformity, with geographical space tied in to cultural representation. In the new South Africa, however, the tools of oppression—including Christian symbols and ideas—are used to construct what might be called “liberating polymorphisms.” So there’s something uniquely South African about the aesthetic of many public sites here, in which the materials of the old are used to construct the new.
Take the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg. When the justices discussed the site for the new court in the mid-1990s, they decided on the old Braamfontein jail, where Nelson Mandela and other activists had been incarcerated.
Rather than levelling the site and creating the new by erasing the old, the Constitutional Court combines African traditional themes with the relics of past suffering. The foyer contains a large wall built from bricks of the old prison—including a concrete slab displaying the graffiti of the past. Older traditions are also invoked, as with the foyer’s tree trunk seats that refer to the ancient African tradition of mediating disputes while sitting on stumps under a tree. Further inside, the courtroom is decorated with cowhide, representing the significance of cattle in African traditional society. A large South African flag made of thousands of tiny beads stands to the right of the justices’ seats. To the left is a window, about half a metre high, but extending for the length of the wall. The justices can see only the feet of passers by through that window, with no idea of race, class, or gender.
Perhaps the most moving piece of art in the court is Judith Mason’s triptych, “The man who sang and the woman who kept silent.” Inspired by testimony from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Mason’s work is centred around a complete dress made of blue plastic bags. It recalls an anti-apartheid activist who was captured, stripped naked, tortured, and then marched out to a field to be executed. As she walked, she picked up a discarded shopping back and used it to cover her private parts. When she knelt over her grave, according to the testimony of her executioner, she asked to be permitted to sing the liberation anthem “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika.” She was then shot in the back of the head and buried. When the commission recovered her remains, the plastic bag was still wrapped around her pelvis.
The seeming hodge-podge aesthetic of the court is visible in the many “informal settlements” that dot the South African landscape—corrugated metal and cardboard shacks assembled on the outskirts and backyards of townships. Here, the very poor take the things cast off by the well-heeled, and use those materials to build dwellings. Old sheets of advertising become colourful wallpaper. Bits of wire and discarded Coke cans are twisted into intricate sculptures which can be found for sale at the side of South Africa’s highways—craftwork that is novel to the tourist, but life-sustaining to its maker. While the “briocoleur” is fashionable intellectually in the West (or at least was), bricolage is a matter of survival in the south.
In his book, A Theology of Public Life, Charles Mathewes reminds us that we live “during the world”—that time from the ascension of Christ to his second coming. During the world, our lives are constituted by anticipatory waiting. The temptation, however, is either to fall into cynicism on the one hand, or to prematurely announce the closure of history on the other. The former temptation is that of conservative reactionary movements; the latter of liberal utopianism. The fact that South Africa decided not to start anew, erasing the past, is significant in this regard. Think of that utopian project called the United States, which sought to erase the history already present in the land, to clear space, to erect a new res publica. Or think of revolutionary France, which sought not to erase space, but time, starting its republic at the year one.
Taking a lesson from the 19th century writer Ernest Renan, who once said that nations were founded on forgetting, South Africa has chosen to place memory front and centre. Its form of nation-building is to use and reuse the material and symbolic resources of the old, reminding its citizens that they still live in media res. “During the world,” history is a site of contestation, deconstruction, and reconstruction. Yet we also see signs here of a longing for a true “new heavens and new earth” (Rev. 21:1), in which our relations are governed by love, and our lives stretch forth to the God who fills all things. We use the sometimes cast-off materials of the old to stretch toward a new which we will never reach on our own, but which we believe will come to us as a gift. As long as South Africa remains in media res there is hope.
