old exhibits
May 3, 2007
In Stellenbosch I went to the opening of a painting exhibition at the Sasol museum. Stellenbosch is a beautiful town but strikingly white- Afrikaner dominated and very much (still) segregated. The exhibition was with works of a deceased Afrikaans painter. As I step in the room I can’t but notice the crowd: all white, upper class elderly (over 60) people sitting on chairs, listening to an elderly lady who introduces a middle-aged scholar who speaks about the painter and his wife. Then the wife (she must be over 70) speaks about her late husband; then the wife the scholar and the lady drink champagne; the champagne is brought by black servants- I mean, catering company eployees. I feel I am in some movie, some “out of Africa” kind of movie, among all these well dressed, upper class art-lovers, nostalgic of the past. I feel I am travelling in time, maybe that’s how the beautiful old days were, filled with art, talk, ease and the black servants, invisible, quietly bringing the food and champagne. And I see these old people around me and it is like nothing has changed for them (has anything changed for them? has anyone taken anything away from them?). And I think, “the world is collapsing around them and they don’t know”…Or they don’t notice…or they prefer to pretend that they don’t know because they are too old anyway…Just outside there is so much filth, poverty and fear. But we’re in the museum, in the sanitized, oblivious world of the exhibition. Dusting away the signs of weariness…
maybe the exhibit was not about the painter… maybe these people are the exhibit… an exhibit of the past.. of what it was like.. of why things should change…
Things are only changing to the worse in this country according to what people say. Some say that during apartheid things were better- i.e. there was not so much crime, there was better policing etc. What happens apparently is that the government is not doing anything about crime, aids etc on purpose, just to keep the masses of the black population in their miserable state. I am thinking that they ended apartheid simply cause they didn’t need it anymore, cause there are other ways to keep people to the margins while maintaining the facade of “democracy”. And what is more frustrating is that those people who were fighting for freedom then, now at best they have nothing to fight against, at worse they are in the government. And for the majority of the black population nothing has changed. The state of blacks here is much worse than, say, the albanians in greece (and they’re in their own country!) and you can see this everyday in the streets.