It’s jacaranda season on the highveld. Every year, when these gentle giants burst into purple bloom, I lose my temporal moorings and find myself “borne back ceaselessly into the past”, in the words of F Scott Fitzgerald’s famous conclusion to The Great Gatsby. While the past is a heavy burden to Fitzgerald’s characters, my memories of days under jacaranda blossoms gone by are generally positive ones.
Nostalgia is a tricky thing, especially in a country like ours. Writers such as Jacob Dlamini, Nedine Moonsamy and David Medalie have reflected critically on its appeal as well as its dangers. Can one yearn innocently for a childhood in the 1980s, including states of emergency, the Groot Krokodil, “total onslaught” and all that? Yet, these thinkers recognise, black and white South Africans alike must be allowed some fond recollections of their youth.
I grew up (and would subsequently return to raise my children) in the Johannesburg suburb of Blairgowrie. There was and is no better place to live in Joburg, but when it comes to jacarandas, Blairgowrie is way down the list. Neighbouring Linden boasts dozens of dense lavender-blue streets; Parkview, Parkwood and Saxonwold cannot be beaten.
Nowadays, in these upmarket parts, the jacaranda trees are at their best when kids in Halloween costumes are going door to door. We definitely didn’t have this in 1980s Blairgowrie — celebrating Halloween was considered proximate to Satanism, and there was too much of that going around already, thank you very much.
As SA’s Nicky Falkof has shown, moral panics usually reassert a dying social order or conservative set of beliefs, and the “Satanic Panic” of the late apartheid years was a case in point. Mind you, if neighbourhood WhatsApp groups are anything to go by, there are still some among us who think that allowing children to dress up and eat sweets is the devil’s work.
Happily the jacarandas transcend all this. Regimes will rise and fall, market bubbles will swell and burst, residents will come and go, but — insects and climate willing — jacarandas will continue to bloom, year in and year out, teaching us about resilience and beauty and evanescence. There is reassurance in this cycle: not the backward-looking comfort of nostalgia, but a gesture towards continuity in anticipation of an unknown future.
Of course, some will tell you that, if you really want to see jacarandas, you must go to Tshwane. Pretoria is, after all, the “Jacaranda City”. I can’t say I endorse this claim. But, fellow Joburgers, there are other reasons to make the trip up north.
I was reminded of this on a recent visit to the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria (UP), where the major exhibition One and the Many opened earlier this year (it will remain on display until May 2026). Javett-UP has become an important part of the SA arts landscape, one of a handful of similar institutions combining academic capital, private funding and a public-facing creative vision.
This is a combination that enables ambitious programming, and One and the Many — with an impressive curatorial team headed by Storm Janse van Rensburg — is suitably broad in its scope. The purview of an exhibition exploring “relationships between singular entities and the collective” may seem vast and vague, but the works included have been corralled into three “chapters” to provide structure and coherence.
Chapter 1 includes abstraction and the dismantling of figurative visual arts traditions, as well as works that engage with the sacred and the numinous, and examples of artists exploring the “buffer zone” between the familiar “safety of home” and “the wilderness beyond”. Chapter 2 emphasises how artists “borrow, remix and reassemble” existing images, paying tribute to those who came before; this section also depicts the “tenderness and tension” that is evoked by different forms of embrace. Chapter 3 zooms out to engage with “colossal time”, experimenting with “scale, memory and temporality”.
Coming to terms with time past, present and future, or reconciling the self and its various others — these are not small undertakings. One and the Many is a dizzying, thrilling journey through SA art history. You’ll need a quiet stroll under the jacarandas to process it all.
