Sourced from press photographs, Paul Stopforth’s triptych The Interrogators (1979) features steely gray portraits of three men, based on photographs of three of the nine policemen who appeared at the 1978 inquest in Pretoria into the death in detention of Steve Biko, leader of the Black People’s Convention, a black consciousness movement in South Africa. Stopforth’s subjects were Colonel Goosen, Lieutenant Wilken, and Major Harold Snyman, and his haunting work introduced into the realm of art for the first time the real faces of representatives of the apartheid state.
Biko was arrested on August 18, 1977, at a police roadblock near Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape for leaving the area to which he was restricted by a banning order. Under interrogation in jail, he was assaulted and beaten so severely in the head that he suffered a brain hemorrhage. On September 11, he was loaded into the back of a police van. Critically injured, he was callously left naked and driven 750 miles to a Pretoria jail, where he died the next day. Police statements in the press at the time said the thirty-year-old Biko had died of a hunger strike, and the 1978 inquest found that since there were no witnesses, the police could not be blamed. Twenty years later, at a hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, four policemen would admit their guilt: Major Harold Snyman, Daniel Siebert, Jacobus Beneke, and Rubin Marx. A fifth applicant was Gideon Nieuwoudt. Amnesty was refused to all.
Stopforth, who made the work while he was director of the Market Theatre Gallery in Johannesburg, talks about being struck by the “ordinariness” of the appearance of the three men alleged to have beaten Biko so badly that he died. Integral to the power of The Interrogators are the humble materials and the method Stopforth used to make his work. Melting a layer of floor wax on board, Stopforth floated a layer of graphite powder on the hot wax. Then, when it had cooled and set, he used an etching needle to scrape away the dark gray layer, revealing pale waxy highlights. A layer of black paint flattened the background, leaving the ghostlike image of a chair to unify the three monochrome images. Using the same wax and graphite technique, Stopforth made a 1983 series of works about the bleak rooms and police cells where activists were questioned, entitled Interrogation Spaces. Stopforth’s works have lost none of their power with the passing of the years, and they remain both an elegy to the outspoken courage of Steve Biko, who undoubtedly would have become one of the country’s leaders had he survived, and a chilling reminder of the Kafkaesque days when the entire country was under surveillance.
The Interrogators 1979
Graphite/floor wax
Triptych: 100 x 180 cm
Collection: Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town
Image courtesy of Iziko South African National Gallery
© Paul Stopforth