An artistic unfolding of the complexity that is SA’s terrible past

Imean, as a parent, when do you tell your children how terrible this country is? How long can you keep them shielded from it?”

This overheard coffee shop conversation promised to be a doozy. I had already paid my bill and I had promises to keep; reluctantly, I left the wellmeaning parents to their soul searching. But the questions (and the assumptions underlying them) stayed with me as I drove through the streets of Johannesburg, watching the city thaw as the sun climbed higher, admiring how the winter light caught the litter bestrewing the pavements.

Joburg has always had ugliness, brokenness and neglect in abundance, but now that it is creeping into even the tidiest suburbs, the narrative of decline has become pervasive among the city’s well-to-do denizens. This chimes with a national narrative of decay and general despair that, I daresay, informed the direction of my coffee shop companions’ dialogue.

Yet for many parents and children in SA, such questions are irrelevant.

If you live in poverty, no-one has to tell you how terrible things are. There is no shield to be upheld. It seems necessary to point out, too because the corruption and ineptitude of the ANC in government tend to skew one’s historical perspective, or to result in selective amnesia that ours has always been a terrible country.

Nevertheless, I sympathise with the coffee shop anguish. Because even though we know about the dangers of nationalism and blind patriotism, as parents our hopes that our children will have a decent shot at happiness are at least partly hinged on the prospect of a meaningful relationship with place, a sense of belonging and heritage, of collective identity and future commitment.

These hopes manifest in a desire for our children to feel pride in their country even when their parents feel anger or disillusionment.

So we lean into Youth Day, with its curricular reassurance that June 16 1976 is part of a then which was worse. For all the wickedness of now, when our children learn about SA’s history at school they cannot fail to discern that this country was once even more terrible.

And, of course, it is not and never has been uniformly terrible. For all our faults, the story of SA and its people is also one of aching beauty. Hence the great parenting challenge: helping your child to navigate the contradictions of SA past and present. How to teach them about a land that has very little unambiguous black and white, and is mostly shades of grey? The pictorial metaphor is appropriate; one way of enabling children to grapple with complexity is to share works of art with them.

Last weekend I took my daughter and son to the Goodman Gallery, where we enjoyed a lesson in art history courtesy of the group exhibition Lasting Influences. The work displayed is a retrospective of sorts, a reminder of how the gallery and the artists it represents have influenced SA’s art scene since the 1960s.

Though all the pieces are for sale, the art and artists are so iconic that it feels like a museum exhibition.

Here are Deborah Bell, Robert Hodgins and William Kentridge, responding to the interregnum of the early 1990s with searing satires of the selfimportant men of capital whose wealth depended on the brutality and exploitation of apartheid but who would subsequently reinvent themselves as liberal heroes of the postapartheid economy.

Here are Sam Nhlengethwa and David Goldblatt, documenting in their different media the reality of the mines. Here is David Koloane, painting still lifes in the 1970s — because black artists were not bound to representation of the spectacle of black oppression (even if Koloane’s Fighting Dogs from 1983 is infused with the nightmare of apartheid).

Here are Edoardo Villa and Walter Battiss and Cecil Skotnes, whose works emerge from the tradition of European modernism; here are Dumile Feni and Ezrom Legae and Sydney Kumalo, who may be situated within an older African aesthetic that, in fact, via Picasso and Matisse and Braque helped to shape European modernism.

You see? It’s complicated. But, as I was reminded at the Goodman, children are able to handle complexity.

Sometimes they manage it better than adults.