The thing nobody warns you about is that it can just go quiet.

Not gone. Quiet. Like a room where a fridge you’d long stopped hearing switches itself off, and there’s suddenly a silence you didn’t know was being filled. For about a year now, maybe a bit longer, the part of me that used to run the whole show has been idling on some low setting, and I keep waiting for it to climb back up to pressure, and it keeps not.

I don’t know how to write about this without either confessing too much or burying myself under enough theory that you can’t see me at all. Let me try to stay in the frame.

In my twenties I was broke and I was constantly, stupidly aroused. I want to be careful not to romanticise it, but I also can’t lie. I had a room in a flat in New Doornfontein, a mattress on the floor, no airtime for half the month, and whole days with nothing in them. Desire filled the days because nothing else was competing for the space. I wasn’t producing anything. Nobody was waiting on me for anything. My time was a wide empty field, and the body does what bodies do in a field. It wanders. It wants. I had nothing to do and everything to feel.

Now I have a calendar. I have the kind of life that looks, from the outside, like arrival. Work I actually care about, which is the trap of it, because you can’t resent work you love in the ordinary way. You just let it eat you and call the eating commitment. And somewhere in all that arriving, the wanting thinned. Sex migrated. It used to be the main event and now it’s an item, and some nights I can feel it sitting on the same list as the unanswered emails, and I do it the way you do the last thing on a list. Competently. A little absently. Relieved when it’s ticked.

I don’t know how to feel about that. I keep reaching for the feeling and finding a shrug. That might be the most honest sentence in here.

I read Byung-Chul Han on a plane, I think it was, over the top of some half-finished funding application, and I remember the small private horror of being described so precisely by a man who has never met me. He has this idea that we’ve become achievement subjects who exploit ourselves and experience the self-exploitation as freedom. That the burnout isn’t the system breaking down, it’s the system running correctly. And in a thinner book he argues that eros is dying, not from the old repression our grandparents were warned about, but from too much positivity, too much yes, too much self and not enough of anyone genuinely other. The achievement subject, he says more or less, can’t really love, because love asks you to disappear a little into someone else, and the achievement subject is far too busy optimising the self to go and disappear anywhere.

Maybe that’s too neat. He’s a very quotable pessimist and I don’t entirely trust how good his sentences make me feel about my own exhaustion. But the diagnosis lands. The work didn’t only take my hours. It took the thing that was living underneath the hours.

There’s an old idea, Freud’s really, that the artist’s making is libido rerouted, desire that couldn’t go where it wanted so it went into the work instead. Sublimation. For years I believed some version of that about myself. That the horniness and the making were the same current, and that I was one of the lucky ones who’d found a respectable pipe to run it through. But I’m not sure the pipe survives contact with how this actually feels. It doesn’t feel like my desire got redirected into the work. It feels like the work drank it. There’s a difference between a river changing course and a river being pumped dry, and I honestly cannot always tell which one happened to me. Maybe both. Maybe on different Tuesdays.

Andy Warhol put it more plainly than any of them, plainly in the way only he could, deadpan and half joking and entirely serious at once. Somewhere in his philosophy he divides everyone into two kinds, the people who get energy from sex and the people who lose it, and he’d worked out long ago that he was firmly the second kind. Too much work, he says. He’d rather be in his room making something, or cleaning. For years I read that as a pose, the professional weirdo doing his act. I don’t read it that way now. I know exactly which of his two types I am, and I’ve probably always been it, and I spent my twenties mistaking a glut of empty time for a glut of appetite. There’s a version of Warhol that is just sublimation carried all the way to the end, a man who poured every last unit of it into the work and the Factory and the fame and kept nothing back for the bed. Some afternoons that doesn’t read to me as a tragedy at all. It reads as a decision.

And then there’s what happens to desire when it does turn up, tired, at eleven at night, in front of a screen. I’ll be honest that the version of arousal most available to me now is the one that asks nothing of me and no one else. A tab. Then another tab. The blue light doing its work.

Amia Srinivasan writes about porn as a kind of education. That for a whole generation it arrived before experience did, and taught the imagination its grammar before the body ever got a turn. She’s careful about it, she isn’t doing the easy panic. But the thought sits in me like a swallowed stone. We didn’t learn desire and then go looking for pictures of it. A lot of us learned the pictures first and then went out hunting for a desire to match. Paul Preciado, who treats all of this as a single machine, calls ours a pharmacopornographic age, the body run by molecules and images, by dopamine and the screen, desire farmed like any other crop. Farmed. That’s the word that keeps me up. The suspicion that the wanting isn’t even fully mine, that it’s been grown in me for a yield.

There’s a whole subculture online now, gooning they call it, people who make a practice of it, almost a devotion, hours of edging in front of an endless feed, chasing the trance rather than any ending. I find it both alien and completely legible. It’s the last stop on a train I’m clearly already on. Desire with the other person removed, and the friction removed, and the risk removed, and the unpredictable weather of somebody else’s body removed, until what’s left is a nervous system being played like an instrument by an industry that has studied it far more closely than any lover ever bothered to.

The libidinal economy was Lyotard’s phrase, more or less, the notion that desire isn’t sealed off from economy, that it flows and pools and gets captured and invested like any other energy in the system. I used to find that idea abstract, a bit undergraduate. I don’t anymore. I can feel the capture. I can feel my own attention being harvested at two in the morning, and the harvest is efficient, and I am somehow the crop and the customer at once.

I said a version of all this out loud once. I posted something on a bad night about not having much of a libido anymore, and within the hour a small crowd had gathered in the replies to ask whether I work out. Do you lift. Have you had your testosterone checked. Try cold showers. As if desire were a muscle group I’d let go slack, as if the whole of it could be sorted with a protocol and a supplement stack, which is of course precisely the logic I’ve spent this essay describing, the one that treats the self as a machine with a maintenance schedule. I do cycle. I’ve a road bike I love and I ride it hard, and it has done exactly nothing for this, and I never expected it to, because I don’t believe the problem lives in my legs.

What I couldn’t say in the replies, because you can’t, is that the surprise underneath the advice had a particular flavour. People seem to assume, for reasons I can more or less guess, that a man who looks like me comes pre-loaded with appetite, that the body itself is a kind of promise. There’s an old and heavy script that issues certain bodies a libido whether or not they were born holding one, and to stand up and admit the tank is low is to let down a fantasy that was never mine in the first place. So the shame turns up right on time. The specific shame of having been told, more or less your whole life, that you are supposed to be effortlessly good at a thing, and quietly knowing that you are not.

I went looking, the way you do when you get tired of contemporary diagnoses that are all so confident about how doomed you are, for something older. The Daoists had a word, jing, for a kind of vital essence, close to what we’d call sexual energy but not only that, a root-stuff you’re born holding a portion of, which you can spend or bank. Their alchemists talked about refining it, turning jing into qi and qi into spirit, transmuting the raw charge up into something finer. Which is sublimation again, but gentler, less Viennese, more agricultural, more like tending a fire than damming a river. And there is this passage in the Tao Te Ching about an infant so full of vital essence that he stiffens without knowing the first thing about union, who can howl all day and never go hoarse, because nothing in him is yet at war with itself. Harmony, Laozi calls it. The baby isn’t conserving on purpose. He simply isn’t yet spending himself against his own grain.

That undid me a little more than the theory did. The possibility that the trouble isn’t that I’ve run out, but that I’ve spent everything forcing, pushing against each day, and that the essence isn’t depleted so much as clenched. Wu wei, the Daoists say. Act without forcing. I have not managed to not-force in roughly six years.

I want to be careful not to land this on a serene Eastern note, tie the bow, tell you I’ve made my peace and I light incense now and the libido came back like a bird returning in spring. It hasn’t. I’ve had partners reach over and I ran the calculation, the grim little calculation, tired or not tired, and I chose tired, and then lay there afterwards feeling like I’d let a small fire go out that I might not know how to relight. And also, if I’m honest, a bit relieved to just sleep. Both. I genuinely don’t know which of those is the truer feeling. I’ve stopped assuming the noble one is automatically the true one.

And there is the other body in the bed, which I keep leaving out of this essay, because it is easier to treat my libido as a private weather system than to admit it happens to someone else too. Sometimes I think I disappoint my partner. I don’t always know that. I read it in small things, or I manufacture it out of my own guilt and then can’t tell the two apart, but the fear is solid even when the evidence for it is thin. That is the part none of the theory reaches. Han can explain why the culture drained me, and Warhol can assure me I was always this way, and the Daoists can tell me to stop forcing, and not one of them is lying in the dark beside a person who wanted more of me than I could find that night.

Do other people go through this. I think they do. I think a great many of us are walking around at a low charge and calling it maturity, or contentment, or simply being busy, and I think the culture would much rather sell us a supplement or a protocol than let us sit with the plain fact that a life optimised for output is not a life optimised for wanting. I don’t have a protocol. I have a suspicion, which is that the appetite of my twenties was never a surplus I’ve since squandered. It was just what a body does when it has nothing to prove and nowhere to be.

Its rare, but the hum comes back sometimes. A whole afternoon with nothing in it, no deliverable, no one waiting, and the old current stirs like it never left, like it was only ever waiting for me to stop. Then Monday. Then the calendar. I close the laptop. Some nights the last thing I feel is the wanting, faint, in the dark, quietly being outbid by sleep.

I had already said one name that evening. Flopo was the second.

We were at that Italian place in Parktown North, the one where the tables sit too tight and you end up in everyone’s conversation, and she had ordered the burrata even though she’d spent the ride saying she was off dairy. I remember thinking that was the most human thing anyone had done all week. I liked her. That was the trouble. Somewhere around the second glass I mentioned Thando, which was fine, Thando was established, Thando had a shape she could hold. And then there was the other one, the one I didn’t have a category for yet, and I felt the sentence coming and I felt myself slow in front of it the way you slow at a robot that’s about to change.

It isn’t a full second. Call it a hitch. The throat does a small administrative thing. My hands go to the stem of the glass.

I said “a friend.”

I don’t know why I keep starting here. I’ve told this story enough times that I no longer trust it. Maybe she didn’t order the burrata. Perhaps the pause was longer than I’m admitting, or shorter, or maybe I’ve built a whole theory of myself on a hesitation that lasted no time at all and meant nothing. It happens. You live a moment once and narrate it four hundred times and eventually the narration is the thing you own, not the moment.

There was a period, maybe two years ago, where I carried Barthes around like a a burner. Not really reading it. Touching it. He has that line about the lover’s solitude, that it’s spoken by multitudes and held up by no one, and for a while it felt like the truest thing anyone had said about me. Nou a’ke sure. It might just be the kind of sentence that flatters your loneliness back at you. That’s most theory, when you’re sad. A mirror that nods.

Anyway. The ride home is what I actually wanted to describe. Empire Road going west at one in the morning, the driver on some station playing old kwaito, neither of us talking. Three conversations open on my phone, all of them warm, none of them cancelling the others, and for the length of maybe two robots I felt like the least lonely person in Johannesburg. Then it went.

Here is the thing I can’t make legible at dinner tables. They love the freedom. They say it out loud, you’re so free, so open, like it’s a quality of light in a room. And then the loving reaches its later chambers and the freedom is the first thing they want to renovate. It comes on small and it always arrives dressed as care. Text me when you’re home. Just so I know. Share your location, only because I worry. Who were you with, not an accusation, a question, a soft one, but I’ve learned to hear the hinge in it. Or perhaps that’s unfair. Perhaps half of them only wanted me home alive. I have been the one asking those questions too, and lying about how much I was asking.

Fanon says somewhere that he came into the world wanting to find meaning in things and found instead that he was a thing among things. I don’t want to over-reach with that, my situation is not his. But there is a way of being wanted that sits very close to being collected, and I know it when it lands, the way you know a room was decorated for you rather than lived in with you. You’re not like the others. Delivered as the highest compliment. It takes an embarrassing number of years to hear that it isn’t one.

The gallery in Newtown. An opening, that warm white wine nobody actually wants, someone’s laugh going up every ninety seconds like a bird let out of a box. Two men on the bench outside, near the security guard’s plastic chair. Their hands were close and not touching, and I’ve told people I photographed them, but I’m fairly sure now that I didn’t. I think I just watched for a while and then went back in for more of the bad wine. Why do I keep adding the photograph. Maybe because a photograph would make it mean something, and watching and doing nothing means less, and I don’t like how much less it means.

What complicates the bench is that in this country the sentence actually exists. It’s written down. The constitution says I may love the way I love, and that is genuinely one of the few places on this continent where you can point at a document and find yourself inside it. It’s also, if I’m honest, a rumour that only holds in certain postcodes. It held at that opening. It holds at the club I’ll get to. Take those same two men and their almost-touching hands to the wrong rank, the wrong road, the village that raised somebody’s uncle, and the document thins to nothing. Freedom here has an address. A few addresses. You learn the map early and you learn it in the body before you learn it in your head.

Keguro Macharia wrote a book I keep going back to, about intimacy in the Black diaspora, friction as a form of closeness, bodies and histories rubbing up against one another. I keep wanting to quote a particular line from it and every time I go looking I can’t find the line, which makes me suspect I wrote it and handed it to him. So this is a confession, not a citation. But the idea holds even where the sentence won’t sit still: that closeness might be friction rather than fusion. That the rub is not the failure of intimacy, it might be intimacy. I dance better believing that, whether or not he said it.

Club Am, Gwigwi Mrwebi Street, Newtown. I’ve done real thinking on that floor, though thinking is the wrong word for it, it happens under thinking, the drum coming up through the sternum. House music does what monogamy can’t picture. It holds a lot of bodies in one groove and asks none of them to become the same body. Nobody on that floor is auditioning you. Or that’s the version I tell. The honest version also has the guy who wouldn’t move his hand off my waist, and the queue for the one working toilet, and a song I can’t stand that the whole room adores, and once, at maybe four in the morning, a woman crying quietly by the speakers, and everyone leaving her alone in the right way, the tender way, the way strangers guard each other in the dark.

And then outside, the sky going grey and then that indecent pink over the Newtown rooftops, and the last cigarette on the pavement passed mouth to mouth, which is an old queer thing, older than me, putting your lips where a stranger’s have just been. The specific cold that shows up right before the sun. The Uber that says eleven minutes. The driver playing gospel, it’s always gospel at that hour, God turning up precisely as we leave Him. I never get their names, the people I share those mornings with. Some family lasts one cigarette. I’ve stopped believing that makes it a smaller family.

Ten years in this godforsaken city. I’ll just say it, because the essay keeps trying to make it beautiful and it isn’t. Ten years, hundreds of dates and not one relationship I could hand you and call a success. There’s a hum under all the abundance, low and steady, the sound a fridge makes that you only notice when it cuts out. It says you’re doing this wrong. It says all these people, and still. I don’t have a rebuttal to the hum. I’ve stopped pretending the openness is a wall I built against it. Some nights it’s just failure, plainly, and it’s mine, and it doesn’t point at anything larger than itself.

Two in the morning, a different night, I watched that old video of Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni, the London one, the two of them across a small table arguing about love with this frightening tenderness. She presses him on what a man owes, on softness. He answers from the wound, from the arithmetic of being told to be strong by the same world that has arranged for him impossible to be. I won’t try to quote them. I’ve watched it too often to trust my version of the words. What stays is the pitch. Two Black people disagreeing about whether love can survive the conditions, and visibly loving each other the whole way through the disagreement. I found my dinner tables in it. I found myself on both sides of that table.

The phone remembers better than the men do. I mean that against the men, not in praise of the phone. The apps keep all of it, the screenshots hold warmth that someone later swore under oath they never offered, the little grey location dot goes on pulsing over a bed that has nothing to do with my life anymore. I have scrolled up to make sure I didn’t invent the tenderness. It was there, timestamped. I still don’t know what to do with the fact that a server in some cooled warehouse is a more faithful witness to my intimate life than several people who once held me.

The exes are distributed around this city like furniture I chose and can’t return. One kind crosses a room to avoid me, and I’ve made a rough peace with them, the avoidance is at least a form of memory. The other kind catches my eye over somebody’s shoulder at an opening and gives the small nod, the one that says I know exactly what you are and I’m glad the world went to the trouble of making one. That nod has rescued more evenings than I’d admit to their faces. It shouldn’t carry as much as it does. It carries a lot.

I keep reaching for the music to explain the love, because music is the only grammar I fully trust. Jazz refusing the single correct note. Amapiano stretching a song past the point of decency until the dancing becomes the composition. Gospel refusing to let you praise on your own. This was in me before the theory, before Barthes, before the book I keep misquoting. My people were polyphonic long before I had a politics for it. Maybe that’s just a prettier light to stand in, the exact move I accused the dinner dates of. Fine. It’s late in the essay and I’ll take one myth.

I don’t have an ending for this and I distrust the version of me that would manufacture one, the version that returns cleanly to the dinner table and the hesitation and ties it off. Life didn’t tie it off. Last week I hesitated again, new table, new name, and I said “a friend” again, and I was annoyed with myself for about four seconds, and then the food came, and it was good, and we talked about something else entirely.

The cigarette gets to the filter. Somebody’s Uber pulls up. The pink is already going ordinary blue. I put it out and I don’t reach for what it means, not this morning. Sometimes it’s only the last one before you go home.

I spent the first 7 years of my school life sitting in a taxi, or perhaps I have always been sitting in a taxi, moving through the city at irregular intervals that have nothing to do with punctuality and everything to do with the mysterious calculations of capacity and route optimization that govern minibus life, and I was watching the hands of a man in the seat ahead of me, noting the particular callousness of them, the way they gripped the beat up leatherette seat with the familiarity of someone who had spent a significant portion of his life inside vehicles not his own, and I found myself thinking about, how many men spend their lives, never having owned a (new) car, and I realized in that moment, with the kind of cold clarity that comes to you when you are trapped in motion with people you do not know and will never see again, that this fact, this simple biographical detail, was not a failure of character or ambition but rather an accurate, almost mathematical description of how the system had been arranged.

The Group Areas Act (1950) displaced millions of people, broke apart families with the casual bureaucratic brutality of paperwork, and what it created, in the space between dispossession and survival, was an entire cultural apparatus devoted to the negotiation of mobility, to the obsessive documentation and performance of movement through space, as though movement itself had become the only language available for saying: I exist, I am visible, I refuse to be immobilized.

When I was 12, the taxi I rode to school determined, with an almost mathematical precision, the social position I occupied in the township and school hierarchy. Its wasn’t philosophical, maybe arithmetic. Yogueta (a triad of taxis painted in the colours of the popular lollipop), Lehobu (which translates to chameleon because of the tacis iridescent paint job) , DZZ, DXT, named after registration plates (or was it named after a particular route, a particular driver’s reputation, a particular sound system’s capacity to amplify bass frequencies in ways that made your chest vibrate?), carried a different kind of passenger than the Yogueta, and to ride the wrong taxi was to announce to the world a series of facts about yourself that you had (not) intended to announce, to mark yourself as not-quite-there, as invisible in precisely the way you most desperately did not want to be invisible. The right taxi meant access to a particular kind of knowledge, a particular social network, a particular libidinal economy of desire and aspiration that operated according to rules that were never written down but were communicated with perfect clarity through the arrangement of bodies in space, through who sat near the window, through which girls could be flirted with without incurring the wrath of the taxi’s designated protectors.

The sound systems inside these vehicles were baroque constructions, metal and wiring and monoblock amplification towers, bass bottles that rose from the frame of the minibus like monuments to something larger than themselves, and I understood, even then, that I was witnessing a form of consumption that had nothing to do with need and everything to do with the assertion of presence in a space that had been designed, deliberately and with genocidal precision, to render you invisible. If you could control the sound, if you could make the bass so heavy that it rattled the windows and shook the fillings in people’s teeth, then you could not be ignored. You existed. You mattered. The vehicle itself became an instrument of visibility, and the man who owned that sound system, who had invested his meagre savings in this technology of amplification, was performing an act that was simultaneously desperate and defiant, an act that said: I am here, I am making noise, I am refusing to disappear into the township’s grey uniformity.

But the taxi was never just a symbol. It was an economic system predicated on a particular form of torture: the torture of incompleteness, of waiting, of the constant state of almost-there. This is what “kopo” means in taxi slang, a term that Skeem Sa 2015 would later use as the title of an EP that captured something essential about the competitive logic of minibus life. Kopo is a full taxi. It is the threshold moment, the point at which the driver can finally leave the rank, finally depart for town, finally begin to move. But before that moment, there is only waiting. The driver either waits or circles the rank repeatedly, picking up passengers one by one, two by two, each arrival incomplete, each potential departure postponed until the exact moment of fullness arrives. And the passengers themselves understand this arithmetic: you cannot leave until we are full. Your movement is contingent on the accumulation of bodies.

Skeem Sa 2015 named their album “Kopo” because they understood that this is the condition of township life, the condition, I suspect, of the entire country: perpetual incompleteness, perpetual waiting, the anxiety of the not-yet-full. You are always in a vehicle that is loaded but cannot depart. You are always waiting for one more passenger, one more policy, one more structural shift, one more promise fulfilled before the plane can finally take off. South Africa has been sitting on the tarmac for thirty years. The engines are running. The seats are full. Everyone is ready. But something, always something, keeps the bird grounded. It circles. It accumulates. It performs the motions of departure without ever actually leaving the ground. We mistake fullness for movement, accumulation for progress, the sound of revving engines for the fact of flight. And meanwhile, the driver keeps circling, the passengers keep waiting, and the country keeps promising that this time, this time we will finally take off.

This reason I started writing this essay is because a couple nights ago a friend DM’d me a video of Brenda Fassie’s ‘Zolla Bud’. It took me back to the first time I heard the jam on one of these crazy sound systems, how it sounded less like a song and more like a demand, a plea, an incantation that repeated itself with such insistence that it began to seem less like entertainment and more like necessity. ‘I wanna be in a zola bud, zola bud, zola bud,’ she sang, and I heard in that repetition not whimsy but hunger, not entertainment but survival, the articulation of a need so basic and so urgent that it could only be expressed through the constant circling back to the same desire, the same impossible refrain: I want to get in the vehicle, I want to be transported somewhere other than where I was born, I want to move. The song became famous not because it was technically accomplished (though it was) but because it said out loud, in Fassie’s particular register of aggression and yearning, what everyone already understood: that the minibus was more than transportation. It was theology. It was politics. It was the primary language through which township dwellers negotiated their claim to space, to movement, to the right to arrive somewhere other than where they had started.

I should tell you about the factory in Rosslyn, the BMW factory that still existed (or had existed, the temporal status of it seemed unclear, as though it existed and did not exist simultaneously, visible and invisible in the way that things in the township were always visible and invisible), where if you worked, if you had secured one of those jobs, you had crossed a threshold that most people in the surrounding areas would never cross. Working at the BMW plant meant something like prosperity, meant that you could aspire to own the gusheshe, that E30, 1983 BMW 325i coupé, fly-mochene, ‘ithemba’ la magomusha’ (”hope of the ghetto/township”), that vehicle that was manufactured locally but still felt impossible, still carries with it the weight of aspiration, still means: you have made it, you have escaped, you have moved up. But for most of us, the factory was simply a landmark, a place you passed on the way to town, and the gusheshe existed only in fantasy, in that particular register of township dreams where you rapped about the car you would never own, performed the desire for it, made it into art because actual ownership was permanently foreclosed.

I was twenty-three when I first understood the real nature of the system, when I was sitting in a minibus that had broken down on the N1 highway (which is to say after some road rage and a heated cinematic car chase it had stopped running and nobody seemed particularly surprised or concerned about this development, the male passengers continuing their conversations as though the vehicle’s mechanical failure was not relevant to their immediate circumstances, as though they had been expecting this all along), and I watched the driver get out and begin tinkering with something beneath the seat while we waited, immobilized, for whatever mysterious repair process he had initiated to complete itself. And I thought: this is what mobility looks like in South Africa, this is what it has always looked like, not the smooth progression from point A to point B but rather this constant breaking down and repair, this makeshift accumulation of solutions, this way of moving through space that assumes breakage as a permanent condition, that understands that the vehicle will always fail you but that failure is not reason enough to stop moving. The Group Areas Act had created a spatial logic so fundamental that even after it was ostensibly repealed, even after apartheid was supposedly over, we were still living inside it, still organizing our lives around the impossible geometries it had established.

When gqom emerged in Durban in the early 2010s, it did not emerge in studios or clubs (or rather, it emerged there too, but that is not the primary genealogy), it emerged in the taxis, those same minibuses with their massive sound systems, those vehicles that had become the primary distribution network for music that could not afford to pay for radio play or streaming promotion. Gqom producers would make CDs and give them to taxi drivers because a taxi with the right sound system and the right music would fill with passengers, would become a destination in itself, would transform the act of commuting into something approaching an experience of luxury, an experience of being transported through the city while listening to music that had been produced in someone’s backroom on a secondhand computer, distributed through Facebook groups and WhatsApp chains, amplified through the speakers of a minibus moving through the city’s re-segregated geography. The taxis that carried gqom became, in the city’s circulatory system, like tiny blood cells, and the roads became like veins, and the music pumped through them, creating a kind of urban vitality that had nothing to do with the formal economy and everything to do with the refusal to be immobilized, the refusal to accept the status quo, the refusal to disappear.

I wrote about this extensively in my essay titled Gold Diggers Mouth but my favourite subculture in South Africa is izikhotane, because they represent something that I have been unable to fully articulate, something about the logic of the system that I only began to understand when I witnessed them for the first time, a group of young men (mostly men, though this was changing) gathered in one of the local malls parking lot on a Saturday afternoon, wearing clothes that seemed both absurd and defiant in their expense, wearing multiple pairs of expensive designer trousers all at once (one on top of another, visible, redundant, excessive), preparing for a kind of competitive performance that the media had already condemned as wasteful, as morally bankrupt, as evidence of the entitlement of the post-apartheid ‘born-free’ generation. And I watched as they tore these clothes, as they poured expensive alcohol on themselves and each other, as they burned money in front of an audience, and I understood, with a clarity that was almost physical, that they were engaged in something profoundly different from mere consumption that they were engaged in a radical refusal of the logic of scarcity that the system had tried to instill in them. They were saying: your logic of accumulation, your idea that I should be grateful for crumbs, your expectation that I should defer pleasure and accept constraint, is not my logic. I will burn your money. I will destroy your expensive things. I will show you that I exist, that I have access, that I will not be constrained by your idea of what is rational.

This was part of the real genealogy of South African culture, the one that did not make it into the official histories or the tourist guides. The diamondfields dandies of the 1880s had used expensive clothing to assert their humanity in the face of systematic dehumanization. The oswenka of the 1950s had dressed in custom three-piece suits and performed elaborate fashion shows as a form of moral code, as a way of saying: you cannot reduce me to my labour, you cannot make me disappear, I exist as something more than the menial work that you have forced me to perform. And now the izikhotane were doing something similar but with a different register, a different language, a different technological apparatus. They had inherited the logic of the system, understood it perfectly, and had decided to invert it, to refuse it, to perform their refusal in the most visible and most offensive way possible.

The difficulty with all of this, the real difficulty that I have been circling around without quite being able to articulate it directly, is that every refusal eventually calcifies into style, everyone is talking about taste but we also need to be talking about style because every style becomes something that can be administered, managed, commodified, packaged, and sold back to you as authenticity. This is the form of late capitalism’s particular genius, its ability to absorb your refusal and transform it into a product. The izikhotane’s custard-soaked flamboyance became an aesthetic that could be packaged by fashion designers, incorporated into high-fashion collections, displayed on runways in Paris, transformed from a radical refusal of scarcity into a sign of hipness, of cultural authenticity, of African cool. K.O’s ‘Caracara,’ which had deliberately returned to the township minibus as a site of authenticity and reclamation, a deliberate gesture of retro nostalgia, a way of saying: we will own this space, we will claim this vehicle as ours, became the sound of a commodified township, a township that existed primarily for external consumption, for the international market’s appetite for the aesthetic of constraint transformed into style. And I realized, with something like despair, that the entire apparatus had been engineered to absorb refusal, to transform resistance into commodity, to make sure that nothing, nothing could ever escape the logic of the market.

But maybe I am wrong. Maybe the refusal is not exhausted. Maybe there is something in the gqom or barcadi beat, something in the way that the bass is designed to destroy your speakers, something in the rawness and the repetition and the refusal to resolve, that cannot be fully commodified, that remains always slightlydangerous, slightly illegible, slightly outside the logic of the market. Maybe the fact that gqom producers still make music on secondhand computers, distribute it through WhatsApp groups, get it into the taxis, play it in the clubs, all without proper compensation from the formal music industry, all as an act of pure cultural production divorced from capital, maybe that fact means something, maybe that means the system has not fully closed, maybe there is still a space, narrow and difficult and constantly shrinking, where refusal is possible.

I am thinking about Hugh Masekela’s ‘Stimela,’ that coal train that transported workers to their deaths or to displacement or to the loss of their families, and I am thinking about Brenda Fassie singing about wanting to be in the zola bud, and I am thinking about Cassper Nyovest’s gusheshe, and I am thinking about the izikhotane burning money in township parks, and I am thinking about my father’s secondhand Colt and my mother’s new car, and I understand, finally, that the entire history of South Africa is inscribed in the history of vehicles, in the history of movement and immobility, in the history of who gets to move and how fast and when and in which direction. The Group Areas Act had said: you will live here, and you cannot move freely. And what South African culture has done, with a stubborn and brilliant insistence, has been to transform that constraint into art, into music, into style, into refusal, to turn immobility into the primary text of visibility, to say: if you will not let me move freely, then I will make the fact of movement itself into my primary language, my primary claim to existence, my primary assertion of human worth.

