Born in 1956, the son of a Xhosa farm worker and a Coloured, or mixed-race mother, an unusual relationship as generally Coloureds considered themselves superior to blacks, Willie Bester grew up in the conservative small Western Cape Town of Montague. Looking back at his childhood, Bester recalls how his father was treated by his white employers in the 1960s: “I remember visiting my father when he was shearing sheep on a farm. Reporting for duty at the back door, my father was given food. The food was put alongside the food of the dogs.”
When Bester looks back upon his life, what puzzles him most is how South African whites, such as the family who owned the farm that employed his father, used the Bible to justify apartheid. The National Party and its adherents ignored the basic Christian principle of “Love thy neighbor,” instead pointing to obscure verses in the Bible that they interpreted as condoning racial discrimination. In small towns like Montague, Coloured people were not allowed to pray in the same church as whites. They were taught that even if they lived good Christian lives, they would still not enter the same heaven as the white man.
Despite his love of drawing as a boy, Bester had never dreamed of art as a possible career. He counted himself lucky as a Coloured person from a poor family to be employed as a dental technician at the age of twenty, a job he held until 1991. In 1986 he spent a year taking part-time art classes at the Community Art Project in Cape Town to develop the talent that gave him such pleasure, and five years later, after showing his work to gallerist Esther Rousso, he had his first solo show of paintings and collages at the Gallery International in Cape Town in 1991.
From this point on, as if to make up for lost time, Bester began to work obsessively. He not only painted but also started to make sculptures from found materials and relics of the apartheid era. The assemblage Apartheid Laboratory (1995) includes such items as hospital drips, straps, rubber tubes, a ball and claw table with a prosthetic leg, a one-way arrow, and a galvanized bath.
Deliberately awkward, the construction of the piece suggests that Bester started at a certain point and just kept adding elements as he found them: a perfect analogy for the methodology of the South African government, which constantly enforced additional legislation to maintain the unwieldy system of apartheid.
Bester uses found objects as complex signifiers, to be understood by the viewer, first in reference to its original context and second in its new position within the sculpture. In this striking piece the artist seems to be communicating to his audience that the inhumane system under which he grew up must never be allowed to recur.
Apartheid Laboratory 1995
Mixed media
300 x 250 x 90 cm
Image courtesy of the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Photographer: Athol Franz
© Willie Bester
Ox Wagon 1996
Mixed media
300 x 350 x 150 cm
Image courtesy of the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Photographer: Athol Franz
© Willie Bester