Like every one of us, the origins of a virtual art exhibition that will be the showpiece of this year’s National Arts Festival can be traced back to the Cradle of Humankind.
A few years ago, the Cradle, about 50km northwest of Johannesburg, was the venue for a conference on the re-emergence of African astronomy, arranged by the ministry of science & technology.
Sculptor, poet, professor and healer Pitika Ntuli was one of the guests. Exploring the topic (ancient knowledge from Africa) in that environment (full of old fossils) gave him the seed of an idea.
“I had the thought that one day I would borrow Mrs Ples and make an artwork out of her,” Ntuli chuckles.
In the end he did not borrow the 2-million-year-old skull, but as the idea grew he conceived of a collection of sculptures constructed of animal bones and other materials, each speaking its own particular truth to the past and the present.
When I see a statue fall, I see someone destroying a precious work. These statues that we do not want in public, let us have a sculpture garden where people can go to learn about history
— Pitika Ntuli
Ntuli and his wife and collaborator, Antoinette Ntuli, visited nature reserves in northern KwaZulu-Natal and were given permission to select bones from “cemeteries” containing the skeletons of animals that have died or been killed, including elephants, rhinos, lions and giraffes.
Azibuyele Emasisweni (Return to the Source) is the result. It consists of 45 sculptures constructed primarily of bones.
“Each one has a name and a surname and they have their own praise songs,” says Ntuli.
The praise songs, sung or spoken by 33 luminaries who are connected to Ntuli in various ways, became a facet of this multi-layered exhibition after the coronavirus scuppered Ntuli’s plan to have a physical exhibition that would travel all over SA.
“After working so hard to bring this art into being, I decided to try and redefine what it means to be an artist and a person interested in spirituality. I saw in the virtual exhibition a golden opportunity to reach a wider world,” he says.
“And because I’m not a selfish guy — I’m a nice guy — I thought, let me share this opportunity with 33 other people. I feel strongly about them all — their writing, their spirits, their inherent goodness. Bringing all these people together is a happy thing for us as South Africans, it’s as simple as that.”
These friends include Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Don Mattera, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, Gcina Mhlope, Sibongile Khumalo, Zolani Mahola, Ela Gandhi, Simphiwe Dana, Yvonne Chaka Chaka, Kwesi Owusu, Eugene Skeef, Albie Sachs, Shado Twala and Bheki Gumede.
Ntuli sent each collaborator a photograph of a sculpture and said: “Look at this piece, what does it say to you? What does it provoke in you? Joke with it, address a political rally to it if you wish. Some read my poem to music, others preferred to do it without. I gave the actress Florence Masebe her piece and when I phoned her I could hear lots of talking in the background — she had gathered her children to look at the sculpture and debate it. So you now have families involved in this work.”
Relaxed at home in a fluffy white sweater and a black beret, Ntuli exudes a joyous youthfulness that makes him appear much younger than his 80 years. We are speaking via Zoom on an icy Thursday evening in Johannesburg. As Ntuli points out, this technology is yet another of the connecting pathways he illustrates through his bone sculptures.
Just as the bones of a living body are held together by connective tissue, Ntuli is at pains to demonstrate that all history is connected, as is all humanity.
“Indigenous African cultures are about participation,” he says. “We live in a world dominated by Newtonian physics, a physics of binary opposites: black, white; good, bad; thin, fat … whereas earlier cultures were more in tune with the quantum mechanics of interconnectedness, interrelationships, interdependence.
“When I was little, I said to my grandmother: ‘There’s this clever man, the cleverest man in the world and his name is Albert Einstein!’ And my grandmother asked: ‘Why is he clever?’ I tried to explain how there used to be space here, and time here … and she laughed at me. She said to me: ‘What is time in your language?’ And I said: ‘Isikhathi.’ And she said: ‘What is space?’ And I said: ‘Umkhathi.’ She said: ‘Umkhathi, isikhathi, these are indivisible.’ She was right. In our cultural view we could not view space and time separately. There was already a space-time continuum.”
This extends, in a more literal way, to his exhibition being viewed on a virtual platform.
“I really like the theory of a parallel universe. My bones demonstrate that. They can sit in a studio in Johannesburg but they are getting their own place in a computer somewhere in Grahamstown that will be seen by somebody in Kroonstad or somebody in New Zealand. My bones are ubiquitous because of technology. Those bones are my quantum children. That’s why I welcome technology.”