And the taxis still run, and the sound systems still boom, and the kids still gather with their expensive clothes and their refusal to be grateful, and the music still pumps through the city’s veins, and I am still here, still invisible and visible simultaneously, still moving through space without owning the space I move through, still trying to understand what it means to live in a country where your very movement is an act of resistance (perhaps this is why we dance the way we do), where the simple fact of arriving somewhere is a form of rebellion, where the ability to make noise and be heard is the only freedom that has not yet been completely absorbed by the market. The threshold keeps shifting, but the desire to cross it, to move, to be seen moving, to make noise while you do it, that has not diminished. If anything, it has only intensified, metastasized into new forms, new beats, new ways of saying: I am here, I am moving, I will not disappear into your infrastructure. Watch me.

I.

The unroadworthy taxi picks me up on Empire Road just after eight, a Super Sixteen with a cracked windscreen and a sticker on the wonky sliding door that says NO FOOD NO FRIENDS, and by the time we crest the ridge above the city the driver has already fought two passengers over short change and turned the radio up on a talk station where a caller is explaining, calmly, in the tone you use for the weather, that the foreigners must go. Below us Johannesburg performs its usual Saturday theatre — marathon runners in their neon, pavement barbers unfolding plastic chairs, recyclers dragging translucent bales of plastic like men hauling clouds — and on the horizon, pale and geometric and frankly absurd, the mine dumps sit in the morning light like the pyramids of a pharaoh who never learned how to die.

I have been looking at these yellow hills for what seems like my entire life and only lately have I understood what I am looking at. They are not hills. They are excretions. Defecation. Manyala. A century and a half of the deepest mines on earth chewed through the Witwatersrand, swallowed the rock, dissolved the gold out of it with cyanide, and spat what remained into the sky in soft toxic dunes, and then the city — my city — grew up around its own waste and learned to call it landscape. Somewhere across the water that gold became bullion, became empire, became the gilt frame around the portrait of a man in a wig; here it became a hill that children with asthma grow up beneath, a hill whose dust rises every August and settles in lungs in Riverlea and Soweto and Diepkloof with the patience of an unpaid debt. If you want a single honest image of what colonialism is, skip the statue and the archive and the biennale wall text; look at the dump. Extraction on one side of the world, excretion on the other. A virus does exactly this: it enters a body, strips it for parts, replicates itself through the body’s own machinery, and leaves behind a cell that is technically still standing but no longer itself. A cold empty hull with a view.

II.

The march meets us at the corner of Rissik, maybe two hundred people in matching T-shirts, sjamboks, spears, knobkieries and small flags, singing beautifully — because we always sing beautifully, even our cruelty is in four-part harmony — and the placards say the clinics are full and the jobs are gone and the foreigners must go, and the driver hoots in solidarity and the gogo next to me sucks her teeth and says haibo, and I watch a man about my age, my build, my face really, scream at a what looks like a Somali shopkeeper who is calmly rolling down his shutters the way you batten for weather you have seen before. Eish. This is the part the fever forgets: an immune response is not intelligent. The body, riddled with something it cannot name, starts attacking its own tissue — the Zimbabwean nurse, the Mozambican bricklayer, the Malawian gardener, people whose grandfathers were dragged down the same shafts by the same recruiting agents under the same compound system — because the actual pathogen does not live at street level; the actual pathogen lives in mineral rights and offshore accounts and the seating charts of commissions of inquiry.

And the commissions, yoh, the commissions. Fok. Every evening the Madlanga Commission unspools another episode of the procedural: generals and ministers and cartels braided together like izinyoka cable, syndicates renting police dockets the way you rent a bakkie; the president wounded and circling; the word impeachment floating through parliament like smoke through a shack. In my district the unemployment rate is sixty-seven percent, which is not a statistic, it is a weather system — it is every third house on the street where a matric certificate curls in a drawer like a fallen leaf. Women are buried every weekend for the crime of saying no. And somewhere in an air-conditioned studio in Texas a man with excellent teeth says the words white genocide, and the algorithm carries it home to us like a dog bringing back something dead. The list gets longer every morning. Some people call this a failed state. I think it is more precise to call it a fever, and the thing about a fever is that it is not the sickness — it is the body’s argument with the sickness. The tragedy is that sometimes the argument kills the patient before it kills the germ.

III.

Steve Biko understood the virology decades before I found the metaphor. He was thirty when the state killed him, driven naked and shackled through the night to Pretoria in the back of a van, and what he had spent his short life saying, in beer halls and clinics and banned pamphlets, was that the colony’s most durable garrison is not the police station but the settlement it builds inside the mind of the colonised — that the conquered man learns to measure himself with the conqueror’s ruler and then mistakes the ruler for reality. Reading I Write What I Like now is like reading a lab report on the present. Black Consciousness was never an identity, it was a praxis: the deliberate, disciplined withdrawal of belief from whiteness as norm — the refusal to live as Europe’s photographic negative, defined entirely by what develops in someone else’s darkroom. When he wrote that the black man was on his own, it was not a lament but a commission: you are on your own the way an author is alone with the page, which is to say, finally free to write.

But then the question that rides with me past the marchers on Rissik: what happened to the consciousness? Because the flag changed and the anthem doubled in length and the virus, being a virus, simply mutated. It learned the vernacular. It put on a leather jacket and a party membership card. It kept the compound system and renamed it the labour-broking sector, kept the Native Affairs filing cabinet and renamed it the tender process, and when the miners at Marikana stood on their koppie asking for a living wage it answered them in the old language, the original language, the one it has never needed to translate. Ka letlalo. The non-normative that Biko died for got normalised, franchised, sold back to us as struggle credentials on a conference lanyard. Consciousness, it turns out, is not an inheritance. It is a fire that has to be lit in every generation, on purpose, in the wind.

IV.

On the other side of the Atlantic there is a man who watched a mining company murder his river, and the murder weapon was a tailings dam — the same soft toxic excretion that stands over my city dressed up as a hill, except theirs let go all at once and rolled down the valley of the Rio Doce like a brown fist, and the Krenak people came down to the banks of the water they call Watu, their grandfather, and covered his body with sheets, because that is what you do when a relative dies. Ailton Krenak has been telling anyone who will listen that the river is not a resource, the mountain is not a deposit, and that the thing calling itself humanity — the thing that invented the citizen and the border and the quarterly earnings call — is a very recent and very provincial club that most of the world’s peoples never actually joined. In Ancestral Future he does something to time that I have not recovered from: he refuses the arrow. The future is not in front of us, some resort we are marching toward on a five-year plan; the future is ancestral, it walks behind and beside us, it is old, it has been here before, and the peoples who were declared obsolete by the colonial encounter are not humanity’s past but its available future — the ones who still know how to be relatives of rivers.

This is the deepest sense of the non-normative I can find: not a subject position, not a box on a diversity form, but a cosmology that never accepted the norm in the first place. The Dikenga knew the arrow of time was a lie long before the physicists started to suspect it — the sun rises, crosses, sets, and continues underneath, through the world of the ancestors, and comes up again; dying is a direction, not an ending. Krenak says our task now is to postpone the end of the world, and he does not mean recycling; he means dreaming, dancing, telling stories, keeping alive the kinds of subjectivity the machine cannot metabolise. The dump above Riverlea and the dead river in Minas Gerais are the same object on two continents, the same excretion, and the peoples singing beside both of them are conducting, whether they know it or not, a single funeral and a single refusal.

V.

Mark Fisher would have called the feeling on that taxi radio by its proper name. He spent his life diagnosing the condition in which the system’s horizon becomes the horizon of the thinkable — where it is easier, as the old line he loved goes, to imagine the end of the world than the end of the arrangement that is ending it — and he called the mood it produces the slow cancellation of the future, a phrase he borrowed from Berardi and wore like mourning dress. But the Fisher I return to is the one who was writing Acid Communism when he died: the one who stopped asking why capitalism is bad and started asking a stranger, sadder, more dangerous question — what happened to our capacity for collective joy? His answer was that the sixties and seventies had begun, chaotically, chemically, communally, to raise a consciousness that terrified capital, and that everything since — the privatisation, the precarity, the individualising of every wound into a personal failing, your unemployment as your bad attitude, your depression as your chemistry — has been a counterrevolution against a future that almost happened. The future was not lost. It was confiscated.

And here is the thing, and I say this with my whole chest: if acid communism has a sound in 2026, it is not playing in a seminar room in London, it is playing at a car wash in Katlehong. The log drum drops and four hundred people who have every statistical reason to despair move like one body, and the amapiano sesh becomes what Fisher said the consciousness-raising group was — a technology for discovering that your private wound is a public condition, that the shame is not yours, that there are others. The groove is a commons that capital has not fully managed to fence, no matter how many streaming platforms it sends. I am not romantic about this; Monday still comes, the rank is still hungry. But emancipatory praxis does not always look like a manifesto. Sometimes it is the rehearsal of the collective in the body — a whole generation practising, every weekend, in three-four time over four-four, how it feels to not be alone.

VI.

I should say, before the essay starts feeling too clean, that I am not writing this from outside the dump. I fly to biennales along the same routes the gold took. I have stood under chandeliers in European foundations drinking prosecco whose provenance I chose not to think about, pitching exhibitions about extraction to money that extraction made. I write funding decks. I mine my own cosmology for content — the cosmograms, the minkisi, the grandmother’s languages — and there is a version of that labour which is restitution and a version which is just the dump wearing a lanyard, the non-normative processed into a deliverable, and the honest thing is that on any given Tuesday I cannot always tell you which one I am doing. The curator is a customs officer at the border of the sayable, and I have stamped some passports I still think about. Biko would not absolve me and I am not asking him to; the discomfort is not a bug in the praxis, it is the entry fee. You do not get to critique the fever from a temperature of thirty-seven degrees. You are in the body too.

VII.

They are re-mining the dumps now. There are companies whose entire business is to sift the excretion for the gold the first extraction missed — extraction squared, the virus returning to eat its own vomit — and on the dumps they have finished with, they plant grass, a special hardy cultivar, to keep the dust down and the lawsuits down, so that the wound photographs like a hill and the hill photographs like heritage. One of them has a viewing deck. You can pay to stand on the excretion and admire the city it excreted.

The taxi drops me at the rank as the light is still coming up gold — of course it comes up gold, this town cannot help itself — and the marchers have gone wherever fevers go to rest, and a gogo at the foot of the yellow hill is sweeping her stoep in long patient strokes, the way her mother swept it, the way the Dikenga turns, and the radio in the next taxi is already arguing tomorrow’s argument. And beneath all of it, beneath the hill and the rank and the commission and the algorithm, the rock itself is still there — three billion years old, older than the encounter, older than the wound, older than the word gold in any language that priced it — and it is speaking, very slowly, in the register rocks use, and if you stand still at the rank at dawn with your taxi fare sweating in your fist you can almost hear what it is saying, which is not a conclusion, rocks do not do conclusions, it is more like a rhythm, patient as a gogo’s broom, saying the future is behind you, walking; saying this is not how the story ends; saying, sharp sharp, see you tomorrow.

The canal at the blue hour is the most persuasive argument Europe ever makes for itself, and I fell for it the way everyone falls for it, standing on a bridge over the Herengracht with a paper cup of coffee going cold in my hand, watching the gabled houses lean toward their own reflections in the black water as though the city were quietly admiring itself, narrating itself, performing for an audience of tourists and pigeons the old story it never tires of telling—that it is beautiful, that it has always been beautiful, that the beauty is simply there, uncaused, a gift of taste and light and Calvinist restraint—and I stood there enchanted, genuinely enchanted, because that is the first thing the essay must admit, that I was not standing outside the spell looking in but inside it, holding my coffee, a Black man with a return ticket and a per diems from an institution whose name I will not embarrass by mentioning, here because Europe had invited me to perform a version of myself it could applaud, and the water held the houses and held the lamplight and held, if you knew how to look, everything the houses had cost.

Because the canals are not natural. I had to keep reminding myself of this, the way you have to keep reminding yourself of an unwelcome fact at a beautiful funeral. They were dug. They were engineered in the seventeenth century as instruments of commerce, arteries for a city that had made itself the warehouse of the world, and the wealth that paid for the digging and the leaning houses and the family crests carved discreetly above the doors came, much of it, from a single chartered company founded in 1621, the Dutch West India Company, which over its life carried something on the order of six hundred thousand human beings across the Atlantic in chains, financed by Amsterdam bankers, in ships built in Amsterdam yards, to grow sugar and coffee and cacao on the plantations of Suriname—a colony Amsterdam itself part-owned through a society whose gentlemen met in the palace on the Dam—and the sugar came back across the same water and was refined in the Jordaan, the very quarter the guidebooks now call charming, its air once thick with the smell of boiling cane, and so the water in front of me was not one water but two: the canal, and beneath it or behind it or inside it the Atlantic, the wide grey medium of the trade, the road made of water down which the bodies went and the sugar returned, and the city had been clever enough, or fortunate enough, or shameless enough, to bury the second water inside the first, so that you could stand on the bridge and feel only the beauty and call the feeling culture.

This is the trick, and it is performed everywhere in Europe, not as conspiracy but as habit, as the deep grammar of the place: the conversion of extraction into heritage, of violence into ambience, of labour into the smooth untroubled surface across which the tourist glides. Whenever I was confronted with beauty I tried, as a discipline, to ask what work had made it possible, and the question ruined a great deal of beauty for me, which I think was the point of asking, though it never quite ruined the canal, because the canal was too good, and that is the most unsettling part, that the beauty is real, that the spell works even on those who know exactly how it was financed.

I came to Europe on the nineteenth of May, which I mention because the visa arrived that same morning, hours before the flight, after weeks of the particular dread that the embassy manufactures as a matter of policy—the dread being, I have come to believe, part of the product, a way of reminding the supplicant that entry is a favour and the favour can be withheld—and I left behind me a Johannesburg in one of its periodic fevers, the xenophobia that returns like a season, the shops of Mozambicans and Somalis and Zimbabweans burning, men with knobkerries hunting other Black men through the same streets, and I carried that smoke with me into the clean Schengen air and it complicated, from the first hour, any simple story I might have told myself about innocence and guilt arranged neatly by colour, because the violence I had just fled was ours, was Black hands on Black bodies, the dispossessed turning on the more recently dispossessed, and Europe, whatever else it is, is the machine that taught the whole world to compete for scarcity it manufactured, and we had learned the lesson well, we were administering it to each other at home while I flew north to pitch for a project on decolonial aesthetics and epistemic dissidence.

The museum is where Europe narrates itself most openly, and the museum is older than it looks, older than its glass and its climate control and its mission statements about access and dialogue, because every museum is the descendant of the Wunderkammer, the cabinet of curiosities, the room in which a Renaissance gentleman assembled the world in miniature—a coral, a coin, a narwhal tusk sold to him as a unicorn’s horn, a saint’s knucklebone, a mask taken from a people he would never meet and whose god it may have been—and arranged the whole of creation by the logic of a single possessing eye, on the premise that to know a thing was to own it and to own it was to shelve it and to shelve it, correctly labelled, was to have understood it; and the modern museum did not break from this premise, it merely industrialised it, added humidity sensors and a café and a gift shop, kept the cabinet and called it a public good, so that when the institution returns an object now, hands a bronze back to a delegation under a flutter of cameras and calls it restitution and reckoning, the gesture is slipperier than it looks, because the drawer is emptied while the cabinet stands, the object goes home while the architecture that says some peoples make culture and other peoples conserve it remains exactly where it was, climate-controlled, humming, the managed air keeping the looted thing at the correct moisture, the water of preservation that is also the water of captivity, breathing on the masks all night in the dark after the guards go home.

And I thought of the table at Berlin, as one does in these rooms, the table around which in the winter of 1884 and into 1885 the powers of Europe sat in Bismarck’s residence on the Wilhelmstrasse beneath a great map of Africa that a Nigerian historian would later describe as drooping down the wall like a question mark, and divided a continent among themselves over the course of a hundred or so days with no African present, not one chief or king or elder or priest, drawing borders with rulers across deserts and rivers and the living bodies of peoples who had never heard the word Berlin, so that the straight lines on the map of Africa today—the unnaturally straight ones, the ones that betray they were drawn by men who had never walked the ground—are not geography but furniture, the pencil-marks of that table, and the states those lines enclose, the states that issue our passports and man our border posts and inherited intact the colonial machinery of administration and law, were founded in that room, without us, and handed to us afterward as though they had always been ours; which is why I have come to believe, and will say plainly even in an essay that distrusts plainness, that the regimes that govern us are illegitimate at the root, not failing but illegitimate, conceived in a German drawing room by men who saw us as terrain—and yet I distrust even this, because to say it cleanly is to imply a pure Africa waiting beneath the colonial paint, intact, retrievable, and there was no such Africa, there were empires here with their own conquests and their own captives, the point being not that we were innocent but that whatever we might have become we were not permitted to become, the breaking done without us and the broken thing then sold back to us as inheritance.

Warsaw refused my categories, which is what I most valued about it. It is not a colonial city in the grammar I had brought with me; it is a city that was erased, flattened deliberately to rubble and then raised again from photographs and paintings and the stubborn memory of its people, so that the old town you walk through is a reconstruction, a city performing its own vanished past to itself, and its ghosts are not the people it stole but the people stolen from it, a Europe that knows erasure from the inside, that was itself partitioned and occupied and made to disappear off the map by its neighbours—and I record this because I do not want the word Europe to harden in my mouth into a single guilty monolith, because the man cleaning the floor of the Warsaw gallery and the man who financed the Suriname plantation are both called European and the word that holds them both has stopped meaning very much. I saw no other Black faces in Warsaw until my colleagues arrived, and before they came there was the old contraction in the body, the grandmother’s caution travelling in the blood, the awareness of being the first of one’s line to stand in a particular northern square. And in that square, and on the coat of arms, and raised in bronze by the Vistula with her sword lifted and her shield ready, I found the mermaid, the Syrenka, the armed water-woman who is the symbol of the city, and I laughed out loud, a real laugh in the cold, because I knew her, I have always known her—why is Mami Wata in Warsaw, I kept asking, why is the spirit of my rivers and the wide sea, keeper of wealth and danger and healing, beautiful and not to be trifled with, standing guard over a Polish tram stop with a sword—and the answer, when it came, was the saddest thing the city told me: that she is a logo here, a civic emblem drained of her divinity, a god demoted to heraldry, which means that Europe too once had its water spirits and its living cosmologies, that they were not always this cold, that somewhere behind the cathedrals there were wells and herbs and turning seasons and women in the water who were worshipped and not trademarked, and that the difference between us is not that they lacked what we have but that they hung their goddess on a wall and we still, some of us, on certain nights, know how to kneel to her.

I kept noticing the cold, and I want to be careful here because it can be misheard as contempt when I mean it closer to grief: that white people, by and large, do not dance, or dance as though apologising to their own bodies, holding the shoulders, managing the face, withholding warmth even in the one act designed to surrender it; that the cities rank, year upon year, near the bottom of every list of friendliness to the stranger, Vienna somewhere down at the very floor of them, immaculate and beautiful and somehow uninhabited by warmth; and I read this first as cruelty and slowly came to read it as a wound, because the hyper-individualism we are taught to envy as the highest freedom is, seen from inside, a kind of solitary confinement with excellent furniture, the self as a sovereign atom owing nothing and held by nothing, which is not liberty but exile from the net, and they are crushed beneath a history they can neither digest nor disown, sitting in cathedrals full of a God they no longer believe in, suspicious of touch and of communion and of the self-abandonment that dancing and grieving and praying all require, because the operating system they built and exported taught them, first of all and most thoroughly, that to need others is to be prey. And when I asked them—what was here before Rome, before the Church, what are your own factory settings, your own indigenous cosmologies—I found the door bolted from the inside, because the pre-Christian, the herb and the well and the old turning year, now travels under the word pagan, and the word pagan has been captured, contaminated, claimed by the political right after a season in which some who reached for the old ways did so as a flag of grievance rather than a homecoming, refusing the vaccine and clutching at roots as a weapon, so that an entire people are now foreclosed from their own ancestors by the politics of a single bad decade, told that to ask after the well is to side with the worst of their kind; and this is its own dispossession, self-inflicted but real, and it produced in me the strangest solidarity I carried home, the recognition that we were robbed of our cosmologies by them and they have been robbed of theirs by the very engine they built and still mistake for freedom, the only real difference being that we know we were robbed and they believe the empty room is liberty—which is not absolution, I want to be clear, understanding the captor’s cage does not unlock mine, but it is something, it is the beginning of a refusal to organise the whole drama by colour alone.

What I want, then—and the essay has been circling this without saying it, the way you circle a grave before you can stand at it—is what I have come to call factory settings, not nostalgia, not the airport-lounge Africa of mudcloth and marketing, not a theme park of ourselves, but something colder and more serious: to wipe the imposed operating system and boot again from the original, from the hyperlocal frameworks our ancestors developed for this specific soil and these specific dead, the ontology in which a person is a person only through other persons, in which land is not property but a relative, an ancestor, the dead lowered into it and waiting, in which knowledge lives in the body and the praise-name and the potter’s hands and the beadwork that is a language and cannot be stolen into a vitrine because it does not survive removal from the body that carries it—and I think of Fanon, the Martinican who put on the white mask and felt it fuse to his face, who understood that decolonisation is not a negotiation but a rupture; and I think of the woman mopping the museum floor; and I think, most of all and last of all, of the man in the cell.

Because the exhibition closes, eventually, as all the performances close, the lights come up over the emptied galleries, the collectors fly home, the panel on decolonial aesthetics is applauded and dispersed, and someone arrives with a bucket—almost always a woman, almost always a migrant, certainly not in the catalogue, certainly outside every frame the institution has hung—and she begins to mop, and the water goes across the floor in long grey arcs under the dying lights, the same water that filled the canal and carried the trade and breathed all night on the looted masks and stood as a goddess in the Vistula with a sword, the water that we pour, at home, for the ancestors, libation onto the ground so the dead can drink, and she is pouring it now without meaning to, this tired woman closing the venue, anointing the floor of Europe’s theatre with the one element that remembers everything and explains nothing, and I want to tell her something but the building is closing and I have a train to catch, and Steve Biko, who said the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed, who was beaten to death in a cell in 1977 and driven naked across the country in the back of a van, is not in this room and is in this room, and somewhere under the mopwater and the marble and the managed air something older than all of it goes on speaking, in a language the museum cannot label and the cabinet cannot hold, and the woman wrings out the cloth, and the last light goes, and Europe, exhausted, immaculate, still narrating, locks its doors behind us for the night.

“I have learned that what I have not drawn I have never really seen.” — Frederick Franck

“Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I. Invocation

There is a word — proxy — that we have domesticated into bureaucracy, into the vocabulary of shareholder meetings and notarized documents, into the bloodless machinery of legal substitution. But before it was clipped into that administrative tidiness, it was procuracy, from the Latin procurare: to take care of, to manage on behalf of another. And before that, before the Latin, there was the raw philosophical problem the word was invented to solve: how does a self act when the self cannot be present? How does an absent body leave a mark in the world? How does the unseen insist on being counted?

Moshekwa Langa has been asking this question his whole life. He simply does it in paint and soil and ballpoint pen and powdered Polyfilla, on paper he floods like a pool on hot Amsterdam summer days.

II. Mythologizing the Subject

You have to understand that Moshekwa Langa was not supposed to happen.

Not in the way that sentences like that are usually meant — as praise wrapped in condescension, as the soft amazement of those who believe certain coordinates cannot produce certain things. No. He was not supposed to happen in a deeper, more structurally precise sense: the apartheid system and its afterlives were engineered, with considerable administrative care, to ensure that a boy from Bakenberg, Limpopo, who did not go to art school, who changed tapes at the SABC, who is made of donkey carriages and firewood and the particular wide sky of the North, would not become one of the most significant artists of his generation. The machinery was thorough. The exclusion was not accidental.

And yet here we are. Here he is, living in Amsterdam, making work that international critics strain to reach the right vocabulary for, that lands in major institutions, that fills a gallery in Cape Town a decade after his first show there — and the myth of him is inseparable from the work of him. This is not incidental. The self-taught artist who came up through an institution (the SABC) designed for mass consumption, who never submitted to the credentialing apparatuses of formal art education, who made himself from the materials available — this biography is not background to the paintings. It isthe paintings. The irreverence is not a style. It is a survival strategy that became a cosmology.

In Wound Tight, I wrote about how the art historical archive is a curated amnesia, how certain gestures only become “radical” when certain hands make them. What Langa represents — what his very existence as a working artist represents — is the refusal to wait for that permission. He didn’t ask. He simply made. And the making accumulated into a body of work so particular, so saturated with its own internal logic, that the institutional world eventually had to come to him. This is a different kind of power than the kind that gets granted. It is the power of someone who understood, early and without sentiment, that the proxy must sometimes act as though the principal is already present, already authorized, already arrived — even when the room is empty, even when the door is still technically closed.

III. The Performance of Strain

But let us not mythologize too easily. Let us look at what the work costs.

Langa describes his studio practice in Proxies as a kind of abandonment to process: he flooded surfaces, layered pigments, trusted the heat, added materials from grocery shops and hardware stores. He speaks of it with the serenity of a craftsman who has made peace with uncertainty — and there is genuine equanimity in his language, a man who has earned the right to say I simply trusted the process because trust, for him, is not passivity but a rigorous epistemology, a way of knowing through making that doesn’t require the anxiety of total control.

But attend to what is underneath that calm. Attend to the materials: Polyfilla, which cakes into stones. Coffee grounds. Fabric shop off-cuts with serrated edges. Building materials. These are not the materials of luxury or ease. These are the materials of the person who improvises, who makes do, who finds beauty in the detritus of ordinary living because ordinary living is what he has always had access to. The hardware store is not a conceptual statement. It is where he shops. And the transformation of those materials into surfaces that art historians reach for lyrical language to describe — bird’s eye views of a rolling landscape, a map and a surface and a legend, a poem — this transformation is labour. It is exhausting labour performed by a man who has also had to carry the weight of being legible to audiences who do not share his coordinates, who approach his work from outside the vernacular, who cannot hear what the work is saying without translation.

What is being concealed in the apparent ease of Langa’s surfaces? The strain of being perpetually in transit between his childhood in Bakenberg and his studio in Amsterdam, between the calf that was stolen and the pool of blue pigment on the studio floor, between being no longer here, no longer there, unheard, unseen, but well noted at the same time. That last phrase is the wound the whole exhibition is managing: the peculiar violence of being well noted but not seen, documented but not recognized, present but functionally absent. To live in that condition and continue to make is not ease. It is endurance. The beautiful surfaces in Proxies are the evidence of what endurance looks like when it refuses to collapse.

IV. Forensic Reading

I was running a lung infection the day I went. Cape Town was warm and generous with its light, the kind of day the city offers sometimes as apology for everything else, and I went anyway, because there are things you do sick and there are things you cannot wait to do well.

The first work that stopped me near the entrance was Spitfires II — and before I could approach it critically, before I could activate the machinery of looking, something else happened. Childhood happened. The word Spitfire in my bones, not as art historical reference, not as Second World War iconography, but as the fighter jets that used to tear across the sky above our township in Pretoria — that sound, that impossible speed, that sudden rupture of the ordinary sky that made everything feel vast and dangerous and full of a world I had not yet seen. The title did that before the image. This is what Langa understands that no art school teaches: that the word is not secondary to the image. That language and image are collaborators in the project of triggering the imagination, and that the imagination, once triggered, does not need to be directed. It finds its own way.

And so I arrived at Spitfires II already open, already activated by a private frequency the work had tuned before I could defend against it.

What is the painting? It is, formally, a dense layering of pigment — reds and blues and the kind of yellow that feels both industrial and alive — with forms that could be planes or birds or memories or wounds. It refuses to resolve. This refusal is not evasion; it is precision. Langa is being precise about what the interior landscape actually looks like: not a clean image but an accumulation, an interference pattern, a thing that keeps moving even when you hold it still.

Then Big Mama — and here the presence was physical, gravitational. There is a specific weight that certain works carry in a room, a quality of demanding rather than requesting attention, and this work had it. The figure — large, central, the title functioning as both description and archetype — sits at the intersection of tenderness and mythological force. Big Mama is everyone’s grandmother and no one’s, is the Limpopo earth and the Amsterdam studio and the distance between them, is the body that remains after everything else has been abstracted away. The work does not sentimentalize. It simply insists.

Moving through the Gravity series — Gravity (Mirage), Gravity (Johnny), Gravity (Arone), Gravity (Far Pavilions), Gravity (Windmill Man) — one notices the darkness. Paper painted black, and then figures that simultaneously absorb and reflect light, that seem to be made of the same darkness that surrounds them, visible only by differentiation rather than contrast. Langa says of them: they are proxies, they are translucent. Ghostly even. They are not me and I am not them. But what is a ghost if not the proxy of someone who was? The ghost stands in for the person who can no longer be present. The ghost acts on behalf of the missing. The ghost says: I was here. I was counted. My presence left a mark in this particular darkness.

Against these stand the Sleeper Agents — Ramokone, Mokome, Mpho, Malose, Thapelo, Seopa, Matlhaba — on white paper, in ballpoint and graphite, figures rendered with a spare, provisional line that feels like thinking-while-drawing, like the hand making decisions the mind hasn’t yet authorized. These figures are described as visitors, strangers, messengers. They hold perhaps a light, perhaps a clue. The names — Sepedi names, Northern Sotho names, names from the same geography as Bakenberg, as my own family’s origins in Limpopo — function as an act of witnessing, of insisting that these people exist, have coordinates, have histories that the gallery wall cannot fully contain.

Ga-Maraba. Manzini (Meetse) Waters. The roots of a suspended bark. Echoes. Regeneration. The titles accumulate like the names in Brenda (2002) — that great earlier work where I once stood at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair trying to find Brenda Fassie’s name in the collage and couldn’t be certain if it was there or not, which is itself the point, the archive refusing legibility even when you are looking directly at it. In Proxies, the same logic operates at a different register: the titles are coordinates without maps, place names without territories, a geography of the interior that corresponds to external locations only obliquely, only for those who have been in those places, felt those weathers, carried those names.

