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Igniting public space at the Chale Wote street art festival in Accra:

  • Authors: Simbao, Ruth K
  • Date: 2018
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147048 , vital:38588 , https://theconversation.com/igniting-public-space-at-the-chale-wote-street-art-festival-in-accra-102783
  • Description: For the past eight years at the end of every August the James Town suburb of Ghana’s capital Accra has been taken over by the Chale Wote street art festival. During the festival, thousands of people, including local celebrities, artists, musicians, boxers and everyday revellers, move up and down the streets mostly by foot and at times on roller skates or unicycles.
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  • Date Issued: 2018

The thirtieth anniversary of the Soweto uprisings: reading the shadow in Sam Nzima's iconic photograph of Hector Pieterson

  • Authors: Simbao, Ruth K
  • Date: 2007
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147536 , vital:38647 , https://doi.org/10.1162/afar.2007.40.2.52
  • Description: This haunting photograph (Fig. 1) from the 1976 Soweto Uprisings in South Africa is often referred to as the single most important photograph to emerge from the struggle against apartheid (Purtilo 1999:22). According to South African film director Feizel Mamdoo, there are particular moments in history that are defined by photographic, celluloid, or television images, such as the world famous photograph of the Saigon girl, naked and burning from napalm (Worsdale 1998; see also Richards 2001). He argues that the iconic photograph by Sam Nzima depicting Hector Pieterson being carried in the arms of Mbuyisa Makhubu, with his distraught sister Antionette1 running alongside, is comparable in the way that “it marks history, both social and personal” (Worsdale 1998).
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  • Date Issued: 2007

Condition Report 3: Art History in Africa: debating localization,legitimization and new solidarities

  • Authors: Simbao, Ruth K , Kouoh, Koyo , Nzewi, Ugochukwu-Smooth C , Sousa, Suzana , Koide, Emi
  • Date: 2019
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/146055 , vital:38491 , https://0-doi.org.wam.seals.ac.za/10.1162/afar_a_00456
  • Description: Following on from the African Arts dialogue, “Zimbabwe Mobilizes: ICAC's Shift from Coup de Grăce to Cultural Coup” (Simbao et al. 2017) this dialogue considers another important event in the visual arts that recently took place on the African continent. Like the International Conference on African Cultures (ICAC) that was held in Harare in 2017, this event in Dakar contributes in important ways towards a shift of the center of gravity of the global academy, particularly the study of art history in and of Africa.
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  • Date Issued: 2019

Blind spots: trickery and the'opaque stickiness' of seeing

  • Authors: Simbao, Ruth K
  • Date: 2015
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147303 , vital:38624 , https://0-hdl.handle.net.wam.seals.ac.za/10520/EJC176319
  • Description: In a flash the spot will disappear, and in its place - and this is the interesting thing - there is nothing. According to experimental psychology, the eye does not fill in the blind spot, but tricks us into thinking that it has been filled. The blind spot is pure absence of vision, and cannot be experienced at all. The blind spot is an invisible absence : an absence whose invisibility is itself invisible (Elkins 1996 : 170).
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  • Date Issued: 2015

A Crown on the Move: stylistic integration of the Luba-Lunda complex in Lunda-Kazembe performance

  • Authors: Simbao, Ruth K
  • Date: 2013
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147524 , vital:38646 , https://doi.org/10.1162/afar.2006.39.3.26
  • Description: Carried on a scarlet and zebra-hide litter above the heads of a throbbing crowd, Mwata Kazembe XIX gloriously stretches out his arms as if to embrace a world that is his own (Fig. 1). As he parts the sea of well-wishers, splashes of red burst into view and the talking drum beats out its decree. Basking in a charged clamor where the senses blur in clouds of dust, Mwata gracefully sways from side to side, jangling the beads and cowries on the back of his akatasa crown. It is on this day that the Lunda-Kazembe Crown moves.
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  • Date Issued: 2013

