Final Session Heated Conversations by Panashe Chigumadzi with Sethembile Msezane| 9 Nov | 6pm (Johannesburg time)
You are warmly invited to the last session of WiSER’s online seminar series
Heated Conversations
Panashe Chigumadzi with Sethembile Msezane will present on
"Ubuntu, Ukufa Kwabantu, and the Anthropocene: Black Social Death in Sethembile Msezane's Liguqubele iZulu"
Click here for paper
The seminar discussion, "Ubuntu, Ukufa Kwabantu, and the Anthropocene: Black Social Death in Sethembile Msezane's Liguqubele iZulu" is based on Panashe Chigumadzi's catalogue essay for Sethembile Msezane’s most recent show, Liguqubele iZulu. As Msezane confronts death — of a loved one, as well as of a former self she can no longer hold onto -- her series of black and white paintings journeys through various forms of death and loss that shifted Msezane’s consciousness as she grappled with an overcast season. In this mourning and grieving process, Liguqubele iZulu reflects Ntu knowledge systems as ecologies of being as Msezane re-members the rupture and finds relief, answers and healing through communion with the ancestral and natural worlds. Invoking the porous boundaries between the spiritual and natural worlds, the artist expresses her turmoil, vulnerability and release in internalising the transforming sky, land and water during this period on a fragile mull canvas. Msezane invokes the portals and powers of healing work through medicinal monochromes interweaving hair tufts imbued with rainwater, snuff and air through breathwork that creates delicate patterns on the porous surface.
Describing Msezane’s Liguqubele iZulu as "a foretelling of difficult times ahead following rupture — ukufa kwabantu" (literally, "the death of [black] people"), Chigumadzi reflects on the temporal and generational shifts in Black Thought on being and becoming as a means to think through what ethical relations with our natural and spiritual worlds demands in the Age of the Anthropecene. What today's generation of isiZulu speakers conceive of as “ukugula kwabantu” (“the illness of [black] people”) (Makanya 2021), older generations of isiZulu speakers would speak of “ukufa kwabantu” (Ngubane 1977). Chigumadzi argues that, across generations, abantu namuhla, speaking of “ukugula kwabantu” and abantu abadala, speaking of “ukufa kwabantu”, both mark the same rupture in being-black-in-the-world — black social and spiritual death. Ubuntu demands that abantu live in balance with their natural and spiritual worlds, so it is that Mkhulu Dr. Harriet Ngubane reminds us that ukufa kwabantu are those illnesses that arise from both ecological and ancestral rupture. If we are out of rhythm with nature and the cosmos, we are out of rhythm with ourselves as people. Collectively, then we can understand that, ukufa kwabantu arises from the Anthropocene’s advent — Euro-American modernity’s insatiable will to conquer the cosmos, nature, and time that kills all life on Earth — including our own. Since the advent of the Euro-American anthropocene, abantu have cried, Lafa elihle kakhulu. The world is dead. Not only have we, abantu, suffered spiritual death, but the land, and indeed, the world in which we live has suffered death too.
Panashe Chigumadzi is the author of These Bones Will Rise Again (2018), a historical memoir reflecting on Robert Mugabe’s military ouster through the spirits of anti-colonial heroine Mbuya Nehanda and her grandmother Mbuya Chigumadzi, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Alan Paton Prize for Non-fiction. Her 2015 debut novel Sweet Medicine (Blackbird Books) won the 2016 K. Sello Duiker Literary Award. Chigumadzi was the founding editor of Vanguard Magazine, a platform for black women coming of age in post-apartheid South Africa. A former columnist for The New York Times, and contributing editor of the Johannesburg Review of Books, her work has featured in titles including The Guardian, Chimurenga, Transition, Africa is A Country, Washington Post and Die Ziet. Chigumadzi is a doctoral candidate in Harvard University’s Departments of African and African American Studies and History. She has been the Dorothy Porter & Charles Harris Wesley Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard, a Fellow-in-Residence at Iowa University’s International Writers Program, and a Ruth First Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand. In 2023, Chigumadzi delivered the 2023 ZAM Nelson Mandela Lecture at the Amsterdam International Theatre, titled "Nixolisa Nigani?" ("With what are you apologising?") as a response to the Dutch prime minister's December 2022 apology for slavery without reparations. Prior to this, she has delivered lectures such as the 2015 Ruth First Lecture at University of the Witwatersrand's Great Hall. In 2016, Chigumadzi was the inaugural curator of Soweto’s Abantu Book Festival, South Africa’s most important gathering for black readers and writers.
Sethembile Msezane lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. Using interdisciplinary practice encompassing performance, photography, film, sculpture and drawing, Msezane creates commanding works heavy with spiritual and political symbolism. The artist explores issues around spirituality, commemoration and African knowledge systems. She processes her dreams as a medium through a lens of the plurality of existence across space and time, asking questions about the remembrance of ancestry. Part of her work has examined the processes of mythmaking which are used to construct history, calling attention to the absence of the black female body in both the narratives and physical spaces of historical commemoration. Msezane is a Norval Sovereign African Art Prize 2024 Finalist, she participated in the 14th edition of PhotoIreland, as well as the13th Bamako Encounters African Biennale of Photography (2022). She completed a residency at Central Saint Martins, London (2022), she participated in the 14th Dak’art Biennale (2022). She was a UEA Global Talent Fellow hosted by the Sainsbury Research Unit and Sainsbury Centre (2021). She was Mellon Artist Residency Fellow in partnership with Gallery of the University of Stellenbosch and the English Department (2020), she is a National Institute for Human Social Sciences Award nominee (2020), OkayAfrica 100 women 2018 Honoree. Msezane was a TEDGlobal Speaker in Arusha, Tanzania (2017). She was a TAF & Sylt Emerging Artist Residency Award winner (TASA) (2016). Msezane is the first recipient of the Rising Light award at the Mbokodo Awards (2016). She is a Barclays L’Atelier Top 10 Finalist (2016). She is a Sasol New Signatures Merit Award winner (2015). Insta @sthemse and website www.sethembile-msezane.com
Wednesday, 8th November 2023
6pm (Johannesburg time)
Register here:
https://wits-za.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwlcO-srzgtHN3ITaJ6sNJr2gTmvz2xKOWl
Heated Conversations is a seminar series convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall
As global warming produces rising seas, falling dam levels and excessive droughts, generating new levels of multi-crisis in the world-now, so too are our conversations and discourses heating up in multiple ways. This seminar series takes up these questions of anthropogenic escalation and pedagogical shifts of gear. It does so in a context in which strengthening Southern bodies of knowledge is ever more crucial to engaging collectively with and comprehending these complex new rubrics and material dimensions. A forum broadly dedicated to the literary and cultural humanities, the seminar is hospitably open to wide participation from as many parts of the world as possible and will invite speakers to offer generative interventions for discussion and debate.
Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor Emeritus at Wits University; Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at WiSER, Wits.