It’s a Thursday afternoon in November, with the summer sun baking the pavements, and everything in sight. Being a weekday, South Africa’s famous Vilakazi Street, home to two Nobel Peace Prize laureates, in Orlando West, in the historic township of Soweto, is not too busy – there are fewer tourists compared to the usual.
I am looking down the linear street, no more than a kilometer, filled with history, craft and commerce, not to mention an assortment of tourists.
It’s a far cry from the street it was in the apartheid days, days before its most-famous resident, Nelson Mandela, was whisked off to prison for 27 years. His home here, number 8115 or Mandela House, which he said is marked with an ‘X’ in his mental geography, is a museum now, the street’s biggest draw. Mandela had returned to this house when he was released from prison in 1990.
Vilakazi’s other famous resident was Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel prize-winning social rights activist who also opposed apartheid.
I strap the camera around my neck, put on my sunglasses and become a tourist, walking from one end to the other exploring the street; it almost feels like I am not in Soweto, this is one of Africa’s world-renowned pieces of real estate.
It takes me less than a minute before I see an urban building to my left, The Box Shop, a shop created primarily for locals but with international tourists streaming in and out.
Launched as a fashion store in 2015 employing about 11 staff, it has extended its retail offerings to furniture and food – mouth-watering delicacies such as mogodu (lamb or beef tripe).
Sifiso Moyo, marketing director of The Box Shop, is one of the store’s four founders who decided to open the store on Vilakazi Street.
“It was a combination of things that made us pursue Vilakazi, we looked at the Gauteng government mandate in terms of revitalizing townships, so we looked at how we are going to align ourselves with that strategy and contribute positively to the dream of township revitalization,” says Moyo.
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I walk again for three minutes, and stop, as I see a gentleman with a snake around his neck. I step closer to make sure I am not imagining things.
It is a snake, a real one, a Red Tail Boa. After introducing myself to the gentleman, he directs me to the house to meet his mother, Lindiwe Mngomezulu.
Her business is offering tourists the Soweto Live Snakes Show. The inspiration for it came when she joined a snake club in Edenvale, east of Johannesburg, South Africa.
Her daughter, Lwandle, had forced her mother to part with R5 to see snakes at the Soweto Arts Festival. Curious, Mngomezulu asked how they could join the club. They were told to visit on Saturdays.
“Love. I wouldn’t have them [the snakes] without love. But the business started when my daughter was seven years old, when she first held a snake. As a mother, I gave her support; wherever she wanted to go where there was snakes, I took her, only to find that I have an interest too,” says Mngomezulu.
I am speaking to Mngomezulu in her living room, which is almost like a mini-zoo – to my right is a monkey, behind me, a parrot, and next to her, a hedgehog. I am a little uneasy knowing there are pythons in the next room, which was once one of the bedrooms in the small home.
The mother and daughter started volunteering at the snake club cleaning the enclosures of 300 reptiles including crocodiles; shortly after, by 2009, they were bringing snakes to the township for snake shows, so it could generate revenue for them. At first, business wasn’t good because they didn’t know how to charge, but worst of all, the community was not in agreement with the idea of snakes in their township as they thought the mother-daughter duo were practicing witchcraft.
“The entrance fee was R5, we didn’t know what we were doing, and people were scared,” says Mngomezulu.
Not long after, Mngomezulu bought her daughter her first pet, a Corn snake, and called it Pikinini because it was small. But the fact remained; they were not making money and had to return the borrowed snakes to the club.
That was when Mngomezulu decided to buy her own snakes to start her own mini snake park. After the Corn snake, it was twin pythons and a boa.
During the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, Mngomezulu went back to the club and borrowed snakes for a show in Soweto, the day of the final game, which drew visitors from all over the world. This time, she made wads of cash, enough to share with the club.
