Anagrams and analysis peel back layers of Malawi and other postcolonial states
I(at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg until April 13), Malawian artist and scholar Samson Kambalu explores the happy accident of a playful but also potentially profound anagram. The terminology in the exhibition’s title may not be familiar, so a few words of explanation are necessary.
Nyasaland was the British “Protectorate ”— to use a wellworn euphemism of late stage colonialism — that became Malawi in 1964. The word thus refers to geographical terrain but also to a torrid history. Like regional neighbour Rhodesia (and much of Africa), it was chewed up by Britain in the late 19th century. Many decades later, independence brought a different form of oppression: Zimbabwe had Robert Mugabe, Malawi had Hastings Banda.
Analysand is a medical term
referring to a person undergoing psychoanalysis. To a limited extent, the artist is the analysand in this process. Kambalu returns to childhood memories: he recalls the common playground practice of swapping cards, in this case a series of national flags that were included in the packaging of Dandy Bubble Gum.
It was, Kambalu perceives in retrospect, part of his development as an artist —a kind of training in abstraction, through the simple geometries and bold colours of national flags. The exhibition pays homage to this in the Dandy Gum Flags series of digital prints, which seem both to celebrate the aesthetic pleasure to be gained from such abstraction and to mock the seriousness attached to the idea of a flag representing a country.
Indeed, it is “the nation” itself that is the real subject of analysis here: Malawi, specifically, is the analysand, although Kambalu — casting himself in a Freudian role — ventures a diagnosis about postcolonial states generally. He identifies various manifestations of the “hysteria” that is a response to colonial trauma.
Kambalu is interested in syncretism, the hybrid cultural forms that develop in the wake of encounters between “Africa” and “the West”. He glosses over the violence, displacement and impoverishment of colonialism, perhaps taking it for granted that this material history is embedded in the cultural practices that are his focus.
A key example are the Beni, Mganda and Malipenga dances, in which participants wear uniforms recalling Malawian army veterans who joined the King’s African Rifles to fight for the British Army during the World Wars. The Beni Flags series dotted around the gallery walls alludes to the flags that are sometimes used in these dances (Yellow Boat Country, notably, reproduces the colours and design of the Malawian flag), another instance of Western nationalism being incorporated into postcolonial African identity.
Dance is, for Kambalu, a way of working through the hysteria of the syncretic experience: “Africans subjected to Western culture and then bewildered by it turn their experiences into dance as a means of coping,” he affirms. But hysteria, in this sense, doesn’t necessarily carry a negative stigma — Kambalu suggests that “it can be a sign of health” as “your soul is stirring”, and thus the source of creativity.
There is a risk in enterprises such as that undertaken in
Nyasaland / Analysand of essentialising the supposed binaries that become fused in syncretic cultures. The notion that “African” and “Western” are somehow dialectical opposites was, after all, a working premise of colonial exploitation. So it is somewhat disconcerting that Kambalu places, for example, “Western time” (“teleological”) in direct contrast to “African time” (“an eternal immanence”).
It is nonetheless intriguing to see how he pursues different temporal modes in his Nyau
Cinema works — short, looped sepia-tone films in which the artist performs as “African dandy”: an out-of-place, out-oftime figure criss-crossing various landscapes.
The dandy, in these fragments, is not so much a synthesis of cultures as of moods. By turns comic and tragic, his repetitive movements have an air of compulsiveness to them; a psychoanalyst would probably see them as pathological. But Kambalu also invests the persona with a sense of purpose — or, at least, patience.
The “Western” point of reference would be Sisyphus, the poor soul in Greek mythology who was doomed forever to repeat the same movements without making any progress.
Is Kambalu’s “African” figure reassured by a sense of rhythm and ritual? He is silent, so we can’t tell.