V. Collapse of Distance

I kept thinking, walking through the show, in a fever-slow version of looking: who is this for?

Not as a dismissal. As a genuine question, an aching one. The works are in Cape Town, in a gallery that is beautiful and serious and attended by people who know how to look, who have the cultural capital to appreciate what they are seeing, who will take photographs and write captions and add it to the record of having been present. And the works are also — simultaneously, irreducibly — from a place and a set of experiences that most of those people will encounter only as aesthetic information, as texture and tone and the interesting otherness of a practice that emerged from coordinates they have never occupied.

I wanted someone there who knew what Ga-Maraba smells like in the evening. I wanted someone there who had heard Spitfire in their chest before they learned to say it. I wanted someone there for whom the Sleeper Agents‘ names were not phonetically interesting but personally intimate — the names of uncles, neighbours, the boy from down the road whose mother made the best pap and whose father you never saw.

This is what it felt like to be in that gallery that warm Cape Town morning, slightly feverish, moving through the work: it felt like speaking to my closest friend in our shared vernacular in a room full of people for whom our language is music they cannot understand. It felt intimate in its vastness. The exhibition was simultaneously private and public, simultaneously speaking to everyone and to someone specific, and I was — impossibly, gratefully — that specific person.

The proxy, I thought then, is also the work itself. The work stands in for the artist, who is in Amsterdam. The work stands in for Bakenberg, which is in Limpopo. The work stands in for a childhood that cannot be recovered, a calf that was never found, dogs that are gone. The work stands in for all the people who cannot afford a plane ticket or a gallery ticket or the particular kind of cultural access that gets you into a room like this. The work is managing all of these absences. And it is doing so with extraordinary, unflinching grace.

VI. The Cultural and Spiritual Frame

Proxy. Procuracy. The act of standing in for the absent.

In Roman law, the procurator was the agent empowered to act on behalf of the dominus — the principal — in their absence. The proxy was not the person, but the proxy had the person’s authority, could speak in the person’s name, could make binding decisions, could appear before institutions that would otherwise not recognize the absent party. The proxy was a legal fiction that made presence possible across distance.

In the African spiritual traditions that run beneath and through Langa’s work — not as explicit iconography but as structural logic — the ancestor is something like a proxy. The ancestor acts on behalf of the living from the other side of the veil. The ancestor can be consulted, can intercede, can make themselves felt through the material world. The dead are not absent. They are operating through proxies: a recurring image in a dream, a name that keeps coming back, a shape in the paint that looks like something you remember but cannot locate.

The Gravity figures, on their black paper, absorbing and reflecting light, ghostly and translucent, not-Langa and also-Langa — these are something like ancestors. They have the gravity, literally, of things that pull. They pull the viewer into a different relationship with darkness, with presence, with the question of what it means to be visible. They are not portraits. They are intermediaries.

Langa sits in a lineage that does not appear in most surveys of South African art history, which — as I have argued elsewhere, following Thami Jali’s lead, following Ernest Mancoba’s example — is a curated amnesia rather than an accurate record. He sits with Mancoba, who understood that abstraction was a return rather than an advance, a circling back to modes of knowing that preceded the colonial demand for legible representation. He sits with Dineo Seshee Bopape, also from Limpopo, also making work that refuses the demand for clean meaning, that insists on polysemy, on the coexistence of multiple registers. He sits with Jali, whose late work about Nukain Mabuza understood that the outsider artist — the person who makes without institutional sanction, who creates a visual language from necessity rather than training — is not marginal to the tradition but is often its most radical node.

What connects these artists is the refusal to perform legibility for audiences who have not earned the intimacy the work requires. What connects them is the insistence on making work that is accountable first to its own internal logic, to the experiences and memories and cosmologies from which it emerged, and only secondarily — if at all — to the market that will eventually try to absorb it.

Langa makes work that the art world has learned to value without, in many cases, fully understanding. This is not a criticism of the art world. It is a description of the proxy function the work performs: it stands in for something — a history, a geography, a set of relations — that its audiences may not have direct access to, and through that standing-in, it makes that something present, makes it count, makes it act in the world.

VII. The Question of Survival

What does it mean to make work like this for thirty years?

What does it mean to carry Bakenberg into Amsterdam, to carry Amsterdam back to Cape Town, to move perpetually between the place you came from and the place that recognized you, the childhood that made you and the career that named you, the private self and the public figure — knowing that the recognition is always partial, always at a slight angle to the thing that was actually made, always arriving in the language of the institution rather than the language of the work?

The exhibition closed yesterday. By the time you read this, the Gravity figures will have been taken down from the walls of Stevenson, wrapped carefully, stored or sold or shipped somewhere. The Sleeper Agents will be in their crates. The installation that took months to make will be gone in an afternoon. And what remains? The photographs, the catalogue, the memory of those who stood in that room. The record.

But records are also proxies. The archive stands in for the experience it cannot contain. The catalogue image stands in for the surface that had the powdered Polyfilla and the coffee grounds and the serrated fabric patterns built into it over months of hot Amsterdam summer days. The review — this review — stands in for whatever happened when I moved through that space with a fever and a history and a love for this artist that I cannot fully account for, that began before I understood what art was, that is made of the same impossible, indeterminate material as the work itself.

What remains, when the performance of artmaking collapses into storage and provenance and the secondary market, is the question Langa has been asking all along: what does a self leave behind when it cannot be present? How does the absent body continue to act? How does the proxy carry the weight of the principal without being consumed by it?

I don’t know. I don’t think Langa knows either. I think that’s why he keeps making.

There is a calf that was stolen in Bakenberg and never found. There are dogs that bit and were loved and died and were never replaced. There are fighter jets tearing across a township sky and a boy looking up with his whole chest open to the world’s terrifying vastness. There are donkey carriages delivering water and sand, echoes of a more bucolic timeline. There is a studio in Amsterdam that becomes a pool in the summer, pigments spreading across the floor, the surface of things slowly densifying into a record of curiosities.

None of it is over. None of it is gone. It is simply operating through proxies now — through the Gravity figures and the Sleeper Agents, through Big Mama and Ga-Maraba and Spitfires II, through the works that close today and reopen wherever they are next seen, by eyes that may or may not know what Bakenberg smells like, by hands that may or may not have gathered firewood, by hearts that may or may not have heard, in the word Spitfire, the sound of the world suddenly cracking open to reveal everything it contains.

The proxy is not the person. But the proxy carries the person’s authority. The proxy appears before institutions and says: I am here. I am acting on behalf of someone you have not fully recognized. My presence is their presence. My mark is their mark.

And what happens when the proxy itself becomes irreplaceable? What happens when the stand-in becomes, over thirty years of making, the thing itself?

That is the question Proxies leaves suspended — not as failure, not as incompletion, but as the only honest place to end. In the white space after the last work. In the gallery after the last visitor. In the archive after the last document. In the world after the last word.

Still present. Not quite nameable. Well noted.

Moshekwa Langa, Proxies, Stevenson Cape Town, 28 March – 9 May 2026

The first time I went to Durban I was four years old. It was a church camp trip. The reason I remember this — the reason it has remained available to me across all the years since, more vivid than most things I have chosen to remember — is because I almost drowned. I rushed into the ocean without understanding the power of its current, and the current pulled me in. The water was warm. That detail has always seemed important, that it was warm rather than cold, that there was no shock to it, only a slow and total rearrangement of where I was in relation to the surface. This is what Durban does. It does not announce itself as dangerous. It does not need to.

I recall, while this was happening, that I managed to focus my attention on a man who was standing in the water not far from me in red underwear. He was very still. Everyone around me was panicking and the waves were crashing and the salt was in my mouth and my nose and the sound was a low, pressurised roar, and he told me to let go. To relax. His voice was unhurried, the way a voice is unhurried when it has decided that urgency will not help. When he brought me back I looked up at him, coughing up sea water, tasting it at the back of my throat, and he lifted me and smiled. I was safe. It was one of the more memorable moments of my childhood, though I would not have described it that way then. What I did not understand, at four, and perhaps still do not understand fully, is that the instruction — let go, relax — was not a comfort. It was a technique. The ocean had a logic, and survival required learning its grammar, suspending your own instincts, submitting to the system’s terms. I have been thinking about this ever since, though I did not always call it thinking.

The second time that matters, I came with Lebo. I had no employment at the time and had just moved in with her after living out of a caravan for over three months — story for another day. The caravan had smelled of damp and instant coffee and a particular brand of cheap incense, she told me, though she had said this without complaint, almost with fondness, which is the way people speak about spaces that held them when nothing else would. She and her friends had planned a trip together; one of the friends couldn’t make it. She asked me to come, and I, unemployed, with two thousand rands to my name, got excited and agreed. This is also how the city works: it makes room for you when the arrangement falls through elsewhere, when someone can’t make the rent by two thousand rands. Entry is rarely formal. Durban absorbs.

We were to travel together and on this trip I produces a photo series and a film — the film was titled Mawatle — and we were also attending the Zakifo festival, where Petit Noir and Damien Marley were performing. To speak of Zakifo is to speak of a particular architecture of collective feeling: a field reorganised into a temporary republic of bodies, bass frequencies, smoke, and the performance of freedom. I will never forget the moment Damien Marley screamed into the microphone: Durban, do you like Ganja? The crowd lurched forward. The air was thick and sweet with smoke, a warm fog that sat at chest height and moved when people moved. Rastafarians were dancing on stage, their feet loud on the boards. His hair touched the floor, his swagger and passion and a love was as palpable as the heat coming off the bodies pressed around me. The set was long but less than I had hoped for. That was my favourite memory of the city. And I have returned to it often enough since that I now wonder what I am returning to: the memory, or the feeling the memory gives me permission to have.

I left Johannesburg mid-morning on a day winter felt close, the air cold thin and bright, the kind that sits in the back of the throat. On the plane the cold slowly gave way. When I landed the day was cloudy but it had rained recently, and as we descended I could see the trees glowing a vivid, almost aggressive green, the vegetation pressing right up to the edges of things. It was unlike the dry and arid landscape of the city I had come from, where the earth in winter goes the colour of old paper. Here everything felt raw and lush and almost wilfully alive. I took an Uber from the garage a little outside the airport and we took the scenic route. The ocean appeared on my left as a dark, flat weight. The driver gave city tips as we drove along, his voice low and certain, pointing at things without looking at them. He knew the city the way people know a city they have no intention of leaving, which is differently from the way a visitor knows it. His knowledge was in the body. Mine was accumulating, transactional, organised toward an exit I had already booked.

We arrived at the Goble Palms as the light was beginning to thicken. The space felt full of promise — high ceilings, wooden floors that gave slightly underfoot, the windows already darkening with bougainvillea. There was the smell particular to old colonial buildings in coastal cities, of wood and salt and something faintly institutional, like a school that had been converted into something pleasant. Which is what it was, in a sense: a conversion. The colonial architecture of Durban — British-inflected, tropics-adjusted, charmed by its own incongruity — has been aestheticised rather than interrogated, packaged as atmosphere at a nightly rate. Strangely, I thought, a bit like home. That thought deserves to be held up to the light. What does it mean to feel at home in a building whose familiarity was produced by an occupation that was not yours? Whose comfort are you inhabiting when you call something home?

That evening I went out and ate wild oysters from the shell, cold and tasting of clean seawater, and drank a bottle of Whole Berry Cabernet Sauvignon, Vintage 2022, which was rough and good and dark in the glass. I remember thinking, and telling anyone who would listen, how incredible the value for money was. Value for money is a phrase worth examining. It expresses satisfaction at a ratio, at getting more than you paid for, but it does not ask who absorbs the remainder. Somewhere in the supply chain of every exceptional value there is a labour that has been priced below its cost. After the oysters we went to The Chairman. I had heard loads about the place, my expectations were high; I went back three more times during the weekend, which is itself a kind of data: the body voting with its return, the system confirming its hold. The music at the club we went to later was re-emasculating in a way I found hard to name — too loud in the wrong frequencies, the bass coming up through the floor without warmth — and I desired more. The party was generic and, by degrees, dangerous. Nonetheless there was a buoyancy to the night, a quality of aliveness in the air that I recognised as specific to this city, and I found it difficult to return to my hotel until the early hours. Buoyancy is the word I keep returning to. It is what the ocean gave me at four, unexpectedly, against my own panic. But buoyancy is also what the system extends selectively: to be held up by a city is not a neutral experience. It means the city has assessed you and found you receivable.

The next morning I woke with a crisp clarity. The light through the curtains was white and specific. I lay in the particular confidence of someone who has slept well in an unfamiliar bed and feels, briefly, that they understand where they are. I went out and navigated the esplanade, which is designed for exactly this — for the feeling of navigation without the reality of it, a controlled perimeter along which one moves with the illusion of freedom while the ocean keeps you honest on one side and the city keeps you honest on the other. The sea breeze came off the ocean in pulses, warm and then cooler, carrying the smell of brine and diesel from the harbour. The harbour is worth thinking about: one of the busiest ports on the African continent, a node in a global logistics network that moves goods at a scale the esplanade is specifically designed not to make you think about. The people here moved with a kind of purpose I found difficult to account for, strong and ferocious in some quality I couldn’t quite locate. I had lunches — the light on the water during lunch, the condensation on the glass, the sound of the city arranged at a comfortable distance. I went to Humble Coffee for the atmosphere, which was layered and warm, the smell of roasting cutting through the salt air. I would also recommend, for those who need a recommendation, the strawberry matcha, which arrived in a glass, very green with red strawberry speckles, very still.

My last evening was spent at Soundset Sunday, one of my favourite parties, a set of many different tables gathered in a courtyard where the sound collected softly, DJs back to back. Later a group of us met at La Pizzeria, which is open twenty-four hours. There was whiskey that smelled of peat and something sweeter underneath. The conversations had a quality I have noticed before in coastal cities at night, a looseness, a willingness to follow a thought wherever it goes, the kind that does not happen in cold places. It made me feel, even afterwards, that the evening had not quite ended, that it was merely continuing somewhere I was no longer present to witness.

Afterwards I walked to the beachfront alone. The ocean was dark and the waves came in without hurry, the same waves, the same water, the same warm current that once decided I was worth returning. I thought about the man in red underwear — his stillness, his unhurried voice, the way he held me up without making a performance of it. Nobody knows they are being held until they are back on the shore. This city had held me, in its way. Carelessly, as cities do. But held. And I had let it, which is its own kind of complicity: the willingness to be supported by a structure without fully examining what the structure is built on, or who laid the foundations, or whose labour keeps the floors from giving way entirely underfoot. I stood there until the feeling passed, and then, because there was nothing else to do, I went to sleep, and in the morning I left, and Durban went on without me, as it had always intended to. The ocean continued. The current moved. Somewhere in it, still, the instruction: let go. Relax. The system does not need your understanding to function. Only your return.

There is a song from my childhood I have never been able to fully bury—or rather, it has refused burial, returning at intervals with the persistence of things that were never merely incidental. It was a rendition of Joe Mafela’s Baba Mnomzana, that warm, wobbling Zulu melody so easily associated with paternal tenderness, except the children at school had revised it. Revision is too gentle a word. It was, more precisely, an early exercise in classification.

“Nwanga Tlhoho’egima.”

The subject was my head. Its size. Its gravitational insistence. They sang with the kind of precision that only cruelty seems able to produce without rehearsal, and I want to be exact here: it was funny. Or rather, it was structured like something funny, which is not quite the same thing. Even then, I could recognise the timing, the collective authorship, the strange efficiency with which a group of children can arrive at consensus when the object is a single body.

What I could not yet recognise—what I was being inducted into—was that this was pedagogy. They were not only mocking me. They were locating me. Fixing me within a hierarchy that none of us had invented but all of us seemed already fluent in. A face, I was learning, could be a problem before it was ever allowed to become a person.

I grew up ko Mabopane and commuted each morning to a Model C school in Centurion—a sentence that appears logistical but contains, compressed within it, an entire grammar of aspiration, translation, and quiet dislocation. I had large lips. A nose still negotiating its proportions. A hairline that read less as boundary than as declaration. And yes, the head. The magnificent, difficult, excessive head.

By the available criteria—which I would later come to understand as neither neutral nor incidental, but historically produced and rigorously maintained—I was ugly. Not in the romanticised sense that ugliness sometimes acquires in retrospect, where it becomes a precursor to revelation. Simply, functionally, socially ugly. The kind of ugly that does not attract intervention. The kind that is processed, bypassed, absorbed into the background of institutional life without comment.

Then, at some indeterminate point—these shifts rarely announce themselves, and when they do it is only retrospectively, staged as inevitability—the proportions resolved. The lips, previously excessive, became legible as form. The nose acquired what is often called character, which is to say it ceased to offend the prevailing grammar. The face reorganised itself into something the world could read without resistance.

And the world, which had not apologised for its earlier indifference, did not mark the transition either. It simply adjusted. Doors opened with marginally less effort. Interactions acquired a softness that had previously been absent, or perhaps withheld. A certain generosity entered the room—not declared, not acknowledged, but consistently applied.

This is often narrated as growth. It is more accurately described as admission.

This essay is not a celebration of that admission. It is a suspicion of it.

What I have not said yet—because it is the clause that destabilises the narrative of becoming—is that my lightness was doing an extraordinary amount of work, most of it silently, all of it efficiently. There are rules here. They are never stated, which is precisely how they maintain their authority.

South Africa’s apartheid architecture did not simply organise bodies; it calibrated them. It installed, within blackness itself, a gradient of worth so finely tuned that it no longer requires enforcement to remain operational. The Population Registration Act did not only divide. It ranked.

That ranking did not disappear. It converted. It moved, seamlessly, into commerce, into culture, into the quiet arithmetic of daily life. It became the global skin-lightening industry, the relaxer aisle, the blue contact lens in a bathroom cabinet in Soweto. It became the difference between an accent described as articulate and one described as excessive. It became, most efficiently, an internal curriculum: that proximity to whiteness is proximity to value. That to be upwardly mobile, one must first perform a kind of self-cleansing — not of dirt, but of origin.

When I arrived at the University of Pretoria I had a gold tooth. A star. I want to describe it accurately: it was beautiful. It was also, I was soon made to understand, a problem. There was a girl I was interested in, and when I expressed this she was direct — she would not date a man with a gold tooth. I want to be honest about what I did next: I removed it. I sacrificed the star. She was unmoved regardless, which is the part of the story that should embarrass me but instead clarifies it, because the lesson was never really about her. The lesson was about what I was willing to subtract from myself in pursuit of legibility within a system I had not yet named. The gold tooth was not ghetto. It was adorned. But we had been so comprehensively trained to read black ornamentation as excess, as a failure of aspiration, that I briefly accepted that judgement as my own.

This is not an isolated pathology. Just this week, Black Twitter convulsed around a tweet celebrating “black Joburg wealth” appearing at a jazz festival in Franschhoek — among the white people, in wine country, as though arrival in those spaces constituted radicalism. The tweet was earnest. That is the disturbing part. Not the aspiration toward leisure, which is legitimate, but the framing of proximity to whiteness as the measure of black achievement. The festival did not change. The wine country did not shift. Only the bodies moved — and were applauded for moving in that direction rather than any other.

When I became beautiful, I did not exit that system. I became more fluent in it.

The philosopher Elaine Scarry suggests, in On Beauty and Being Just, that beauty carries an ethical charge — that encounters with the beautiful produce in us a kind of outward turning, a generosity, an inclination toward justice. It is an elegant argument. It is also, I think, the kind of argument that becomes persuasive when one has not had to consider its exclusions too closely.

The conflation of aesthetic grace with moral virtue is not an accident. It is an inheritance. It is why Frantz Fanon could not move through a French city without his body being read as excess, as threat, as the necessary contrast against which the category of the beautiful — European, ordered, contained — could stabilise itself.

In the 1870s, Francis Galton — Darwin’s cousin, founder of eugenics — developed composite photography to identify the criminal face. He overlaid portraits of convicted criminals, expecting ugliness to accumulate in the composite, expecting the body to confess its own disorder. The composites were instead conventionally attractive. He was genuinely disturbed by this result. And then, with the confidence available only to men who have never had to doubt the infrastructure beneath them, he proceeded anyway. The experiment that disproved the thesis was simply absorbed into the project as an anomaly. Beauty and moral virtue had already been soldered together so thoroughly that evidence to the contrary could not dislodge the joint. The data was not wrong. It was inconvenient. The distinction, in the history of power, has rarely mattered.

The halo effect — the tendency for perceived attractiveness to bleed upward into assumptions of competence, goodness, trustworthiness — is often presented as a cognitive quirk. It is more accurately understood as infrastructure. And between 1867 and the early twentieth century, several American cities made that infrastructure legislative. Chicago’s municipal code held that any person “diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object” could be fined for public appearance. These ordinances, known collectively now as the Ugly Laws, were not fully repealed until 1974. The state did not merely prefer beauty. It criminalised its absence. The halo effect, in other words, was not simply a bias in individual perception. It was, for nearly a century, a misdemeanour.

A world that has already decided who deserves care does not need to deliberate. It only needs to recognise.

Consider the Dove “Real Beauty” campaign, which positioned itself as corrective — as though the problem with beauty were merely its exclusions rather than its existence as a sorting mechanism. It expanded the frame. It diversified the image. But expansion is not dismantling. And the full account of Dove requires the name that the campaign’s framers preferred not to speak in the same breath: Fair & Lovely. Both products belonged to Unilever. While one division was photographing women with grey hair and stretch marks and calling it liberation, another was selling skin-lightening cream across Africa and Asia with advertising that explicitly promised career advancement and romantic success through lighter skin — the same internal curriculum, now in a tube, now with a before-and-after. In 2020, under public pressure, Unilever renamed Fair & Lovely to Glow & Lovely. They did not discontinue it. The same corporation selling you self-acceptance in one market and selling you skin-lightening in another is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense. It is a complete business model. It is the beauty industry’s most honest self-portrait: the aspiration and the correction, manufactured in the same facility, shipped to different shelves.

Renovation is mistaken, here, for transformation. The building remains intact. Only the facade is repainted.

Or take Lupita Nyong’o’s now-canonical speech on self-perception and dark skin. Its afterlife is instructive. The testimony did not destabilise the system that necessitated it. It was absorbed, circulated, aestheticised. The lesson, finally, was not that beauty is a structure of power. It was that the structure is, under exceptional conditions, permeable.

Here is what I know from having occupied different positions within that structure: ugliness and poverty are treated as adjacent conditions. The body in difficulty is the body that has failed to perform adequacy. And when I became legible as beautiful, I was granted the latitude that beauty purchases — patience, generosity, the assumption of interiority. None of this announced itself. It arrived like weather.

But there is a dimension of this that is less frequently articulated, perhaps because it is less easily sanitised. Ugliness is also about desire. About who is permitted to be wanted. The boys who sang that song were not only adjudicating my social position. They were, in the blunt logic of boyhood, already sorting us into those who would be chosen and those who would not. Male beauty, within many Southern African contexts, carries its own instability. To be called beautiful is not unambiguously to be affirmed. It unsettles. It feminises. It complicates.

I grew into a face the world recognises as beautiful, and I have had to decide, repeatedly, how to inhabit that recognition without reproducing its logic. I have not always succeeded. I have felt the same evaluative mechanisms move through me, uninvited but not resisted.

I want to be precise: I did not earn this. My face resolved. This is not the same as virtue.

Consider what the anti-aging industry is offering. Not youth, precisely, nor even health, though both function as alibis. What it offers is the simulation of a body outside of time. A body that does not accumulate evidence. A face that does not record its duration.

The scale of this desire — measurable now in hundreds of billions — suggests not vanity but terror. A culturally sanctioned refusal to recognise the body as archive. A wrinkle becomes error. A scar becomes defect. Grey hair becomes failure. The project, then, is not preservation but erasure.

This may be colonialism’s most enduring manoeuvre: not merely to produce dissatisfaction with the body, but to produce estrangement from time itself. To make us fear the very processes through which we become legible to our own histories. To sell, at considerable profit, the performance of a body that does not age, does not mark, does not die — a body, in other words, that has no ancestors. We were taught to hate ourselves and love their wealth. The anti-aging shelf is simply the latest conjugation of that lesson: spend enough, subtract enough, and you might yet escape the evidence of what you are.

The word glamour, incidentally, derives from the Scottish for a magic spell — from gramarye, occult learning, which shares its root with grammar. Both descend from the medieval Latin grammatica, referring to learning so arcane it was indistinguishable from sorcery. Glamour was, originally, enchantment. A spell cast over the eyes of the beholder to make them see something other than what was there. It entered the vocabulary of fashion and beauty only in the twentieth century. The word never lost its original meaning. It simply stopped announcing it. What we call the beauty industry is, in this older sense, a glamour industry — a project of managed enchantment, of making the constructed appear natural, the imposed appear chosen, the produced appear discovered.

We are, beneath that spell, accumulations of selection. Libraries of ancestry, every one of us. Every feature I was mocked for — the lips, the nose, the disproportionate head — arrived through generations of affirmation. Somewhere, repeatedly, across centuries of choosing, these forms were found beautiful. Were continued. The gold tooth was not an aberration in this lineage. It was an ornament in it — a way of saying, in the vocabulary of adornment that runs through African aesthetics from Nile to Cape, I am here and I am adorned and this is not incidental.

The colonial gaze did not discover ugliness. It produced it. And then it sold us the instruments of our own correction.

The Nguni concept of ubuntu is often translated too cleanly as “I am because we are.” What it describes, more precisely, is a theory of personhood that does not begin with the visible. It begins with relation. With being held in memory. With being called into recognition across time. The colonial gaze, which sorts bodies before it encounters them, is an interruption of this process. It substitutes surface for relation. It replaces being known with being seen.

I have a beautiful face now. That is the simplest way to say it, and also the least accurate. What it has given me is not knowledge, exactly, but access — to the contours of a system that had previously refused to disclose itself. Privilege does not clarify. It reveals selectively.

The child with the heavy, magnificent head was not waiting to become legible. He was already in possession of something the system could not read. The star in his mouth was not a flaw in his composition. It was a signature.

The tragedy is often described as delay. It is not delay. It is instruction — years spent learning to see oneself through a vocabulary that was never designed to recognise you. Spent removing stars from your own mouth in the hope that the subtraction will finally be enough.

It will not be enough.

And even now, the question remains, not as metaphor but as residue:

What, exactly, was he being prepared for?

I. The Decoy

Start with what the category cannot hold. Waste. That is the word consistently levelled at izikhotane — that label, at once diagnostic and dismissive, which promises understanding while foreclosing it. To call izikhotane waste is to arrive at the scene after the act, look at the stain of Ultramel on a burnt Italian shirt, and conclude you have understood the event. You have understood nothing. You have merely confirmed your prior. The waste is a decoy. The decoy is the whole point.

When South African luxury house MaXhosa Africa closed its Autumn/Winter 2026 runway presentation in Paris — the Siyi’Kulture collection, their fifth consecutive appearance on the official Paris Fashion Week calendar — a group of dancers and media personality Robot Boii poured Ultramel custard onto a MaXhosa carpet. The act was meant as homage. What it triggered instead was the most clarifying argument about a subculture South African Black Twitter has had in years. The argument was not really about Robot Boii. It was not really about MaXhosa. It was about the object — the skhothane — and what becomes of an object when someone else picks it up and uses it as a finishing move.

The custard is the hinge. It migrates from Thokoza Park in Soweto to a packed building in the 8th arrondissement, and in that migration it changes everything except its consistency. Thick. Yellow. Irreversible once poured. The same Ultramel, but no longer the same act.

THEORETICAL FRAME I · SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE

Guy Debord, writing in 1967, described the spectacle not as a collection of images but as “a social relation among people, mediated by images.” The spectacle does not merely show — it replaces. What was once directly lived becomes its own representation, and that representation, evacuated of the original living, circulates freely, changeable by whoever holds distribution rights. The spectacle’s central operation is precisely this: it takes something that required a body in a specific place to be meaningful, and makes it available everywhere to everyone, meaning nothing in particular.

Izikhotane was never about custard. The Ultramel was always a vehicle. What the Ultramel announced — in Tembisa, in Katlehong, in Diepsloot — was a relation of forces: I have enough to waste this. I am beyond the reach of scarcity. My abundance is so total I can destroy what you cannot afford to own. The custard was not the statement; the custard was the punctuation to a statement about social standing, about selfhood recovered from under the rubble of post-apartheid inequality, about young Black men performing an impossible sovereignty in the only arena that had ever admitted them.

On a Paris runway, the custard is punctuation to a different sentence. It has been promoted, and in being promoted, it has been emptied. Debord called it recuperation: the spectacle intercepts radical gestures, commodifies them, reinserts them into the mainstream where they function as style, as edge, as a flavour of the real without the consequence of the real. The custard in Paris is recuperated custard. It is custard as concept art. And concept art — aowa, haai — has never made anyone’s pulse jump like Gold Digger biting his iPhone with a gold grill.

“If I can burn this two point three shirt, who are you? You are no one.”
— Gadlamba , a Skothane from Thokoza Park, Soweto, circa 2014

II. MaTariana: On Being the Original

But to understand what the custard meant before it reached Paris, you have to understand what izikhotane understood about themselves long before Paris showed any interest. They called themselves MaTariana. The Italians. Not ironically, not aspirationally — ontologically. The name is a declaration of identity, not of imitation, and the distinction is everything.

When Bogosi Sekhukhuni still lived in joburg he observed something that most analysis of izikhotane misses entirely: that there is a genuine and deep convergence between Black township aesthetic sensibility and Italian baroque taste that precedes and exceeds any individual purchase of a DMD shirt or a pair of Rossimoda Pagani loafers. Walk into a Soweto home and look at it honestly. The heavy brocade curtains. The lounge suite with the plastic still on — preserved, precious, never allowed to degrade from its ideal form. The baroque bed base and headboard, the ornamented ceiling, the chandelier in a room that size has no architectural reason to contain one. These are not imported tastes. They are parallel productions. Two cultures, arriving from entirely different histories of exclusion and aspiration and religious pageantry, converging on the same aesthetic logic: that beauty should be excessive, that abundance should announce itself, that ornamentation is not decoration but argument.

