‘There’s Something I Must Tell You’ by Sue Williamson

Sue Williamson emerged as an artist in the 1970s, powerful in her anti-apartheid stance and in the urgent manner in which she explored the complexities of the South African milieu. She had worked as a journalist and her instinct was to look deep and document, to honour the “ordinary” and to excavate the story — or the testimony — behind every image.

By the end of the 1980s, those stifling dog days at the end of apartheid, Williamson’s work was brimming with rage and sorrow. The killing of Matthew Goniwe, the smashing of District Six.

She foregrounded women’s stories and was always acutely aware of who speaks for whom and asked how one can work “to present their voice in a way that is authentic and genuine”. She produced a series of striking portraits of women, titled All Our Mothers, which included political figures such as Amina Cachalia, Winnie Mandela, Cheryl Carolus (when she was still in the UDF) and Helen Joseph. The famous series continues to this day.

Williamson is a versatile artist, working in video, mixed-media installation, photo etching, screen printing, and photography. A book on her 50-year practice, There’s Something I Must Tell You, was published late last year to coincide with her eponymous retrospective at the Iziko South African National Gallery.

One of the most arresting exhibitions featured in its pages is “Messages from the Moat”. It is no secret that the original coloniser of the Cape of Good Hope, the Dutch East India Company, traded in slaves. Williamson discovered the deeds of the transactions and conceived a dramatic installation of bottles etched with the name of an enslaved person, their birthplace, the buyer, the seller, and the price paid in rijksdollars. It is a startling, disturbing picture.

The book is a valuable record of the work of one of the country’s most important artists at the overlapping edges of art and activism.

‘A Natural History of the Studio’ by William Kentridge

In Joburg last month, an eager crowd gathered at Love Books to listen to world-renowned artist William Kentridge. It was a rare opportunity to see and hear him, as he spends much of his time abroad or in his Houghton studio. He was discussing his book A Natural History of the Studio, which is based on a series of lectures he gave at Oxford.

In it he looks back to his childhood in Joburg, where he was raised in a secular Jewish home in a family that had changed its surname from Kantorovich to Kentridge. He notes that it wasn’t that Judaism was expunged, but that he was “bifurcated: the Jewishness circling the Englishness, or the Englishness circling the Jewishness”.

His father, the eminent barrister Sir Sydney Kentridge, would read chapters of English classics to the children after supper: Great Expectations, Pride and Prejudice.

He remembers idyllic picnics and the central presence in the house of the massive Shorter Oxford Dictionary. Years later he started drawing on the pages of dictionaries and encyclopaedias in an act, he says, of resistance to the weight of these words — a new thinking inscribed over the old.

Kentridge then takes us into his studio, which is his sanctuary and theatre, his laboratory and editing suite. He introduces us to his creative process and the prompts for many of his astounding productions. It is a rare and generous exploration of a profound artist’s mind’s eye.

‘We, the People: 30 Years of Art and Democracy in South Africa’ by Liese van der Watt

Both Kentridge and Williamson are featured in a sumptuous new collection titled We, the People: 30 Years of Art and Democracy in South Africa. It looks at more than 70 artists and dozens of their works, compiled by distinguished art historian Liese van der Watt.

She divides the book into four sections: “To belong”, “To protest”, “To care”, and “To be heard”. It is a rousing reminder that democracy is not something we have and own, or something static. Instead it is something we need to do continuously.

The pages blaze with images: the performance artist Steven Cohen in his famous chandelier tutu teetering among the ruins of a squatter camp, the densely embroidered Keiskamma Altarpiece by the Keiskamma Art Project, the luminous tones of Walter Meyer’s dorps.

This important book constitutes the annals of 30 years of our democracy, and the intense, inventive art that helped shape it.

Wanted

There is a risk of slipping into cliché in doing so: yet another vindication of the perennially underfunded, underappreciated brilliance of South African creative practitioners working with limited resources to produce world-class theatre. A sort of ‘hulle weet nie wat ons weet nie” take on the performing arts. But bound up in this there is always some element of “cultural cringe”, a combination of envy and insecurity in the way that former colonies regard former colonial powers. In any case, in the arts world comparisons can be odious. Each creation is its own, beautiful thing.

Having said all that, pairing these productions is, inevitably, flattering to the local Into the Woods. Director Sylvaine Strike and designer Marcel Meyer work wonders with a minimalist set, using a dozen flexible planks of wood and simple but effective costume design to create a self-contained theatrical world. As for the cast — it is hardly surprising that numerous Lamta students are cast in professional productions before they graduate. These performers could hold their own in any company, on any stage around the globe.

Sondheim initiated a new kind of musical with his wordy, witty compositions, full of characters self-consciously singing and talking their way through dilemmas by turns profound and superficial. For Into the Woods, a collaboration with librettist James Lapine, he applied that endearing combination of earnest endeavour and neurotic humour to the fairytale world of the Brothers Grimm. When the musical premiered in 1987, it offered new manifestations of Rapunzel, Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood, along with Jack and his giants, as well as the bakers and witches and princes (and wolves and hens and cows) populating the popular folk stories retold by the Grimms.

In a sense, of course, these were not entirely new versions — they benefited from the cumulative insights of 20th-century psychology, which had shown how such archetypal narratives express basic human desires, fears and needs. The parent-child relationship is central to all of this, and Into the Woods is replete with abandoned, exploited, abused or misunderstood daughters and sons. Sondheim famously explained how his own difficult upbringing informed his interpretation of the tales: “The father uncomfortable with babies is my father and the mother who regrets having had children is my mother.”

