Revisioning Azaria Mbatha

Abstract

Azaria Mbatha is a black South African artist who lived and worked during the height of the apartheid regime, whose modus operandi of intervening with political reality required the medium to disguise his dissident politics. Under the apartheid censorship, which finds its genesis in the Dutch Reformed Church’s theology, Mbatha’s use of the gospel as subject matter provided sanctuary for the socially engaged and politically explosive content, simultaneously counter-appropriating the theopolitical narrative of the DRC in the service of all politically marginalized subjects. Unfortunately, the UBC Museum of Anthropology, which has the privilege of introducing the artist to the community, contradicts the artist’s position by binding him to tribal heritage. It declares the artist’s use of gospel is the “attempt to reconcile his Zulu heritage with Christianity.” In this fixation on the artist’s biographical data, namely his tribal heritage, the label displays the work of art in the historical amnesia that omits the political reality of apartheid Mbatha lived in and resisted against.

Furthermore, suspending the historical time of apartheid from the discourse, the label creates the false perception that the artists worked in a vacuum of the tribal past, and prevents the artwork from being received as modern art. This essay deconstructs this institutional praxis and questions the validity of the long-standing discursive framework around Mbatha’s work, perpetuated by museums, exhibitions, and art-historical writings, which originates in the uncritical reception of Rorke Drift’s commercial narrative about its pupils. By exposing the implicit imperial capitalist bias embedded in institutional discourse, this research seeks to revise interpretations of the work and to revive the agency of the autonomous artist Azaria Mbatha.