Before Takashi Kurasawa jeans entered the streets of Pirara around 2006, the number one jean among matsatsantsa le dikhotane was Diesel. Not because Diesel was the most expensive option available. Because Diesel was Italian. The logic was already in place. The preference was already structurally coherent. The skhothane did not discover Italian aesthetics through a brand catalogue; they recognised a family resemblance. When they put on the DMD shirt or the Rossimoda loafer, they were not copying. They were confirming something they already knew about how beauty works, how display works, how the surface of a thing can be a form of argument about the interior.

THE SIMULACRUM

Baudrillard’s simulacrum is commonly understood as a copy that has lost its original — a representation so divorced from the real that it no longer refers back to anything. But the more precise and more devastating version of the concept is the simulacrum that never had an original to begin with: the copy that is not a copy because the thing it resembles was arrived at independently, from different coordinates, by different routes. This is not imitation. This is convergence. The township baroque is not a degraded version of Italian baroque. It is Italian baroque’s equal, produced under different pressure, carrying different stakes.

This reframes the entire phenomenon. When izikhotane wear Rossimoda and Versace and DMD — when they call themselves MaTariana and mean it — they are not performing aspiration toward a European ideal. They are recognising a cousin. The aesthetic convergence Sekhukhuni describes collapses the distance that the usual narrative of “poor kids buying things they cannot afford” depends on. That narrative requires a gap: between the thing’s proper context (European wealth, European taste) and its improper context (township, scarcity). But if the aesthetic logic was already present in the township — in the curtains, in the lounge suite, in the headboard — then there is no gap. There is only recognition. The Italian brand arrives and the skhothane says: ngyakuzwa. I know you.

And here is the irony that the Paris runway could not contain: when izikhotane finally arrived in Europe, Europe did not recognise that Europe had already arrived in Katlehong. The aesthetic conversation had been happening for decades, on one side only, without acknowledgment. MaTariana walked into the room and the room thought it was seeing a novelty. What it was seeing was a mirror.

III. The Arms Race You Cannot Win By Standing Still

Before the spectacle was theorised, it was lived. The diamondfield dandies of Kimberley in the 1880s wore expensive suits in the dust of the mining compounds where they were worked nearly to death. The oswenka of Jeppestown in the 1950s competed in sartorial battles that were not about fashion so much as they were about insisting on personhood under a system designed to deny it. The pantsula reappropriated the gardening uniform — the very costume of their subjugation — and made it a language of aesthetic authority. Each of these subcultures is a point in the same long line. The township has always known how to dress as an argument. Izikhotane is not the beginning of this logic. Izikhotane is its most recent, most extreme, most theoretically self-aware iteration.

THEORETICAL FRAME II · THE RED QUEEN HYPOTHESIS

Leigh Van Valen proposed in 1973 that species must continually evolve simply to maintain parity with co-evolving rivals — that standing still, in a world of mutual pressure, is effectively moving backwards. He named this after Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen, who tells Alice: “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” The hypothesis describes what biologists call an arms race: a dynamic in which every adaptation in one organism triggers a counter-adaptation in the other, driving escalation without rest. The race does not end. There is no winning; there is only the running.

Izikhotane is a Red Queen culture. From its emergence in the East Rand townships around 2005, it has always been structured as an escalating arms race between crews — not against an external enemy, but against one another, in the productive competition of display. You show up in a Rossimoda loafer; I show up in three pairs of DMD trousers. You pour Ultramel on your shirt; I set my shirt on fire. You destroy something worth a month of wages; I destroy something worth two. The logic is not waste — the logic is ukugqivisa: to outdo, to outperform, to force the other crew to escalate or concede. The Ultramel is not the end point. The Ultramel was always the opening move in the next round.

What the MaTariana framing adds to this Red Queen analysis is a ground beneath the escalation. The arms race is not arbitrary. It is not random conspicuous consumption. It is an arms race conducted in a specific aesthetic language that the participants understand as theirs — that they understand as beautiful, as correct, as the proper idiom for what they are trying to say. You cannot understand why the escalation takes the forms it takes — why Italian brands specifically, why baroque excess specifically, why the particular combination of the ornate and the destructible — without understanding that the township already had an aesthetic philosophy, and that philosophy rhymed with Italian baroque before it ever consciously engaged with it.

Which is why what happened in the park — the memory I carry without needing anyone to confirm it — was not spectacle. It was sport. It was war. It was art. A crew called Maswitsi against a crew called Sportavelas, and a young man called Gold Digger, and a grill in his mouth, and an iPhone 8 he was about to destroy for the pure uncontractable reason that he could, that the doing would be unassailable, that no counter-move existed on the day that could answer it. He bit down. The screen cracked. The crowd went — I cannot find the English for this — not wild, not silent, but something between reverence and riot. I have stood in galleries at openings and watched people perform appreciation. I have seen nothing that moved the body the way that moment moved the bodies around me in that park.

INTERLUDE · THOKOZA PARK, JOHANNESBURG

Two groups assembled. A crowd around them — not an audience, something older than an audience, a monyanyako, a gathering that was part of the event. The gumba music loud enough to make your sternum a percussion instrument. The Sportavelas opened strong: coordination, colour-saturation, destruction staged with the precision of choreography. Maswitsi responded. Back and forth. This is the Red Queen in the flesh: two organisms driving each other to the edge of what is possible.

Then Gold Digger stepped forward. He did not announce himself. The grill caught the afternoon light — gold, baroque, excessive, completely correct. The iPhone was a current model. He held it up — a moment of suspension, the crowd contracting inward — and bit down, and the screen cracked front and back, and the piece was over. Not because anyone said so. Because there was nowhere to go from there. The evolutionary ceiling, at least for that afternoon, had been reached.

I have never seen a gallery or museum work achieve that kind of foreclosure (except perhaps Arthur Jafa’s Love is the message, the message is Death). The best I have seen in a white cube is a kind of extended ambiguity. What Gold Digger did was different: waphela impela. It finished everything. And the grill in his mouth — MaTariana to the end — was the most Italian thing I have ever seen in my life.

IV. The Name That Won’t Come, and What That Costs

Here is what the category of waste cannot hold: the precise phenomenology of that moment, which was a moment of total presence, of social time compressed into a single irreversible act, the opposite of spectacle precisely because it could not be replicated, could not be resold, could not be streamed. The iPhone was broken. The breaking was the thing. The breaking was ukugqivisa taken to its logical terminus — the only authentic terminus of an arms race, which is the point at which one party simply cannot go further.

Debord wrote that the spectacle turns “the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing.” Izikhotane, in its originary form, inverts this progression. The skhothane does not merely appear to have — he destroys what he has, and in destroying it performs a having so total it transcends the object. The shirt is not an object, it is an argument. The burned money is not money — it is the refusal of money’s logic. The bitten iPhone is not a consumer product — it is a monument to the freedom that consists in the ability to destroy what money buys. This is not waste. This is a theology of sovereignty, practised by people whom the post-apartheid dispensation gave nominal freedom and kept materially dispossessed.

And the Italian brand in this equation is not incidental. The choice of Diesel over a cheaper jean, of Rossimoda over a more affordable shoe, of Versace over a local label — these are not status moves in any simple sense. They are aesthetic moves. The skhothane is selecting the object that is most philosophically consonant with his own aesthetic logic: the baroque, the ornate, the premium, the thing that announces its own value in excess of its utility. When he destroys that object, he is not destroying a European brand. He is destroying the most perfect available materialisation of his own aesthetic philosophy. That is the sacrifice. That is what makes it sacred.

“Get the original people to do it. It does not look properly executed.”
— @snezuluh on X (formerly Twitter), March 2026

The tweet is devastating precisely because it understands something the runway couldn’t accommodate: that the epistemology is in the body, and you cannot hire the epistemology. The skhothane who pours Ultramel knows something about the crowd’s judgment, about the invisible tribunal of the community, about the stakes of being seen to fail in the arms race — all of which makes the act legible. Remove the stakes, stage the act, choreograph the destruction, and what you have left is custard on a carpet. The referent has been severed from the reference. In Paris, no one could have made the choice not to escalate. Everyone was hired. Haai whabo?. That is the whole problem.

V. Recuperation, and What Survives It

The response on Black Twitter was passionate in a way that confused some commentators. Why does it matter, they asked. It is just custard. Why are people angry about custard? The question is itself a symptom. The people who ask it have never had their own self-invented grammar mistranslated in front of an international audience, their vernacular used as decoration for someone else’s fluency claim. The passion is the Red Queen mechanism in the social sphere — the subculture running as fast as it can to stay ahead of the thing that is chasing it, which is no longer just class anxiety or racial dispossession, but now also the aestheticisation industry, the global appetite for “African streetwear,” the machinery that converts township creativity into runway capital without returning to the township the dignity of accurate citation.

There is also something specific here about the Italian dimension that this critique exposes. When MaXhosa, a Xhosa heritage brand, borrows izikhotane — a subculture whose aesthetic identity is specifically and consciously MaTariana — and presents it on a Paris runway to an international audience that has no framework for understanding the township-baroque convergence, what gets communicated is: African street culture. The specificities collapse. The Italian layer, which is the most philosophically interesting layer, the one that makes the simulacrum argument possible, the one that reframes the whole thing from imitation to convergence — that layer is invisible. What Paris sees is colourful and exuberant and African and foreign. What Paris sees is not MaTariana. Paris has never heard the name.

THE CONVERGENCE

What Debord and Van Valen together describe is a world in which no gesture remains where it begins. Recuperation is the spectacle’s version of the Red Queen: every subversive adaptation is met with a counter-adaptation from the dominant culture, which absorbs the adaptation, neutralises its charge, and incorporates it as product. The skhothane destroys a shirt; the spectacle markets a shirt inspired by the destruction. The cycle does not stop. The question is not whether recuperation will happen — it will, it always does — but whether anything survives recuperation. The Red Queen says: the only way to survive is to keep running, to keep generating novelty faster than the predator can absorb it.

What survives recuperation is not the gesture. The gesture is gone the moment it is legible to the machinery. What survives is the epistemology — the knowing-in-the-body that produced the gesture and will produce the next one, and the one after that. Material Don Dada — Tshepo Pitso, born in Vaal, now with half a million Instagram followers, designing his own line for DMD Muracchini Linea Italiana, now the subject of a reality TV show on Mzansi Wethu — is also recuperated. He is also running in the Red Queen. But something in him knows something about the park that the runway does not know. That knowing will generate the next move.

VI. The Object, Circulating

The Ultramel carton. Let us track it. It begins as a product of a South African dairy company, a yellow carton available in any Spar or Pick n Pay, associated in South African popular consciousness with Sunday lunch, with umsebenzi, with the particular sweetness of a dessert that is unambiguously ours — not aspirational, not imported, perhaps prestigious. The skhothane picks it up and makes it precious by making it destructive: the Ultramel is valuable in the performance precisely because ordinarily it is not. Its very ordinariness becomes the subversion. I am so abundant that I can destroy abundance with abundance. The carton, in the township park, is a readymade — Duchamp’s urinal in Katlehong.

Note the structure of that inversion. The Rossimoda loafer is already a baroque object — it arrives precious. The Ultramel carton is a humble object made momentarily precious through the act of destroying it alongside the loafer. The two objects in the same performance space create a dialectic: the Italian and the township, the imported and the homegrown, the aspirational and the everyday, all destroyed together. This is not accidental. This is compositional intelligence. The skhothane is curating a tableau in which the convergence Sekhukhuni describes — Italian baroque and township aesthetic — is enacted, then annihilated, then rendered more vivid by the annihilation than it could have been by any other means. You cannot understand the custard without the loafer. You cannot understand the loafer without MaTariana.

Then the carton migrates. It reaches a luxury fashion presentation in Paris. Now it is precious in a different register: it is authentic African street culture, it is global South creativity, it is the kind of signifier that makes international fashion editors feel they have touched something real. The carton is the same carton. What has changed is the relation it mediates — which is no longer between two crews disputing dominance in front of a crowd that will hold them accountable, but between a South African brand and an international market that wants proof of roots.

Debord said the spectacle is the flip side of money. The Ultramel carton in Paris is not Ultramel. It is Ultramel as spectacle: the image of Ultramel, circulating, generating value, cut loose from the living relation it once mediated. The social relation it originally expressed — the epistemology of the park, the tribunal of the crowd, the Red Queen logic of escalation, the baroque philosophy of

MaTariana — has been abstracted away. What remains is yellow and thick and pouring slowly down onto a carpet that costs more than a month’s rent in Tembisa.

VII. What Waste Cannot Hold

Return now to the category. Waste. The diamondfield dandies were waste. The oswenka were waste. The pantsula were waste. Izikhotane are waste. Each generation of waste more legible to the generation after it — the diamondfield dandy recoverable now as proto-resistance, the oswenka now respected, the pantsula now on Beyoncé’s stage — while the current generation of waste is not yet legible, not yet recuperated into something the larger culture can praise without misunderstanding it. It is in the discomfort zone: not yet history, not yet product, still doing the thing it needs to do.

The category of waste cannot hold the fact that destruction — deliberate, sovereign, communally witnessed destruction — is a form of production. What is produced is not a commodity. What is produced is a relation: the skhothane who destroys something has forced everyone present to acknowledge that he exists, that his existence is not reducible to the object he has just destroyed, that his selfhood exceeds any sum of his possessions. The terminus of this argument is: the act of destruction is a proof against the spectacle’s most fundamental proposition. Debord says having becomes appearing. The skhothane says: I will demonstrate that I have so thoroughly that I will destroy the evidence. Appearing is insufficient. Being requires the destruction of its own proof.

The waste category also cannot hold the MaTariana layer — cannot hold the fact that the objects being destroyed are not random brands but a specific aesthetic philosophy made material, that the destruction is therefore a form of philosophical sacrifice, that the Rossimoda loafer going into the fire is not extravagance but argument: I understand beauty well enough to burn it. The baroque tradition, in its European form, built cathedrals to say something similar — that the most serious arguments about what matters are made not in prose but in excess, in ornament, in the willingness to use the best materials for something beyond utility. The skhothane knows this. MaTariana always knew this.

This is why the Maswitsi winning move landed the way it landed. Gold Digger did not merely win a dance-off. He performed an ontological argument. He said, in a grammar that required no translation: ngiyaphila. I am alive. Not as a citizen, not as a consumer, not as a demographic, not as a target market. Alive as a subject who acts, whose action is irreversible, whose moment cannot be curated after the fact. The iPhone is broken. It cannot be unbroken. That is the thing the gallery cannot give you, and the runway cannot give you, and the tweet cannot give you. Only the park, and the crowd, and the act itself.

∗

VIII. Coda: The Plastic, Still On

The category of waste collapses now under the weight of what we have seen. Not because waste is wrong as a description of the surface — things are destroyed, yes — but because waste as an explanation mistakes the surface for the depth. The depth is this: a culture that has been told for generations that it cannot afford beauty, cannot produce value, cannot generate the kind of selfhood that warrants respect, has invented a grammar of sovereignty through destruction. And that grammar is not an imitation of any European grammar. It is a parallel production, arriving at the same conclusions about excess and ornament and the baroque, from its own interior logic, confirmed but not originated by the Italian brands it eventually chose to wear.

The lounge suite with the plastic still on is the key image. It is preservation as argument: I will not let use diminish what I have. I will protect the beautiful thing from the ordinary. I will keep it more perfect than function requires because perfection is the point, not function. This is baroque logic. This is MaTariana logic. This is izikhotane logic. The plastic is not poverty — the plastic is philosophy. The skhothane who burns a DMD shirt is performing the inverse of the same gesture: I will not let possession diminish what I have. I will release the thing at its peak because the peak is the point, not the accumulation.

When that grammar is borrowed — by a luxury house, by a runway, by a well-intentioned dancer in Paris — something real is acknowledged. The acknowledgment is not nothing. But the gesture also does what Debord said the spectacle always does: it converts a lived relation into its image and sends the image circulating. The image circulates now in Paris and Johannesburg and Lagos and on your timeline, yellow and thick, generating engagement, generating debate, generating this essay. The original act — the park, the crowd, the irreversibility, the baroque philosophy of

MaTariana confirmed in the moment of destruction — stays where it was. In Thokoza Park. In Katlehong. In the memory of everyone who was there when Gold Digger bit down and something finished.

Both parts persist. That is the devastating part. The custard pours in Paris. And somewhere, ko-kasi, someone is figuring out the next move. Someone is standing in front of a wardrobe full of Italian clothes — MaTariana to the last button — deciding which one to burn. The Red Queen does not rest. The plastic is still on the lounge suite. The lounge suite is still perfect. The arms race has no finish line.

This essay draws on Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967) and Leigh Van Valen’s Red Queen Hypothesis (1973), Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum, and the cultural observations of Bogosi Sekhukhuni on the convergence of Black township and Italian baroque aesthetics. The scene at the park is a personal account. Gold Digger is not a metaphor. The MaXhosa Africa Siyi’Kulture collection debuted at Paris Fashion Week on 8 March 2026.

I wake up already tired of the news. The news has been the same news for several years now, only louder — empire redistributing itself, the old centres announcing their relevance with increasing desperation, each headline a performance of authority by an institution that has not yet noticed it is performing for an emptying room. I make tea. I stretch. I look at my phone and the war is still happening. It has a name now — Operation Epic Fury — which tells you everything about the civilisation that named it, the one that can aestheticise its violence into a brand, package the bombing of a city into a content strategy, release footage of Kharg Island burning as if this were a trailer, as if the world were an audience that had consented to attend.

I put the phone down. The steam rises from the cup. Somewhere a model is generating a diagnosis. Somewhere a machine is writing code. Somewhere a legal brief is being drafted in 0.4 seconds by something that has never known hunger, never sat in a waiting room, never watched a grandmother work. How long has a thing had to be true before we are allowed to call it true? And conversely: how long can a thing appear true before we are required to notice it isn’t?

There is a word I keep returning to. Attribution. As in: we agreed, collectively, to call this powerful, and it became powerful. As in: the nkisi has no power until the community gathers around it and says this is the thing — and then it is the thing, irreversibly, the way a currency becomes real only because enough people agree to treat it as real, the way a supreme leader’s authority is total until the morning it isn’t, until the missiles arrive and the consensus ruptures and what was solid turns out to have been a performance of solidity all along.

Power is not a property of things. Power is an imagination. This is the sentence that keeps arriving while I watch two civilisational crises unfold on the same screen — the war in West Asia and the quieter, slower war of AI against the knowledge economy — and what strikes me is that both are crises of attribution, both moments where a consensus that seemed permanent is revealing its contingency. Khamenei is dead. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. The markets are doing what markets do when the agreement that underlies them starts to show its seams: performing stability while privately abandoning the premise. This is what a collapsing consensus looks like. Not sudden. Not clean. Just the floor giving slightly underfoot.

I learned about consensual attribution from my grandmother. Slowly, sideways, in the body before the mind. When a community has a problem, they go to a sculptor who calls the nkisi into being. At the moment you receive the sculpture it has no power. You take it to the inyanga, who inserts bilongo — substances attributed to your problem — into a cavity in its stomach, sealing them in, pressing nails through the surface as incantations. The object fills with agreement. The more people who participate, who believe, the more power accrues. This is not metaphor. This is the mechanism. And it is the same mechanism by which a dollar bill holds value, by which a university ranking confers prestige, by which a supreme leader commands a state — until it isn’t, until it doesn’t, until the nails stop going in.

What is a dollar bill without the consensus that it’s worth something? What is a medical degree, now that the machine can pass the exam?

The machine has learned. It has eaten the textbooks, ingested the syllabi, processed the case law and diagnostic manuals and source code, and it is now capable of performing, at speed and without error, the codified knowledge that an entire generation of Black and brown families was told was the path to safety. Doctor. Lawyer. Engineer. Computer scientist. The credentialed. The ones who made it through the narrow door of a knowledge economy built by one civilisation to serve itself — always contingent, it turns out, on that civilisation’s continued authority to define what knowledge was.

The machine can replicate codified knowledge. It cannot replicate tacit knowledge — the understanding that comes from the body, from time, from experience. It can pass the board exam. It cannot sit with a dying patient. It can generate the brief. It cannot read the room. And when researchers ask people which jobs should be protected from automation, they find moral repugnance at the idea of replacing artists, funeral directors, clergy — not doctors, not lawyers, not the professions a generation of families sacrificed to enter. The things people feel cannot be automated are exactly the things that were never institutionalised: presence, ritual, the handmade, the body in the room. The things operating through a logic closer to the nkisi than the syllabus.

What does it mean that the machine arrived just as the knowledge economy was finally, unevenly, beginning to include us? It means the rules changed. It means the rules always change. It means the consensus was never about us.

I pull up a song I loved when I was twelve. It’s a trap and I play it anyway and there I am: a boy in Mabopane, certain of nothing except the reality of the music, the way the melody said you exist, you are here, this feeling is real. The machine can generate something that sounds like that song — analyse the chord structure, replicate the production, simulate the emotional arc. What it cannot do is mean it the way I mean it at thirty-something, in the morning, while a war is happening and the knowledge economy is dissolving and the cup is going cold. It cannot need it.

The boy in Mabopane did not know he was living inside a knowledge system that would spend the next two decades being argued over in conference rooms he wasn’t invited into. He just knew what worked. He watched his grandmother work. He knew the texture of something real. And what she was doing — what she was always doing — was operating in the register the machine cannot enter: the register where to agree that something is powerful is to make it powerful, where the nkisi becomes itself through the community’s belief, where the healing happens not despite the consensus but through it.

The machine cannot imagine. I mean this precisely. It can recombine, extrapolate, perform imagination so convincingly the performance becomes indistinguishable from the thing. But it cannot originate a new agreement about what is real. And that is the thesis — the thing the nkisi taught me and the war is confirming and the AI disruption is making newly urgent: power can never exist. It can only be imagined. It is an act of collective imagination. Which means the communities most practised in imagining outside the dominant consensus — the ones who had to, because the dominant consensus was not built for them — are not at the bottom of the new order. They are, or could be, at its source.

We are in someone’s luvemba — the dikenga stage of death before transformation, the suspension before the cycle turns toward musoni and rebirth begins. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Somewhere a curriculum is being revised. Somewhere a machine is generating a report that a paralegal used to write, and the paralegal is being told to reskill — which is its own kind of epistemic violence. And somewhere further from the centre, something older is becoming legible again. Not primitive. Not past. Precise.

What is being dismantled — by AI, by the war, by the slow depreciating of Western epistemic authority — is not just the credential or the oil price or the supreme leader’s body. What is being dismantled is the consensus that there was only one kind of knowledge. And what is left, what has always been left when you strip the apparatus back, is imagination. Just imagination. Which turns out to be everything.

The machine can simulate survival. It cannot need it. The needing — the fact that imagination is not a feature but a requirement, not an option but a condition of being human and located and alive — that is the thing that cannot be automated. That is what we started with. That is what we will have left.

The cup is cold. The nkisi is waiting.

Power can never exist. It can only be imagined. It always could only be imagined. We just agreed, finally, to say so.

This essay exists in the gap since “Before the Fair.” It’s what happens when you stand in front of Moshekwa Langa’s Brenda (2002) at the Investec Cape Town Art fair and something shifts that you can’t quite translate into words. Until now. Until the work refuses even that.

Steve Kekana.

Blind musician. Khumalo was his real surname. But we know him as Kekana because that’s what stuck, that’s what circulated, that’s the name that got written down and remembered and archived by someone who cared enough to write it on a piece of paper in Moshekwa Langa’s Brenda.

Why Steve Kekana? Why him, among all the names?

Because he’s the one who sang despite—despite the blindness, despite the apartheid system that had no use for a blind Black musician, despite everything that said no. He sang “Abakhwetha” and it was on the radio and it mattered. And then what? Then the system consumed him or he moved through it or he disappeared or he stayed. The archive doesn’t care about the ending. The archive just cares that he existed. That his name was worth keeping.

Lux Beauty Soap

Not a person. A product. A brand. But in Langa’s hands, surrounded by names and faces and photographs, Lux becomes something else. Lux becomes the beautiful lie. The aspirational image. The thing you buy to become someone else. The thing that promises transformation but delivers only the fantasy of it.

And Brenda bought it. Brenda used it. Brenda was the kind of person who understood that transformation happens on the surface first, that the body is a text that can be rewritten, that beauty—Lux beauty—is a political act when your Blackness is a crime.

In the heat of the night

Zamalek

Carling Black Label

Sidney Poitier. Cairo. Beer. The specific geography of desire and consumption and the places we escape to in our minds when the present is unbearable. In the heat of the night—the film, the temperature, the intensity, the moment when everything becomes visible and dangerous and necessary. Zamalek—the wealthy island, the escape, the elsewhere. Carling Black Label—the drink you buy when you have just enough money, when you’re celebrating survival, when you’re thirsty

These aren’t random. These are the coordinates of a life. These are the places and products and desires that map a particular Black South African existence.

failure of the imagination

This is Langa’s whisper. This is where the critique lives. Not in what’s written, but in what’s absent. The imagination failed to envision a South Africa where Brenda could exist unmolested. Failed to imagine a space for her excess, her sexuality, her queerness, her refusal. The imagination failed and so the body had to do the work that the imagination couldn’t.

And now Langa is archiving that failure. Making it visible. Making it material. Turning the failure into a kind of testimony.

Le Petit Voleur

The Small Thief. Truffaut, 1988. A film about a child stealing to survive. A film about the minor crimes of existence. A film about taking what you need because the system won’t give it to you. Brenda was a thief in this way—stealing space, stealing visibility, stealing the right to exist as she wanted to exist. And the system called it crime. Called it scandal. Called it obscene.

But it was survival.

with the benefit of hindsight

Silas Thosago

Kaffir

The slur. The word that was used to deny humanity. The word that Brenda would have heard, that every Black person in South Africa heard, that existed as a constant hum beneath everything else. Langa writes it down. Langa holds the word. Langa refuses to sanitise it or make it safe or explain it away.

This is what the archive does. It refuses to clean up the language of harm. It insists on the precise texture of violence.

And Silas Thosago—I don’t know who this is. But the name is here. The name is held. The name is dignified by proximity to the others, by being written down, by being part of the accumulation.

Immigration

The movement. The displacement. The way bodies get moved around and controlled and tracked. The way some people get to stay and others have to leave. The way Langa himself moved—from South Africa to the Netherlands, from one archive to another, from one position of illegibility to another.

Immigration is about the refusal to stay still. About the refusal to be contained. About the desperate movement toward elsewhere because here has become impossible.

Baileys

Zamalek

In the heat of the night

The cream liqueur. The whiskey. The heat. The things you consume to make the unbearable bearable. The things you drink when you’re celebrating or grieving or simply trying to get through the evening. The specific luxuries of South African nightlife—the brands that meant something, that signalled a particular kind of access or aspiration or survival.

Kimberley

The last word. The southern frontier. The diamond city. The place where fortunes were made and lost and where the extraction of wealth left Black bodies broken and landless. Kimberley is where the logic of the entire system was born—the logic of taking, of mining, of reducing everything (including people) to extractable value.

And it’s the last word on the word tower.

Which means Langa is ending with extraction. With the violence that underpins everything. With the acknowledgement that we’re all still living in Kimberley, that the system of taking has never actually ended, that we’re all still being mined.

---

But where is Brenda?

I looked. I stood in front of it at the fair and I looked. I’ve looked at the photographs since. I’ve zoomed in. I’ve searched the left column where the names are listed next to a highlighter green mark. I’ve scanned the centre, the right side, the layered accumulation. And I cannot definitively say whether Brenda Fassie’s name is written down in the collage or not.

I think I’ve found it. Then I’m not sure. Then I’m convinced it’s not there. Then I think maybe it is, hidden among the other names, obscured by the photographs, layered beneath the text. The collage is so dense, so deliberately chaotic, that certainty becomes impossible.

And maybe that’s the point.

The title tells you it’s about Brenda. The photographs show her. Her energy saturates the entire piece. But whether her actual name appears in the accumulation of names, whether she’s integrated into the word tower or whether she’s held separately through absence—this is something the work refuses to make clear.

The work refuses legibility. Even now. Even when you’re looking directly at it. Even when you’re searching for her name specifically. The illegibility persists.

This is what Langa understood: sometimes the most powerful archive is the one that holds everyone—or almost everyone, or maybe everyone, you can’t quite tell—in a state of absolute uncertainty. Sometimes the refusal to be legible is so complete that even absence becomes ambiguous.

So Langa writes down everyone else. Steve Kekana. Silas Thosago. The schoolchildren. The friends. The lovers. The people whose names matter precisely because they’re visible, because they’re there, because you can find them if you search hard enough.

And Brenda becomes the space that refuses to resolve. Brenda becomes the uncertainty itself. Brenda becomes what holds the archive together through the refusal to be pinned down, named, fixed, located.

Brenda becomes the heat. The luxury. The crime. The theft. The immigration. The drink you need. The soap you buy. The blindness you sing through. The slurs you refuse to sanitise. The diamonds you refuse to extract.

Brenda becomes Kimberley.

Which is to say: Brenda becomes the whole system, and the refusal of the system, all at once.

And the work just hangs there.

Unsold.

Alive.

Refusing even to be named.

Or maybe named. You can’t be sure.

I landed on Friday night, the day before Valentine’s. It’s now Monday, February 16th. The Investec Artfair opens this week and I can feel the shift happening in real time—the way the energy moves from genuine to transactional, the way galleries start thinking in booth numbers instead of conversations. I have maybe three more days of the art world as it actually functions before it becomes something else entirely.

