CHRIS THURMAN: Reclaiming the right to dream

We tend to associate imagination, creativity and playfulness with childhood. Adulthood is for serious business: productivity, consumption, reproduction. Following these assumptions, however, there is a risk that artistic practice becomes seen as part of a developmental stage — something that most people put aside when they grow up.

The implication of this logic is that artists are childlike. Their work may be valued, and in fact very valuable, but they are infantilised. In SA, this problem is not helped by the fact that government representatives and leaders in the arts have over the years acted like children themselves: getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar, displaying petulance, throwing tantrums, wanting to show off to their friends. Our current sports, arts & culture minister has thrown in some grown-up bigotry for good measure.

The irony is that our society does not do enough to protect and nurture our children’s sense of creativity, which includes their ability to imagine alternative ways of being — for themselves, for their families, for their communities. Children who live in poverty or who occupy precarious and marginalised social positions typically exhibit low self-esteem, and are not encouraged to explore a wide horizon of possible identities and futures.

This is compounded by what seems to be a global mental health crisis for young people. From the pervasive effect of smartphones and social media, to the collective impact on generations Z and Alpha of being raised in a discourse of impending climate catastrophe, the reasons for a pandemic of anxiety and depression are clear. Maybe the kids are all right — or they will be — because they are also learning to talk about and reflect on it all much better than their parents and grandparents ever did. But it is more difficult to facilitate the development of this skill in under-resourced environments.

Enter Little Lions Child Coaching, a nonprofit organisation “rooted in the vibrant tapestry of Cape Town townships and rapidly expanding throughout SA”, seeking to “normalise conversations about mental health” through workshops and mentorship programmes. It’s an inspiring and urgent mission, and its success is celebrated in Reimagining Themba, an exhibition by photographer Mikhailia Petersen at the Reservoir gallery in Cape Town.

Themba (meaning hope or faith) is a character in a children’s book written by Amy Melhuish and illustrated by Rae Lakey. A young lion who has lost his mane, Themba comes to learn that he has unique qualities that are or will be appreciated by others. This process of self-affirmation and celebration is key to Petersen’s portraits of 12 mentees from the Little Lions programme.

In these images, the young women appear both as themselves and as figures in a kind of fantasia. Dressed in finery and experimenting with props — balloons, wings, a golden glitter ball — they adopt poses, lie down, run around, exuding confidence and serenity. There is playfulness, laughter and delight, but there are also a number of photographs in which the subjects are caught in a pensive and earnest mood. Photographs like Divinity and Towards the Sun convey a numinous, angelic quality.

There is quiet defiance too: the keen gaze into the camera lens in We Will Always Have Each Other and Stronger Together says, “this is me, this is us”. Indeed, the portraits signify what Kopano Maroga, in a short catalogue essay, calls “the beauteous process of defining one’s own conditions for representation”.

Maroga applies this principle beyond the young women in the photographs, expanding the purview of the exhibition, by quoting Adrienne Maree Brown: “Imagination is one of the spoils of colonisation, which in many ways is claiming who gets to imagine the future for a given geography. Losing our imagination is a symptom of trauma. Reclaiming the right to dream the future, strengthening the muscle to imagine together as black people, is a revolutionary decolonising activity.”

Reimagining Themba vividly depicts the importance of “dreaming the future”. By exercising their imaginations in this way, the subjects of these photographs — like all the participants in the broader Little Lions programme — also assert their rights to dignity, self-love and joy in the present.

• ‘Reimagining Themba’ is at Reservoir (68 Bree Street, Cape Town) until August 30.

This column originally appeared in Business Day.