Extract from the Keynote Address delivered by Dr M Mushonga* at the Oliewenhuis Art Museum, Bloemfontein, 4 October 2022.
The Man/Woman in the Mirror
So, this evening I am going to try and talk about what I think are some of the key lessons we learn from Pitika Ntuli’s Azibuyele Emasisweni (Return to the Source) art which scored a first at the Global Fine Arts Awards. Yet in order to speak to the art, it is important to know the person behind the art. Yet, what do I know about he who has been described by many as an exceptional artist. From where I stand, Pitika is not an exceptional artist because exceptional artists do not exist. There has never been an exceptional artist anywhere, anytime. What has always existed are good thinking-doers and doing-thinkers who die for art to live. Then, what do I know about he who is a sculptor; a cultural ambassador, a historian, and according to Ngugi Wa Thiongo, a poet of resurrection; he who loves to die a little many times in order to give birth to another piece of art; a predatory poet who violates linguistic principles, strangles morphology, and murders syntax before locking them up in muted cages of sounds; a spiritual healer yet also the spirit himself. What do I know about an activist writer and decolonial scholar who spent 32 years of his life in political exile? What do I know about he who refused to succumb to the detonation of a cultural bomb at the centre of his universe? What do I know about he who resisted to get the software of European knowledge and memory downloaded into his hard disk of African Spiritualism, gnoseology, and memory?
1. Africa-Centred and Planet-Centred Azibuyele Emasisweni
I have titled my talk Decolonial Aesthetics/Aesthesis in Pitika Ntuli’s Azibuyele Emasisweni (Return to the Source) Art (Exhibition) to speak to Pitika’s life story and intellectual interventions that challenge orthodoxy epistemology and philosophy. Decolonial aesthetics/aesthesis therefore refers to ongoing artistic projects responding to imperial globalization and global coloniality. It is the terrain where Pitika Ntuli and artists around the world are contesting the legacies of modernity by being involved in projects of re-existence in artistic practices all over the world. Decolonial aesthetics is about the liberation of sensing, sensibilities, tastes, emotions, beauty, et cetera, that remained/remain trapped by modernity and its darker side: coloniality.
Pitika’s Azibuyele Emasisweni and all his artist works challenge the [Hegelian, Roperian and Hobbesian] idea of a pre-European Africa as a land of childhood, an Africa without history, an Africa that existed outside the geographical reach of reason, a place where there was no account of Time, NO Arts, No Letters, No Society except WARS & DEATH. To weave his art around themes such as Earth; Water; Air; Fire; African Spirituality; Indigenous Knowledge Systems; and Healing, Azibuyele Emasisweni calls upon us to be African again, and to refuse to be photocopies of the West. Pitika, like Ngugi wa Thiongo and many like-minded thinkers, is making a passionate call to ‘return to the base’. What is the base? The base is the people and their languages, cultures, spiritualities, cosmologies, belief systems, sensibilities, and their gnoseologies (knowledges).
Pitika’s art simply demonstrates the indisputable fact that all human beings are not only born into valid knowledge systems, but are also legitimate knowers and producers of legitimate knowledge. It tells us that all organisms need to know in order to live and have to live in order to know. For without living there is no knowing and without knowing there is no living. Without various concoctions of roots, leaves of trees, herbs, steaming, belief systems, spiritual interventions and various ways of thinking and doing, Africa could not have fared better than other continents in the brutal fight against COVID-19. Pitika summoned bones to heal many bodies and souls during the moment of COVID-19. Yet, the healing touch of Pitika’s bones predates and postdates the pandemic in its obvious attempts to not only heal the deep colonial wounds of slavery, enslavement, genocides, colonialism, apartheid, imperialism, land theft and appropriations, linguicides, culturecides, epistemicides, and the endless structural adjustments of African lives and economies by the West, aided by autocratic, incompetent, greedy and corrupt African leaders, but also to unsettle and disrupt orthodox forms of cure, treating and healing. Azibuyele Emasisweni art is a measure of resilience in both dark and happy moments.