Cape Town feels different when you arrive like this, mid-fair-week. The city is already in a state of preparation and extraction. Rent prices are spiralling. Digital nomads are claiming the good neighbourhoods. There’s talk of the wall the DA is planning to build—a literal architecture of separation—but no one seems to have the energy to fight it anymore. The city is too expensive, too beautiful, too complicit. Everyone who’s here is either extracting value or watching themselves be extracted.

But for this weekend—the last one before the fair—I felt something else.

I’ve spent enough time in Johannesburg to recognise what a diffused art scene feels like. Joburg is more “cultural” than artistic—there’s infrastructure, weight, history. But it’s all so spread thin that people are exhausted. The scene constantly defends itself, apologises for itself, explains why art matters when the city itself is crumbling around you. The energy is reactive. Defensive. You make work despite the city, not because of it.

Cape Town feels sharp in a way that unsettles me. And I say this as someone deeply cynical about optimism, deeply suspicious of beauty, deeply aware that what I’m witnessing is built on privilege and extraction and the leisure that only certain bodies can afford.

But people here actually seem to care about art. Not as credential. Not as commodity. As art. And I don’t know what to do with that, especially not now, when the fair is about to arrive and turn all of this care into booth inventory.

So I’m trying to figure it out before that happens. Before the market logic becomes explicit. Before care gets translated into sale prices.

I went to see Gregory Olympio at Blank on Saturday morning. Vaisseaux. The show bored me productively, which is to say it made me uncomfortable in a way that felt necessary.

Mostly bodies laying supine or prostrate. Olympio has a fabulous sensibility to colour—the bodies are rendered in warm ochres, burnt siennas, pale pinks, the skin almost anthropological in its precision. But then the space around them vibrates with acidic greens, bruised purples, colours that have nothing to do with the body’s interiority. The background refuses to harmonise. It’s as though the world has given up on caring about what the person feels and simply imposed its own palette onto the space.

What kept me in the gallery was the posture. Not just reclining, but the specific quality of surrender. These aren’t figures resting or sleeping. These are figures that have stopped resisting the horizontal. The body has accepted the waiting. I thought about what Olympios has said about “floating roots” (racines flottante), about never quite belonging to a place. But in these paintings, the figures have stopped trying to belong anywhere. They’ve accepted it. And that surrender—that’s what created the productive boredom. The boredom of South African unemployed youth. The boredom of a historical moment where waiting is not temporary but permanent, structural, unavoidable.

I didn’t read the exhibition text. I wanted to encounter the paintings directly. But what happened was physical: my own body stiffened in response. I became aware of my posture. I straightened up. My body was being asked to witness passivity without being permitted to move away from it. There’s something almost cruel in that formal relationship.

But I was suffocating. I needed to leave.

I walked across the street to Stevenson and stepped directly into Penny Siopis’ Love in the Turning World.

The entire gallery is red.

Not one red. Reds everywhere. Deep reds, bright reds, reds that recede and reds that advance, reds that feel warm and reds that feel cold. The entire space is saturated the way a body is saturated with blood. I felt soaked in it immediately, unable to distance myself, unable to step outside. This is what love looks like, I thought. If love is something overwhelming and all-consuming. If love is what you cannot escape from.

Cape Town is exfoliated compared to Johannesburg—grey and naked and mineral. When you walk into Stevenson from the grey afternoon light, stepping into that red is like being reabsorbed into a language you didn’t know you still spoke. A language that doesn’t have words. Just saturation. Just the fact of being inside something you didn’t choose and can’t escape.

What unsettles me is the category we use to explain work like this: emotion. Subjectivity. The personal. These words feel voyeuristic when applied to Siopis’ red, because Siopis is not expressing an emotion. She’s materialising a condition that refuses translation. Love is incredibly subjective, yes—it depends on someone’s particular history of feeling loved or unloved. But Siopis refuses to explain that variation. She doesn’t apologise for the universality of the red. The red is total. The red absorbs everything.

And here’s what I keep thinking: Siopis is a major figure in South African art history. She’s been making work for decades. This red is not apologetic. It’s not trying to fit into anything. It’s not asking to be understood. It simply is. And the fact that Stevenson—a major commercial gallery—can give over an entire space to this kind of uncompromising saturation suggests something about what the Cape Town art world values. It values the refusal to explain. It values material presence over narrative.

I’m still soaked in that red.

This is where I started to understand what I’m trying to figure out.

What Olympios does with waiting—with passive exhaustion—Siopis does with saturation and excess. Both are describing forms of exhaustion, but they approach it from opposite directions. Olympios paralyses through subtraction: empty bodies, bright meaningless colours, refusal to explain. Siopis paralyses through excess: so much red, so much presence, that you can’t escape it, can’t reduce it.

Both are uncompromising. Neither one is trying to make you comfortable. Neither one is trying to be liked. And yet both galleries are hosting this work as though it matters. Not as niche. Not as defensive gesture. As priority.

This is what made me start to believe in the optimism, even though I’m cynical and I didn’t want to.

After the galleries, I tried to digest the overwhelming with the mundane. I had a R160 burger without fries at a packed restaurant filled with Germans and digital nomads and young professionals. Cape Town, baby Monaco. An African city completely saturated with European sensibilities and European money. The leisure here is completely different from Joburg—in Joburg, leisure feels guilty, stolen. In Cape Town, leisure feels like a right. The beach is everywhere. The forest is everywhere.

But I was also aware of what that leisure cost. Who gets to sit in these restaurants. Who can afford the R160 burger without fries. Who has time to go to galleries on a Saturday afternoon. To be an artist in Cape Town requires a certain privilege—financial, racial, perhaps cultural. To live in Cape Town as an artist requires even more. The fact that there’s genuine care about art here doesn’t erase that only a very specific demographic can afford to participate in that care.

So the optimism is real, but it’s also implicated. It’s built on extraction and exclusion. And yet the care is still real. Both things are true simultaneously.

Later, at AKJP, I was having a drink and paging through Zander Blom’s The Drain of Progress—this catalogue raisonné he published in 2007 when he was barely out of his twenties. A self-authored archive. A young artist narrating his own myth before anyone else could do it for him. The book is fabulous—dense, thoughtful, completely confident.

What I love about Zander is that he’s timeless. Sometimes I think he’s a vampire, that he exists outside of time somehow.

But reading the book in that moment, I realised that Blom had already moved beyond the position he was occupying in that catalogue. And then I arrived at Candy Shop at Girls, Girls, Girls and there he was—Zander putting up the sign for the show. I had literally just been reading his archive. I had literally just been holding the fixed narrative. And then I saw him in the present tense, doing something completely different: enabling other people’s emergence. Curating. Facilitating. No longer the author, but the infrastructure.

The uncanniness of that collision—past and present, the book and the body, the fixed narrative and the living person—it rattled something. It suggested that even the most carefully controlled self-narration gets superseded. Even the archive becomes history.

And then I entered Candy Shop.

The space was overwhelming. Tons of work. Maybe too much, but the quality was consistently high (except for the works that looked to digital, too AI adjacent). The salon style—the abundance, the refusal of curation in the traditional sense, the insistence that this is a gathering not a show—felt like the exact opposite extreme from what I’d experienced at Blank. Where Olympios’ boredom is austere, Candy Shop is baroque. Where Blank is about waiting, Candy Shop is about circulation.

I knew a lot of the artists in the room. The price points were accessible—500 rands for a Nano Laface handmade t-shirt, which I bought. I like Nano’s work. He has cool factor off the charts. He reminds me of Miles Davis—there’s an effortless sophistication, a refusal to try too hard, that comes across in every gesture.

But more than that, there was a feeling in the space. The who’s who of the Cape Town art world were there, yes—so it’s not free from status anxiety, not free from the market’s logic. And yet people were actually talking to each other. Actually engaged with the work.

And I realised: this is what the optimism is about. Not that the market isn’t operating. Of course it is. But that despite the market, despite the privilege, despite the extraction—people are still making work that they believe in. People are still showing up. People are still having real conversations about art.

Later that night, someone I met at Candy Shop invited me to Evol. We arrived to be told the party didn’t start until 10pm, so we waited downstairs by the bar. I had a beer. The person I was with played slots and won some cash. There’s something almost absurdist about that moment—winning money at a slot machine whilst waiting for a party to start. The randomness of it. The way value just appears, or doesn’t, based on luck.

Eventually we got in. And the first thing I noticed: Cape Town is overwhelmingly white. Structurally, demographically, the room was white. The music was great. Surprisingly, people danced. It wasn’t happy dancing though. It was ecstatic but not happy. The kind of dancing that comes from exhaustion or desire or the need to move when the mind is overwhelmed. The kind of dancing that says: I am here, I exist, I am not waiting anymore.

I left after two drinks because I had another long day coming up.

The next day was Misfits—an independent group show organised by artists I genuinely love. The show was in a studio in the same building as Chimurenga factory, my favourite place in Cape Town. I arrived with a massive headache so I didn’t immediately engage with the work, instead spent an hour talking to Felix Laband and it was genuinely one of the best conversations I’ve had in months. He loves my work as much as I love his. That’s not nothing. That’s the opposite of the diffusion I experience in Joburg. That’s presence.

The show had loads of work. Maybe too much. But the quality was high, consistently high. And the salon style—the refusal to be selective, the insistence on abundance, the way the work circulates and mingles and demands to be looked at even when there’s too much to see—this felt like it’s on the extreme end of what I experienced at the big galleries.

This is what I keep coming back to: Cape Town has a strange affinity to extremes.

Blank is austere, minimal, bored. Candy Shop is baroque, abundant, social. Stevenson is saturated and overwhelming. Misfits is chaotic and generous. The institutional galleries and the salon spaces all exist in the same city, operating at full intensity, refusing to compromise, refusing to apologise.

It’s now Monday, February 16th. I’m still in Cape Town. The fair opens this week and I can feel the shift already happening.

The galleries are preparing their booths. The collectors are arriving. The energy is moving from genuine to transactional. The care I witnessed this weekend—the real conversations, the accessible price points, the refusal to apologise—all of that is about to collide with market logic made explicit.

And here’s what I’m sitting with: the care was real. The conversations were real. The refusal to explain was real. Olympios’ paintings still refuse to explain themselves. Siopis’ red still saturates the space. Blom still hangs signs for other people’s exhibitions. Nano’s t-shirt costs 500 rands. Felix’s love for the work is genuine.

But in a few days, all of this gets compressed into booth numbers and sale prices and collector profiles. The market is going to claim it. The museums are going to claim it. The auction houses will eventually claim it. I know this. I’m cynical enough to know this.

What I’m trying to hold onto—what I witnessed this weekend—is that people still care. Despite everything. Or maybe because of everything.

Maybe the extremes are what allow the care to persist. Maybe the austere refusal and the baroque abundance and the saturated red and the salon generosity are all ways of insisting that something other than market logic matters. Maybe they’re all technologies for survival in a system that would consume everything if we let it.

I don’t have answers yet. I’m still in the middle of it. But I think I understand something: care and complicity are not opposites. They can coexist. They do coexist. And that coexistence—that’s where the real work is happening.

The fair is coming. And I’m about to find out what happens when all of this genuine care hits the market directly. When the conversation becomes transaction. When the painting gets a booth number.

I’m still soaked in that red.

And I’m about to watch it get sold.

The sun is not up yet but the music is already playing, has been playing all night, will play until someone decides it’s over which means it will play forever because who decides these things anymore, who has the authority to say when the celebration ends. I am walking through Newtown at some hour that feels like performance, like I am supposed to be here witnessing something, like the jazz club with its careful lighting and its entrance fee and its cocktails named after dead musicians is supposed to mean something about continuity, about how we survived, about how the music never stopped even when they bulldozed the yards and renamed the streets and called it Triomf which means triumph which means we lost but at least we lost beautifully, at least there are records.

I keep thinking about Miriam Makeba curtsying to Dambuza Mdledle when he approached her after a show in Orlando, how she was twenty years old and shy and just another girl trying to sing, how she curtsied because that’s how she was brought up, because that’s what girls do when addressed by older men, by men with power, by men who can make you visible. The Manhattan Brothers need a female vocalist. Not: we think you’re talented. Not: would you like to join us. Just: we need, and she curtsied, and she joined, and Kippie Moeketsi said she had no curves, said he never thought she would make it, said she was small-fry compared to them, the real guys, ons was die ouens then, and they sat her down and practiced with her, told her how to use her voice, how to improve her vocal chords, and she listened attentively because what else do you do when men are making you, when men are giving you the infrastructure to become.

The bartender at the jazz club is explaining the cocktail menu to a table of tourists and I want to tell them that Saduva was the closing song, the song they played at 4 am before the national anthem, the song that gave Miriam her boost because Dolly Rathebe was the number one girl singer and there could only be one at a time, only one body on stage wearing the long evening dress, only one voice permitted to make the crowds rave. But I don’t say anything because I am also a tourist here, also paying the entrance fee, also drinking something called The Sophiatown Revival which tastes like ginger and nostalgia and costs more than my father made in a day when he was working in Makeba’s garden, when he was doing the physical labor that makes a garden legible as wealth, when the housekeeper made him food and Makeba emerged and said no, not for them, the food is for my guests.

My father used to play Makeba’s records in the house, not the famous ones, not Pata Pata or The Click Song, but the early stuff, the recordings with the Manhattans, the ones where you can hear how shy she was, how she was trying to be loud enough to be heard over four men singing behind her, how she didn’t have a microphone sometimes so her voice had to carry on its own force. My father would play these records while he moved through the house, and both my parents would sing along, my mother’s vibrato weaving through my father’s tenor, their voices trying to find the harmonies, trying to match the Xhosa lyrics they didn’t fully understand, their bodies swaying slightly as if the music was moving them without their permission, as if they were performing being moved because that’s what you do when music like this is playing, you perform being transported, you perform being connected to something larger than the room you’re standing in, larger than the ordinary work of keeping a house running, larger than the fact that their son is watching them and learning how to be in a body which means learning how to move as if the music owns it.

I read somewhere that when Victoria Falls was named—when the white man saw it and decided it needed his queen’s name—there were already names for it in the languages of the people who lived there, names that described what the water did, how it sounded, what it meant to stand at the edge and feel the spray on your face. Miriam Makeba wrote her name on a rock beneath the falls when she was twenty-two years old, touring with the Manhattan Brothers, young enough to think names last, young enough to believe that making your mark matters. She wondered how long the names would last. It doesn’t matter, she wrote, our lives are so short compared to the falls, which will go on and on. But for now, here is little Miriam Makeba, writing her name on a rock. I am twenty-two years old. If you want, you can buy my records. You can hear me on the radio or see me give a show with the Manhattan Brothers. And I’ll look right back at you from the pages of a magazine or from a billboard with a bottle of Coca-Cola in my hand.

The jazz club has a photograph of her on the wall, not from those years but from later, from exile, from the period when she was performing for Kennedy and Nkrumah, when she was the international face of something, when her face was doing work that her voice couldn’t do anymore, or maybe the work was the same work, the work of being looked at, of being the body that represents, of standing in for an entire people so that the entire people can remain abstract, can remain statistics and policies and problems to be solved rather than persons with names who write on rocks and hope the names last even though they know the names won’t last, even though they know the falls will outlive everything.

I keep walking. The streets are empty in that way that streets are empty in the hours between drunk and sober, between night and morning, between the performance of nightlife and the reality of having to go home. A man is sleeping against the wall of the old market building, the one that’s been renovated now, turned into a space for artisan coffee and vintage clothing and pop-up exhibitions about the history of the market when it was still a market, when people came here to buy vegetables and meat and the ordinary necessities of life rather than experiences, rather than the feeling of being in a place that matters, that has history, that allows you to feel like you’re touching something authentic while you sip your flat white and scroll through your phone deciding which image of the space is worth posting, which angle makes you look like someone who understands what this place means.

The sleeping man doesn’t look up as I pass and I don’t look down which means we are both performing our roles correctly, both understanding that the city at this hour belongs to those who can afford to be awake by choice rather than necessity, belongs to those who are walking home from clubs rather than walking to work, walking for exercise rather than walking because there’s no other way to get where you need to go.

Kippie Moeketsi said that musicians had a tough time in those days, di tsotsi nebatla le di tomahawk and chop up instruments for no reason, that he once ran down Von Wielligh Street at three in the morning with a thug chasing him shouting kom hier jong, Kippie, and he only escaped because a police van appeared. I keep thinking about what it means to be chased, to be running from violence that might come from the gangs or might come from the police or might come from the system itself that wants you to exist as labour or as entertainment but never as both, never as someone who deserves to walk home safely after playing music all night, after making people dance, after creating the conditions for joy that other people will consume and then leave behind when they go back to their houses in the suburbs where the streets are quiet and well-lit and patrolled.

When Makeba married Stokely Carmichael in 1968, her recording contracts were canceled, her performances were boycotted, the system that had made her saleable could not absorb her as political, could not allow her to be both beautiful and dangerous, both the voice of Africa and the woman who chooses to love a man the system has designated as threat. She spent thirty years in exile which means thirty years of performing for audiences who wanted her to embody resistance without requiring them to resist anything, wanted her to sing about suffering without having to address the structures that produce suffering, wanted her to be the sound of freedom while they went home to their comfortable houses and felt good about having paid to see her, having purchased their ticket to moral clarity.

The sun is starting to come up now, that false dawn that makes everything look possible for about ten minutes before the real light arrives and shows you what the night was hiding, shows you the garbage and the broken glass and the evidence that what felt like transcendence was just bodies in a room moving to rhythms they didn’t create, consuming pleasures they didn’t make, participating in an economy that profits from the aestheticization of what was never meant to be aesthetic, was only ever meant to be survival, only ever meant to be the music you play when the alternative is silence.

I keep thinking about Can Themba’s party where Dolly Rathebe sang and the walls seemed to sway with the music and Trevor Huddleston said he felt like a corpse striding from the grave, like Europe was being translated into Africa and he was the one who couldn’t survive the translation, who was shown as dead by proximity to so much life. And I think about how we tell that story now, how we turn it into evidence of culture’s power to transform, to transcend, to create moments of shared humanity that prove something about our capacity for beauty even under oppression. But what if Huddleston was right? What if he was the corpse, what if that’s what whiteness is in that room, what if the recognition he had was not about being transformed by African culture but about being revealed as already dead, as the body that takes and takes and calls it appreciation, calls it love, calls it solidarity while remaining fundamentally unchanged, while going back to his mission and his church and his eventual departure from the country where he will be remembered as the good one, the one who cared, the one who saw.

The jazz club is closing now, the last patrons stumbling out into the morning light, blinking like children woken from sleep, like they can’t quite believe the night is over, like they paid good money for this feeling and now they have to go back to their lives where nothing has changed except they have a story to tell about the music, about the atmosphere, about how alive they felt, how connected, how present.

Miriam Makeba died on stage in Italy in 2008, collapsed during a performance, seventy-six years old and still performing, still being the voice, still being the body that represents, still giving audiences what they came for which was the feeling that by being there, by witnessing her, by applauding, they were participating in something larger than themselves, something that mattered. And we say she died doing what she loved as if love is the right word for being made into symbol, being required to embody struggle until your body gives out, being celebrated and consumed and never quite allowed to rest because rest would mean acknowledging that the performance is over, that what we’re watching is not transcendence but labor, not resistance but the managed extraction of cultural value from the very violence that necessitated the culture in the first place.

I am walking home now, walking through streets that have names I don’t recognize because the names keep changing, because the city keeps rebranding itself, keeps performing renewal, keeps building jazz clubs and heritage sites and apartment complexes for young professionals who want to live somewhere with character, somewhere authentic, somewhere that lets them feel like they’re part of the city’s transformation even as their presence is the transformation, parts of the city deteriorate even as the rents go up and the people who made this place what it is get pushed further out, get scattered across the periphery where the music still plays but nobody pays to hear it, where the parties still happen but nobody writes about them, where life continues in all its complexity and beauty and violence but without the cameras, without the entrance fee, without the cocktail menu that makes it legible as culture rather than just existence.

My phone buzzes with a message from a friend asking about my research on Festac, its anniversary is in 2027, the festival that’s supposed to celebrate pan-African creativity, that’s supposed to create space for African artists to gather and perform and sell and network and feel like we’re building something together, building the infrastructure that was destroyed, building the commons that was bulldozed. He asks how if its going good and I want to say yes because I am tired of saying no, tired of critique, tired of being the person who can’t just enjoy things, who can’t just dance, who can’t just let the music move his body without thinking about who owns the venue, who profits from the ticket sales, who gets to go home after the festival and who has to stay and clean up, who performs and who watches and whether the distinction matters when we’re all performing anyway, all moving through roles we’ve been assigned, all trying to find the choreography that lets us survive without becoming complicit except survival and complicity are the same thing now, have been the same thing, were always the same thing.

I stop at a café that’s just opening, order coffee from a barista who looks like she hasn’t slept, who moves through the motions of making my drink with the exhausted grace of someone who has learned to perform service so smoothly that it looks like she’s not performing at all, like this is just who she is, like her body knows how to make coffee the way my mother’s body knew how to move to Makeba’s music, automatically, without thought, without the possibility of refusal because refusal would mean acknowledging that there’s something to refuse which would mean acknowledging that we have choices which would mean taking responsibility for the choices we make which would mean facing the fact that every morning we wake up and put on our clothes and go to our jobs or our classes or our protests or our jazz clubs and participate in the same systems we claim to oppose, perform the same roles we claim to resist, buy the same tickets to the same shows where we feel the same feelings of connection and transcendence and shared humanity and then go home and nothing changes except we have a story to tell, except we have an experience to post about, except we have proof that we were there, that we witnessed, that we cared.

The coffee is good. Too good. I drink it standing at the counter watching the city wake up through the window, watching people begin their commutes, their routines, their performances of normalcy in a place that was built on violence and continues to operate on violence but has learned to make the violence so aesthetically pleasing, so well-choreographed, so seamlessly integrated into the experience of daily life that we can drink our coffee and feel grateful for the morning light and the taste of something bitter and sweet at once and not think about how the café is on a street that used to have a different name, used to house different people, used to be part of a neighbourhood that was destroyed so that this neighbourhood could exist, could be renovated, could become the kind of place where people like me can buy expensive coffee and feel at home.

I finish the coffee. I start walking again. The music is still playing somewhere, has never stopped playing, will never stop playing because that’s what we do, that’s how we survive, we make music and we dance and we perform our resistance and our joy and our suffering and we call it culture and we sell tickets to it and we write essays about it and we build festivals around it and we never quite acknowledge that the music is playing over something, is covering something, is the sound we make to drown out the sound of bulldozers that are still coming, have never stopped coming, have just learned to arrive more quietly, have learned to call themselves development and renewal and transformation and progress.

I put my headphones in. I pull up Miriam Makeba singing Saduva, the closing song, the song they played at 4 am before the national anthem, before everyone had to go home or pretend to go home or find somewhere else to continue the party because the party never really ends, just moves, just relocates, just finds new venues with new names and new entrance fees and new cocktail menus but the same music, always the same music, always the voice of a woman who was twenty years old once and curtsied to a man who could make her visible and spent the rest of her life visible, spectacularly visible, internationally visible, visible until she collapsed on a stage in Italy still performing, still being watched, still giving audiences what they paid for which was her, which was the idea of her, which was the feeling of witnessing something that matters.

The song plays in my ears as I walk and my body moves without my permission, performs being moved because that’s what bodies do when music like this is playing, when the voice is that good, when the rhythm is that infectious, when the history is that heavy and that beautiful and that unbearable all at once. I am thirty-two years old. If you want, you can read my essays. You can see me at the festivals and the protests and the jazz clubs. You can watch me perform my understanding, my awareness, my complicity, my resistance, my exhaustion. And I’ll look right back at you from wherever I am, from whatever role I’m playing, from whatever stage I’ve been assigned, and we’ll both know that we’re lying, that the performance is the point, that there’s no outside, that the walls are swaying with music but the music is recorded now, is packaged now, is for sale now, and we’re all dancing to it anyway, and the dancing feels good, and the feeling good is suspect, and the suspicion doesn’t stop the dancing, and the dancing doesn’t stop the bulldozers, and the bulldozers don’t stop the music, and the music just keeps playing, keeps playing, keeps playing.

I came late to caring about what AI might take from us, which is to say I came to it already tired. I grew up in Mabopane where knowledge moved through bodies, through my mother’s voice conjugating Tswana verbs, spitori, through my father’s hands naming plants in languages that carried more intelligence than Latin binomials about which leaves could break a fever. When I encountered Plato’s complaint about writing in the Phaedrus—the Egyptian king Thamus rejecting Thoth’s gift because it would produce forgetfulness—I recognized the argument as contemporary grief.

Socrates worries that writing cannot respond, cannot adjust to the listener’s need, that it will say the same dead thing to everyone. But what he’s really mourning is the loss of control, the way writing democratizes access and makes the philosopher-priest redundant. Yet we know his complaint only because Plato wrote it down, which means the argument arrives already compromised, already complicit in the system it refuses.

Last Saturday I saw Marabi at the Market Theatre, Arthur Molepo’s adaptation of Modikwe Dikobe’s novel set in the Doornfontein yards of 1930s Johannesburg where black migrants were learning that the city was a machine for converting culture into labor and song into longing. In one scene, Mr. Elocute brings a record player to the yard and the piano player tries to destroy it. Mr. Elocute reassures him—”records last forever”—and the line landed with the weight of prophecy and threat braided together.

The piano player would have understood what the early record companies chose to ignore: that marabi—that raucous, distinctly African mixture of home-brewed harmony blended with Afro-American ragtime and jazz, thrashed out of weatherbeaten pianos and harmoniums in slumyard shebeens to the accompaniment of inebriated patrons shaking pebble-filled tins—was synonymous with life itself, even as it was denounced from pulpits as immoral and branded as cacophony by music critics. When Gallo finally recorded Mabiletsa’s ‘Zulu Piano Medley Nr. 1’ sometime around 1940, they regarded it as such a poor commercial prospect that they waited nearly four years before releasing it. One of the very few authentic marabi piano pieces ever captured, and the company didn’t think it was worth selling. What the piano player knew was that the record doesn’t preserve the music but kills it into repetition, transforms the living thing into a commodity that can be shelved. I think of Kippie Moeketsi talking about those early days, how talent scouts started telling musicians “don’t play jazz because the audience don’t like it,” how financial difficulties broke up the best big bands. But before that dissolution, there was a moment when jazz in South Africa was not a remote elitist art-form but truly the entertainment music of the masses, when township residents danced to eight-to-ten piece bands serving up a dynamic mixture of marabi and African Jazz, when the essentially circular structure of African music remained prominent alongside the complex voicings and arranged alternation between brass and reeds that had typified American big band jazz since the 1920s. The record player freezes performance into an artifact consumed without reciprocal exchange—without adjustment to the room, negotiation with the audience, improvisation that makes song into conversation rather than monument.

The Manhattan Brothers understood this tension. When Gallo first recorded them in 1947, they were African show business veterans copying the songs and style of the Mills Brothers and the Inkspots, transforming English lyrics into African vernacular. But then something shifted. At Gallo’s insistence, the quartet began developing material that was more African, and ‘Jikela Emaweni’—one of their biggest hits—emerged from this process: an exact, beautifully harmonized rendition of an ancient Xhosa melody still sung at drinking parties among rural non-Christians in the 1930s, where at the conclusion of festivities male and female participants would pair off into the night to “turn around to the cliffs.” The quartet composed a new second melodic line, added lyrics that contributed to the spirit of the original, and a South African classic was born. But what does it mean that we know this music primarily through its recorded form, that the drinking parties and the pairing off and the specific quality of voices echoing against actual cliffs have been replaced by shellac spinning at 78 rpm?

The fear is familiar—it’s the same fear every new technology forces on threatened forms. What interests me is not whether the fear is justified but what it reveals about how little we’ve valued the texture of human thought, how thoroughly we’ve accepted a flattened model of creativity that treats writing as information transfer, music as pleasing sound, art as content.

When people argue that oral cultures are superior to written ones, they romanticize systematic exclusion. But orality is a different architecture of knowledge that distributes memory across community. I think of the shebeens in Sophiatown where knowledge moved through laughter and attention. The problem was never writing but the colonial violence that positioned it as the only valid form of knowledge production, that sent bulldozers to turn Sophiatown into rubble, building Triomf on tears that soaked into soil.

I’ve spent years developing a concept called generative non-alignment, a way of refusing institutions that want your work but not your complexity. My Khemisi project uses digital tools to preserve oral knowledge, complicit in Plato’s paradox. But I’m designing the archive to resist complete extraction, to keep essential knowledge locked in relationships that cannot be scraped, the way Sophiatown or Marabi kept its knowledge alive in bodies dancing as bulldozers approached.

The question AI forces is what the record player forced on the marabi pianist, what bulldozers forced on Sophiatown: what is it that only humans can do, and is that thing valuable enough to defend? I suspect the answer has to do with error, with beautiful failures that occur when bodies reach beyond capacity. When Trevor Huddleston watched Dolly Rathebe sing at Can Themba’s house, he described how stone-faced figures sprang to life, how walls seemed to sway with music, how Europe was translated into Africa and he felt like a corpse striding from the grave. That translation, that aliveness—you cannot record that.

What you also cannot record is the shouting, extraverted trumpet work that died forever in US jazz with the beginnings of bop and the birth of the cool, the kind of playing that still thrived in tracks like ‘Diepkloof Ekhaya’ by the Jazz Dazzlers in 1960, featuring Kippie on first alto alongside Gwi Gwi Mrwebe and Mackay Davashe. You can capture the notes, yes, but not the sweat in the hall, not the way bodies moved in response, not the particular temperature of a Johannesburg night or the specific cocktail of hope and desperation that made people need this music in their bodies rather than as background sound. The record companies were right to worry about marabi’s commercial prospects—not because the music wasn’t good enough but because marabi was never meant to be a product. It was a practice, a way of being together, a refusal of the terms the city offered.

