Torn Halves of an Integral

Decolonial Activism
RhodesMustFall and Sethembile Msezane’s
Chapangu
Matthias Pauwels

South African artist Sethembile Msezane performing during the removal of the statue of Cecil
John Rhodes from the main campus of the University of Cape Town on the 9th of April 2015
after a month of student protests. The performance is entitled ‘Chapangu - The Day Rhodes
Fell’ (Photograph http://www.sethembile-msezane.com).
 Torn Halves of an Integral Decolonial Activism.
RhodesMustFall and Sethembile Msezane’s Chapangu.

Dr. Matthias Pauwels

‣ Presentation at the two-day symposium of the South African Society of Critical Theory
(SASCT), University of the Free State. Anta Boga Hotel, Bloemfontein. Friday 17 September
2017. Session 3: ‘Critical Conversations on Progress and Protests in SA’.
‣ Short version of a longer essay currently in the publication process.

I. RhodesMustFall Between ‘Poo Activism’ and Performance Extravaganza

This paper reflects on a seeming oddity during the inaugurating moment of the on-going
student protests at South Africa’s universities. I refer here to the ninth of April 2015, the
day on which the statue of Cecil John Rhodes was removed from the main campus of
the University of Cape Town (UCT) after a month of contestations by students regarding
its central position at the institution. Protests were ignited by the pouring of faeces on
the statue by Chumani Maxwele a month earlier and reached their climax with ecstatic
students posing triumphantly on and around the statue on the day of its removal,
clenching fists and singing revolutionary songs.

Somewhat removed from the heat of the action, something else drew the attention of
many participants and onlookers: a somewhat enigmatic, carnivalesque performance by
artist Sethembile Msezane, then a student at UCT’s Michaelis school of art. For hours on
end during the removal of the statue, Msezane stood steadfastly on a white pedestal
with fancy stilettos, dressed in a black lace maillot, her face covered with a traditional
Zulu beaded mask and two ornamental canes with swathes of hair hanging from it
attached to her arms.

In this performance, Msezane creates a clever play of allusions to the history of

colonialism and contemporary attempts toward decolonization. The main reference is
indicated by the work’s title: Chapangu - The Day Rhodes Fell. Chapangu is the Shona
word for the Bateleur Eagle, which served as model for the so-called Zimbabwe Birds, a
series of soapstone sculptures that formed part of the historical city of Great Zimbabwe.
The fate of these sculptures are typical of many cultural treasures of Africa. In 1889,
hunter/looter Willi Posselt took the most intact specimen of the sculptures by holding
indignant locals at gunpoint and ‘compensating’ them with a few insignificant
household goods. Posselt went on to sell the sculpture to Rhodes, who put it up in his
Groote Schuur estate in Cape Town, where it is still kept today.

In light of this troubled history, one can understand the primary set of meanings of
Msezane’s poetic rendering of the Zimbabwe bird at the removal of Rhodes’ statue.
Together with this statue and the colonialist legacy of plunder and cultural
misrecognition that it exemplifies, Rhodes’ Zimbabwe Bird is imagined to be
decolonized as well, free to fly off and return to its native land and people. If not the
statue itself, then its spirit at least, was symbolically liberated when Msezane, at the
exact moment when Rhodes’ statue was lifted by the crane and became airborne,
proudly lifted her arms kitted out as the bateleur eagle’s wings. This gesture was
completed when Msezane staged the homecoming of the Zimbabwe Bird in a later,
companion performance, appropriately titled Chapangu - The Return to Great
Zimbabwe.

Contrasting Styles of Decolonial Cultural Activism

In this paper, I address the remarkable contrast between Msezane’s performance and
the dominant cultural politics of the RhodesMustFall (RMF) movement, as epitomized
by its activism against Rhodes’ statue. It here concerns two very different, opposite
even, practices of cultural contestation that, although both subscribe to the project of
decolonization, are difficult to reconcile and made to cohere as part of one movement.
In what follows I want to explore the field of tensions opened up by and between them
and contemplate on some of the aporia provoked by ongoing decolonial cultural
contestations in South Africa.

