SOUTH AFRICA’S BLUE DRESS

Abstract

Inside the Constitutional Court of South Africa hangs Judith Mason’s artwork, entitled The Man Who Sang and the Woman Who Kept Silent, more commonly known as The Blue Dress. Mason created the artwork to commemorate Phila Ndwandwe and Harold Sefola after hearing testimony from the perpetrators of their deaths at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In this article I explore how The Blue Dress contributes to the reimagining of human rights culture in South Africa in three key ways. First, the artwork is a symbolic reparation that recognizes the harm suffered under apartheid. Second, the artwork is an alternative record of women’s experiences of sexual violence; experiences which are largely absent from the official TRC record. Third, the artwork is a form of judicial consciousness which keeps the past alive so that a different future can be imagined. I argue that The Blue Dress instantiates an “ethics of responsibility” in post-apartheid human rights discourse. That is, the responsibility to remember past violations of human rights in order to prevent future ones and the responsibility to recognize past triumphs of human rights in order to support future ones. The article draws on seven months of participant observation fieldwork at the Court, which included fifty-four interviews with judges, clerks, staff members, advocates, artists, curators, and visitors, as well as visual and archival research.

Keywords:

• art
• human rights
• Constitutional Court of South Africa
• Phila Ndwandwe
• Judith Mason

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

I would like to thank Danielle Celermajer, Millicent Churcher, Moira Gatens, and the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and guidance. Thank you also to my doctoral supervisor Duncan Bell and to participants in the “Institutional Transformation: Imagination, Affect, and Embodiment” workshop at the University of Sydney for their insightful engagement with an earlier version of this article. Very many thanks are due to the Constitutional Court of South Africa and all those interviewed. Thank you to Akona Kenqu and DALRO for the use of images. This work is supported by the British Academy, grant number PF170086. The research was also supported by Ca’Foscari University; the Cambridge Political Economy Society Trust; the Centre of Governance and Human Rights at the University of Cambridge and the Centre for Human Rights and the Institute for International and Comparative Law in Africa at the University of Pretoria, through a grant from the David and Elaine Potter Foundation; Queens’ College Cambridge; the Smuts Memorial Fund, managed by the University of Cambridge in memory of Jan Christiaan Smuts; the University of Cambridge Fieldwork Fund; the University of Witwatersrand; and Wolfson College Cambridge.

1 I borrow this phrase from Le Roux. In section 5, I discuss Le Roux’s use of this phrase and how my conception departs.

2 Interviews were conducted between May and November 2014 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

3 The five applicants for amnesty in the murder of Harold Sefola were: Hendrik Jack Cronje, Jacques Hechter, Wouter Mentz, Roelof Venter, and Paul van Vuuren.

4 The seven applicants for amnesty in the murder of Phila Ndwandwe were: Hendrik Johannes Petrus Botha, Salmon Johannes Gerhardus du Preez, Johannes Albertus Steyn, Andy Taylor, Roelof Brand Visagie, Jacobus Adriaan Vorster, and Lawrence Gerald Wasserman.

5 This introduction to Ndwandwe and Sefola is necessarily brief, but it is not without reflection upon the ethical considerations of the economy of storytelling; who benefits and who is empowered when these stories are shared in different forms (Nako 284).

6 The Blue Dress also raises important ethical questions about representing people’s stories. What entitles Mason to commemorate Ndwandwe, and to call her “Sister” after she is dead? Why should we care about Mason’s struggle to become politically conscientized?

7 This idea connects with long-standing debates in human rights scholarship about whether moral discourse or sentimental education is more effective in promoting respect for human rights (see Donnelly; Rorty).

8 The seven security branch officers who killed Ndwandwe deny committing sexual assault. Yet there are inconsistencies between the perpetrators’ testimonies and between the official reports about the exhumation of her body that cast a high level of doubt on these denials; these inconsistencies include whether Ndwandwe was kept naked for several days, whether she was stripped before being shot, and how she came to be covered in a plastic bag (see Ainslie; Russell). Other discussions of Ndwandwe’s case make the sexual violence explicit: “after being sexually violated and raped and left in the veldt, [she] found scatterings of blue plastic that she used to cover herself” (van Marle et al. 561).

9 The lecture was on the topic of reparative humanism. The idea is that forgiveness is the wrong word to describe the goal of encounters between victims and perpetrators; rather, reparative humanism captures the transformative moments that unfold through these encounters. See Gobodo-Madikizela, “Forgiveness is the Wrong Word.”

10 I want to flag and address two potential criticisms facing the arguments presented in this article. The first anticipated criticism relates to the artwork perpetuating untruths. Foremost, that Ndwandwe’s body was discovered with a plastic bag fashioned into underwear is a point of contention. Official reports from the TRC record the presence of the plastic underwear, while testimonies from Ndwandwe’s killers and other available evidence indicate contradictory accounts (see Ainslie; Russell; Vorster). The narratives about resistance and human dignity that emerge from The Blue Dress rely – to some extent – on the existence of the plastic underwear. However, to dismiss the artwork as untrue, largely because of the uncertainty about the plastic underwear, obscures the value in understanding how and why contradictory reports of Ndwandwe’s story arise, and the implications of these multiple versions for South Africa’s national imagination. It risks closing down vital discussions about the complexities of truth-telling, trauma, and memory-making which the TRC prompted. As Vorster asks, “[d]oes the reliance on spectacle and exaggeration, despite its potential deceptiveness, allow a vital moment for empathy-building that might otherwise not exist? And if so, does it matter whether the story of Ndwandwe is absolutely true?” (180). These questions need to be posed again and again in order to prevent the neat resolution of Ndwandwe’s story and the subsequent forgetting that this entails (see Vorster). Ndwandwe was denied the opportunity to tell her story; The Blue Dress offers an encounter with her memory and the problems which arise in remembering. Second, some readers might claim that The Blue Dress is simply that, a pretty blue dress and nothing more. It is a cliché, but it is also true, to say that diverse interpretations arise from different beholders. This speaks to the dynamic complexity of art; interpretation can be curated but not controlled. Individual doubt about the aesthetic merit of The Blue Dress does not negate how the artwork continues to pervade judicial and scholarly imagination.