The parent-child relationship is central to all of this, and Into the Woods is replete with abandoned, exploited, abused or misunderstood daughters and sons.

Sondheim

The other central theme (and the musical’s key refrain) is “I wish ….” The woods are a place of fantasy, longing and transformation. Sometimes this entails freedom and redemption, sometimes violence and cruelty, sometimes both. It is perfect material for Strike, whose best work — from her commedia dell’arte interpretations of Molière to her first musical with Lamta, the smash hit Spring Awakening – has explored the dark impulses motivating most behaviour.

Beyond the threshold of cynicism, however, is a deep and abiding love for humans in all our messy complexity. The “pure” yearning to have a baby is driven by the same biological urges as the lascivious thrill of sex with a hot stranger or seeking brutal revenge on those who harm our offspring. Likewise, those who show self-sacrifice and kindness in one moment may, in the next, demonstrate a willingness to throw others under the bus (or into the giant’s mouth) to protect themselves. Like the composite Cubist face that Meyer employs to depict a vengeful, grieving giant — who no doubt has her own reasons for sowing wanton destruction — we are fractured and fracturing creatures, our identities cohering only for brief moments.

If this sounds rather grim … well, that is only appropriate. But Into the Woods is also very funny and the music soars into the sublime. Above all, the accomplished performances, sharp choreography and inventive staging of this production cannot but leave audiences smiling, no matter how dark the woods get.

• ‘Into the Woods’ is at the Theatre on the Bay until November 14.

Business Day

Story audio is generated using AI

At The Fussy Vegan in Greenside, Stella Meldau is contemplating an act of wild abandon: a chocolate milkshake. Vegan, naturally.

She tells me she has just welcomed a fluffy baby donkey called Octavia to Woodrock Animal Rescue, which she founded with her husband, Nicholas.

“I honestly feel like Mother Mary. I’m so excited with my little Octavia,” she says.

I cannot tell a lie: this delectable creature sounds so heartachingly cute that I’m contemplating how I could work a donkey into my life.

Stella has been saving animals since she was a small girl in Arcadia — the Jewish children’s home in Parktown — where she walked an imaginary dog in a shoebox.

“I was born on the other side of the Jews, the poorer ones. Nobody actually knows that there are poor Jews,” she tells me. Her father died young.

“My mother kept trying to kill herself. I miss her every day. I can tear up just thinking about her. She was precious, and she adored us.”

Eventually, the girls were placed in Arcadia. “You either fell into the system or you became somebody who was going to take the world and push it to the limits. I think that always groomed me to being not fearful.”

At 12, back home in Orange Grove, she met Nicholas, the Lebanese boy next door, who shared her sensibilities. They have been joined at the hip ever since.

“We would go around the area looking for kittens and little puppies and trying to save boxes of chickens that were sold in Alex, and putting them in his drawers. We had a snake called Lucky and a goat that we put on his bed.”

I knew I was a good teacher. And then I just thought, I’m wasting my time here. I can’t be a nobody. I have to be somebody

Stella Meldau, co-founder of Woodrock Animal Rescue

Stella became a schoolteacher, then an entrepreneur, building and selling businesses in company administration and recruitment.

“I knew I was a good teacher. And then I just thought, I’m wasting my time here. I can’t be a nobody. I have to be somebody.”

They had three children and a home overrun by animals. At one point, they had 35 dogs, so they bought the property next door. A household employee eventually drew the line at a pig.

“She phoned me and said, ‘I will do anything, but I’m not going to have a pig in my kitchen.’”

When the neighbours complained about the barking, the couple bought land in the Hennops River Valley. Woodrock was born. Today, it cares for hundreds of animals and has saved countless numbers over the years.

“My mother said, ‘You’ve got a small yard full of shit. You’re just going to have a big one now.’ But we had a plan of action. That is the only plan I ever had. I never planned a child. We just had three children. But the farm we planned. We planned it strategically.”

Then, at the height of her seemingly charmed life, came breast cancer.

“I called it an acorn because it wasn’t my enemy. But I had missed my mammogram, and I thought, ‘It doesn’t matter. Of course I’m invincible. I’ll go when I get time, because a busy person never finds time for themselves.’”

Her PA insisted on an appointment. Tests revealed advanced cancer. Chemotherapy, radiation and surgery followed. She chose not to have breast reconstruction.

Losing her hair, however, was devastating. “It wasn’t determining that I had cancer, because that I could get through; it was the fact that I had lost the person.”

Her daughter later persuaded her to get a tattoo, a reminder to care for herself.

“We found a dog, Heidi. She’d been tied up in a flour sack with wire and thrown into the river. She’d managed to pull herself out of the river and bark through the flour sack and carry on breathing. Some construction guys found her.”

Heidi also had breast cancer. On the day Stella started chemotherapy, Heidi underwent treatment too.

Heidi survived and was adopted into a loving home. For Stella, rescue must mean a life worth living.

“These animals thrive. They don’t just live; they absolutely thrive. And if they’re not going to thrive, it’s better for them to be put to sleep, purely because they don’t have quality of life.”

She teaches children responsible pet ownership every weekend.

“These animals, they can have food and shelter, but if you don’t have love, what have you got? If you don’t feel accepted, if you don’t feel that you are part of something, life is much harder. These animals are so loved, and they return it a million times over. Coming from an animal, there’s no judgment.”

I ask what she would tell that little girl in Arcadia.

“I’d say do it again. I’d do it all over again. I had no other tools, but that was my toolbox, and I worked with that box, and I used everything in that toolbox to the best of my ability.”

Sunday Times Lifestyle