Let me start by making a first inventory of some of the most important contrasts.

(a) Between an activism driven by a ‘passion for the real’, by unmediated

confrontations with the ugly reality and an urge toward action and change in the
here and now on the one hand, and the fictionalization and poeticization of the
real, the evocation of an imaginary universe in which pressing issues are
broadened and given depth by linking them to past events, on the other.

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 (b)Between an urge toward desublimation, the reduction of cultural phenomena
and political processes to their base impulses and interests on the one hand, and
an attempt at resublimation understood as the transformation of basic affects into
more elevated, cultural endeavours on the other.

(c) Between a blunt display and uninhibited expression of raw emotion (anger,
disgust, euphoria) on the one hand, and the evocation of less obvious, fragile
and precarious emotions such as curiosity and beauty on the other.

(d)Between a mode of activism that is confrontational, aims to shock and forces

everyone to take sides on the one hand, and one that seduces and solicits
wonder, stirs the imagination and invites the co-creation of meaning on the
other.

(e) Between a cultural politics of iconoclasm on the one hand, and an attempt at
creating new icons or counterimages, on the other.

(f) Between a cultural politics of vandalism, violence and destruction on the one
hand, and one of “remembrance”, repositioning and re-imagining on the other.

(g) Between a straightforward, single issue and goal-directed type of activism - of

the basic form ‘X must fall’ - on the one hand, and one that takes time and effort
to fully comprehend, has multiple, intersecting meanings and isn’t geared
toward achieving something concretely identifiable, on the other.

(h)Between spontaneous, gut-driven action and a very restrained, carefully crafted,

staged and executed action.

(i) Between a populist form of activism on the one hand, and a somewhat
distanced, elevated, autonomous act - think of the white pedestal used by
Msezane - on the other.

Underlying these blatant contrasts between Msezane’s Chapangu and RMF, I take there
to be an opposition between two more fundamental paradigms of aesthetic politics. In
what follows, I shall make these paradigms more explicit, as well as present possible
legitimations of each and implicit critiques toward the other, starting with RMF.

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II. RhodesMustFall, Or, The Cultural Politics of Strategic Philistinism
I propose to characterize the underlying model of RMF’s crass mode of cultural activism
in terms of a philistine critique of art and culture. This not only relates to acts of
vandalism toward colonialist monuments - the treatment of UCT’s Rhodes statue being
a case in point - but also the infamous burning of paintings by student protesters at UCT
on February 16, 2016. Instead of momentary lapses of reason, I take such blunt displays
of indifference and outright aggression toward art to express the philistine attitudes and
strategies at the heart of RMF activism in extreme and dramatic form.

Fredric Jameson and the Redemption of the Philistine Hatred of Art

In order to articulate the latter, I turn to Marxian cultural philosopher Fredric Jameson’s
(theorization of the relation between art and philistinism in Theodor Adorno’s work. Key
here is Adorno’s notion of the “guilt” or “blackness” of art as a social activity. This
concerns the claim that art as a specialized form of practice is inextricably entangled in
more general processes of social division, classification and hierarchization. Jameson’s
key reference here is a passage in The Dialectic of Enlightenment on the episode in
Homer’s The Odyssey where Odysseus devises a clever plan to navigate his ship past
the sirens. Adorno and Horkheimer interpret this scene as an allegory of how a stratified
order with clearly defined “social roles” is established through the divorcing of “the
enjoyment of art and manual work”. In Homer’s epic tale, “feudal baron” Odysseus
claims the exclusive right and ability to listen to the Sirens’ songs while, inversely,
preventing the oarsmen from doing the same, their ears having been filled with wax,
thus incapacitating their ability for auditory enjoyment. The rationale behind the latter is
to prevent the oarsmen - as “workers” - from being distracted by the aesthetic pleasure
afforded by the Sirens’ songs, so as to channel all their physical and mental energy into
the sole task of propelling the ship.

