sabelo mlangeni: at home/ghost towns

AT HOME

Home path, 2007

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Ngaphesheya komfula, 2007

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Kokhokho, 2004

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Umalusi, 2006

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Umsinyane, 2006

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Tuckshop, Ngema, 2006

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Nobuhle, 2008

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Bus terminal, 2008 A stream, 2009

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Hlanhla, 2006

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Cebile, New Stand, 2006Lindelani Vilakazi, 2007

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Ngwane store, 2006

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Unompopi, 2006

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Mkhize village, 2009Unkomoziyophuza, 2007

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Corner store, 2006

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Home revisit, weekend, 2008

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Mthwalume I-IV, KZN, 2008

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AmaJericoh, 2008

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Nothando Dlamini, 2008

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Noluthando, 2008 Lutheran Church, 2009

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Msobotsheni, 2006

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Tyres and hooves, 2006

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Mkhuphula, 2006

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Deli Nyandeni, 2006

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Portrait of a family, Msibi, 2008

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Omakoti, Msinga, 2006

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Forgotten land, 2004

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In the four years since he first exhibited Invisible Women, a subdued and humanist portrait

of the broom-toting, working-class women who nightly bag the accumulated debris left by

daytime traders in Johannesburg, Sabelo Mlangeni has devoted himself to essaying two

very specific geographies, both of them a kind of home. The apparent contradiction in this

last statement is not at all unusual. In the manner of countless men and women before

him, economic migrants who travelled to Johannesburg in search of opportunity and

betterment, in 2001 Mlangeni left Driefontein, his rural birthplace in southern Mpumalanga,

for the big city.

Situated on the upper reaches of South Africa’s vast eastern escarpment, close to

Wakkerstroom, Amersfoort, Volksrust and Piet Retief, Driefontein and its neighbouring

country towns and villages are central to Mlangeni’s larger photographic project. However,

unlike his photographs of Johannesburg, characterised by nonjudgmental descriptions of

very particular metropolitan locales — the newly paved avenues of Johannesburg’s CBD, the

decrepit exteriors of the modernist flat blocks that line them, a men’s only labour hostel on

the city’s East Rand — Mlangeni’s rural pictures survey a much larger and more elusive terrain,

South Africa’s residual world, that vast outland beyond the cosmopolitan prospect.

IMPRESSIONS OF THE RESIDUAL WORLD

SEAN O’TOOLE

35

Rather than settle into a bounded geographical somewhere, a Boksburg or a Beaufort West,

for instance, Mlangeni has opted to collapse the small towns and villages dotted across

the south-eastern highveld into one. So, Standerton blurs into Amersfoort, and the 100km

distance between Ermelo and Piet Retief is erased. Ngema, near the Heyshope Dam, is folded

into the dusty, stripped landscape at Jericho Dam, even though the two are separated by a

50km drive via Amsterdam along the R33 — or a good day’s walk for the area’s economically

inactive residents, many of them child-minding elders. While it is fair to say that Mlangeni’s

new photographic essays, Ghost Towns and At Home, are marked by a definite sense of

placelessness, his essays are nonetheless, in their own way, uniquely located. A sequence of

road numbers helps map the particular geographic remit of his new photographs.

Let’s start at Standerton. Located 160km south-east of Johannesburg, on the northern

banks of the Vaal River, the town is a busy minibus taxi route from Gauteng to southern

Mpumalanga and northern KwaZulu-Natal. The R23, briefly known as Dr Nelson Mandela

Road in Standerton’s eastern suburb of Meyerville, follows the railway line south-east

towards Volksrust, where this busy arterial road intersects with the N11. Mlangeni knows the

route well: he uses it whenever he visits his mother in Driefontein, located 65km north-east

of Volksrust on the R543 to Piet Retief. Named after a slain trekboer and farmer, Piet Retief

in turn connects with Ermelo, the apex of the more or less rhombus-shaped terrain imaged

in Ghost Towns and At Home, by way of the N2. Completing the missing boundary line in this

top-down schematic is the R39, which links Ermelo to Standerton.

Notably, Mlangeni’s photographs avoid panoptic overviews, offering instead the

uncomplicated and partial street-views familiar to pedestrians and motorists. Pay attention

to the quality of the tarred roads in Mlangeni’s photographs. The furrowed and potholed

roads that connect the region’s ‘forgotten towns’, as the photographer describes them, make

for arduous driving. In part, this is because of the many heavy-duty trucks that transport

coal to the coal-fired electrical power stations in the area. More than a few of these chimney-

stacked monoliths are located at intervals along the N11, between Middelburg and Volksrust

— they include Hendrina and Arnot north of Ermelo, Camden a short distance south, also

Majuba, which is located between Volksrust and Amersfoort.