I’m writing this with AI tools available but choosing not to use them because the thinking is the point, because the way an idea unfolds is not separable from the idea itself. Something in the doing cannot be outsourced—the unrepeatable, the contextual, the embodied, the flawed.

South Africa knows about surviving systems designed to make you obsolete. Marabi was born in slumyards and illegal shebeens where black people insisted on existing as artists when they were only supposed to exist as labor. The music survived by understanding the threat was never the tool but the system deploying it as replacement. Kippie said musicians had a tough time—tsotsis would chop up instruments for no reason. The violence was about what the music represented: refusal to be only what the system said you could be.

What I took from that moment in the yard, from the piano player’s doomed attempt to smash the machine, is the recognition that survival is not the same as winning, that to keep making music in a world designed to turn music into content is already a form of resistance. When Miriam Makeba joined the Manhattan Brothers, she was just another girl trying to sing, and Kippie and the others would sit with her and practice, tell her how to use her voice, and she would listen attentively. They made her famous not by teaching her to sing but by creating the conditions where her voice could emerge. That kind of making, that kind of attention to another person’s becoming, cannot be automated. It requires presence, requires the willingness to sit together in a room and work through the difficulty, requires understanding that talent is not a raw material to be extracted but a relationship that must be cultivated.

And here is where the record player and the AI and the bulldozer reveal themselves as manifestations of the same impulse: the desire to extract value without relationship, to preserve without presence, to scale without friction. Gallo could wait four years to release Mabiletsa’s recording because once captured, the music was no longer accountable to the people who made it. The recording became an asset, managed according to commercial logic rather than cultural necessity. This is what Mr. Elocute was really promising: not preservation but dispossession, not memory but relief from the obligation to remember actively, collectively, in bodies gathered together.

We will not stop the machines. But we might learn to live in the friction, in the space between the record and the performance, between what can be captured and what escapes. We might learn that the thing worth defending is the right to be slow, to fail, to need each other in ways that cannot be mediated by a screen, to make music that dies the moment it is played and must be played again, differently, with different people under different circumstances. The right to thrash out rhythms on weatherbeaten pianos while patrons shake pebble-filled tins, to be denounced from pulpits and still insist that this is what aliveness sounds like.

The permanence Mr. Elocute promised was always a lie. Records do not last forever—they warp and scratch and the technology to play them becomes obsolete. But the piano player’s hands do last, in the sense that matters: in the memory of other hands, in the songs that keep getting made in defiance of every logic that says they should stop, in the knowledge that moves through bodies even when the shebeens are bulldozed and the victory declared. Triomf sits on tears that soaked into soil, and those tears are still there, under the concrete. What we inherit from marabi is not the recordings—precious as they are as fragments—but the insistence that music is what happens between people, that culture is what we make together in the face of systems designed to make us alone, that the point was never the product but the practice, never the monument but the movement, never the record but the refusal to let the record be enough.

In Sam Nhlengethwa’s 2018 exhibition Waiting, bodies gather in blues and earth tones—patient, perpetual, assembled in lines that seem to extend beyond the canvas edge into some eternal afternoon where time pools like standing water. The figures do not fidget. They do not rage. They simply are, caught in that peculiar South African grammar where waiting is not interruption but condition, not delay but design. To stand in queue is to participate in the nation’s longest-running performance: the ritual redistribution of hours from the poor to the system that requires their exhaustion as fuel.

Every morning before the city wakes, millions rise. In Soweto, in Alexandra, in Tembisa and Khayelitsha, the alarm becomes a kind of violence—four a.m., sometimes earlier, the body pulled from sleep into the cold morning assembly of survival. They will wait for the taxi. They will wait in the taxi. They will wait at the rank. They will wait at the gate, at the punch clock, at the supervisor’s desk. By the time the work begins, they have already spent three hours in service to the infrastructure of their own subjugation, and this is before a single brick is laid, a single floor is cleaned, a single child in Sandton is fed breakfast by hands that left their own children sleeping.

What does it mean when an entire population is trained to stand still? When patience becomes the primary skill required for citizenship?

Nhlengethwa paints the queue not as chaos but as composition—ordered, almost serene, a congregation waiting not for salvation but for the 4:37, the 16:52, the bus that may or may not arrive, the train that runs when Prasa remembers it exists. There is something devotional in this waiting, something that mimics prayer: the body bent toward a future that refuses to come, the faith that if one simply endures long enough, the doors will open, the ticket will be validated, the day’s labor will yield enough to return tomorrow and wait again.

But who is the god of this church? Who benefits from the genuflection?

In Johannesburg, time itself is segregated. It moves at different velocities depending on which suburb you occupy, which skin you wear, which bank card you pull from your wallet. In Sandton, time is purchased—delivered via Uber in eight minutes, brewed as artisan coffee, extracted from employees whose own time was bought wholesale at dawn. In Hillbrow, five kilometers south, time accumulates: it piles up in the corridors of Home Affairs, in the waiting rooms of public clinics where sick bodies queue from sunrise knowing they may not be seen by sunset, in the lobbies of the Department of Labour where the unemployed spend days pursuing the single grant that might buy another week’s grace.

Capitec Bank. The name itself has become shorthand, a class signifier more immediate than accent or address. In the mall, the lines fork: FNB moves swiftly, Absa hums along, Nedbank processes the insured and salaried with machine efficiency. But at Capitec, the queue swells—domestic workers cashing out, delivery drivers checking balances, the precarious and informal lined up to access money that was already theirs but must be mediated through systems that charge fees for the privilege of being poor. The line itself becomes billboard: See who waits. See who can afford not to.

This is the economics of time as it functions under late apartheid’s financial reincarnation: those with capital buy speed, buy access, buy the ability to skip—the VIP lane, the priority boarding, the private hospital, the toll road that cuts the commute by forty minutes while the poor sit in traffic on the potholed state route, breathing exhaust, burning daylight that could have been spent with children, with rest, with anything resembling a life not entirely colonized by the commute.

Do you ever wonder what it costs, metabolically, to wake at 4 a.m. for twenty years? What it does to the body, the dream life, the capacity for imagination when every day begins in darkness and ends in exhaustion? The construction worker downs a Switch—not breakfast, but caffeine converted directly into labor-hours, the body as battery, recharged just enough to swing the hammer, pour the foundation, build the penthouse someone else will sleep in. The children drink Dragon, that sickly-sweet lightning in a can, because there is no time for food, because the school is far and the taxi won’t wait and hunger is a problem that can be postponed with chemistry until lunch, if there is lunch, if there is money for lunch.

Vetkoek and energy drinks: the infrastructure holding the nation’s working class upright. Not nourishment—propulsion. The meal as fuel, the body as vehicle, the person as afterthought.

And above, in the glass towers, in the gated estates where jacarandas bloom purple and time slows to the pace of leisure, others have built heaven. They do not wait. They do not queue. Their time is their own—or rather, it is subsidized by the accumulated waiting-hours of the many, those millions in Nhlengethwa’s frames whose stillness makes possible someone else’s motion, whose delay enables another’s arrival, whose exhaustion is the hidden subsidy that keeps the economy liquid.

Some are living in the apocalypse. Others have made heaven on earth. And the distance between them is five kilometers, ten minutes by car if you take the toll road, two hours if you take the taxi, forever if you are walking and waiting and standing in line.

Apartheid was always an economics before it was an ethics. It was about the allocation of hours, the geography of access, the infrastructure of who gets to go and who must stay. When it “ended,” the signs came down but the systems remained, polished and financialized, racial capitalism given a multicultural rebrand. The queue is the residue. The waiting is the inheritance.

In Waiting, Nhlengethwa does not editorialize. He does not paint rage or rupture. He paints Tuesday. He paints the ordinary catastrophe, the mundane as monument. His figures are patient because they have no choice, because the system depends on their patience, because to refuse to wait is to refuse to eat, to house oneself, to remain tethered to the legal economy at all.

But look closely: there is dignity here too, or perhaps something beyond dignity—refusal disguised as compliance. They wait, yes, but they wait together. The queue is also community, the rank is also reunion, the morning commute is where gossip is traded and strategies shared, where the informal economy of care circulates in coins and cigarettes and somebody lending someone airtime because the data ran out and the employer needs confirmation of the shift.

The state builds waiting into the system—under-resources the trains, understaffs the clinics, digitizes the grants but not the infrastructure, creates bureaucratic mazes that require the poor to spend days pursuing services the wealthy can access with a phone call—because waiting is the point. Waiting exhausts. Waiting demoralizes. Waiting ensures that by the time you reach the counter, you are too tired to ask why the system is this way, too depleted to organize, too busy calculating the next commute to imagine a strike.

Who benefits when a population spends half its waking life in transit or in queue?

Follow the time. Follow the hours siphoned from the townships and deposited in the suburbs as extended workdays, as always-available labor, as the permanent on-call status of the domestic worker who cannot leave until the madam returns, regardless of what time the madam decides that will be. Follow the energy: the Switch, the Dragon, Mofaya, the instant coffee and white bread, the type that makes your heart beat weird, the cheap carbohydrates and stimulants that convert poverty into productivity just long enough to get through the shift.

This is extraction without mine shafts. This is the body as quarry, and time as the ore.

In the banking court at the mall, the lines divide like a river around class. Capitec swells; the others trickle. It is not an accident. It is a design so elegant it need not announce itself: the bank for the poor will move slowly, will have fewer tellers, will charge higher fees for smaller balances, will make every transaction a test of endurance. And those who can will migrate to the banks that work, that process quickly, that reward the already-resourced with efficiency and points and the time to do something other than stand in line.

The woman at Capitec has been there an hour. She will be there another. She knows. She came prepared—she brought water, she wore comfortable shoes, she told her employer she would be late and accepted the docked pay because the grant has to be collected, the child’s school fees have to be paid, and the system requires her physical presence, her body as proof, her waiting as penance for needing help at all.

The man at FNB is in and out in eleven minutes. He does not notice the line at Capitec. He does not register the wait. His time is his own. This is what privilege looks like in practice: not malice, but oblivion. Not cruelty, but the simple fact of moving through a world arranged for your convenience while others are arranged to serve it.

And both are in the same mall, five meters apart, living in different centuries.

Nhlengethwa’s exhibition appeared in 2018, the same year Eskom began its rolling blackouts in earnest, the same year the trains stopped running reliably, the same year the infrastructure began its loud collapse and everyone pretended to be surprised. But the art remembers what the headlines forget: South Africa has always run on waiting, has always required a permanent underclass whose time is not their own, whose hours are held hostage by systems designed to fail them slowly enough that the failure looks like personal inadequacy rather than structural violence.

The queue is not a bug. It is the feature.

And what do we call it when an entire people are trained to wait without complaint? When endurance becomes the national virtue and patience the primary curriculum? When the ability to stand in line for six hours to renew an ID becomes proof of citizenship, and those who cannot—who must work, who have no one to hold their place, who cannot afford to lose a day’s wages to bureaucracy—are rendered administratively invisible, their lives unverifiable, their existence unbanked and therefore suspect?

We call it democracy. We call it transformation. We call it the New South Africa, where freedom arrived but the infrastructure of unfreedom remained, where the vote was extended but the trains were not, where political liberation occurred without economic redistribution and so the waiting continues, the queueing persists, the 4 a.m. alarms keep ringing in the townships while Sandton sleeps.

But here is the thing Nhlengethwa also paints, the thing the exhibition holds in its blues and ochres: they are still here. Still waiting, yes, but still present, still showing up, still rebuilding the world every morning from 4 a.m. onward despite everything designed to deplete them. There is a kind of spiritual warfare in this, a refusal enacted not through protest but through persistence—the construction worker who keeps building, the domestic worker who keeps raising other people’s children while loving her own from a distance, the taxi driver navigating the potholes and the bribes and the breakdowns to get people where they need to go because the state will not.

The queue is also a kind of congregation. The wait is also a form of witness. And if you listen closely, underneath the exhaustion, there is still song—on the taxi, in the rank, someone is always singing, always laughing, always finding a way to make the unbearable briefly bearable, to convert suffering into solidarity, to transform the queue from punishment into gathering.

This is not resilience. Resilience is what those who impose waiting call it when the people refuse to die from it. This is something else—something older, something that remembers that the wait has never been brief, that our people have been waiting for centuries, and in the waiting, learned to build worlds the oppressor cannot see, cannot tax, cannot steal because they are made of time given freely, of hours shared outside the market’s logic, of care that circulates according to need rather than price.

If there is a prayer here, it is not for redemption—the system is past redeeming. It is for something simpler and more radical: that the people who have waited their whole lives might one day live in a city, a country, a world that does not require their exhaustion as its foundation. That they might sleep until six. That they might eat breakfast. That they might spend their time on something other than standing in line to access the minimum required to survive another day.

That the queue might finally, mercifully, end—not because the system learned to process them faster, but because the system was abolished and replaced with something that valued their hours as much as it currently values the accumulation of capital in Sandton’s towers.

Until then, they wait. The paintings wait. The exhibition closed but the queue remains.

And somewhere in Johannesburg, right now, someone is standing in line at Capitec while someone else speeds past in a car that costs more than a lifetime of waiting.

Both are in the same city. Both are in the same century.

One is living in the apocalypse. The other has made heaven on earth.

And the distance between them is not five kilometers.

It is five hundred years, still unpaid.

When I was seventeen I used to drag new clothes across the concrete behind my school, punch holes into t-shirts, rub dirt into the knees of jeans my mother had saved for months to buy, leave leather shoes outside in the rain. Not vandalism exactly, not even rebellion in any legible sense—just this urgent need to erase the shininess of acquisition, to pre-empt the moment when someone might notice I wanted something enough to buy it new. The poverty I’d grown up adjacent to had taught me that desire makes you vulnerable, that wanting things you can’t afford writes itself across your body in garish, humiliating legibility, but somehow I’d internalized the inverse pathology too: that appearing to want what you could suddenly afford was equally obscene, a different kind of exposure. So I manufactured duration, faked a history of casual ownership, turned myself into an archive of a life I hadn’t lived. What I understand now—watching Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons send men down a runway in deliberately creased shirts, crushed hats, dirty French cuffs paired with eccentric cufflinks, aged shoes and haphazardly tied belts—is that I was performing a confused version of something Prada has spent decades refining into philosophical position: the refusal of perfection as fascist aesthetic, the rejection of newness as the only marker of value, the understanding that garments meant to last must be allowed to show time, to carry impressions of life, to resist the tyranny of the pristine.

The Prada FW26 menswear show stages what their notes call “archaeologies of thought,” every garment marked by duration, by what persists when you refuse the algorithmic cycle of acquisition and disposal that structures contemporary consumer desire. There’s something genuinely radical about this—not radical in the performative sense that gets immediately absorbed and commodified, but radical in the original sense of going to the root—because what Prada is doing here is rejecting the entire visual vocabulary of fascist uniformity: the perfectly pressed, the militarily precise, the obsessively maintained, the aesthetic that says power is perfection and perfection is newness and newness is the erasure of all evidence that bodies move through time and make choices and accumulate histories. This comes after Ralph Lauren’s first runway show in twenty years (establishment refinement, American old money, the fantasy of inherited class performed through objects maintained in museum condition) and after Zegna (that Italian understanding of construction so perfect it erases its own labor, wealth so quiet it never admits to effort), and what Prada is saying in response is something more dangerous to power: that meaning and intellectual depth require the visible evidence of having been worn, that we resist both algorithmic optimization and establishment authority by choosing things that will last long enough to show time, that the elongated silhouette conscious of the human form within refuses both the oversized shapes that have become fashion’s algorithmic default and the rigid lines of uniform thinking. Dirty cuffs, materials that reference construction paper, crushed hats, haphazardly tied belts—these aren’t poverty cosplay but the deliberate rejection of newness as virtue, the understanding that Prada’s founding joke on fascism (making luxury absurd, making perfection eccentric, making the uniform weird) now extends to making duration visible, making wear honourable, making the choice to keep and re-wear and let things accumulate patina into an aesthetic position against the replacement cycle that structures both fast fashion and algorithmic culture.

This maps precisely onto what Shumon Basar calls the “extreme present,” that atomization of time into dopamine-driven micro-units that replace any coherent sense of duration with an endless now of clicks, refreshes, the one-to-two-second intervals that dictate perceived speed and program desire at the level of nervous system response. Prada’s collection—with its precise construction that provokes curiosity rather than immediate legibility, its collaged prints that layer antiquity, renaissance, modernity, its refusal of the singular logic of now—reads as an invitation to exit algorithmic time entirely, to choose buy better buy less as both practical strategy and philosophical stance, to understand that garments showing wear aren’t failed objects but successful ones, evidence that something was chosen well enough to keep, made well enough to last, loved enough to show the accumulated marks of bodies moving through the world. The show’s staging at the Deposito of Fondazione Prada, what they describe as “a liminal space, vestiges of interior lives newly framing an arena for public display,” literalizes this: the private made public, the concealed revealed, the intimate work of choosing what to keep and what matters exposed as the actual site of resistance to systems that want us buying, cycling, disposing, refreshing, always already moving toward the next optimized recommendation. When Miuccia Prada says she positions fashion “outside traditional vestiment to reconcile cultural symbols, especially those of progressive youth culture,” when Raf Simons explores adolescence as the moment of “signaling an extreme rather than refining,” what they’re both circling is the understanding that the choice to wear things that show time, that refuse polish, that carry visible evidence of having been kept, becomes a way of asserting human unpredictability against algorithmic determinism, a way of saying this body has a history that can’t be predicted, optimized, or replaced.

The question isn’t whether this is perfect resistance—nothing is perfect resistance, perfection itself is the problem, the fascist aesthetic we’re trying to escape—but whether choosing duration over newness, complexity over optimization, the worn over the pristine, opens any actual space for unmanaged desire, for choices made slowly enough to mean something. I think the answer is yes, or yes enough, or yes in the specific way that matters: when you buy better and buy less, when you choose garments made to last and then actually wear them long enough to show that lasting, when you refuse the replacement cycle and let things accumulate the marks of your specific life, you’re not just making a sustainable choice or an aesthetic choice but an ethical choice about what kind of time you want to inhabit, what kind of desire you want to cultivate, what kind of self you want to become. Prada’s collection both excavates and honours this, turns the wound of wanting into the site of meaning not through cynical performance but through genuine refusal: refusal of the perfect, refusal of the new, refusal of the uniform aesthetic that links fascist militarism to algorithmic optimization to fast fashion’s endless cycle of acquisition and disposal. Which is perhaps as close as we get now to the practical joke Prada has always been playing on power: making the choice to keep, to wear, to show time into something more subversive than any gesture of spectacular rebellion, more threatening to established order than any aesthetic of newness could ever be.

Culture can still be re-tuned, but only if we’re willing to understand duration as discipline, wearing as practice, the choice to buy better and buy less as the actual work of resistance rather than its aestheticized substitute. The conditional future is this: choose garments made to last, wear them until they show your life, refuse the algorithm’s next recommendation, learn to read creases and wear and patina as evidence not of failure but of fidelity to choices made slowly enough to mean something. Let the perfect stay fascist. Let the new stay algorithmic. Let power have its uniforms and its optimization and its endless cycle of planned obsolescence. We’ll keep the things that last long enough to become ours, that show time enough to prove we were here, that refuse replacement long enough to suggest another way of being in the world. That’s the practical joke, the one Prada keeps playing: that the choice to wear things that show you’ve worn them becomes the most sophisticated resistance available, the gesture that turns duration into weapon, time into evidence, keeping into rebellion against everything that wants us always already moving toward whatever comes next.

There’s a conversation trending on South African X right now about “the boy child left behind”—specifically the black boy child. It’s contentious in ways that make my teeth ache, because the implicit claim is that somehow black women have ascended while black boys languish. Anyone who’s looked at our maternal mortality rates, at intimate partner violence statistics, at who still holds economic power, knows this is a mythology that requires black women to remain the eternal scapegoat for structural failures we didn’t author.

But this isn’t about statistics. A couple of days ago, I was in an Uber visiting my family in Mabopane, and the driver and I fell into one of those transit confessions where strangers become temporary witnesses. We talked about anti-intellectualism among black males in township communities, about how we both got bullied in school for being smart, for reading, for asking questions. I thought I understood this violence—the usual coordinates of broken education, internalized oppression, masculinity that mistakes brutality for strength.

Then he said: “They see it as a betrayal.”

I haven’t stopped thinking about that phrase. Betrayal of what? Of whom? And who authored the terms of this treachery?

Let me start with what I remember: Grade 1 to 8. 4am. Every morning for nearly a decade. From the dusty streets of Mabopane township to the leafy suburbs of Erasmia, Centurion. I wasn’t poor—my mother is a school teacher, my father was a successful landscaper and botanist—but I wasn’t rich either. Too rich for the poor kids, too poor for the rich ones. That liminal space where you belong nowhere fully, where every day is a border crossing.

The boys who stayed in Mabopane, the ones I’d see after school, the cool ones with all the girls fawning—they looked at us differently. The ones who took the predawn trek to white schools. Like we’d chosen something, like that 4am alarm was ambition rather than what it actually was: our parents’ desperate mathematics about futures, about what Model C education might buy that township schools couldn’t deliver.

At Erasmia, I had friends—Lucky Lloyd, Timon Whitaker. They were the A-students, the best in our year. Mr. Diepenaar, our English teacher (I think he was gay, though we never spoke about it), took a liking to us. He gave me Holes by Louis Sachar. I read it so many times the spine broke. I defended Lucky when boys bullied him for being gay—the same boys who’d come out themselves years later, after all that violence they’d performed to prove they weren’t what they were.

But here’s what breaks me now: my mother is a language teacher. Tswana. She spent her life teaching others to read, to love language, to understand that words are technology. But at home, reading wasn’t emphasized. The only book worth reading was the Holy Bible. The intellectual life I built happened at that Model C school, with those white teachers, in that suburb I had to travel hours to reach. Not at home. Not in Mabopane.

What does that mean? That the very intellectual formation I’m using to write this essay is inseparable from that daily crossing into whiteness? That my curiosity was nurtured by Mr. Diepenaar, not by the community I returned to every evening?

This is the trap, the cruel architecture: Bantu Education destroyed township schools so thoroughly that parents like mine had to send their children into white spaces to get education that might mean something. Model C schools were the compromise—technically integrated but still fundamentally white in pedagogy, in values, in what counted as knowledge.

So the anti-intellectualism I encountered wasn’t at school. It was when I came home. When the boys in Mabopane looked at me like I’d betrayed something by leaving every morning, by speaking English too well, by carrying books from Mr. Diepenaar, by defending Lucky when they’d learned that queerness—like intellectualism—was grounds for punishment.

They weren’t entirely wrong. I was leaving. Every single day. Four in the morning, over and over, choosing to cross that border. And what was I learning there? Not just academics. I was learning how to code-switch, how to perform middle-class respectability, how to navigate white institutional spaces, how to become the kind of black boy who’d eventually curate exhibitions in around the world, who’d study abroad, who’d write essays on Substack and art publications.

The boys who stayed—the cool ones, the ones everyone wanted—I call them island boys now. Because they can’t leave. They belong to the township in a way I don’t anymore, in a way I chose not to by taking that daily 4am exodus. They’re stuck there, not because they’re stupid or lazy, but because that Model C crossing wasn’t available to them, or they refused it, or their parents couldn’t sustain the daily logistics of it, or a thousand other reasons that had nothing to do with merit and everything to do with structural access.

And now? Now they’re posting on X about the “boy child left behind.” Now they’re consuming far-right content about how feminism destroyed them, how black women are the enemy, how immigrants stole their futures. Now they’re performing wounded masculinity as politics, as if their rage at being trapped isn’t legitimate but must be directed at the nearest available target.

But here’s what breaks my heart about that Uber driver’s phrase—about betrayal: the boys in Mabopane weren’t wrong that something was being betrayed. They just couldn’t name what. Because the real treachery wasn’t my 4am alarm. It was the system that made that alarm necessary, that destroyed their schools while building Model C institutions in white suburbs, that taught all of us that intelligence means whiteness means leaving means betrayal.

Fort Hare—where Mandela, Sobukwe, Mqhayi studied—was deliberately destroyed as an intellectual center. Verwoerd designed Bantu Education to create exactly this: black people who see learning as the enemy, who’ve internalized that African knowledge systems are worthless. My mother teaches Tswana but her knowledge was never valued the way Mr. Diepenaar’s English lessons were. My father’s botanical knowledge—Tsonga plant wisdom—was never “science” the way white taxonomies were.

So when those island boys looked at me with suspicion, they were reading something true: that I’d accepted the terms of a game rigged against us all, that my escape was individual rather than collective, that my success would be measured by how well I could perform in white institutional spaces while they remained trapped in places white capital had already abandoned.

And I’m asking myself: what did I betray to get here? Who did I leave behind at that 4am crossing? Because I’m writing this essay in a particular register that signals education, access, escape—writing for people like me who got out, not for the boys who stayed, not for the Uber driver, certainly not for the young men on X convinced their dispossession is black women’s fault.

But what if black masculinity could be something other than this binary—either island boy trapped and raging, or model-minority curator performing critique from safe institutional distance? What if it could be Lucky’s courage to be gay in a homophobic school? What if it could be the Uber driver’s ability to see, to name, to analyze even while caught in the mechanism?

What if it could be rooted not in Western individualism but in ubuntu, in the intellectual community my ancestors understood—knowledge as collective, as dreaming and ritual, as something that doesn’t require anyone’s subjugation as proof of your worth?

The boys who bullied Lucky for being gay, who later came out themselves—that haunts me. All that violence they performed to prove they weren’t what they were. All that self-hatred weaponized against someone brave enough to be visible. That’s the cost of this performance: we destroy ourselves and call it culture, attack our own vulnerability and call it strength, enforce our own cages and call it loyalty.

The island boys aren’t wrong that they’ve been left behind. They have. But not by black women, not by intellectuals, not by queers. By a system that needed some of us to make that 4am crossing while ensuring most couldn’t, that needed my individual escape to prove meritocracy works while keeping structural barriers intact.

And now I watch them scroll through content that confirms their worst intuitions, that tells them their rage is justified but misdirects where it should go. I watch them become foot soldiers for ideologies that would see them dead just as readily as anyone else positioned beneath whiteness. I watch them turn their legitimate fury lateral, horizontal, anywhere but upward at actual architecture of dispossession.

So when the Uber driver said “they see it as a betrayal,” he named something true. But the question is: can we betray the betrayal itself? Can we refuse the script that says intellectualism means leaving, that staying means ignorance, that there’s nothing between Model C assimilation and black anti-intellectualism?

What if we reclaimed the intellectual traditions that existed before they taught us shame? What if that 4am crossing could be collective rather than individual escape route? What if the island boys could leave the island not by abandoning each other but by building bridges together?

I don’t have easy answers. What I have is memory of that decade of 4am alarms, of Lucky’s courage, of Mr. Diepenaar’s kindness, of my mother teaching Tswana while I learned to value English more. What I have is the knowledge that I’m complicit in the very structures I critique, that my escape left others behind, that my voice reaches audiences those island boys will never access.

The only real betrayal left is choosing not to know this when we already do. The only question that matters is what we build with that knowledge—whether we keep performing our guilt through critique while systems stay intact, or whether we risk something real: the possibility that liberation means none of us are free until the island boys can leave too, until that 4am crossing isn’t necessary, until thinking and staying aren’t opposites.

Until then, we’re all just performing our assigned roles in a script written to ensure some of us escape individually while structures of abandonment remain unchanged. And calling that escape success is the final betrayal—the one that makes all the others possible.

I light a candle in the room where Elegy should have stood. Not the room in Venice—I looked forward to visiting, I will likely never stand in the South African pavilion even if it exists, even if something eventually fills the space that Gabrielle Goliath’s work was meant to occupy. I light the candle here, in Johannesburg, where distance has never prevented a haunting, where the disappeared always find ways to make themselves present.

The candle is white. The kind sold at Checkers for load shedding, for the moments when the grid fails and we are left with our own small flames. I light it because this is what I know how to do when something goes dark. When speech is withdrawn. When presence is terminated.

Elegy, selected December 6, 2025 by unanimous committee decision. Terminated January 6, 2026 by the Department of Sports, Arts and Culture. No formal notice. No public explanation. Just the quiet erasure of a commitment, leaving only absence where South Africa’s presence at Venice Biennale 2026 was supposed to sound.

Let me tell you what Elegy is. What it does. What note it holds when it is allowed to be heard.

Seven opera singers gather in a space. Women’s voices trained in Western classical tradition—that architecture of breath and discipline—now deployed for a ritual opera was never designed to hold. They sustain a single note. Not a melody. Not harmony. A single haunting tone held collectively over the course of one hour.

One hour. Sixty minutes. The singers take turns on a podium, each holding the note for as long as her lungs allow—sometimes thirty seconds, sometimes two minutes, depending on breath capacity, emotional endurance, how long the body can sustain sound before it must stop to survive. When one can sing no more, another steps up. The note passes between them like a living thing, like breath itself, like the way grief moves through a community—not equally distributed but collectively carried.

This is Elegy. Gabrielle Goliath’s ongoing work of “remembrance, repair and black feminist love,” performed since 2015 in locations from Johannesburg to São Paulo, Paris, Basel, Munich, Amsterdam. Each performance commemorates specific individuals—women and LGBTQIA+ people lost to what Goliath calls “a normative crisis of rape culture and femicide in South Africa and globally.” Not victims as category. Not statistics. Named lives. Mourned losses. Each performance includes a eulogistic text—sometimes written by mothers, by friends, by lovers; sometimes by scholars who reach across centuries to name women whose deaths exist only as fragments in colonial archives.

The audience stands or sits immersed in this sound. There is no escape from it. The note fills the room, vibrates in your chest, enters your body whether you consent or not. This is intentional. Mourning as physical experience. Grief not abstract but embodied, not distant but immediate, not past but ongoing.