2. The Humans and ‘Mother’ Earth/Nature
Angry and abused earth is the reason of our suffering in the 21st century. ‘Mother’ earth is angry because the Imperial Man decided to raise himself above nature, and to remove himself from nature and as part of nature, to colonise nature, and turn nature into a natural resource to be exploited, changing its functions dramatically.
To return to the source is therefore a clarion call for all of us to recognise the mutuality between humans and earth. Civilisations like those in Africa respected mountains, trees, pools of water, springs, valleys, rivers, forests as other beings and as the abode of goddesses and gods. The forces of creation and those created were part of the same reality. But the arrival of the Imperial Being changed all this. He began to see Africans as barbarians who were failing to rise above the state of nature. There was now confrontation between nature and the West, and victory was not always on nature’s side. The natural world was now a servant of man rather than a partner. The current climate crisis and enduring pandemics are a sign that our planet earth is in dire need of repair. It is calling our attention to the process of re-membering, reconstitution, and putting it together as Pitika does with metal, wood, stones and bones. That is why Pitika tells us that he does not copy nor work like nature, but ‘works with nature’. This is a call to planet-centred and African-centred thinking, doing, sensing, and living. It is a reminder that we need to rethink alternative relationships with each other and with non-humans, rooted in reciprocity and responsibility. Achille Mbembe is convinced that it is the fear of our planet earth turning into a hothouse where we could be cooked to death (and become the tools for Pitika’s art) that is propelling the desire to colonise other planets like Mars, Jupiter, etc. Yet, for now, the Earth is our only shared roof and shelter, and for that reason, we must work hard to preserve it. As Pitika posits, by killing and destroying the environment in the chase for individual riches and wealth, we are actually killing ourselves because we are the environment as the environment is us. Blowing up mountains just to obtain one gram of gold?
3. Being (Human) and the Bones
Besides elevating himself above nature, the Western Man also elevated himself above all other ‘Beings’ and relegated others to the domain of perpetual ‘Becoming’. Western philosophy got preoccupied with the idea of ‘Being’ vs the ‘Rest’. On the contrary, African philosophy is preoccupied with issues of compositionality or ethics of care (ubuntu) and relationality. By bringing together 33 local and international talent to breathe life into Azibuyele Emasisweni Art, Pitika demonstrates the importance of incompleteness in our lives. Anyone interested in understanding the illusion of autonomy and the importance of incompleteness and interdependency must read Amos Tutuola’s bewitching novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard. Drawing on West African Yoruba oral folktale tradition, Amos Tutuola chronicles the incredible adventures of an alcoholic man and his search for his dead palm-wine tapster. As he ventures through the land of the dead, he encounters a host of supernatural and often terrifying beings – among them the complete gentleman who was returning hired body parts to their owners. This gentleman had hired the best body parts to win the heart of the most beautiful lady in the land. When he reached where he hired the left foot, he pulled it out, and gave it to the owner and paid him; and when he reached the place where he hired the right foot, he pulled it out and gave it to the owner and paid for the rentage, until he was a complete skeleton. In the Palm-Wine Drinkard, Tutuola shows that the supernatural is quite simply natural. Gods, death, spirits and the curious and terrible creatures of the bushes and forests take on human nature, just as humans develop the supernatural attributes of these ordinarily invisible forces in their lives. The boundaries between nature and culture, village and town, home and bushes, human and supernatural, rational and superstitious, primitive and civilised, tradition and modernity, Africa and the West, are collapsed. The idea of mobile Africa which pays more attention to the business of repair, to curating life – to matters of breathing and respiration as opposed to the hierarchisation and controlling of populations comes alive. Items that would rather be considered as rubbish such as bones are resurrected. That is why Homi Bhabha described Pitika as a curator of life for his ability to release “the spirit and the story that has rested deep in the bones” and “make the silence of bones… speak and sing.” Pitika is the only person I know who can make bones live. Deep in the Valley of Dry Bones, the Almighty God asked the prophet Ezekiel, ‘Son of man, will these bones live?’. Ezekiel replied, ‘O Sovereign Lord, you alone know’. ‘Prophesy over these bones, that they may live’, God commanded Ezekiel. Ezekiel did as commanded, and the bones came to life – the frontal and nasal bones; the parietal and preseptal bones; the maxilla and scival bones; the palatine and lacrimal bones, and the rest of the bones joined together in the split of a second and Ezekiel stood there, perplexed, and frightened. Yet, in this 21st century, we have someone who works with elephant, rhino, giraffe and horses’ bones to challenge death through their artistic resurrection. His name is Pitika aka Spirit Ntuli. He says that he works with bones because they ‘are more durable and the evidence that we were alive 3.5 million years ago’.
