Cutting anti-apartheid images: Bongiwe Dhlomo's activist linocut prints

This paper discusses political content in a series of linocut prints created by a female Zulu artist, Bongiwe (commonly known as Bongi) Dhlomo (b. 1956) in 1982 during late apartheid in South Africa. Deeply influenced by the 1976 Soweto uprising, Dhlomo decided to study art at Rorke’s Drift (The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Southern Africa’s Art and Craft Centre) and, on graduating, created images with political content. I explore her visual portrayal of the spatial politics resulting from apartheid ideology, and the policy of separate development. In order to establish ‘homelands’ for different ethnic groups, the Nationalist government undertook forced removals and relocated people, taking them from established communities to ‘historic’ places of origin. Focussing on Dhlomo’s ‘Removals’ series (1982) I consider her images as a spatial narrative about black South African experience and discuss the iconography of the seven ‘Removals’ prints, and the appropriateness of linocut as a process for personal commentary on the disruptive migrations experienced by millions of black South Africans. I argue that Dhlomo’s empathetic, representational rendering of the diasporic condition offers a record of historic events, avoids the didactic tone and stylistic mannerisms of much ‘protest art’ and ‘struggle politics’, and expresses deeply felt responses to South African life under apartheid.