Apollo Magazine writes that Elegy “epitomises Goliath’s conceptually profound yet immaculately tender approach to one of the most harrowing realities of life in contemporary South Africa: the prevalence of gender-based violence.”

Conceptually profound. Immaculately tender. Both at once. This is what Ingrid Masondo recognized when she curated Elegy for Venice—a work that could resonate with Koyo Kouoh’s curatorial vision for the 61st Biennale, In Minor Keys, which centers artists as “vital interpreters of the social and psychic condition.” Kouoh, who died in May 2025, shaped this Biennale as a framework for practices that address loss with “sensitivity, responsibility, and emotional depth.”

The selection committee—Greer Valley, Molemo Moiloa, Nomusa Makhubu, Sean O’Toole, Tumelo Mosaka—chose Elegy unanimously. These are not random names. These are curators whose judgment has shaped South African art discourse through decades of rigorous attention, of looking closely when institutions look away.

They chose this work. They announced it. They stood behind it.

And then the Department of Sports, Arts and Culture terminated the entire partnership with Art Periodic. No pavilion. No project. No Gabrielle Goliath at Venice.

I need to call a difficult witness now: the history of South Africa’s Venice participation itself.

1995: no pavilion. The first Biennale after democracy. We were not there.

1997: no pavilion.

1999: no pavilion.

The first official South African participation was 2001—Sue Williamson’s Truth Games, engaging directly with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Since then: sporadic participation, chronic underfunding, irregular governance, last-minute crises. This is not new. The current collapse is simply the latest iteration of a pattern so established it feels like structure.

The Department of Sports, Arts and Culture has never adequately funded arts infrastructure. This is the same department that proposed spending R22 million on a massive flag in Tshwane while artists and cultural workers struggle for basic resources, while museums operate with skeleton staff, while the nation’s cultural heritage crumbles from neglect. The flag proposal generated widespread criticism, but it revealed something essential: the state understands spectacle but not substance, understands monuments but not the patient work of institutional maintenance, understands visibility but not care.

Venice requires sustained commitment. It requires funding, logistics, relationship-building with La Biennale di Venezia, maintaining the lease on the pavilion even in years when South Africa does not participate. This boring, unglamorous work has never been consistently done. And so we arrive at moments like this: a couple of months before the Biennale opens, no confirmed project, a selection process voided, artists and curators left in limbo, and South Africa’s absence becoming the story rather than our presence.

The spirits are speaking now. They are saying: this is not about Elegy alone. This is about infrastructure collapse, about institutions that have been slowly failing for thirty years, about the gradual erosion of the frameworks that allow cultural production to operate at international scale.

I need to sit with the sound itself, with what it means to hold a single note for an hour.

Opera training teaches the voice to move—scales, arias, the athletic display of range and flexibility. Elegy refuses this. The note does not develop. It does not crescendo or decrescendo. It simply is, sustained, relentless in its refusal to become anything other than itself.

This is formally radical. In Western musical tradition, a held note creates tension that demands resolution. The ear expects movement, expects the sound to go somewhere. Elegy denies this expectation. It insists on stasis, on duration without development, on grief that does not resolve.

The sound is described as “haunting.” Not metaphor—it haunts. It persists beyond the moment, refuses to be forgotten, returns and returns. Like the dead who remain present through their absence, who continue to shape the world they no longer inhabit.

Deborah A. Thomas, who witnessed Elegy at the Cape Town Slave Lodge in 2018, describes how some audience members became uncomfortable after ten minutes, how some left. How those who remained “settled deeply into the sound, and into the worlds evoked by and through that sound.” She describes watching as the singers, after finishing their turns on the podium, sat among the audience—one woman began quietly sobbing. Thomas placed her hand on hers, “felt the spark of relation and care.”

This is the work’s power: it creates conditions for collective feeling without prescribing what that feeling should be. It makes space for grief without instrumentalizing it, without asking mourning to serve any purpose beyond itself.

Elegy has taken many forms since 2015. There are live performances. There is a 10-channel video installation created in 2024 that documents ten performances mourning: Camron Britz, Hannah Cornelius, Eunice Ntombifuthi Dube, Kagiso Maema, Lerato ‘Tambai’ Moloi, Sizakele Sigasa & Salome Masooa, Noluvo Swelindawo, Joan Thabeng, Louisa van de Caab, Cornelia van Piloane.

Some names you may recognize. Hannah Cornelius, UCT student killed in 2017. Lerato ‘Tambai’ Moloi. Noluvo ‘Vovo’ Swelindawo, murdered in Khayelitsha in 2016.

Others you likely do not know. Joan Thabeng, transgender woman killed in a hate crime by a man her community calls mantanyola—one who rapes men, women, and children—who walks free because “the police are not serving us as they should.” Kagiso Maema, studying information technology, “a drama Queen, a dancer and an entertainer” who helped community members fix their radios, TVs, cell phones. Her mother writes: “Now I, and society, must struggle alone with our technology.”

And names separated from us by centuries. Louisa van de Caab, enslaved woman killed in 1786. Cornelia van Piloane, shot in the head by Carel Boom van Koningsburg in the Slave Lodge in 1763—she survived the gunshot but the archive never records her death, leaving her suspended in that violence forever, never given the closure of an ending.

For these women whose lives exist only in eight lines of archival record, scholars like Saarah Jappie write speculative eulogies. She addresses Cornelia directly across 253 years: “Beloved Cornelia, we owe you an apology. How many times have we walked past that building and neglected to remember you?” She addresses Louisa: “Could you have seen any of this coming? What were your final thoughts? Did you ever dream of your mother’s Malabar? What used to make you smile? And did you ever feel free?”

These questions have no answers. That is the point. To mourn what cannot be fully known, to insist that even fragmentary archives deserve grief, to refuse letting anyone be forgotten just because their death was convenient for systems that required Black and brown and feminised bodies to be killable without consequence.

This is black feminist love: not sentiment but practice. Not feeling but commitment. The insistence that these lives are “loveable and grieveable,” worth the hour of sustained attention that Elegy demands.

I am thinking about Nqabisa Mkatali, who was present at the 2017 Elegy performance for her murdered partner, Noluvo Swelindawo.

Goliath writes: “Nqabisa’s own cry was loud, piercing, heart-breaking, soul-splitting, and, in that moment, the only tribute she felt able to share.”

Nqabisa’s cry joining the singers’ sustained tone. Not interrupting the ritual but becoming part of it. Individual grief existing within collective mourning. The work does not erase the particular in favor of the universal, does not ask Nqabisa to moderate her pain for anyone’s comfort. It makes room for “loud, piercing, heart-breaking, soul-splitting” sound because that is what grief actually sounds like.

Noluvo was murdered by Sigcine Mdani, who “stamped on her head and repeatedly kicked her in the face” before abducting her from her home. Judge Derek Wille acknowledged she was a victim “not only of misogyny and femicide, but of gross intolerance—which is to say, of queerphobia.”

The eulogies do not sanitize these deaths. Camron Britz’s mother describes finding her daughter “just about 60 meters from home... murdered and raped and her body was broken.” Joan Thabeng’s friend describes finding her at 4am, “half naked, her clothes were torn; cell phone, wallet and keys were stolen. It looked like a car accident, because she was covered in dirt... Joan wasn’t hit by a car, she’d been strangled and thrown out into the street.”

Elegy holds this specificity without trafficking in violence, without reproducing the visual economy that makes Black and brown and queer bodies available for consumption. Goliath describes the work as “refusing spectacle and the objectification of bodies deemed rapeable and killable.” The violence is named but not shown. The grief is held but not exploited.

This is the methodology: create space where mourning can be collective without being instrumentalized. Where the dead are present not as lesson or warning but as absence—the irreversible subtraction of particular lives from the world.

The selection committee’s statement describes Elegy as addressing “planetary concerns of loss and disregard” with “urgent specifics of a national disaster of femicide in South Africa” while extending to “experiences in Namibia and Gaza.” The work “recognises and mourns the tragic loss of innocent lives, including Palestinian women and children.”

On January 6, 2026, the Department of Sports, Arts and Culture terminated the entire Art Periodic partnership. No formal termination notice was made public. No explanation was given.

The selection committee responded with a statement that uses language rarely seen in art discourse: “The termination of the project proposed for the South African Pavilion constitutes an abuse of executive authority and a serious violation of the principles enshrined in South Africa’s Constitution... We reject, without reservation, any effort to coerce artists or curators into altering artistic statements to serve political narratives. We further reject all forms of censorship and intimidation that seek to curtail critical artistic practice.”

These are not aesthetic disagreements. These are accusations of constitutional violation. Of the state using its power to silence artistic expression after selection, after announcement, after commitment.

Hoosein Mahomed, writing about both this Venice crisis and the concurrent Steven Cohen censorship at Iziko, identifies the pattern: “In both Venice and the Cohen retrospective, the problem is not controversy. It is hesitation... These are not failures of intention so much as failures of institutional resolve. They suggest organisations unsure of their mandates, reluctant to stand by their procedures and reactive when steadiness is required.”

Hesitation. Not dramatic rupture but quiet withdrawal. Not explicit censorship but the manufactured emergency that makes execution impossible and then blames complexity, timeline, unforeseen circumstances—anything except the decision itself.

This is how institutions fail in South Africa. The same state apparatus that proposed spending R22 million on a massive flag in Tshwane—a decision that generated widespread criticism—now cannot maintain commitment to a pavilion it leases, to artists it selected through a transparent process, to representation at the most significant contemporary art platform globally.

The reputational cost is incalculable. South Africa is absent from the Biennale where Africa was supposed to be centered, where Kouoh’s vision created space for African and diasporic practices to be interpretive rather than supplemental. We are absent at the moment we were supposed to be most present.

The absence is not principled. It is not boycott or protest. It is simply failure. Institutional collapse disguised as procedural necessity.

I want to think about what is lost when Elegy is not heard at Venice.

Not just Goliath’s work or Masondo’s curation. But the sound itself. Elegy is site-responsive—each performance negotiates the specific acoustics of its location, how sound carries in that particular architecture, how audiences move within it. The Venice pavilion has its own sonic properties. Whatever form of Elegy was planned for that space, it would have been shaped by those conditions.

Now we will never know how it would have sounded there. We will never know which individuals would have been commemorated, whether the work would have taken the form of live performance or installation, how Italian and international audiences would have responded to an hour of sustained tone mourning South African women, LGBTQIA+ individuals, Palestinian lives.

The work exists only as potential now. As what should have been. As the sound that will not be heard.

Deborah A. Thomas writes that Elegy “creates the conditions for us to give ourselves over to the work of mourning, and, potentially, to reflect on the conditions that create the need for mourning in the first place.”

This is the work’s politics: it does not tell you what to think. It creates conditions for reflection. It generates feeling “in relation to, rather than feeling ‘for,’ specific lives rather than faceless victims.” It makes grief collective without prescribing how that collective should organize itself, what actions should follow.

Thomas describes Elegy as “a necessary precursor to something that will take place afterward.” Not activism itself—the work does not claim to prevent future violence, does not offer solutions. But preparation. A practice of “yielding, of giving oneself over to something or someone, of surrender to modes of vulnerability grounded in embodied practice.”

When seven singers hold a note for an hour and the audience stays inside that sound, something happens that cannot be controlled. People cry. People hold hands. People recognize shared vulnerability, shared exposure to systems that make some bodies killable and then expect us to move on.

Elegy refuses this acceptance. It insists on staying inside grief, on holding the note beyond comfort, on creating duration where institutions want efficiency.

The work was selected through a transparent process. It was endorsed unanimously by a committee of respected curators. It aligned with the Biennale’s curatorial vision. And then it was terminated without explanation.

I return to the candle. Still burning. Still holding light in this room where I am writing, trying to call Elegy into presence even though it has been disappeared.

The candle is not metaphor. It is actual: wax melting, wick burning, flame that moves with my breath. This is what Elegydoes—makes grief actual. Not symbolic. Creates actual sound that enters actual bodies and requires actual time and produces actual feeling that persists after the performance ends.

Goliath calls this “the urgent, ongoing life-work of mourning.” Not work that finishes. Not labor that completes. But ongoing. Urgent. Life-work—the work that sustains life even as it confronts death, that insists on care even as it acknowledges failure.

Venice will open in April. The South African pavilion will be something—empty, perhaps, or hastily filled with work selected outside the failed process. And Elegy will continue elsewhere. Because the work is not the pavilion. The work is the performance. The work is seven singers who will gather in Johannesburg, Cape Town, wherever space exists for grief to be held collectively. The work is the note that will be sustained, whether the state sanctions that mourning or not.

I blow out the candle. The smoke rises, disperses. But the smell remains—that particular scent of extinguished flame that lingers long after the light is gone.

The note unsounded. The pavilion empty. The work disappeared from where it was selected to be.

But somewhere, seven voices are practicing. Somewhere, lungs are filling with breath. Somewhere, the note is preparing to sound again.

Silence is not surrender. And absence can speak louder than presence when you know what has been taken.

I keep thinking about Thami Jali’s hands that night at Thokozani Mthiyane’s studio at Ellis House in 2018—Thokozani, one of my favourite artists and a beloved mentor, had brought us together, and we stayed up until the light changed and the conversation felt less like an interview and more like a séance, summoning the ghosts of a tradition that South African art history has been too nervous, too colonial, too fucking respectable to properly acknowledge—and I wonder now, years later, sitting here with my own hands hovering over a keyboard trying to make this argument cohere into something that won’t be immediately dismissed as “too angry” or “not rigorous enough” (which is really just code for “this makes me uncomfortable because it names the thing we’ve agreed not to name”), whether the entire architecture of what we call South African art history is really just an elaborate act of forgetting, a curated amnesia designed to protect the fiction that abstraction arrived here on European ships, in European minds, carried by European hands that had earned the right to make marks that didn’t represent anything because they had already mastered representation, because they had already proved (to whom? themselves? their dead fathers? the market?) that they could draw a face, a body, a recognizable world, before they earned the privilege of destroying it, deconstructing it, making it difficult.

But here’s the thing—and this is where the whole edifice starts to crack, where the careful taxonomy of influence and innovation and “important contributions” begins to reveal itself as the administrative sorting system it always was—Ernest Mancoba was already there, was already past there, had already understood by the 1940s (while living in Paris in what I can only imagine was a particular kind of exile that combined the violence of French colonialism with the slightly more polite violence of French intellectual culture’s insistence that African artists could only ever be “primitive” or “derivative,” never simply contemporary, never simply themselves) that abstraction wasn’t some advanced degree in Western art history but a return, a circling back, a way of accessing something that existed before representation became the gold standard of artistic legitimacy, before the colonial project required that African artists prove they had graduated from “craft” to “art” by demonstrating technical mastery of European conventions, which is really just another way of saying: prove you can mimic us before we’ll allow you to have a vision of your own.

Mancoba painted Composition in 1941, these geometric forms that refuse narrative, refuse to be about anything other than their own relationships to each other, their own internal logic, and I think about how that painting exists in the same historical moment as the formalization of apartheid’s predecessor policies, exists in the same moment when black intellectual labor was being systematically criminalized, when the very idea of a black person engaged in cerebral work (my word, and it’s the right word, the perfect word actually because it names the apartheid anxiety so precisely) was treated as a category error, a violation of the natural order, and yet here is Mancoba making work that is nothing but intellectual labor, nothing but the mind moving through space, making decisions about color and form and composition that don’t require the artist to prove a damn thing about their ability to render the visible world because the visible world, as it was being constructed by apartheid, as it was being carved into locations and bantustans and servants’ quarters, was a lie anyway, was a fiction more abstract than any painting could ever be.

(And I know what happens here, I know the counterargument arrives right on schedule: “But Mancoba was in Paris, he was influenced by European modernism, CoBrA, et cetera”—as if influence only moves in one direction, as if the presence of African artists in European capitals didn’t also constitute a radical intervention, a troubling of the narrative, and here’s something that makes the whole story even more absurd: when Okwui Enwezor—whose work I deeply respect—reintroduced Mancoba to the art world in “The Short Century” touring exhibitions in 2001-2002, one of the three works included was actually not Mancoba’s at all; it was by his Danish wife, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, and Mancoba was still alive then, or if Enwezor couldn’t reach him directly, the South African art historian Elza Miles was still reachable, but nobody bothered to check, which tells you everything about how seriously people were actually looking at the work versus how much they wanted the symbolic presence of an African abstract artist to fill a gap in their narrative, as if we’re supposed to pretend that the “primitive” art that European modernists were so busy appropriating wasn’t a form of abstraction itself, wasn’t already doing the work of formal innovation that Europe would later claim as its own invention, and as if this whole paranoid policing of influence isn’t really just another way of saying: we’ll allow you to have been influenced by us, but we cannot allow ourselves to have been influenced by you, because that would disrupt the entire timeline, the entire story we’ve told ourselves about who brings culture to whom.)

And let’s talk about what happened with CoBrA, because this is where the erasure gets particularly instructive: Mancoba met the CoBrA artists—Asger Jorn, Constant, and the others—through a 1948 exhibition at Høst, a Danish art association, where both he and Sonja Ferlov were invited alongside the artists who would go on to sign the CoBrA manifesto, and some people have called that Høst exhibition the “first” CoBrA show, which has led to Mancoba sometimes being labeled a “founder” of CoBrA, but the reality is murkier and more revealing: CoBrA was intentionally “organized and disorganized,” didn’t keep a members list, anyone could be a “member” if they ascribed to the philosophy, but the actual exhibitions were organized mainly by Jorn and Constant, and in 1949 when the first CoBrA exhibition in a public institution happened at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Mancoba was invited but didn’t attend (reasons unknown—maybe he had a small child, maybe he lived 40 km from Copenhagen and couldn’t make it, maybe he saw something in the invitation that made him hesitate), and that decision—that single absence—meant he was left out of subsequent CoBrA retrospectives because he wasn’t in that “seminal” exhibition, which is a polite way of saying that the infrastructure of art history operates through a series of seemingly neutral criteria (were you in the Stedelijk show? yes or no?) that actually encode much deeper exclusions, and it’s worth noting that an important CoBrA art historian (and I know who this is, and so does anyone who has done the research, but I’ll follow Winnie Sze’s discretion in not naming her) didn’t believe Mancoba should be included in the canon for various reasons, including that she didn’t find his work spontaneous or childlike like the other CoBrA artists, but also—and this is the part that should make us all pause—because she said his work “betrayed his African origins,” and what the fuck does that even mean except that there was a right way and a wrong way for an African artist to make abstract work, a right way and a wrong way to be “influenced,” and Mancoba apparently got it wrong by being too sophisticated, too considered, too intellectual, too much of everything that abstraction supposedly requires except when it’s coming from an African who is then supposed to be “spontaneous” and “intuitive” rather than deliberate and thoughtful.

But here’s what makes Mancoba’s work so devastating to the canonical narrative: it refuses to be either/or, refuses to be neatly sorted into “African” or “Western” categories, and this is what people struggle with—Europeans see the handling of paint, the color field as interrogation of perspective, these “Western aspects,” while Africans identify with his palette and especially the subject of the kota (West African reliquary) in the kota-esque paintings as aspects of “African spirituality,” so people understand the aspects they know, but what breaks their neat filing systems is that in Mancoba’s work, BOTH Western and African aspects are simultaneously present, it’s a kota but painted partially abstractly using Western painting language, it’s a Western color field painting made using African color tones, and Mancoba’s work is not a pastiche of either culture, which is what makes it interesting and unique but also why it’s so difficult to fit into an art historical canon that needs things to stay in their lanes, that needs “African art” to mean one thing and “modernism” to mean another and never the twain shall meet except through the safe channel of “influence” that only flows one direction.

And Mancoba himself gave us the key to understanding what he was doing—he quoted Rimbaud’s phrase “je est un autre,” which translates with its intentional grammatical error as “I is another,” and for Mancoba this summarized his belief in the role of art, that art allowed us to see “the other,” to see others in ourselves and to see ourselves in others, which is both a philosophical position and a formal strategy, a way of making work that refuses the colonial insistence on fixed, knowable, categorizable identities and instead proposes something more fluid, more complex, more true to how culture actually works when it isn’t being policed by people with institutional investments in keeping things separate.

The thing about portraiture—and I’m unnervingly right about this, in a way that makes me want to argue with myself just to avoid the discomfort of certainty—is that it performs legibility, it performs the kind of labor that can be seen and therefore valued, can be assessed and graded and placed on a spectrum from “crude” to “accomplished,” and under apartheid (and let’s be honest, under capitalism more broadly, under any system that requires human beings to constantly audition for their humanity), this performance of visible labor becomes a survival strategy, becomes a way of saying: look, I can do the thing you value, I have mastered your metrics, now will you see me? And portraiture in black South African art has done important work, revolutionary work even—I’m not trying to diminish that, not trying to set up some false hierarchy where abstraction is somehow more advanced or more politically sophisticated—but I am saying that the overwhelming dominance of portraiture, the way it has become almost synonymous with black South African painting, might tell us less about what black artists want to make and more about what the market (the institutions, the collectors, the gallery system that still operates according to colonial logics even when it’s mouthing decolonial platitudes at the openings I attend, at the art fair booth I’m preparing for Cape Town in February, where I’ll present “Between Two Sessions” and hope that the interactive digital components I’m developing will somehow bridge the gap between what the market wants and what the work actually needs to say) is willing to recognize, is willing to pay for, is willing to put on a wall and call “important.”

Thami Jali understood this, and that night at Thokozani’s studio (which feels now like it happened in another lifetime, in anotherJohannesburg, before everything became so professionalized, so careful, so afraid of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person), he talked about the violence of expectation, about how audiences—especially white audiences, especially international audiences who wanted their African art to arrive with a clear manual, a legible politics, a story that confirmed their existing understanding of what African suffering looks like—would get actively angry when confronted with abstraction, would feel cheated, would want their money back (literally and metaphorically), because abstraction refuses to perform the kind of trauma-legibility that makes white guilt comfortable with itself, that allows the market to digest black pain and call it consciousness-raising.

And Jali’s work, these explosive arrangements of color and form that seem to contain entire cosmologies, entire philosophical systems, entire ways of being in the world that don’t require Western approval or validation—the kind of work I wish I had seen more of before he died, before I lost the chance to have more of those conversations that felt like initiation, like being let into a secret tradition that exists parallel to the official one—but I need to tell you about what Jali was doing in his recent work before he died, this exhibition called “Mphendla Ndlela” (I’m looking for a way) at KZNSA Gallery in 2024, which was ostensibly a homage to Nukain Mabuza, a farm laborer and gardener of Mozambican or Swazi origins who spent fifteen years producing a “stone garden” in Mpumalanga, painting rocks and chairs in bold, distinctive patterns, creating this obsessive, visionary environment that nobody quite knew what to do with until Mabuza committed suicide in 1991, a year after he left the farm, and Jali first encountered Mabuza through the pages of Farmer’s Weekly in 1991—couldn’t read the Afrikaans text but the images “hit him right between the eyes”—and then in 1999 Jali made a fortuitous sojourn through Barberton that enabled him to visit the Stone Garden in person, and he began his homage to Mabuza tentatively, teaching young people at the Matsulu Art Centre in Mpumalanga to produce ceramic tiles based on Mabuza’s distinct aesthetic, and this fascination continued until Jali’s death, until these final paintings where Mabuza’s distinctively painted rocks appear scattered across Jali’s compositions, nestled into the ground and floating through the air, and Mabuza’s painted chairs—said to be among his few possessions—assume a regal and surreal presence, soaring through the skies.

And here’s what’s so moving about how Jali approached Mabuza: he chose to conceal Mabuza’s actual likeness by draping him in a red and white striped cloth (in a work called Seated Figure II), and this cloth reappears in other works, serving to conjure a cloaked, body-less presence (Seated Figure I, Resurrection I and Resurrection II), and this choice to avoid mimesis and rather to depict Mabuza’s presence as shrouded and ethereal tells us that Mabuza has assumed the function of a symbol or sign, Mabuza is both historical figure and idea, and indeed much of Jali’s iconography doesn’t draw directly from Mabuza at all—the red and white striped cloth is one Jali himself owns, and the landscape isn’t rocky Mpumalanga but rather the sandy Namib, referenced from photographs, so the land that is pictured is an expansive one, bridging swathes of the subcontinent, and the ruins and discarded building blocks that pop up intermittently remind us of Jali’s earlier, gritty body of work depicting broken dwellings, poignant works that speak to the traces of human presence that linger beyond life as we think we know it.

And what drew Jali to assign such a central place to Mabuza? For Jali, Mabuza was the quintessential outsider artist, someone who developed a unique visual language, manifesting a vision, passion and commitment to express his own authenticity, bereft of any self-conscious conceptions of “art,” and such a path is often a lonely one and can have tragic consequences—Mabuza’s suicide in 1991 stands as testament to this—and I think Jali used Mabuza to affirm his conviction that art is about something deeper than materialism, and that deeper purpose resonated for Jali who gave up what promised to be a lucrative career in law to become an artist at Rorke’s Drift in the early 1980s, at a time when Black artists were seldom featured in public collections and published surveys of South African art, and it also resonated deeply because Jali found in Mabuza qualities that he first encountered with his maternal grandmother, who was fascinated by mirrors, glass and light, and created large cardboard aeroplanes that she hung from trees, and like Mabuza, her solitary, idiosyncratic ways were misunderstood and she was shunned for her difference, both were considered insane, witches, or both, and hearing Jali thread links between Mabuza and his grandmother that night at Thoko’s studio suggested that—through the methodology of researching Mabuza’s life and seeking meaning in his work—Jali had constructed a gateway through which he could engage reflectively with the memory of his maternal grandmother, could honor both of them simultaneously, could insist that their visions mattered even though the world had dismissed them as mad.

But it’s arguably through a series of six abstract paintings that Jali’s interlocution of Mabuza’s aesthetic is most fully realized—Mabuza’s name features in four of the titles: Rhapsody for Nukain and three versions of Blues for Nukain—and it is in these works that Jali hones in on stylistic elements associated with Mabuza’s bold aesthetic: dots, rectangles within rectangles and parallel bands of color, and here too, you can’t ignore the circular format adopted for the Blues for Nukainseries, which, coupled with the geometric patterning, recall isiZulu earplugs, although the motifs themselves are more explicitly those of Mabuza, and these paintings manifest Jali’s effort to imagine the music Mabuza would have listened to, because music—particularly Jazz—was central to Jali’s studio practice, and he explained that these works were his attempt to imagine how Mabuza’s visual language would sound, so we are called to imagine how these works sound as much as we are taken by how they look, which is a stimulating proposition because it reminds us not only of early Western modernists who sought to bridge the visual and aural but also has affinities with theories of African aesthetics as multi-dimensional and multi-sensory rather than purely visual, and Jali’s abstract paintings are more than formalist arrangements of color and pattern—their eloquence pulsates with presence, they are paintings that look better in person than in photographs, that refuse to be fully captured by documentation, that insist on embodied encounter.

(I’m thinking now about how many times I’ve been in conversations—panel discussions, curatorial meetings, those exhausting institutional negotiations where I’m simultaneously trying to coordinate major exhibitions while maintaining my own practice, trying to make space for other artists while figuring out how to survive as one myself—where someone will say something like “We need more diverse voices in the conversation about contemporary African art” as if the voices don’t already exist, as if I’m not sitting right there, as if the problem isn’t voices but ears, isn’t production but reception, isn’t absence but a cultivated form of selective attention that allows certain people to remain comfortable in their expertise, to maintain their gatekeeping positions, to avoid the destabilizing recognition that they might have been looking at the wrong things, asking the wrong questions, building their entire careers on a curated misunderstanding while artists and curators from Mabopane are supposed to be grateful for the invitation to educate them, to do the labor of dismantling the very frameworks that excluded us in the first place, and to do it politely, to do it without anger, to do it in ways that don’t make anyone uncomfortable enough to withdraw funding.)

Now Moshekwa Langa, who takes this refusal even further, who makes work that seems to exist in multiple temporal registers at once—drawings that accumulate like sediment, installations that feel archaeological but also somehow prophetic, as if they’re excavating a future that hasn’t happened yet—and I think about how Langa’s work resists not just representation but also the demand for resolution, for clear meaning, for the kind of interpretive closure that makes art history comfortable, that allows the discipline to file things away, to say “this means X” and move on to the next thing, the next artist, the next neatly bounded career that can be summarized in a wall text.

Langa is from Limpopo, which matters—not in some essentialist way (I’m already exhausted by the discourse that wants to make rurality into a kind of authenticity badge, as if my own trajectory from Mabopane doesn’t complicate these neat binaries)—but because it reminds us that the geography of South African abstraction doesn’t follow the expected maps, doesn’t move predictably from “centers” to “peripheries,” doesn’t need Johannesburg or Cape Town or Lagos (where I spend so much time now coordinating festivals and exhibitions) or some European residency to legitimate itself, already contains its own logics, its own references, its own reasons for existing that don’t require external validation.

And then Dineo Seshee Bopape, who might be the most uncompromising of them all, who makes work that feels like it’s always in the middle of becoming something else, installations with soil and sound and water and light that refuse the commodity form so completely that I sometimes wonder how they survive in an art world that ultimately wants everything to be purchasable, wants everything to fit in a shipping crate—and Bopape’s work seems to say, very quietly but also absolutely firmly: no, not this, this belongs to the earth, to ritual time, to epistemologies that precede and exceed the market, the kind of epistemologies I’ve been trying to articulate through my own practice, through the monotypes I make at David Krut Workshop, through the dream-work and ritual that informed my initiation in 2018 (the same year I met Jali at Thoko’s studio, as if that timing means something), through Khemisi and the archive I’m building to preserve sacred knowledge that exists outside of institutional frameworks—and if you can’t meet it there then that’s your limitation, not mine.