To deploy bones to ‘divine the state of the nation in a season of anomie’ is to be truly innovative and to demonstrate the importance of repair. Matter such as bones, metal, wood, etc, is folded, remixed, welded, blended in new combinations according to a logic of composition. Putting together and repairing what has been broken up as opposed to tearing apart is Pitika’s ‘daily bread’ that turns him into a thinking-doer and doing-thinker.
4. Conclusion
Pitika’s Azibuyele Emasisweni art is gesturing us towards decolonial aesthetics/aesthesis of re-humanizing, re-membering, re-constituting, repairing, re-existence and re-worlding. How do we do this? I want to offer three concluding points on how to do this. First, in the US, a movement called Decolonize This Place is demanding the decolonization of the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. It accuses the museum of putting art first before people. Their slogan reads: They Want the Art, Not the People. 
Decolonize This Place demands that institutions to go beyond diversity, equity and inclusion. It poses the following tormenting and unsettling questions: Why does an institution need professional curators? An Executive Director? A Board of Trustees? Decolonize This Place sees these professionalized roles as elite concentrations of power. It wants to see museums and similar institutions as places of collective care and not places of curation. In light of this, I challenge the Bloemfontein National Museum and all museums on the continent and around the world to rethink their approaches to art. Museums are gently cautioned against the default response of institutions to a crisis of governance by containing and assimilating the crisis through internal processes that allow for stalling, evasion, and damage control while leaving the system that perpetuates injustice intact.
Second, for universities, Azibuyele Emasisweni art is the best example of how to decolonise knowledge. Pitika decolonises knowledge by recentering Africa and its rich Indigenous Knowledge Systems. Quantum physics and mechanics, history, astronomy, mathematics, geometry and all the disciplines and interdisciplines in the sciences and humanities come to life in Azibuyele Emasisweni. To return to the source/base speaks to the need to see Africa as the centre from which we think and look at the world instead of the converse. In all his artwork, Pitika recognises the importance of where he begins to tell his story, conscious of the fact that a story that starts in the wrong place cannot arrive at the right conclusion. In his book, The Haitians: A Decolonial History, Jean Casimir declares:
My position of strength comes from observing the outside world through Haitian eyes. When I do the opposite I place myself in a position of inferiority by accepting the definition put in place by the gaze of another.
Pitika’s decolonial Azibuyele Emasisweni art demonstrates unlimited possibilities of healing; healing the bones of those who perished during colonial and postcolonial genocides and aggrandizement; and unlimited possibilities of engendering decolonised and re-humanized pedagogies. Pitika tells us that ‘our common survival depends on us working collectively to both heal ourselves and the earth’.
Finally, to heal ourselves and the earth, to avoid a repeat of the ugly past, and to engender pluriversal pedagogies, we need to find common ground and to start building one thing that is key to every individual, relationship, institution, government, nation, and planet earth. If that one thing is removed, it will destroy the most successful individual, nation, economy, civilisation, and ‘mother’ earth. Yet, if that one thing is leveraged, it has the potential to create unparallel success and happiness. That one thing is LOVE. President Nelson Mandela once remarked, ‘If people can learn to hate, they can learn and be taught how to love.’
We must begin to learn to love and to teach others love. To love thy neighbour and nature, thy neighbour loving thy neighbour and nature, and thy neighbour loving thy neighbour and nature, until love becomes pandemic. We must have the wisdom, knowledge and courage to love; and be ready to re-create the world by creating a peaceful society under social, economic and political conditions that may not permit love and peace.
*Munyaradzi Mushonga (PhD), Programme Director for Africa Studies, Centre for Gender and Africa Studies, University of the Free State.
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