sabelo mlangeni: at home/ghost towns
DESCRIPTION
Stevenson catalogue 59, 2011TRANSCRIPT
AT HOME
Home path, 2007
2
3
Ngaphesheya komfula, 2007
4
Kokhokho, 2004
5
Umalusi, 2006
6
Umsinyane, 2006
7
Tuckshop, Ngema, 2006
8
Nobuhle, 2008
9
Bus terminal, 2008 A stream, 2009
10
11
Hlanhla, 2006
12
Cebile, New Stand, 2006Lindelani Vilakazi, 2007
13
Ngwane store, 2006
14
Unompopi, 2006
15
16
Mkhize village, 2009Unkomoziyophuza, 2007
17
Corner store, 2006
18
Home revisit, weekend, 2008
19
20
Mthwalume I-IV, KZN, 2008
21
AmaJericoh, 2008
22
Nothando Dlamini, 2008
23
Noluthando, 2008 Lutheran Church, 2009
24
25
Msobotsheni, 2006
26
Tyres and hooves, 2006
27
Mkhuphula, 2006
28
Deli Nyandeni, 2006
29
Portrait of a family, Msibi, 2008
30
Omakoti, Msinga, 2006
31
32
Forgotten land, 2004
33
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
38
GHOST TOWNS
Dutch Reformed Church, 2011
40
41
Victorian architecture, 2011
42
43
Idolobha langakithi, 20111939 Welworths, 2011
44
45
Intaba ebhaliwe, 2011
46
Volksrust town centre, 2011
47
‘No parking’, 2011
48
N11, 2011
49
Amersfoort Shell filling station, 2011
50
Department of Labour, 2011
51
Inkosi Yame cafe, 2011
52
Bus station, 2011
53
Half past 10am, 2011
54
‘We always cheap’, 2011
55
39 Carrington Str, 2011
56
Midtown hotel, 2011
57
Decisive moment, 2011
58
Hong Kong City, 2011
59
Dallas Drankwinkel, 2010
60
World of Hair, 2010
61
Impala House, 2011
62
Coming or going, 2011
63
Emthunzini, 2011
64
Mother and child selling fruit, 2011
65
Piekwiek Dry, 2011
66
Dr Nelson Mandela Weg, 2011
67
Mannequins, 2011
68
Empty world, 2011
69
Massey tractors, 2011
70
‘Bakers special’, 2011
71
72
Load shedding, 2009
73
Cosmos flowers, 2011
74
75
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
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