Crucial here is the way in which regulation of access to aesthetic enjoyment - or, again,
the granting of the license, ability, time and energy to contemplate and be distracted by
art - plays a key role in the founding of a social hierarchy and division of labour.
Exclusion from the sphere of art and culture is legitimated in terms of the
rationalization, specialization and maximization of the labour process. In this regard,
we can understand Jameson’s concise determination of the guilt of art in a class society
in terms of its status as “luxury and class privilege”.

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A similar process of aesthetic division can be seen to lie at the heart of the (neo)
colonialist order. Here also, art functions as an exclusionary device, a site of division,
privilege and distinction, but now predominantly between colonizer and colonized.
The colonized were thought to be inherently incapable of ‘advanced’, ‘disinterested’ art
appreciation, whether on biological or cultural racist grounds. Insofar as aesthetic
capabilities were granted to them, these were considered to be of no practical use to
them in view of their exclusively menial employment in the colonialist economy.
Inversely, art appreciation became a mark of distinction of the colonizer, even if this
was all but obvious in the actual, ‘philistine’ behaviour and pastimes of the colonizers.
This troubled historical status of art as colonialist or race privilege should be taken into
account in theorizing and assessing the deep suspicion, disregard and aggression
toward art displayed by the formerly colonized.

Another crucial aspect of art’s guilt distinguished by Jameson is also extrapolated from
Adorno and Horkheimer’s reading of Odysseus’ encounter with the Sirens. While the
oarsmen/workers are deprived of the ability of aesthetic enjoyment and hence “come to
incarnate the practical realm”, the aristocrat/Odysseus’s enjoyment of beauty is
divorced, inversely, from “praxis”, becomes without “consequences”, is “neutralized”,
with art turned into “a mere object of contemplation” . This refers to the fact that
Odysseus had himself tied to the ship’s mast so as not to be able to act upon the
seductive songs of the Sirens and their “allurement” of happiness. This has grave
implications for art’s ability to realize the happiness contained in its beauty. Being
excluded from the practical sphere, this happiness must of necessity remain
“powerless”.

This is then said to create a sense of being “cheated” among the masses, who
understand that art’s promise of happiness thus necessarily “remains a lie as long as
classes exist”. That is to say, as long as art serves as object of mere contemplation for
the privileged classes, with the majority of society excluded and deprived from
aesthetic enjoyment. This is identified as one of the key sources of philistine attitudes.
What is found to be “unbearable” is “the thought of happiness without power [...],
because only then [i.e. with power] would it be true happiness”.

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RhodesMustFall, Or, The Cultural Politics of Strategic Philistinism
Based on Jameson’s redemptive reading of philistinism, I argue that acts of violence
against art by student protesters cannot be dismissed outright. They can be seen to be
driven by a sobering insight into the structural complicity and historical guilt of art and
culture in the constitution and perpetuation of social, cultural, and - specifically in
South Africa - racial division. It concerns a guilt that is not so much attributable to
individual artists, art works or practices. Rather, on a supra-individual level, art, as a
specialized and distinguished social activity, is structurally implicated in processes of
class and race division. By the mere fact of producing or consuming art, one is
complicit to a system of which one knows that it is a predominantly elitist affair that
provides the markers of cultural distinction to the privileged, while the majority of the
population is unable de facto to participate in it.

This is not to say that this guilt cannot be moderated and alleviated in significant ways
by artists in individual works. Msezane’s Chapangu, for instance, clearly attempts to
breach the distance between art and life, performance and activism, aesthetics and
politics, art and the masses, imagined and real change. I attempts to give art
‘consequence’ and ‘power’ by aligning the fictive take-off of Rhodes’ Zimbabwe bird
with the actual removal of Rhodes’ statue. The latter are certainly redeeming features,
yet might not be sufficient to absolve it completely from the general guilt of art.

This?? became apparent in the art burnings at UCT, when students destroyed several
paintings by black artist Keresemose Richard Baholo indiscriminately with institutional
portraits of university dignitaries. This happened despite the clear anti-apartheid theme
of Baholo’s work, protests in the early 1990s at UCT against interference by the
apartheid state in the university’s affairs.

