Abstract
As a student uprising tears across the fabric of post-apartheid campuses, the class of 2015 conjures Black Consciousness to articulate the pervasive epistemic assaults they endure daily at the ivory tower. As if time stood still, as though 1976 never left the scene, the philosophy of Black Consciousness is no lurking spectre; but it is an indispensable affirmation, a restorative life force that gives elaboration and credence to the grammar of black suffering. This is, therefore, a timely book.
The Iconography of Black Consciousness: Biko’s Ghost offers a seemingly paradoxical 365-page study on the visual iconography that centres the life and death of a single black South African man; Stephen Bantu Biko. I say seemingly paradoxical, in as far as Black Consciousness has a non-place in art history’s canonical discourse. The discipline of art history has played a discreet yet instrumental role in the humanities tool kit. It has worked just as tirelessly to picture the status of the Black as the antithesis to the human subject. For that reason, Biko’s Ghost becomes somewhat of a rejoinder to an epistemological practice, where the Black is a thing mounted and studied as a visual appendage; fixed in a frame of object-hood.
The arrival of Shannen Hill’s book is perhaps the long-awaited promise of a new day. Hill’s inter-disciplinary approach to Black Consciousness iconography is commendable because subalternity thrives on the brokenness of parochial canonical boundaries, and it is here where the book interweaves the disciplinary paths of art history and visual culture, political science, media studies and post/anticolonial theory. Hill (2015:13) writes:
These disciplinary paths led me to conclude that Mr Biko, the famed martyr whose death in detention came to stand for the horrors of apartheid writ large and Black Consciousness, popularly known as BC, are both entities that have mightily influenced race discourse in South Africa and indeed worldwide.
Post-apartheid race discourse was driven at a national scale by the ANC’s embrace of non-racialism as its ideological base. Hill agitates that it is from this political backdrop that Biko’s Ghost becomes a critical rethink of a hasty rainbowist rhetoric that, like the notion of colour-blindness, ironically defaults into whiteness, in its strategic disavowal of difference.
Biko’s Ghost is a comprehensive unearthing and Hill dexterously weaves various theories of representation as she takes us through the turbulent visual history of Biko and the Black Consciousness archive. She consults an overwhelming assortment of rich archival material in her quest to locate and articulate the aesthetics of Black Consciousness.
Oddly enough, within this vast expanse of representation, there is no mention of Lesego Rampolokeng,’s (2007) Bantu Ghost: A stream of (black) unconsciousness. This was a commemorative play, produced in 2007, whose title bears a notable resemblance to Hill’s own title The Iconography of Black Consciousness: Biko’s Ghost. Across seven cogent chapters, the book pieces together a biographical and a theoretical portrait of Biko and Black Consciousness that stretches over 40 years. Chapters one, two and three definitively anchor Hill’s argument into theoretical frameworks of trauma and representation, icon and ideology, and this analysis is sustained throughout the four chapters that follow.
In Chapter two, Of icons and inquests, Hill (2015) highlights the medium of portraiture as a vehicle of study that “inscribes social identity in as much as it describes the individual”, from this genre she carefully tracks a visual language that frames Biko into recognisable typecasts shaping his legacy. Out of all of them, the portraits that emerge with particular lasting poignancy are the images that were generated from the state’s autopsy of Biko’s corpse, where Biko’s broken and mutilated body becomes emblematic of South Africa’s body politic; a state at vicious war with black bodies.
The author demonstrates the extensive role that visual culture has played in the ongoing life of Black Consciousness; there is an emphasis on visual culture as the most vital organ in the book’s body of analysis. For instance, in Chapter three, Contemplating death: artists and abjection, she leans on Julia Kristeva’s (1982) essay on abjection in Powers of Horror as she theoretically disassembles the artworks of Paul Stopforth and Ezrom Legae. The artworks were produced by Legae and Stopforth shortly after Biko’s death in 1977 right up to the 1980s. They respond viscerally and specifically to Steve Biko’s detention, torture, death and his rise to martyrdom. ‘They rendered art whilst the wounds of Biko were fresh,” Hill says, connoting the artists’ creative uptake of human pain and suffering. This is a powerful double-bind, paradoxical statement which on the one hand echoes an unwitting ethical charge on aesthetics, whilst on the other hand signifying a positively defining moment in South African art, where Biko’s death is used as an instrument for raising consciousness and mobilisation. During this period, art defies its safety net of exclusivist internal references that bear little relevance to the beloved country set aflame.
Biko’s Ghost is a text that unequivocally articulates the emdeddedness of socio-political issues in the heart of art and visual discourse. This stream of Biko-inspired resistance art retained the potency of a Black Consciousness ethic to a point when, in the late eighties, it seemed to endanger a not yet born, but much anticipated, rainbow nationalism. This moment becomes salient in 1989 when Albie Sachs (1990) presents his polemic paper, Preparing ourselves for freedom in Lusaka at an ANC seminar. Here he urges that art should separate itself from politics and warns against the use of art as a tool for struggle, as this practice robs it of aesthetic merit. This line of critique is in harmony with Njabulo Ndebele’s criticism of the culture of spectacle in The Rediscovery of the Ordinary (1986) here he alleges that politics spectacularises art and as a result compromises aesthetic integrity. Biko’s Ghost, doesn’t lend itself to be understood within a restraining, separatist disciplinary schema that typifies parochial frames of analysing art. The importance of this book lies in its impeccable timing with the current power of student activism, that is led with a Black Consciousness ethos of decolonising knowledge systems.
Hill’s book simultaneously places art and visuality into the centre of political acts and into conditions of abjection, which quintessentially embody the post-apartheid moment. After all, it was in the visual realm where the student uprising was instigated by the transgressive act of a single student who threw faeces on the statue of Cecil John Rhodes.