In my previous column, I wrote about artworks from the exhibition “Atlas of Uncertainty: Transforming African Cityscapes”, which depict aspects of life in Johannesburg. But Joburg is only one of three urban hubs that are the focal points in this project; its counterparts are Nairobi and Accra, the capitals of Kenya and Ghana, respectively.
In South Africa, conversations about key issues affecting people across the continent tend to be infected by a dangerous combination of parochialism and exceptionalism — the small-minded notion that we are unique and more important than anywhere else in the vast landmass that lies beyond our borders. Little do we realise how much our collective views of the African continent are inherited from colonial stereotypes.
These might not take the clumsy form of Jacob Zuma’s notorious defence of e-tolls in Gauteng: “We can’t think like Africans in Africa, generally. This is Johannesburg. It’s not some national road in Malawi.” But if you analyse most of the discourse about “Africans in Africa” that emerges around braais and on social media in South Africa, the underlying sentiment is similar.
Many of our politicians have also borrowed the playbook of xenophobic populism from the West. “Foreign nationals”, “illegal immigrants”, undocumented makwerekwere … such recycled language shapes the misperception that overburdened South African cities are the only destinations on the continent sought out by displaced people and aspirational migrants.
“Atlas of Uncertainty” is a healthy corrective in this regard. Take, for example, Onyis Martin’s Mashua: a papier mâché dhow, symbol of waterborne travel across eastern Africa. For Martin, it represents the more common way in which people arrive in Nairobi after long voyages, which is by bus at Machakos Station. Receipts collected from this precinct are among the materials used to line the boat, with layers of street posters. They become, the artist explains, “papers of freedom” — a kind of visa that proves a traveller has spent money and can be allowed in.
The boat is thus “a sign of transactions that keep people in the city” (their movement is “enabled and constrained by what can be paid for”), but it also suggests precarity: a vessel made of paper cannot be used in water. Facing Martin’s dhow is Billie McTernan’s large-scale installation “Map of Dreams and Realities”, which draws on the stories of residents in Old Fadama, a neighbourhood in Accra that has long been a “landing place” for migrants. While they are in the city centre, McTernan suggests that Old Fadama’s occupants live “on the edges”.
Other works in the exhibition emphasise movement through rather than to the metropolis. Manjahi Njoroge’s photographs track figures navigating Nairobi wrapped in fabrics decorated with “fragments of map data”. Sean Kweifio-Okai’s black-and-white images document Okada — Accra’s motorcycle taxis — and the communities of trust and belonging developed by their riders. Clifford Assiama Bright-Abu imagines an alternative form of community with his Jamestown Mobility Pods, futuristic structures drawing on the art and history of Accra’s famous fishing district that are designed to accommodate families and small groups.
A different futurism is found in Alice Raymond’s “Atlas of the Future Accra”, which looks not to technology but to the natural world. Raymond identifies “organic bifurcations” such as forking tree branches as signifiers of “a lost language between humans and nonhumans”. There are echoes of this approach in Sebawali Mwakai Sio’s engagement with Nairobi’s Kawangware informal settlement, which she interprets through the framework of biomimicry.
Austine Adika’s quirky “Strangers & Spaces” sculptures feature humanoid figures who remind us of the unnatural materials that dominate such environments: they are forged in aluminium. Evoking “the uneasy familiarity of strangeness” — a neighbour “glimpsed in passing”, a half-recognised face “from another time” — Adika’s work resonates with that of two other Kenyan artists in the exhibition. For Wallace Juma, who employs reclaimed PVC from billboards to create his grim “atlases”, Nairobi is “an amorphous, seemingly sentient being”, reflecting the “thoughts and desires” of its inhabitants. Daniel Muchina sees the city as a “haunted archive”; his video installation Madini eerily overlays the “memories and shadows” of its streets, exploring “what quietly moves beneath the everyday”.
- “Atlas of Uncertainty” is at the Origins Centre, Wits University, until July 3.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.