Rather than a tragic mishap on the part of student activists, such indiscriminate acts of
destruction of art demonstrate that no matter how solidarious with decolonial struggles
or socially engaged, art cannot undo its status of relative exclusivity and luxury in the
context of such struggles. Art’s promise of human liberation will always remain
inconsequential relative to radical social activism. Artistic acts will never be able to
force the kind of radical, momentous changes which activism can enforce (such as the
removal of Rhodes’ statue) or, at least, not in a straightforward, calculable way.

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From a philistine perspective, art can thus be experienced as grossly inadequate and
even unbearable in conditions of heightened revolutionary struggle. It can quickly
become the object of the philistine’s intolerant, envious, and destructive attitude toward
projected illusions of the possible realization of happiness in societal conditions in
which it is perceived to be structurally impossible.

III. Chapangu as an ‘Aesthetic Cut’ in RMF’s Activist Routines

Having offered an activist, philistine?? critique of engaged?? art, I shall now change
sides and look at RMF from the perspective of Chapangu and formulate an aesthetic
critique of philistine forms of cultural activism. This involves uncovering a political
register of Msezane’s performance that is less obvious than its critique of colonialist
plunder. It here does not so much concern Chapangu’s intervention on the level of the
politics of representation or its activist component. It is an aspect that lies at the heart of
many of the previously listed characterizations of Msezane’s performance activism in
opposition to the mainstream forms of RMF’s activism. I am referring to a politicity
immanent to art and aesthetic experience as such. For this, I turn to recent work by
contemporary philosopher Jacques Rancière on the relation between aesthetics and
politics.

Jacques Rancière and the Immanent Politicity of Aesthetic Experience

One of Rancière’s key moves is to identify an emancipatory power inherent to art and
aesthetics in idealist and romanticist conceptions, mainly those of Immanuel Kant and
Friedrich Schiller. He mainly focuses on what Kant took to be a crucial component of
aesthetic experience, namely, the harmonious, horizontal free and lively play between
the human faculties of the imagination, reason and sense-perception. In aesthetic
experience, the imagination is said to operate in a state of productivity and self-activity,
as opposed to being merely reproductive and subservient, as in the case of scientific
and moral reasoning and sensual experience. For Rancière there is something liberating
about this aesthetic mode in which the divisions, hierarchies and relations of
domination between the faculties that usually rule human existence are suspended.
One can think here of the domination of mind over matter, ideas over sensations, truth
over sensibility, morality over the body, but also more general oppositions or hierarchies
such as those of ends and means, reality and appearance, facts and fiction. The latter

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are all said to be invalidated in aesthetic experience, combined in non-hierarchical
fashion. Because of this, Rancière considers aesthetic experience to establish a “cut”,
“break”, “gap” or, again, a “surplus in the order of things”.

Importantly, this aesthetic mode of experience is regarded as confined to the sphere of

art, but as constituting a “specific mode of living in the world”. Although exemplarily
manifested in relation to art, the liberating mode of aesthetic experience suggests a
broader rethinking and restructuring of life and society, creating the "hope of ‘changing
life’”. In this sense, we can understand Rancière’s contention that the suspension of “the
ordinary hierarchies incorporated in everyday sensory experience” in aesthetic
production and reception is closely linked to the “social experience of emancipation”.
The freedom afforded by aesthetic experience is held to be key to emancipatory politics
because it provides “an opportunity for bodies to have different capabilities than those
attributed to them by society, possibilities for aspects of life to have different meanings
and be awarded more importance in society”. Even if art is not able to realize such
liberating effects in an instrumentalist way, it is credited for being able to create a sense
or experience of their possibility. Because of this, Rancière considers aesthetic
experience to be able to “open[...] up new passages for political subjectification”, to
stimulate playfulness with political subjects and subjectivities or invent new ones. For
Rancière this also crucially involves an act of dis-identification by individuals or groups,
a distancing and suspension of the places, roles and capacities imposed on them by the
existing order.

