Portraits of Nelson Mandela over the years — from the reverential to the interpretive — have firmly entrenched his status in popular culture.
On balance, it is a strange place to mourn Nelson Mandela, but in a country marked by so many unresolved contradictions, Nelson Mandela Square, a privately owned public piazza in the upmarket business suburb of Sandton, is both a fitting and an unavoidable choice of venue.
One of 150 public memorial areas hastily designated nationally to cater for the massive outpouring of grief, solidarity and respect in the wake of Mandela’s death, the square is known for its landmark 6m-high bronze likeness of the boy from Mvezo in the Eastern Cape who became a statesman. At its unveiling in April 2004, television celebrity and businesswoman Basetsana Kumalo described the sculpture that dominates the square as “a very happy statue”. It is hard to contest this interpretation, given the display of emotion enacted in front of the work in recent days.
Similar scenes of wreath-laying and prayer have also played out in front of sculptures depicting Mandela on Parliament Square in central London and Nobel Square at Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront.
The squat figure of Mandela in Cape Town is the work of Claudette Schreuders, an artist whose intimate, family-focused art was indelibly shaped by the early days after apartheid. She is married to Anton Kannemeyer, the scabrous comic-book satirist and co-founder, with Conrad Botes, of Bitterkomix. For all their obsessions with genitalia and Afrikaner guilt, it was Botes who in 1995 produced an illustration of a flying Mandela in a superhero costume with the word “Madibaman” emblazoned above him.
Mandela’s passage from liberation hero to icon is not unusual; it has precedents elsewhere. Nor is the process whereby his self-image has become abstracted from his life story exceptional.
“Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation,” cynically asserted the Marxist intellectual Guy Debord in 1967, long before the advent of Google and its offering of 2.8-million search results responding to Mandela’s name.
Despite the surfeit of contradictory images we now associate with his name, what remains truly extraordinary is Nelson Mandela’s durability as a visual icon. The assaults of pernickety censors, ropey artists and avaricious businesspeople may have tarnished its value somewhat, but ultimately, the munificence and light Mandela embodies, as a person who lived, continues to prosper, undiminished.
For full story by Sean O’Toole: Friday | Mail & Guardian.