The art of change: perspectives on transformation in South Africa

  • Authors: Makhubu, Nomusa , Simbao, Ruth K
  • Date: 2013
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147642 , vital:38657 , https://0-doi.org.wam.seals.ac.za/10.1080/09528822.2013.798180
  • Description: There have been almost two decades of democracy in South Africa, yet rising anger and violent discontent lay bare continuing inequity. It is timely to ask the question: can South Africans really be frank about how meaningful the transformation from oppressive political and economic structures has been? Does the inclination towards neo-liberalism and capitalism in South Africa’s post-Apartheid democracy allow real change? Where economic inequality and spatial divisions still persist and, indeed, are actively reproduced by current market forces, can South Africans really create inclusive and integrative spaces? The Art of Change: Perspectives on Transformation in South Africa confronts some of these issues, reopening debates and encouraging reflection on cultural dynamics in South Africa during the past two decades.
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  • Date Issued: 2013

China-Africa relations: research approaches

  • Authors: Simbao, Ruth K
  • Date: 2012
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147503 , vital:38644 , https://doi.org/10.1162/afar.2012.45.2.1
  • Description: About to board a plane in Johannesburg, I handed my temporary boarding pass to the flight attendant who exclaimed,“Simbao, you have a fong kong boarding pass!” Fong kong is a slang term used in South Africa meaning fake, cheap, or low quality and is often associated with Chinese imports. In this case, the term was used to refer to a temporary pass issued earlier on my journey that needed to be replaced with a new boarding pass in Johannesburg.
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  • Date Issued: 2012

Infecting the city: site-situational performance and ambulatory hermeneutics

  • Authors: Simbao, Ruth K
  • Date: 2016
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/146156 , vital:38500 , DOI: 10.1080/09528822.2016.1266776
  • Description: This article proposes the term ‘site-situational’ art or performance as a meaningful shift beyond ‘site-specificity’ and as a way to develop forward-moving and relational understandings of place. While place falls prey to Western, modernist stereotypes of closed, territorial geographic systems, site-situational readings, radical forms of ‘recognition’ and ambulatory hermeneutics enable an understanding of place as a wandering signifier, a trickster figure, and an in-the-moment conversation between environments and living beings. Through an analysis of the 2009 Infecting the City performing arts festival in South Africa, the article links site-situational performance to situational understandings of identification in the context of migration and xenophobia. It connects the participatory creative resistance aspired to by the Situationists that transforms situations rather than just recognises them, to the potential mutuality that can be experienced when one recognises oneself in the face of a ‘foreigner’ as well as the potential culpability that accompanies pro-active recognition-on-the-run.
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  • Date Issued: 2016

Zimbabwe mobilizes: ICAC's shift from Coup de Grăce to Cultural Coup

Dialectics of dance and dress: the performative negotiation of Soli girl initiates (Moye) in Zambia

  • Authors: Simbao, Ruth K
  • Date: 2010
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147492 , vital:38643 , https://doi.org/10.1162/afar.2010.43.3.64
  • Description: During a 2005 dance rehearsal in Nkomeshya Village near Lusaka, Zambia, a group of Soli girl initiates (moye) entered a clearing, slowly moving towards the drummer who beckoned them with her rhythmic eats. The girls per-formed a polite curtseying step, reflecting the meek modesty they are taught to display when they humbly greet elders or their future husbands with downcast eyes.
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  • Date Issued: 2010

Cosmological efficacy and the politics of Sacred Place: Soli Rainmaking in contemporary Zambia

  • Authors: Simbao, Ruth K
  • Date: 2014
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147482 , vital:38642 , https://doi.org/10.1162/AFAR_a_00163
  • Description: In this article I analyze cosmological efficacy in light of the politicization and apparent secularization of contemporary annual ceremonies in Zambia, south-central Africa, which are framed by scholars as neotraditional (Lentz 2001), folklorized (van Binsbergen 1994), or retraditionalized (Gould 2005:3, 6) events. My term “festivalization” registers the formalization of Zambian performances such as rituals, harvest festivals, inaugurations, and initiations as annual festival events, but does not imply a pejorative attitude towards cultural change and so-called inauthenticity, as the words “folklorization” or “retraditionalization” seem to do.
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  • Date Issued: 2014