Chapangu as an ‘Aesthetic Cut’ in RMF’s Activist Routines

In case of RMF - and decolonial student protests in general - one could take the
aesthetic mode of being to be hemmed in from two sides. On the one hand, by an
absolute sense of decolonial justice in reaction to what is held to be an equally
absolute, radical evil (apartheid, white supremacy, etc.). On the other hand, by an
almost physically felt, visceral feeling of repulsion toward everything associated,
directly or indirectly, with neo/colonialism. Whether from above or below, whether
based on an unconditional sense of right or ‘immediate’ sensations of disgust, the
danger is that creative activity is subordinated and made subservient to the higher
moral cause or one’s immediate feelings of anger. What threatens to be put on the back
burner, if it is not eliminated entirely, is the freedom, the licence, the ability even, to

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play and to imagine. This might result in forms of repression driven by indisputable
claims of justice or by ‘authentic’ feelings of hurt and rage, or by both, causing a
‘coincidence of opposites’ in which moral and political injustice is physically felt as,
and inflamed by, feelings of rage and vice versa.

In contrast, and in line with Rancière’s conceptualization of the emancipatory

dimension of art, Msezane’s Chapangu can be seen to achieve a more balanced and
playful integration of the sensory, affective, cognitive and moral dimensions of the
ongoing struggle against the contemporary legacy of colonialism. Here we can offer
another interpretation of the title of Msezane’s UCT performance. While Chapangu is
the Shona term for the Bateleur Eagle, the French term bateleur means ‘street performer’
and also refers to acrobats and tight rope walkers. In Msezane’s performance, this play
of meanings can be seen to refer not only to Msezane balancing herself by stretching
her winged arms on the pedestal amidst the frenzied crowd of students and activists. It
might also be indicative of the way in which Chapangu achieves a fragile balance
between the said, multiple dimensions of the struggle for decolonization, between art
and activism, aesthetics and politics, fiction and reality, imagination and action.

Finally, one could also see in Msezane’s performance a liberation from, and dis-
identification with regard to dominant black, radical political subjectivities, as
instantiated by RMF. It concerns the routine mode of decolonial activists as enraged,
frenzied, ecstatic and impassioned subjects, as entirely consumed by, and self-identical
with their pain, anger and moral and political righteousness, allowing little room for
critical distance and alternative self-determinations. In contrast, Msezane’s performance
qua aesthetic performance - i.e. still apart from its representational content or
pedagogic aim - enacts the ability to play with alternative, fictive identities, freeing itself
from stereotypical, hackneyed modes of activist subjectivity through role-playing, in this
instance by ‘becoming-bird’ - as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari might have phrased
it - thus becoming something other or more than her pain, oppression, demands or
abstract, principled positions.

Conclusion: ‘Torn Halves’ of an Integral Decolonial Activism?

To be sure, from the philistine perspective set out by Jameson, the immanently
emancipatory nature of aesthetic experience as theorized by Rancière can be

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interpreted and downplayed as a variant of the ‘powerless happiness’ that provokes the
ire of philistines. The connection between art and the ‘hope’ of ‘changing life’ or, again,
art’s capacity to offer a sense of the possibility of liberation, might confirm the
philistine’s suspicion regarding the ultimate powerlessness of art’s promises of
happiness and a different, better life.

Rancière, for his part, might consider art nonetheless as empowering in itself, even if
not in the strong, decisive sense activists long for.

There are thus sound arguments to be made for the liberatory force of both RMF’s crass
mode of cultural contestation and Msezane’s artistic performance interventions. When
considered together, however, their modalities of aesthetic politics appear
irreconcilable and engender critical tensions back and forth. One appropriate way in
which the uneasy, tensional, antinomous relation of these two logics of aesthetic
politics might be conceived is in terms of Adorno’s famous characterization of the
antinomous relation between modernist art and popular modes of culture, namely that
“Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up”.

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