Ghost Towns includes two photographs that mordantly offer comment on the region’s

centrality to sustaining South Africa’s overburdened national electrical grid. Compressed

into the abundance recorded in Mlangeni’s photograph N11 is a road sign indicating the way

36

to Ermelo and Volksrust; it leans against the two metal uprights that once elevated the

sign more prominently at the T-junction. The dysfunction registered in this picture is more

explicitly declared in Load shedding. Titled after the euphemistic engineering description for

the power outages that have intermittently plunged various parts of the country into night,

the photo shows a listing and functionless lamppost in front of an electrical substation, its

mechanical parts enclosed by a concrete slab wall.

Mlangeni’s street-view studies of outland South Africa also include brick walls, stuccoed

walls, even tiled walls, his photo Piekwiek Dry recording a typical South African medley

of built verticals — a tall, windowless brick wall looms over a smoke-blackened concrete

rampart. Although now largely populated by black subjects, many seemingly in transit,

these forgotten built environments are the product of white conquest. Extensively settled

in the 1800s, albeit not without significant resistance by the indigenous population, as the

fateful death of Piet Retief reminds, white settlers arriving in the former Transvaal staked

their legal claims to land by riding half an hour on horseback in each of the four cardinal

directions from a central point, typically a water source. The first settler homes were mud-

packed wattle-and-daub structures, prompting Dingane kaSenzangakhona Zulu, leader of

the Zulu kingdom until 1840, to compare the trekboers to swallows (inkonjane) because of

their ephemeral mud homes. Stone and fired brick, the latter initially an expensive luxury,

eventually came to assert the permanency of the settler population’s ambitions.

But for architect Gerard Moerdijk’s grey sandstone church in Piet Retief, the dorps imaged

in Mlangeni’s Ghost Towns essay claim few noteworthy architectural landmarks. The

impoverished examples of Art Deco recorded in his photographs are just that, stunted — and

in the case of the Welworths building appear to be assimilating into the region’s pervasive

brick vernacular, the cement-grey and dusty brown hues of which are unknowable from

Mlangeni’s black and white photos. One recent brick building particularly intrigues: the

double-storey government office portrayed in Department of Labour. Similar to his 2006

photo of a Chinese goods wholesale store at 154 Market Street, a single light in an otherwise

darkened building elegantly registering the punctum, the action in this new photo also

happens upstairs. ‘Epilepsy’ reads a sign in the top left window.

Mlangeni’s subtle and open-ended essays, which deploy impression and humour — see for

example Decisive moment, its title and action jokingly pointing to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s well-

known 1932 photograph of a man leaping over a glassy puddle behind Gare St Lazare — can

37

and do capably function as standalone statements. Ghost Towns is principally concerned with

recording the way in which the opportunities of universal franchise (including the freedom

to live and work where one pleases) have ‘somehow skipped past these towns’. At Home,

by distinction, describes the system of dependence and support that makes it necessary

for many South Africans to claim two homes. The two projects, which both eschew system

and exactitude, favouring the askew glance and snapshot-like view, are nonetheless in many

ways connected, the formal, former white world of Ghost Towns a stark counterpoint to the

sparse, undeveloped and occasionally exhausted landscapes portrayed in At Home. That

Mlangeni prefers loose visual impressions (‘instinctive response’, Dorothea Lange called

it) to systematic analysis brings to mind Santu Mofokeng, an accomplished essayist whose

stated ambition early on was to offer ‘a richer and more nuanced appreciation of Soweto

life’ — and by extension black South African life in general.

In carrying the torch for a less didactic, more inquisitive and open-ended practice, Mlangeni’s

understated essays, in particular At Home, occasionally reiterate (rather than merely quote)

Mofokeng’s early work. Although principally a photo about the evacuation of labour from

the rural areas to the big metropolitan cities, Mlangeni’s Bus terminal, with its hat-wearing

figure on a bicycle, recalls Mofokeng’s 1985 street scene of a postman wearing a pith helmet

steering his bicycle round a corner in Orlando East. Similarly, the battered old rural taxi in

Unkomoziyophuza restates, without lapsing into cliché or formula, what Mofokeng observed

on the dusty road between Botsobelo and Onverwagt in 1986. Productive dialogues both,

and each suggestive of how, as Mlangeni capably puts it, ‘past and present scars’ have been

‘left unattended’.