Installation view: Chale Wote Festival 2018

  • Authors: Simbao, Ruth K
  • Date: 2018
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147059 , vital:38589 , https://www.contemporaryand.com/magazines/chale-wote-festival-accra-2018/
  • Description: The Chale Wote festival opened on the Day of Re-Membering (20 August), when the Nai Priest poured libations at Brazil House in order to invoke the ancestral spirits. Core events took place on the streets and at various public spaces in James Town from 25 – 26 August. A number of artists including Kiffouly Youchaou, Kresiah Mukwazhi, Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi (crazinisT artisT), Charlotte Brathwaite, Percy Nii Nortey and the Ubulungiswa/Justice collective created works inside Ussher Fort and James Fort, which were built as slave forts by the Dutch and the British.
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  • Date Issued: 2018

Situating Africa: an alter-geopolitics of knowledge, or Chapungu rises

  • Authors: Simbao, Ruth K
  • Date: 2017
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/146112 , vital:38496 , https://0-doi.org.wam.seals.ac.za/10.1162/AFAR_a_00340
  • Description: This journal issue marks the beginning of a new partnership with African Arts as Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, joins the editorial consortium. As the National Research Foundation Chair in Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa, I will work with collaborators based largely on the African continent to produce one issue of African Arts per year. This first issue has grown out of conversations with artists, curators, and writers based in Uganda, Zimbabwe, and South Africa at a publishing workshop organized by Rhodes University, as well as an institutional collaboration with Makerere University in Uganda. It also includes a dialogue with colleagues in Tanzania, Zambia, Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa, Benin, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, the US, Uganda, and Angola/Portugal. A core goal of our work is to significantly increase the participation of authors based on the African continent as a way of strengthening our discipline with a scholarly approach that takes seriously an alter-geopolitics of knowledge as a decolonial concept (Koopman 2011; Mignolo 2002).
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  • Date Issued: 2017

Reaching sideways, writing our ways: the orientation of the arts of Africa discourse

  • Authors: Simbao, Ruth K , Miko, William B , Ijisakin, Eyitayo T , Tchibozo, Romuald , Hwati, Masimba , NG-Yang, Kristin , Mudekereza, Patrick , Nalubowa, Aidah , Hyacinthe. Genevieve , Jason, Lee-Roy , Abdou, Eman , Chachage, Rehema , Tumusiime, Amanda , Sousa, Suzana , Muchemwa, Fadzai
  • Date: 2017
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/145886 , vital:38475 , https://0-doi.org.wam.seals.ac.za/10.1162/AFAR_a_00341
  • Description: In Rehema Chachage's video installation, Kwa Baba Rithi Undugu (2010), sculptural objects representing old-fashioned transistor radios are mounted on the wall, side by side (Fig. 1). Embedded in each radio is a small video screen, which reveals a figure who stands in one place while the vertical line of the radio tuner crosses her body in search of the desired frequency (Figs. 2–3). A man's voice wafts in and out as it is periodically interrupted by unsolicited noise, revealing the difficulty of relating to others when sound is interrupted or there is an absence of voice. Voice, writes Chachage, is a “prerequisite for interlocution and the construction of discourse.” This work engages with the assertion that to “live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree …” and to do so full heartedly with your “eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit … whole body and deeds” (Bakhtin 1984:293).
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  • Date Issued: 2017

Dungamanzi/stirring waters: Tsonga and Shangaan art from southern Africa, Nessa Leibhammer (Ed.): book reviews

  • Authors: Simbao, Ruth K
  • Date: 2008
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147358 , vital:38629 , https://0-hdl.handle.net.wam.seals.ac.za/10520/EJC31053
  • Description: A woman known as Nkoma We Lwandle (Cow of the Ocean) and a man, Dunga Manzi (Stirring Waters), are remembered as the first Tsonga diviners. Trained by Nzunzu - a powerful water serpent - they were pulled into a lake for a few months and later emerged as influential healers. Such stories (like the one relayed by Dederen of a young girl, Nsatimuni, who also temporarily disappeared into a lake) represent 'death' and 'rebirth', reflecting Arnold van Gennep's (1909) well-known schema of rites de passage: séparation, marge, and agrégation. Separated from daily life, these characters sink into another world where people breathe in water like a foetus in the liquid depths of a womb, evoking impending new birth (p. 171).
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  • Date Issued: 2008