The Ntulis went to live in Underberg, in KwaZulu-Natal, for the first part of the lockdown, where he completed more works of bone and wood and wrote the poetry for the 45 praise songs that accompany his sculptures. The couple miss their children, he says, but apart from that it has been a happy time.
“Before the lockdown I missed my wife. Although we live in the same house, we were both so busy. Lockdown has brought us closer together. I have not missed anything except my children.”
He agrees that the pandemic separating people physically has, paradoxically, opened doors for us to engage more closely with each other. One of the motives that drove his current work was a dissatisfaction with the direction art seems to be taking.
“It is too disengaged from the realities and the issues that are confronting us,” he says. “As a healer, I was thinking about what was happening in the country, so much negativity, femicide, rape, women abuse, xenophobia, corruption … Cleansing needs to be done. Healing needs to be done.”
Animal bones symbolise different things in different cultures. To some they are trophies to be mounted on walls. In the Nguni tradition, says Ntuli, animals must be guarded and protected. This, he says, is why so many surnames have animal meanings.
“I’m Ntuli. I am a hyena, I am a mamba snake. You attack a hyena, you attack a mamba snake, you are attacking the Ntuli clan because we were the people allocated by our ancestors to preserve these animals. There are many surnames like this and many animals are supposed to be protected, but there was no way to do that. We were moved out of our villages, stuck in informal settlements, in one-entrance townships and the rest.
“These are things, without accusing anybody, that must be addressed. We need to say: ‘Here we are.’ We have knowledge systems that we can use in our schools, in our communities, to bring people closer together irrespective of who they are, what their gender is and what their belief systems are.”
Nature and humanity are both close to Ntuli’s heart. “The Earth seems to me to be very angry,” he says. “It’s abused, it’s misused, it’s polluted, the whole ecological balance is affected. I hope that this exhibition engages us on the real things that really matter — our Earth, our ecosystem, our sense of being.”
The bone sculptures are a departure from the enormous granite works he is perhaps most famous for. Some weigh more than 20t. It would be hard to pull them down, should anyone dare. Ntuli is conflicted about the current wave of revisionism that has seen many stone likenesses of unpopular figures destroyed around the world.
“Statues are being pulled down. Statues of slavers are being pulled down. There are sculptures of people whose ideas I really do not like but I also see the spirit and the feeling and the work that the artist put into that figure. I cannot encourage anyone to destroy any sculpture, but rather to rethink.
“When I see a statue fall, I see someone destroying a precious work that some artist has done. It is being destroyed by people who probably can’t even sculpt a candlestick. These statues that we do not want in public, let us have a sculpture garden where these works can be viewed and protected and where people can go to learn about history.”
Among his own new works are some that pay tribute to slaves taken from Africa. “I’m making reference to that, to the bridge of bones that links us with the African diaspora, to those who died and those who survived. But those who survived are now being attacked and killed by soldiers continuing the old American ideology that black lives do not actually matter.”
As pleased as he is about the way technology will enable his work to be seen, heard and experienced all over the world, Ntuli is also looking forward to the day when he, his collaborators and his audience can gather together and physically enjoy the sculptures.
“When one day we can take the exhibition out, we will have such a time. On that day people will be so happy that they will forgive ALL their enemies, except maybe one ex-politician here and one active politician somewhere else … who I won’t mention, not because I am afraid but because I don’t want their names to touch my tongue.”
CARVING OUT A LIFE
Pitika Ntuli was born in 1940 in Springs and grew up in Witbank in Mpumalanga.
During the apartheid era he was arrested and imprisoned until, in 1978, international pressure forced his release and he went into exile. He completed a master of fine arts at Brunel University in London in 1985 and has lectured as an art professor at many institutions, including Central St Martin’s College of Art in the UK and Wits University in SA.
As a sculptor he has held dozens of exhibitions and his works are held in many public, private and corporate collections.
• Source: The Melrose Gallery
• Azibuyele Emasisweni (Return to the Source) will be opened online at 6.30pm on Thursday June 25 by minister of international relations & co-operation Naledi Pandor and run until August 2.
•View the exhibition on themelrosegallery.com and other content on nationalartsfestival.co.za
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