Sean O’Toole is a journalist and writer based in Cape Town, and co-editor of CityScapes, a magazine that critically examines urban issues.

SOURCESRenfrew Christie, Electricity, Industry, and Class in South Africa. Albany: SUNY Press, 1985Elize Labuschagne, ‘From Trekboer to Builder’, in Architecture of the Transvaal, edited by Roger C Fisher and Schalk le Roux. Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1988, pp 25-53Santu Mofokeng, ‘A Letter from Johannesburg’, Das Bild Forum – Journées internationales de la photographie de Herten, 1993

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GHOST TOWNS

Dutch Reformed Church, 2011

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41

Victorian architecture, 2011

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43

Idolobha langakithi, 20111939 Welworths, 2011

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Intaba ebhaliwe, 2011

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Volksrust town centre, 2011

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‘No parking’, 2011

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N11, 2011

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Amersfoort Shell filling station, 2011

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Department of Labour, 2011

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Inkosi Yame cafe, 2011

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Bus station, 2011

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Half past 10am, 2011

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‘We always cheap’, 2011

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39 Carrington Str, 2011

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Midtown hotel, 2011

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Decisive moment, 2011

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Hong Kong City, 2011

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Dallas Drankwinkel, 2010

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World of Hair, 2010

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Impala House, 2011

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Coming or going, 2011

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Emthunzini, 2011

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Mother and child selling fruit, 2011

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Piekwiek Dry, 2011

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Dr Nelson Mandela Weg, 2011

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Mannequins, 2011

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Empty world, 2011

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Massey tractors, 2011

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‘Bakers special’, 2011

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Load shedding, 2009

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Cosmos flowers, 2011

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CAPE TOWNBuchanan Building160 Sir Lowry RoadWoodstock 7925PO Box 616Green Point 8051T +27 (0)21 462 1500F +27 (0)21 462 1501

JOHANNESBURG62 Juta StreetBraamfontein 2001Postnet Suite 281Private Bag x9Melville 2109T +27 (0)11 326 0034/41F +27 (0)86 275 1918

info@stevenson.infowww.stevenson.info

Catalogue 59October 2011

Cover Victorian architecture, 2011

Editor Sophie PerryerDesign Gabrielle GuyPrinting Hansa Print, Cape Town

SABELO MLANGENI

Born 1980 in Driefontein; lives in

Johannesburg.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2011 At Home/Ghost Towns, Stevenson,

Cape Town

2010 Men Only/At Home, Brodie/

Stevenson, Johannesburg

2007 Invisible Women, Warren Siebrits,

Johannesburg

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2011 9th Rencontres de Bamako African

Photography Biennial, Mali

Lagos Photo Festival, Nigeria

Appropriated Landscapes, Walther

Collection, Neu-Ulm/Burlafingen,

Germany

A Space Between, Margate Photo

Festival, Kent, UK

Afropolis: City, Media, Art, Iwalewa-

haus, University of Bayreuth,

Germany

Becoming: Photographs from the

Wedge Collection, Nasher Museum of

Art, Duke University, Durham, NC, US

Possible Cities: Africa in Photography

and Video, Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery,

Haverford College, PA, US

Figures and Fictions: Contemporary

South African Photography,

Victoria & Albert Museum, London

2010 Afropolis: City, Media, Art,

Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum,

Cologne, Germany

Bonani Africa Photography Festival,

Cape Town

Boy Oh Boy, Fred Snitzer, Miami

After A: Photo Notes on South Africa,

Atri Reportage Festival, Atri, Italy

This is Our Time, Michael Stevenson,

Cape Town

1910-2010: From Pierneef to

Gugulective, Iziko South African

National Gallery, Cape Town

I am not afraid. The Market

Photo Workshop, Johannesburg,

Johannesburg Art Gallery

2009 Summer 2009/10: Projects, Michael

Stevenson, Cape Town

2005 Johannesburg Circa Now,

Johannesburg Art Gallery,

Johannesburg

Gender and Visual Exhibitions,

District Six Museum, Cape Town

2004 Obsession, PhotoZA Gallery,

Johannesburg

2003 Positive Pulse, Sun City, South Africa

AWARDS

2009 Tollman Award for Visual Arts

2006-7 Edward Ruiz Mentorship Award,

Market Photo Workshop