Rise and fall of apartheid: photography and the bureaucracy of everyday life

  • Authors: Simbao, Ruth K
  • Date: 2014
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147604 , vital:38653 , DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2014.998052
  • Description: The exhibition catalogue Rise and Fall of Apartheid is a valuable collection of photographic images that create, according to Enwezor, “a critical visualization and interrogation of […] [apartheid’s] normative symbols, signs and representation” (18). The catalogue focuses on African subjects as “agents of their own emancipation” (18), and contextualises South Africa’s anticipation of the end of apartheid within broader global changes in the late 1980s. Essays by Okwui Enwezor, Michael Godby, Achille Mbembe, Darren Newbury, Colin Richards, Patricia Hayes, Andries Walter Olifant, Rory Bester and Khwezi Gule are included in the catalogue, and are interspersed between photographic images that are grouped in chronological clusters: 1948–1959; 1960–1969; 1970–1979; 1980–1989; and 1990–1995.
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  • Date Issued: 2014

AmaNdebele, Peter Magubane and Sandra Klopper: book review

  • Authors: Simbao, Ruth K
  • Date: 2006
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147336 , vital:38627 , https://0-hdl.handle.net.wam.seals.ac.za/10520/EJC31002
  • Description: AmaNdebele is a very attractive book with beautifully reproduced colour photographs taken by the renowned photographer Peter Magubane, who secured enormous credibility as a photojournalist during the violent years of apartheid. While some South African readers who browse through the glossy portrayals of ceremonial attire and homestead decorations may recall Magubane's earlier books such as Soweto speaks (1981) and Soweto: The fruit of fear (1986) in which the photographer laid bare the ferocious violence of apartheid rule, many readers will skip over the nuances of both Magubane's disrupted career and the contentious relationship between the Ndebele people and the South African apartheid government.
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  • Date Issued: 2006

Light on a hill: building the Constitutional Court of South Africa, Bronwyn Law-Viljoen (Ed.): book review

  • Authors: Simbao, Ruth K
  • Date: 2007
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147324 , vital:38626 , https://0-hdl.handle.net.wam.seals.ac.za/10520/EJC31011
  • Description: Light on a hill : Building the Constitutional Court of South Africa is a visually elegant book that claims to 'reflect the spirit of the Court and be a beautiful object in its own right' (p. 8). Certainly this book is striking, with its rich photographs by Angela Buckland, its fresh, breathable design by Adele Prins, and its broad format with lavish centerfolds. Reading the text is in many ways an enlightening process of understanding the conceptual underpinnings of the buildings that make up the Constitutional Court complex, but this process of reading takes a few twists and turns along the way.
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  • Date Issued: 2007

Pushing against ‘China-Africa’ slowly, and with small stories:

  • Authors: Simbao, Ruth K
  • Date: 2019
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/146778 , vital:38556 , http://www.somethingweafricansgot.com/about-1
  • Description: the new focus on african arts and critical thought.
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  • Date Issued: 2019

A Geopolitics of knowledge and the value of discomfort:

  • Authors: Simbao, Ruth K
  • Date: 2016
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/146444 , vital:38526 , https://www.ru.ac.za/fineart/latestnews/alutacontinuadoingitfordaddytenyearson.html
  • Description: In 2006, the short essay ‘Doing it for Daddy’ by visual artist Sharlene Khan caused controversy when it expressed the opinion that since 1994, ‘transformation’ in the visual arts field in South Africa seemed to have halted at the point of White women replacing White men in positions of power. It questioned this new position of dominance in institutions that remained colonially and racially untransformed. On the 16 and 17th of September 2016, the School of Fine Art at Rhodes University will host a one-day symposium ‘A luta Continua: Doing it for Daddy - Ten years on…’ which seeks to both commemorate that article and those who ‘speak up’, but also, fundamentally, to continue looking at the ways in which various social oppressions intersect in the fields of art history and visual arts in South Africa. Presenters include Khwezi Gule, Nontobeko Ntombela, Nomusa Makhubu, Same Mdluli, Fouad Asfour, Ruth Simbao, Sharlene Khan, students from Wits School of Arts and Rhodes Art History and Visual Culture, as well as a performance by visual artist Sikhumbuzo Makandula.
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  • Date Issued: 2016
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