Stephen Pitti Delivers Gaspar Bacon Lecture
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September 2008 New academic year begins Diana Wylie authors work on South African The 2008-09 academic year opens artist with a substantial number of faculty on leave, several full-time replacements for Jacana Media of South Africa has recently published Professor Diana Wylie’s new- those instructors, one new tenure-track est book, Art and Revolution: The Life and Death of Thami Mnyele, South African Artist. appointee, and one faculty search. We are pleased to reprint part of the Preface to the work: Those on leave this year are Brooke Blower (full year), Charles Capper (full t began for me in an art museum in Africa. I was in Gaborone, Botswana, at year), Arianne Chernock (full year), lunchtime on a summer day in 1980 and the archives where I was researching Barbara Diefendorf (spring semester), Imy first book had just closed. With time on my hands, I wandered into the Anna Geifman (fall), Thomas Glick Botswana National Museum and Art Gallery. A one-man show was hanging on its (spring), Bruce Schulman (full year), walls. As I walked through the gallery, I saw images that brought me close to tears. Jonathan Zatlin (full year). Heléna The pictures showed me, better than words, how it felt to have a lid pressing down Tóth will replace Jonathan Zatlin; Paul on your hopes and dreams. The drawings didn’t shout. They weren’t adorned with Schmitz will replace Bruce Schulman; sentiment. They made statements that obviously came from deep inside the artist. Samuel Deese will teach courses in ‘Ah, yes,’ I said to myself, ‘now I see.’ American political history instead of Weeks later I met the artist, Thami Mnyele, whose story I tell in this book, and the anticipated hire in US history (that we became friends for a while. Five years later, when he died, I wrote down every- search is still in progress). thing I could remember him having said. It seemed the only way to hold on to a re- Suzanne O’Brien, a specialist in markably sensitive man who modern Japanese history, is the depart- had the talent to change the ment’s newest member; this year she way people look at things. I will teach the Japanese lecture course, a was struck by the disparity colloquium in Japanese history, a sec- between our fates. Born the tion of hi 200, and a new lecture course same year as I, he died just on the Samurai. weeks before I began my first The department has received autho- long-term academic job, rization (pending budgetary approval) teaching African history at to search for a scholar in modern Jewish Yale University. I couldn’t history at the assistant-professor level. help comparing my trajec- Advertisements have been placed, and tory with his: it was upsetting visits to campus are expected to take and humbling to come face place early in the new year. Professor to face with my relative privi- Thomas Glick is chairing this search. lege. Professor Nina Silber has been Hard times twisted, dis- named Director of Graduate Studies torted, and broke up the for 2008-09, and Professor Cathal story of Thami’s life. Docu- Nolan will serve as Director of Under- ments were lost and de- graduate Studies; Professor Louis stroyed. Much valuable in- Ferleger will chair the Curriculum formation was never re- Committee. ♦ corded in the first place, and 1 memories are fading. The times did not sonal goals cannot but be bound up equally unrevealing. Thami’s former always permit the sharing of confi- with political ones. Stories that stress comrade, Tim Williams, now deputy dences. Fearing that silence could lead one realm to the exclusion of the other national commissioner of police, to popular ignorance and finally to fail to capture how decisions are really found that all relevant police files had indifference and alienation, I have writ- made and play out. been destroyed before he began work- ten this book. Paradoxes necessarily emerge when ing there in 1994. Former comrades That this account is fragmented is the personal is given its due. We might launched a similar effort to find art ap- part of the story. Until I realised this recognise when apparently political propriated by the security police, but truth, my difficulties in research made acts had personal roots and when a de- came up with nothing. me anxious that I wouldn’t be able to cent man belied his ideals. An honest draw accurately even the major outlines and full-bodied biography makes it * * * * * * * * of the man’s life. Then I began to un- harder to subscribe to a simple defini- derstand that the silences and the dis- tion of the hero. When a hero is a mar- The pictures drawn by Thami tortions in fact revealed the extreme in- tyr, mythology is likely to flourish. helped me tell his story. In conjunction security that led Thami to make his po- Few conventional sources like letters with interviews, they opened the door litical choices. and diaries were available to help me on a man who was a player in key move- I never interviewed Thami. We sim- tell the story of Thami Mnyele. The na- ments that were not simply trying to ply talked: I never posed questions for tional archives contain only two refer- change, but actually to transform purposes of constructing his life story. ences to the Mnyeles: the documents South African society. A private and reticent person, he did pertaining to his parents’ divorce in Thami’s work, however, is hard to not mean to be the subject of a book. 1950, and an embargoed dossier on his find and it is not always well cared for. He might well have agreed with critic half-brother, David, who was arrested The staff at the National Museum and Janet Malcolm that biography is ines- in 1976. The schools Thami attended in Art Gallery in Gaborone ripped the left capably trivial because it cannot cap- Makapanstad and Natal kept no re- side of ‘Things fall apart’ when remov- ture the kernel of a man; it cannot re- cords of his work. In fact, his secondary ing it from its frame—a sign, perhaps, cord a person’s complexity as well as school moved out of the buildings that the work doesn’t have much popu- fiction can. where he studied; they are now occu- lar resonance in a country where refu- I have nevertheless soldiered on, pied by an entirely different institution. gees were often seen as a problem. In- partly because Thami’s life strikes me as I was reduced to photographing a sect holes and fungus afflict two other emblematic of his times. His story plaque on the wall and researching the Mnyele drawings stored there. Johan- shows how varied are the causes and school’s history in the state archives. I nesburg’s Standard Bank employees re- consequences of political commit- found the texts Thami was likely to cently discovered and put in storage the ment. We delude ourselves if we imag- have studied at school by visiting a 1976 version of ‘Things fall apart’, after ine we can understand the engine of so- nearly derelict building owned by the years of not knowing the bank owned cial movements without investigating Department of Education in Pretoria; the drawing. The security police confis- the private lives that drive them. Per- unused and unvisited, the building cated some of his work over the years, houses a library of dust-covered books but they destroyed large sections of revealing how the world was authorita- their archives. Short of cash, Thami’s tively presented to a child in the 1950s. I mother sold to an art dealer the draw- drove to Rorke’s Drift, his art school in ing entitled ‘There goes a man sad and NEWS rural Natal, only to find the place deep in sorrow, like a river under- stripped clean of records. ground’; the only art remaining in her of the History Department The written record proved thin right home is a faded reproduction of a sea- at Boston University through to the end of Thami’s life. In scape. is published monthly September 2003 I applied to the Department of De- Thami’s art can best be seen in the through May at the department office, fence, Centre for Military Intelligence, homes of his friends. Sometimes he 226 Bay State Road, Boston, MA for permission to read the files pro- gave them work to bring back to South 02215, telephone: 617-353-2551, E- duced by military officials planning, ex- Africa for safekeeping. At other times mail: [email protected], Website: fl he sold drawings for low prices as a sign www.bu.edu/history. ecuting, and re ecting on the raid that killed him. Nearly two years later, after of friendship. The pictures are lovingly, Editor: James T. Dutton, Depart- my request had risen through the though not publicly, preserved behind ment Administrator queue of documents whose declassifi- glass. They are dispersed around the cation was requested, I paid to receive globe, and can be found as far afield as Items of interest for publication and 889 changes of address should be sent to pages of ‘masked’ documents. (The Birmingham (England), Barcelona, the editor. names of all participants were con- Boston, London, Newry (Northern Ire- cealed.) Very little in those pages bears land), and Stockholm. on the raid itself. The police archive is How often did I use my imagination Page 2 NEWS 2 to reconstruct the past? I tried to limit months in Ethiopia conducting field severely any flights of fancy.