Mmakgoba Mapula Helen Sebidi’s first name, Mmakgoba, means “mother of animals,” alluding to the significance of animals in traditional Tswana culture; Mapula means “mother of rain”: A fierce storm broke a drought shortly after Sebidi was born, and Sebidi means “boiling.” All the names suggest power. Talking about the symbolic presence of animals in her paintings, Sebidi explains: “In the Garden of God, animals were there first—the animals taught the people. In our culture, we don’t say a thing straight out—if you are having a hard life, we won’t call your life bad, we will say, ‘You are fighting with an animal, and if you catch his tongue you will come right.’ ”
Sebidi’s lyrical drawings and paintings are packed densely with images of people and animals locked in a pulsating struggle for space with an angry and volatile energy. The tension in the heaving mass of forms within Sebidi’s tableaux provokes an anxious response in the viewer, as if the paper they are drawn onto cannot possibly hold their weight or sustain the friction of their constant movement. Such a sense of anxiety succinctly captures the psychological and political climate of South Africa in the late 1980s, a time of unrest and frenzied State repression.
Sebidi’s works made at this time illustrate the plight of South African blacks, people who were not free to come and go as they chose, suffering the injustice of apartheid, forced to live according to government decree, stuffed together in overcrowded townships by callously impractical bureaucratic policies and ideological obsessions.
Sebidi was born in 1943, in the then Northern Transvaal, and grew up in a rural environment in the care of her grandmother while her mother worked in Johannesburg. Surrounded by a Tswana community that appreciated and practiced various modes of visual, oral, and musical traditions, Sebidi in her youth learned the value of creative expression. She left her rural home for Johannesburg in 1959 to earn a living in the city and spent the 1960s working as a domestic worker and a dressmaker for white families. One of her employers, a German woman, painted, and seeing her work, Sebidi could not resist the urge to make her own painting.
From that time on, Sebidi sought out artists and used every opportunity to learn, taking classes with the accomplished watercolorist John Koenakeefe Mohl from Soweto for two years and later studying at the Johannesburg Art Foundation, which accepted students of all races. A 1984 workshop in collage at the Foundation was a breakthrough for Sebidi, who as a result of the process of cutting up and reassembling her drawings began to work far more freely and on a large scale.
Regarded by eminent curators of contemporary art like Salah Hassan and Olu Oguibe as one of the best draftspeople on the continent of Africa, Sebidi’s compelling canvases are a profound comment on the often agonizing psychological and physical push and pull of life as a black woman in South Africa.
Tears of Africa 1988
Charcoal and collage on paper
200 x 400 cm
Collection: North-West University, South Africa
Photographer: Athol Franz
© Mmakgoba Mapula Helen Sebidi