At a time when gatherings of more than three people could be declared illegal under the Riotous Assemblies Act, a 1956 government measure that effectively prevented protest marches and demonstrations, funerals took on a particular significance: Religious occasions did not fall under this restrictive legislation. When an activist was laid to rest in the eighties, hundreds, even thousands of people would gather, expressing solidarity through protest songs and political speeches. Officially restricted from interfering at the ceremony, police would often harass or shoot people on their way to or from funerals.
One of the most shocking examples of this took place on March 21, 1985, in the small town of Uitenhage in the Eastern Cape, when police opened fire on a march that began as a funeral procession of several thousand people. When the shooting stopped, twenty people lay dead, many more injured. Most had been shot in the back.
Cape Town artist Kevin Brand memorialized the massacre in a sculptural installation titled 19 Boys Running (1988). The title contains a paradox: The boys are said to be running, but their bodies have been cut off at the waist and their legs are already transformed into cheap pine coffins. His message going considerably beyond a graphic reimagining of one particular incident of police brutality, Brand’s piece symbolizes how the dreams of young black men for freedom of expression, acceptance, mobility, and democracy were summarily ended by the state.
“The artist views making art as a process of coming to terms with the issues thrown up by the society that surrounds him,” wrote Denise Penfold in the monograph Kevin Brand (2008). “This interweaving of idiosyncratic concerns with broader social issues is also why Brand’s work cannot easily be pinned down to a singular political agenda.”
19 Boys Running 1988
Sculpture installation: wood, polystyrene, paper, paint
Average height: 160 cm
Collection: Iziko South African National Gallery
Photographer: Jac de Villiers
© Kevin Brand