Morning Comrades!
Another instalment of this series and one I am particularly looking forward to. This time we are heading to South Africa and Botswana specifically to offer you an introduction to the Medu Art Ensemble.
Truthfully, one could write - and most definitely should - write entire books on the Pan African struggle in the 20th Century against Colonialism, the role of the Communist Parties, the Internationalism and most definitely about the incredible art that came and continues to come out of this context. There are some but most definitely not enough.
This dispatch is truthfully just the tip of the iceberg and I urge everyone reading this to start digging, there is a world to discover, cherish and learn from.
For context sake: Similar to other struggles in Africa post World War 2, the struggle for liberation in South Africa was first and foremost an anti-colonial struggle. However, and again, very similar to many other anti-colonial indigenous struggles that started during this time, these were organized along the principles of trade unionism, council-communism and supported, materially especially, by the existing Communist parties around the world. No amount of white, capitalist bullshit can erase those facts in history and at the very least, our role here is to learn from these struggles, respect and uphold their memories. To be sure, many of these movements are extremely active today.
The Medu Art Ensemble was supported by, and had members of the African National Congress ( the ANC ) and the South African Communist Party, both of which were outlawed during Apartheid, specifically after the Sharpeville Massacre.
The Medu Art Ensemble was a collective of cultural activists based in Gaborone, Botswana during the height of the anti-apartheid resistance movement during the late twentieth century. The collective formed originally in 1977 as a group of black South African artists mutually invested in regional liberation struggles and resistance to South Africa’s apartheid policy of racial segregation. Medu’s members, or “cultural workers” as they preferred to be called, felt that the term "cultural workers" was far more fitting to their mission rather than referring to themselves as artists because the such a pursuit was regarded as something trivial and therefore inherently elitist and white.
With the support of the African National Congress (ANC), in Gaborone Medu officially registered as a cultural organization with the Botswanan government. Medu means “roots” in the Northern Sotho language, and so describes the collective's underground operations (in defiance of the apartheid government's ban on oppositional political parties and organizations). The collective’s cultural work was rhizomatic in nature, stretching across seven semi-autonomous units: Film, Graphics, Music, Photography, Poetry, Publishing and Research, and Theatre.
In Gaborone, Medu organized concerts, conducted art and creative writing workshops, produced films, organized public health campaigns, and mounted exhibitions among other activities. The collective also produced agitational newsletters and political posters, both of which sought to simultaneously bolster regional solidarity, critique the injustices of the apartheid state, and promote black consciousness. One of Medu's flagship events was the 1982 Culture and Resistance Festival and Symposium, which brought thousands of activists, cultural workers, and ordinary people together (from across Africa, the Americas, and Europe) for a week of concerts, exhibitions, talks, workshops and other forms of radical cultural programing. This massive undertaking brought greater attention to Medu's activism, heightening in particular the apartheid government's scrutiny of collective's work. Medu disbanded in 1985, following the South African Defence Force's murderous Raid on Gaborone, which resulted in the death of twelve people, including Medu members Mike Hamlyn, Thamsanga Mnyele, George Phahle, and Lindi Phahle.
A Pan Africanist and anti-colonial enterprise, Medu engaged with international revolutionary art including the work of German theatre-maker Bertolt Brecht, Vietnamese resistance poetry, the Mexican mural painters and Chile’s muralists who spoke back to dictatorship.
Hugely important historical documents pertaining to their work and other communist revolutionaries include magazines such as Staffrider and the African Communist - whose entire back catalogues, dating from 1978-1993 and 1959-1994 have been scanned and been made available, for free, here. Yeah you read that right. Again, get digging.
Medu played a formative role in shaping the visual culture of resistance in South Africa during the late 1970s and early 1980s along with other key printmaking initiatives such as Junction Avenue, Screen Training Project, and Cape Town Arts Project. Operating both contemporaneously with and after Medu, these collectives also issued posters to inform and galvanize their compatriots, countering the disinformation campaigns and ideologies promulgated by the apartheid government.
The iconography found across the collective's posters partakes of an international socialist and revolutionary lexicon of broken chains, clenched fists, upraised arms, and heroic depictions of activists and freedom fighters. This symbolism originated in World War I–era labor and anti-oppression movements across the world and was expressed in the work of Soviet and antifascist poster makers, Mexican muralists and print workshop members, and participants in the Harlem Renaissance—all of whom Medu graphic artists acknowledged as sources of inspiration. The posters were often folded inside of newsletters and clandestinely smuggled into South Africa where they were often posted in public spaces before being torn down by state police or censors. Numerous examples of Medu's posters appeared on official censorship registries in accordance with apartheid state's 1974 Publications Act which outlined materials the regime deemed "undesirable," or potentially threatening to apartheid law; during the 1980s, newspapers such as the Rand Daily Mail ran columns on censored material, many of which included Medu's posters and newsletters. These posters were either smuggled into South Africa by sympathetic travellers or diplomats and then placed on walls where they may have only lasted a few hours until they were torn down by the police. Other posters, the majority of one that still exists today, were sent across to the world so as to raise awareness about the issues in South Africa.
Despite their “official” end after the deadly raid in 1985, many of the artists continued working both in the role of artists but also in the role of revolutionaries way in the mid 90s. Some of these comrades are still around today and worthy of your time.
As always, thank you for your time, attention and interest.
Yours, without compromise,
V.