(Bopape is also from Limpopo, and I keep coming back to this, keep wondering what it means that two of the most significant abstract artists working in South Africa right now both come from a place that art history has barely bothered to map, that exists in the national imagination primarily as a site of “traditional culture” [read: the past, the museum, the thing we’ve moved beyond] rather than as a site of contemporary intellectual production, of formal innovation, of artists who are doing the most interesting thinking about what art can be, what it can do, how it can refuse its own instrumentalization while also maintaining connection to ancestral knowledge systems.)

Bopape’s work makes me think about the question—the Fontana question, the cut-canvas question, the question of why there’s no black equivalent to these gestures that get celebrated as groundbreaking when white European men do them—and I think the answer isn’t that black artists haven’t made these gestures, haven’t engaged in these radical formal experiments (I see it in my own studio, in the work that emerges from somewhere between intention and accident, between what I know intellectually and what comes through ritual practice), but that the infrastructure of recognition has been engineered, quite deliberately, to make certain gestures visible and others invisible, to make certain artists into “innovators” and others into “interesting regional practitioners,” which is really just a polite way of saying: we acknowledge you exist but we’re not going to let you matter, we’ll put you in the Cape Town Art Fair booth but we won’t give you the institutional survey, won’t write the monograph, won’t do the work of actually integrating you into the canon because that would require admitting the canon was incomplete, was wrong, was built on exclusions that weren’t aesthetic but ideological.

Bronwyn Katz then, making sculpture from discarded beds, from the material infrastructure of migrant labor, and I need to tell you about seeing her work for the first time in Cape Town at a group show years ago when she was a recent graduate asking around for disused mattresses to make sculptures from: The first work I saw was a mattress stripped of all its materials and stuffing, rid of all the marks and stains of living, hung up on the wall as though it were a painting, the bed springs still in place, sticking madly out in all directions, both affronting and comical, but it was the green yarn wound, dutifully, carefully, to cover the last coil of each spring that moved me, these green woollen rings seemed to offer something soft, a collation of prayers, and I wrote in my diary about Walter Benjamin’s quote that “attention is the prayer of the soul,” because more than anything, Katz exemplifies this phrase—there was a mechanical violence in stripping away the person from the mattress, but there was also a redemption of the individual in the soulful labor of winding yarn, and I was astonished at the simple act of attention that was represented by the minute ringlets of wool and how it transformed a ready-made into a work of feeling.

And years later, at her solo show “I turn myself into a star and visit my loved ones in the sky” at White Cube Bermondsey in 2021, Katz took this practice even further—ten deconstructed bed frames made from bits of salvaged mattresses, pot scourers (steel wool pot scourers, those mundane domestic objects that can’t escape their connotations of domestic labour, of race, of gender) and colored wool yarn, and the titles of the works are salvaged too: named in !Ora, of the Korana people, a language decimated to the point of near extinction by colonialism and apartheid—||Ūs|amiros (Springbok star), |Amis||ãub (Magellanic clouds), ǃNoas (Tortoise star), ǃOmm (Porcupine star), ǃXankukua (Orion’s Belt), |Hōdi (Pleiades)—and one piece, ||Ūs|amiros, was made of bedsprings liberated from their stuffings and wire frames, but here each spring was covered by stainless steel pot scourers extended like socks over their lengths, and the scourer-covered-bedsprings turned into a strange mass of polyp-like entities reaching out like fingers or mushrooms, aside from their artificial colours—blue, chrome—they appeared almost organic, almost alive, even desperate and disturbing, as if they were begging us in their wordless way (and I’m thinking here of Derek Mahon’s poem “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford”: “They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way, / To do something, to speak on their behalf / Or at least not to close the door again. / Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii! / ‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say”).

And several other works in that show were made from the wire-frames rather than the bedsprings of mattresses—pieces like |Amis||ãub (Magellanic clouds) I and II, not unlike Bauhaus in their formal sensibility, reduced the everyday physical shape of the bed frame to simple wire lines and gestures of colour, each of the wire-frame works covered in part by tightly wound, coloured yarn, the shape of the mattress always alluded to but often altered, abstracted, the original quotidian aspects of a bed only faintly hinted at, and there’s a work called |Hōdi (Pleiades) that turns the mattress into five blue, vertical lines spaced evenly and parallel on the wall, lines that suggest the shape of a rectangle, the diluted memory of a mattress, and at the end of each line, the blue-covered wire bends up into squared curlicues, reminiscent distortions of bedsprings: memories of lost souls and loved ones.

And this is Katz taking these objects that are about as far from abstract as you can get (they’re hyperspecific, they’re loaded, they’re practically screaming their history—the hostel system, migrant labor, apartheid’s spatial engineering, all the violences encoded in where people were allowed to sleep and how) and somehow making them abstract anyway, making them into formal investigations of space and weight and containment, making them refuse their own narrative legibility—and this is perhaps the move that scares people the most, this insistence that you can be historically grounded AND formally radical, that abstraction isn’t an escape from politics but a different way of engaging with it, a way of saying: the visible wound is not the only wound, there are violences that operate at the level of form itself, at the level of who gets to make space, who gets to take up room, who gets to be illegible and still be taken seriously.

And in Katz’s wall pieces there is a pathos so small and delicate it is barely there, a humbleness in winding wool around wire so carefully, something quiet and sensitive—stripped of all the fluff of the ego, what is left is a singular austerity, like mythology: strange and timeless, and the slightness of these works feel equivalent to bandaging a wound or tending to a vegetable garden: an art of healing, or mourning; a language of spirits and stars, and you become aware of the many ghosts of the exhibition: languages (the !Ora language itself, nearly extinct, now naming these constellation-works), ancestors, loved ones, strangers, bodies, objects, and South Africa’s histories seem to hound the materials from which the work is made, but Katz attempts, through her work, to transcend semantic congestion by reconstructing an inscrutable language that can speak on behalf of the Other, and as the exhibition title suggests (borrowed from George Seferis’s poem “Mythistorema”: “Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels”), there’s something about taking the debris of domestic objects and re-assembling them into an abstract expression of living—not of a single life, not a personal experience (these are not the old mattresses of Granny Jean or Bronwyn Katz anymore), they have been stripped of the individual and given new names in a language of ancestors, a tongue full of ghosts speaks the names, and the individual gives way to a mythopoeia of collective experience of aporia, amnesia, and Katz’s work seems to suggest that it’s in the peculiar, rather than the particular, that the universal is found, to turn oneself into a tortoise star is to be subsumed by a strange universe, it is to pay attention to those obscure people forgotten among the asphodels.

Katz’s work makes me angry in the best way, makes me angry at the structures that required her to prove anything, that required any of these artists to prove anything, to audition for space in an archive that should have been theirs from the beginning, and I keep thinking about what a South African art history would look like if it had started from abstraction, if it had said: Mancoba is the foundation, Jali is the tradition, Langa and Bopape and Katz are the continuation of something that was never broken, was never lost, was only deliberately ignored—what would that history look like? What canons would crumble? What careers would have to be reassessed? What institutions would have to admit they’d been looking at everything backwards, teaching the wrong lessons, building their entire edifice on a selective reading that protected certain investments at the expense of the truth?

But here’s where I have to be honest, where the essay has to turn on itself the way I turn on myself in moments of doubt, in moments when I wonder if all this work I’m doing—preparing for the art fair, coordinating international exhibitions, managing budgets and timelines and partnerships—is actually changing anything or just making me complicit in systems that will never fundamentally shift: I don’t think we get to simply invert the hierarchy, to say “abstraction good, portraiture bad,” to create some new canon that’s just as rigid as the old one but with different names attached—because that’s what institutions do, that’s what the market does, they take radical ideas and turn them into new orthodoxies, new ways of sorting and ranking and excluding.

What I’m arguing for is a complete overhaul of the framework itself, a recognition that the entire concept of “South African art history” as it’s currently constructed is a colonial artifact masquerading as neutral scholarship, and that these artists—Mancoba, Jali, Langa, Bopape, Katz, and others—aren’t asking to be added to the canon, they’re exposing the canon as fraudulent, as built on exclusions that were never aesthetic but always political, always about who gets to decide what counts as serious, what counts as significant, what counts as worth preserving, whose ancestors get acknowledged as still present, still relevant, still speaking through the work if you know how to listen.

And the theory about physical versus intellectual labor, about how abstraction was (is) viewed with suspicion because it doesn’t provide visible evidence of work (the way my own practice sometimes feels suspect even to me when I’m working with materials that seem too simple, too direct, when the ritual component isn’t visible in the final object), doesn’t offer proof of skill in ways that satisfy the colonial hunger for measurable achievement—this cuts so deep because it names the ongoing anxiety, the one that still operates even in supposedly progressive spaces: the anxiety that if we can’t see the work, if we can’t measure it, if we can’t grade it according to technical standards inherited from European academies, then maybe it isn’t work at all, maybe it’s just... what? A scam? A joke?

(Which is funny because the actual scam is the one where we all pretend that market valuations make sense, that the artists who sell for millions earned it through pure talent rather than through proximity to the right networks—but we don’t talk about that, we talk about “quality” and “rigor” as if these things exist outside of the social relations that produce and recognize them, as if my upcoming fair presentation doesn’t come with its own complicated negotiations about how to make work that’s both formally rigorous and commercially viable, how to survive while also maintaining integrity.)

I think about that night with Jali at Thokozani’s studio often, think about how he was already sick but didn’t tell us, didn’t let it stop him from talking about the hidden histories, about the artists who never got their moment—and I think about how much knowledge has been lost, how many conversations I’ll never have, specifically me, someone who was initiated the same year I met him, as if there are lineages that extend beyond what gets documented, beyond what institutions recognize, and I think about the responsibility that comes with being one of the people who heard these stories, who has access to platforms (however precarious, however compromised), who can choose what to amplify, what to preserve, what to build.

This is the palimpsest: not a neat layering of influence but a messy, contested, partially illegible archive where some marks have been deliberately obscured, where some voices have been turned down so low you have to strain to hear them (the way I sometimes feel like I’m straining to hear my own voice over the institutional noise), where the official history and the actual history exist in such complete contradiction that you have to choose which one you believe, and that choice is political, is about whose authority you recognize, whose knowledge you trust, whose vision of the past and therefore the future you’re willing to invest in, whose ancestors you’re willing to acknowledge as still present.

So here I am, preparing for Cape Town, developing work that tries to hold all these contradictions—the formal investigation and the market reality, the ancestral knowledge and the contemporary context, the personal practice and the curatorial responsibility—writing this love letter to artists who refused to prove they could draw, who insisted on their right to be illegible, to be difficult, to make work that doesn’t solve anything or resolve anything—and I don’t know how to end this except to say: the archive is incomplete, the history is unfinished, the canon is a lie, and somewhere right now someone is making abstract work that refuses everything we think we know, and that person probably doesn’t have the support they need, probably doesn’t have the infrastructure that would allow them to work without compromise—and that work matters, that person matters, and the fact that we might never know their name doesn’t change that, it just indicts us, indicts the systems we’ve built, the hierarchies we’ve maintained, the stories we keep telling ourselves about who brings light and who receives it, who makes history and who becomes its footnote, who gets to be abstract and who has to keep proving, over and over again, that they have earned the right to exist without explanation.

Now let me connect this to necropolitics, to the bodies (living and dead) that museums keep in various states of suspension, to what Achille Mbembe describes as sovereign power operating not just through capacity to let live or make die (Foucault’s biopolitics, the administration of populations and optimisation of life) but through determining which bodies are disposable, which deaths matter, which flesh can be exposed to death with impunity, and crucially: which bodies can be kept in states between living and dead, suspended in zones where they’re available for use without being granted full status as human subjects deserving protection (Mbembe develops this analysing colonial occupation and plantation slavery and contemporary zones of exception like refugee camps and occupied territories, but the framework applies to museums too, to institutions that keep bodies in perpetual suspension between dead and not-properly-dead, between objects available for study and display and something more than objects that deserves respect if not quite the respect accorded to bodies that institutions recognise as fully human).

Museums are necropolitical zones par excellence (Mbembe doesn’t apply his framework this way but should, or I’m applying it for him because once you see it you can’t unsee it): institutions that keep bodies extracted from burial contexts and display them under educational pretense (mummies neither properly dead nor alive, removed from funerary practices designed to protect and honor them, placed in cases where millions of tourists stare annually while eating snacks purchased at museum café, the dead becoming backdrop for selfies and school field trips and date nights for couples who think looking at ancient corpses is cultured way to spend Friday evening). Institutions that determine which remains are sacred (European ancestors must be buried in consecrated ground, must be protected from disturbance, must never be displayed regardless of educational value or public interest) and which are resources (colonized peoples’ remains can be studied, displayed, stored in climate-controlled facilities for ongoing research access, kept available indefinitely because their value as specimens outweighs any obligation to return them to descendants or communities). Institutions that create zones where bodies exist simultaneously as objects (available for viewing, for scientific analysis, for use in ways their original possessors never consented to) and as more-than-objects (we acknowledge these were people, we’re not barbarians, we frame everything with sensitivity and educational context, we’re preserving heritage not displaying trophies even though the distinction between preservation and trophy-taking collapses under minimal pressure if you look at how “preservation” consistently benefits institutions that stole remains while doing nothing for communities they were stolen from).

And this necropolitical framing extends to living bodies too, to people who exist in zones between full subject status (deserving protection, having rights that can’t be violated, maintaining control over their own images and stories) and object status (available for use, rendered as material for others’ projects, having their consent presumed or extracted or considered unnecessary because the work is important enough to override ordinary obligations). Nomsa occupies this zone in Cohen’s work: neither fully autonomous subject (she can’t control how images circulate, can’t share in economic or mystical value they generate, can’t refuse uses she didn’t anticipate, can’t make objections that matter more than artist’s vision or curator’s interpretation or institution’s commitment to showing important work) nor simply object (we acknowledge she’s person, we’re told she consented, there’s relationship and affection claimed, Cohen talks about how she raised him and how the work honors her labor even while using that labor as material). Suspended between subject and object, available for use without having power to determine terms of that use or refuse uses that extend beyond what she consented to, kept in necropolitical zone where her body becomes site for operations (representational, economic, mystical) that generate value for everyone except her.

The skulls Cohen walks on occupy similar zone: legally purchased (so not stolen in technical sense, not requiring repatriation like museum remains increasingly do, not obviously problematic in way that makes institutions refuse to display them), but extracted from somewhere through processes we don’t examine because “legal” covers multitude of violence (whose ancestors? what colonial systems declared their remains fair game for collection and sale? what does it mean that human bones are available for purchase in Soho boutiques, that death under capitalism becomes commodity like everything else, that you can buy skulls next to vintage furniture and artisanal chocolates as if they’re all equivalent forms of décor?). The skulls function simultaneously as dead matter (bones, material, props for performance art about mortality and commodification) and as more-than-matter (human remains, sacred to someone presumably, worthy of respect even if that respect doesn’t prevent Cohen from fashioning them into shoes and walking on them through financial district as critique of capital’s reduction of everything including death to exchange value). Suspended between object and more-than-object, between dead and not-properly-dead, between available-for-use and deserving-protection, occupying necropolitical zone that museums create and maintain and operate within even while claiming to be educational institutions rather than sites of ongoing extraction.

And Cohen’s practice positions him as figure who can move between these zones, who has access to both living bodies (Nomsa, available to him through histories of domestic service and racial capitalism) and dead bodies (skulls, available through boutiques that sell curiosities extracted from somewhere), who can choreograph both into ritual performances that claim to critique their availability while depending entirely on that availability, who operates according to mystical/aesthetic logics that exempt him from ordinary ethical constraints because he’s not doing simple representation, he’s doing ritual confrontation with Magog, he’s attempting eschatological breakthrough, he’s working within frameworks (Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, apocalyptic theology) that have their own protocols and permissions that secular ethics don’t capture or constrain (or so the claim goes, so the title Magog suggests, so the pattern of his work implies if you read it through esoteric rather than simply critical lens).

Here’s where it gets properly occult, where we enter territory that contemporary art institutions have no frameworks for addressing because they’ve spent centuries pretending this dimension doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter or is just aesthetic reference rather than actual practice: what if Cohen is actually doing ritual work, not metaphorically or aesthetically but actually attempting operations that function on mystical/spiritual registers, actually trying to transform states and break curses and achieve breakthrough using methods that require bodies (living and dead) as material? Not invoking ritual as aesthetic strategy (the way plenty of contemporary artists reference shamanism or ancient religious practices or indigenous ceremonies as formal devices without claiming to actually be shamans or priests or practitioners), not appropriating mystical aesthetics for provocative framing, but actually attempting operations meant to generate effects beyond representation, beyond market circulation, beyond what secular frameworks allow us to acknowledge as real.

If that’s what’s happening (and the title Magog, the pattern across his work, the dead butterflies and animal slaughter and walking on skulls and stripping of domestic worker and everything positioned within Jewish eschatological narratives about apocalypse and redemption suggest it might be, suggest Cohen is serious about this dimension or wants us to think he’s serious even if he isn’t), then we’re dealing with register that our critical frameworks can’t address because they’re designed for secular interpretation, because contemporary art theory teaches us to read everything as representation or market or identity or discourse but never as actual magic, never as genuine ritual, never as attempt to operate on registers that Enlightenment rationality declared don’t exist except as superstition or ideology or false consciousness that proper education should dispel.

And museums (descendants of Wunderkammer, cabinets of curiosity that were always partly occult operations before they became educational institutions, collections designed to gather world’s magical objects and rarities and marvels into single space where their combined power could be harnessed by collectors who believed in correspondences and sympathies and the capacity of objects to carry forces beyond material properties, who thought assembling the world in miniature would grant knowledge and power over the world at scale) inherited this occult dimension but secularized it, translated magical operation into educational mission and aesthetic appreciation and cultural enrichment and public benefit. Kept the practices (collecting bodies extracted from colonies, displaying sacred objects removed from ritual contexts, creating spaces where profane and sacred intermingle in ways that generate charge for viewers even if that charge is now called aesthetic rather than mystical, educational rather than magical) while denying the original intentions that motivated them, while insisting that what looks like ongoing extraction of mystical/ritual value from colonized bodies and sacred objects is actually just preservation and education and making heritage available to publics who wouldn’t otherwise have access.

So when Cohen brings explicitly ritual work into museum context (if that’s what Magog is, if the eschatological framing is serious rather than aesthetic appropriation), when he titles piece after apocalyptic force in Jewish mysticism and incorporates Kabbalistic frameworks about breaking shells and uses bodies (living and dead) according to logics borrowed from mystical traditions about sacrifice and transformation and the necessity of confronting darkness before achieving light—the institution doesn’t know what to do because it has no framework for distinguishing genuine ritual practice from aesthetic appropriation of ritual, no way to evaluate whether mystical intention makes exploitation more or less problematic, no protocols for when art becomes actual magic and whether that changes ethical obligations to subjects/materials/bodies involved. The black cloths covering his work become accidental admission: we don’t know what we’re dealing with here, we don’t have categories that capture both exploitation and mystical operation simultaneously, secular frameworks are insufficient but we don’t have non-secular ones, so we’ll just cover everything and hope controversy resolves itself through dialogue and time and everyone eventually forgetting except Nomsa whose images still circulate and whose body was used for operations she may not have understood as operations rather than just participation in challenging art project about domestic labor.

But here’s what the republication of Joja’s review forces us to confront, what makes me think there’s something important in holding both readings simultaneously rather than choosing between them: two truths can exist at once and neither cancels the other, and the fact that both are true makes this worse rather than better, reveals dimensions of violence that persist beyond what either secular critique or mystical interpretation capture alone. Truth one (Joja’s structural analysis, secular frameworks, the reading that focuses on representation and exploitation): the work uses Nomsa’s body as fungible material, reproduces colonial logics of extraction, enacts violence of stripping and directing Black domestic worker to perform primitivist narratives while claiming to critique those narratives, positions Black woman’s flesh as raw material for white artist’s meaning-making, generates value (economic, cultural, professional) that flows entirely away from subject toward artist and institutions and everyone positioned to benefit from art world’s machinery. Truth two (mystical reading we’ve been missing, esoteric dimension that title Magog signals): the work attempts ritual engagement with apocalyptic violence, operates within Jewish eschatological framework where confronting Magog (chaos, shells trapping divine sparks, forces that must be broken before redemption becomes possible) is necessary for transformation, positions apartheid’s domestic labor system as apocalyptic force that must be engaged ritually not just represented critically, tries to achieve breakthrough or transcendence or working-through of Jewish South African complicity through practices that require bodies as sites for mystical operations.

Both are true. The simultaneity is the problem. Cohen is extracting not just economic value (career, retrospective, market circulation if work sells) or cultural value (prestige, institutional backing, position as important artist engaging difficult histories) but spiritual/ritual value from Nomsa’s body, is using her flesh as site for working through his Jewish South African theological concerns about guilt and redemption, is instrumentalizing her material reality (actual labor under apartheid, actual body shaped by that labor, actual history of being available to white families as domestic worker) for his mystical/eschatological purposes (achieving breakthrough, breaking shells, confronting Magog as preparation for transformation or transcendence or whatever redemption looks like after you’ve benefited from apocalyptic system). She becomes vessel for his ritual work without necessarily understanding or consenting to that dimension, becomes material for operations that function on registers beyond representation even while representations circulate and generate their own forms of value and violence.

And this reveals additional layer of extraction that all my essays about markets and consent frameworks and snuff aesthetics have been missing: mystical extraction, the use of bodies for ritual purposes without subjects’ understanding or participation in ritual framework, the instrumentalization of flesh for spiritual/theological work that benefits practitioner while using subjects as material for operations they don’t control or share in or possibly even recognize as operations rather than just weird performances they agreed to be part of because artist asked and they had affection/obligation/complicated relationship that made refusal difficult. Museums keeping mummies on permanent display might be engaging similar extraction—not just colonial appropriation of remains (though obviously that) but ongoing harnessing of those bodies’ power, the sacred charge that persists in remains that received centuries of ritual attention and veneration before being extracted from contexts designed to protect them, the mystical/spiritual value that colonial institutions claimed while insisting they were just doing science and education and preservation of heritage for humanity’s benefit (humanity being code for Europeans and their descendants, heritage being code for anything we stole and now claim universal ownership of).

The boom in Black portraiture that has defined art world for past decade—the market discovery that Black bodies sell, that collectors will pay millions for paintings of young Black men, that institutions need Black representation to maintain legitimacy and funding, that there’s enormous appetite for work engaging Blackness as long as that engagement stays within aesthetic frames that make it consumable rather than genuinely threatening—this boom might include mystical extraction alongside economic, might involve artists using Black bodies not just to generate market value but to work through their own spiritual/theological/psychological concerns, to achieve transformations or breakthroughs or redemptions that require others’ flesh as material, to perform operations that function on registers we’re not examining because secular frameworks teach us those registers don’t exist or are just aesthetic strategies rather than actual practices meant to generate actual effects.

And if that’s happening (and Cohen’s work suggests it might be, and he’s probably not alone, probably other artists working with ritual and sacrifice and esoteric symbolism that isn’t merely formal reference but might be functional, operational, meant to do something beyond representation), then we need frameworks for evaluating mystical extraction that don’t reduce to either “it’s all just aesthetics” (which misses possibility of genuine ritual intention and actual operations being attempted) or “magic isn’t real so it doesn’t matter” (which dodges the question of what consent means when someone’s body is used for mystical purposes they don’t share, don’t understand, can’t negotiate because the frameworks for negotiation don’t exist in secular institutions that have spent centuries insisting this dimension isn’t real even while continuing to extract value from it).

The occult museum—keeping bodies in suspension between dead and not-quite-dead, displaying remains extracted from colonies and burial contexts, creating spaces where sacred and profane intermingle under educational pretense, operating according to logics that mix preservation with extraction and aesthetic appreciation with ongoing assertion of necropolitical power to determine which bodies are available and which are protected—this structure persists whether we acknowledge mystical dimension or not, continues functioning whether we admit that institutions might still be sites of ritual operations (even if those operations are now called education rather than magic, cultural enrichment rather than extraction of spiritual value from bodies rendered available through colonial violence and racial capitalism). The black cloths at Iziko make visible what usually stays hidden, what institutions work hard to keep obscured: they don’t know how to handle work that operates simultaneously on secular registers (market, representation, critique of exploitation) and mystical registers (ritual, eschatology, sacrifice as technology for achieving transformation), don’t have frameworks for when art becomes magic and whether that changes anything about ethics or accountability or obligations we have to subjects whose bodies become sites for operations they didn’t consent to because they didn’t know operations were happening, because they thought they were just participating in art project not being used for mystical purposes that extract value on registers beyond representation.

And the limits of power reveal themselves here too, reveal something about why thirteen years of available critique didn’t stop the work from showing, why Joja’s brilliant analysis circulated without producing consequences until workers forced the issue: critique without power to refuse remains just content, just discourse that institutions can absorb and acknowledge and even celebrate as evidence of how seriously they take difficult questions while never letting that discourse determine material decisions about who gets shown, who gets funded, who gets to continue extracting value (economic, cultural, mystical) from bodies positioned as available. The occult dimension remains occult—hidden not because no one can see it but because seeing it without having power to refuse it changes nothing, because acknowledging mystical extraction while maintaining institutional structures that depend on that extraction just adds another layer of sophistication to the alibis, because we’ve spent so long insisting that magic isn’t real and ritual is just aesthetic strategy that we don’t have vocabularies for addressing extraction that happens on registers Enlightenment rationality declared don’t exist.

But what if those registers do exist, what if ritual operations are actual operations even when performed by contemporary artists in secular institutions, what if Cohen is genuinely attempting to break shells and confront Magog and achieve transformation through practices that use Nomsa’s body for mystical purposes alongside representational ones? What if museums are necropolitical zones where multiple forms of extraction overlap (economic value from attendance and prestige, educational value from displaying bodies as resources, cultural value from possessing world’s heritage, mystical value from keeping sacred objects and remains available for ongoing operations that institutions claim aren’t happening because they’re secular now, they’re educational, they’re just preserving not practicing even though preservation and practice might not be distinguishable when you’re keeping sacred objects extracted from ritual contexts and displaying bodies removed from burial practices designed to protect them)? What if the boom in using bodies—especially Black bodies marked by histories of commodification under slavery and colonialism and ongoing racial capitalism—includes not just market extraction but spiritual instrumentalization, artists seeking their redemptions through others’ flesh, working through their guilts and complicities by using subjects who don’t share theological frameworks and don’t control how their bodies get used for operations that function beyond representation?

These questions don’t have answers because we haven’t developed frameworks for asking them seriously, because acknowledging mystical dimension seems like regression or credulity or taking artists’ pretensions too seriously when maybe the point is just that they’re exploitative opportunists using esoteric aesthetics as sophisticated alibi. But the black cloths hanging at Iziko (or removed by now, or negotiated into some compromise that lets everyone claim they did right thing while Nomsa’s images continue circulating and Cohen’s retrospective continues and museums continue operating according to necropolitical logics they’ve inherited from Wunderkammer and colonial extraction and five centuries of European institutions declaring themselves stewards of humanity’s heritage meaning stewards of everything they’ve stolen)—those cloths suggest that maybe secular critique isn’t reaching registers where some violence happens, that power operates through mystical extraction we’re not examining, that bodies suspended in necropolitical zones between subject and object, between protected and available, between dead and not-properly-dead, those bodies are telling us something if we’re willing to listen about dimensions of violence that persist beyond what contemporary art theory prepares us to address or even acknowledge as real rather than just metaphor or aesthetic strategy or confusion between criticism and credulous acceptance of artists’ mystical claims.

And I don’t know how to end this except with image of those black cloths still covering work at Iziko (in my mind at least, in photographs I keep scrolling through on Instagram while the actual cloths may already be gone), covering Golgotha where Cohen walks on skulls and covering Magog where Nomsa is stripped and directed to perform evolutionary narratives, covering both the dead bodies and the living body, refusing to distinguish between them, making visible through covering that the institution doesn’t know what it’s dealing with, doesn’t have frameworks adequate to what’s happening, can only drape everything in black and hope that gesture toward sensitivity and dialogue will be enough to contain controversy without requiring actual accountability or transformation of structures (necropolitical, economic, mystical) that made this work possible and will make next version possible once everyone forgets except the subjects whose bodies were used and who have to live with consequences while everyone else moves on to next controversy, next covered exhibition, next moment when we discover that institutions still don’t know how to handle bodies except as material, still extract value on multiple registers while insisting they’re just doing education and preservation and making important work available to publics who deserve access to difficult art even when—especially when—that difficulty is produced by using actual people’s actual bodies as sites for operations (representational, economic, ritual) they can’t control or refuse or share in the benefits of, suspended in necropolitical zones that persist from Wunderkammer through colonial extraction through contemporary museums’ ongoing determination of which bodies are available and which are protected, which remains can be displayed indefinitely and which must be returned, which violence can be enacted in name of art or education or mystical breakthrough and which must be covered with black cloth and hidden from view not because institutions have developed ethics adequate to the problem but because workers finally said no and had power to make that refusal matter even if only temporarily, even if only as compromise that satisfies no one, even if the deeper structures persist and will produce next version of this controversy because we still haven’t examined what museums do, what artists extract, what bodies pay for others’ redemptions and transformations and achievements of breakthrough on mystical registers we’ve spent centuries insisting don’t exist while continuing to extract value from them, continuing to operate as if sacred and secular are separate when institutions’ practices suggest they never separated, just changed alibis, just found more sophisticated ways to justify keeping bodies available for operations that persist under cover of education and cultural enrichment and humanity’s shared heritage and all the other phrases that obscure ongoing violence while making it sound progressive, necessary, inevitable as inheritance we’re stuck with because power isn’t conspiracy, it’s timing and structural advantage mistaken for merit and histories that narrow into habits we perform without examining until something breaks and forces us to see what we’ve been doing all along.