In 1988, the same year that Cape Town Kevin Brand made 19 Boys Running, on the other side of the country, in the heavily repressed KwaZulu-Natal, Sfiso Ka-Mkame was teaching silkscreen printing at the Community Arts Workshop in central Durban and making all his own work in his room in the suburb of Clermont.
Using his favored medium of oil pastel, in the eighties Ka-Mkame made his works on paper by drawing numerous small scenes—such as a funeral, a girl in a blue dress running with blood staining her chest, uniformed school-children waving protest placards, a woman seated alone at her dining room table, a field of graves marked by crosses. Each small scene was separate from the adjoining ones: Together they made a richly hued but somber patchwork of distress. The technique Mkame used is known as sgraffito—colors are layered, one on top of the next, then scratched through in an excavationlike procedure, so that scraps of the color below the surface hues are revealed.
Mkame described the scenes as “just what I see when I wake up in the morning.” Inviting the Almighty to share his experience in bearing witness, Mkame has incised his title in small neat letters below a row of hanging bodies: Letters to God.
Always concerned with women’s rights, another work from this period, Homage to the Mothers (1988), paid tribute to the particularly heavy load carried by black women in society. Many young men at this time left home and were not seen again—either they had gone into exile or had been killed by the police.
Although the artist continues to work with a variety of subjects and techniques, since the coming of democracy his work has taken a new turn. Still favoring oil pastels, his palette has become vivid in a number of striking and celebratory works that reference rituals and the life of the community all over Africa.
Letters to God (detail) 1988
Oil pastel on paper
128 x 91 cm
Collection: Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: Kathleen Grundlingh
© Sfiso Ka-Mkame
Homage to the Mothers 1988
Oil pastel on paper
64 x 91 cm
Photographer: David Hewitt
© Sfiso Ka-Mkame