Sadly, in 2013, three of Mngomezulu’s snakes died because of pneumonia. Her four-roomed house in Vilakazi Street wasn’t warm enough for the snakes.
Today, thankfully, business is okay, and Mngomezulu can more than afford a loaf of bread. She is now extending her house to accommodate more snakes and tourists. The entrance fee is worth it. People come in to touch the snakes and pose with them for photos.
“Our show is not just a show, it’s an educational show, we educate you about the snakes we have, because I take care of them, we grow them, train them. They are used to cameras, noise and people,” says Mngomezulu.
Not only does she make money on Vilakazi Street, she also has her snakes starring in films and the small screen, namely a South African TV show shot in 2015 titled Ngempela.
Although her show also includes her other pets: a monkey, parrot, bearded dragon lizard, hedgehog and a yellow anaconda, Mngomezulu says the fear of snakes can drive people away.
“When one stands at the gate and fears going in, others get scared too,” she says. The tour guides are also an issue; they don’t spend time at the Soweto Live Snakes Show which affects her business.
I don’t get to watch the show, so I move on to the house next door, a space selling art.
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Thamaga Montjane is CEO of JHTCE (Joining Hands To Create Employment). He says the challenges he faces are people going only to one end of Vilakazi Street and not going further up – to this spot where his shop is.
I can relate to it. As I was walking towards Mandela House, I could see more action – more cars, more color, more tourists thronging the stalls there – than here, by Montjane’s shop.
I speak to one of the vendors a few feet from Mandela House. Bongane Ngcobo sells t-shirts, caps and African art. An entrepreneur in his own right, he says he makes about R4,000 ($282) on a good day and about R200 ($14) when it’s not so good.
As I stroll further down, the street is getting busier. I am drawn to a group of idling youngsters outside an art gallery named Shova Lifestyle Origin.
Thabo Modise, the owner here, started off selling t-shirts in the streets of Soweto; now he owns the gallery and the boutique next to it.
“It is a lifestyle boutique, where we have local fashion designers showing their work and we have a gallery for locals to do the same,” says Modise. He is an entrepreneurial success on Vilakazi Street.
The ambience of the street gets more vibrant as the afternoon progresses. I go across the road from the gallery, to Sakhumzi; a popular restaurant in Soweto, right next door to Tutu’s house. I step in to speak to a few tourists gulping down drinks and South African food.
“It feels awesome being here, we went to the Mandela museum and it was great, proper energy, real place,” says Tavis Wright, a tourist from England.
Lorenzo Grifantini, a tourist from Italy, says there is life and movement in the street and the people look happy.
Not too far from where I am seated at the restaurant, I spot more tourists savoring the local food.
“I didn’t expect a vibrant and classy restaurant like this here, I’m really surprised and I’m loving the food. I had tripe, it was very delicious,” says Adrian Seigs, also a tourist from Europe.
At the end of Vilakazi Street is Kwa Lichaba, a busy car wash corner on the opposite side.
Eventually, what was meant to be a 10-minute walk for me with my camera, turned out to be an hour-long expedition.
On the journey, I learned that the street boasts more South African tourists than foreigners and that hawkers could possibly make more money on a daily basis than a business with a counter, cash register, tables and a door.
As I look at the street again, I think of Benedict Wallet Vilakazi, the South African Zulu poet, author and linguist who died in 1947, and after who the street is named.
Little did he know that school children would be fighting for education on that street, that Winnie, the former ANC Women’s League president and ex-wife of Mandela, would be arrested on that very street, that Nobel accolades would arrive all the way from Sweden to this street in Soweto, or that today Vilakazi Street is more about preserving history – and making money off it.

Vilakazi-Str-043

Pythons And  Peacemakers Down Vilakazi Street

During my first weeks in the United States (US), far from Africa; tension gripped a dimmed hall, as did a compelling voice narrating the chilling events of World War 1 more than a century ago. The war raged for more than four years, killing 17 million people and leaving millions more injured and bereaved.
Today, young and old, can sit on a bench and look down at a trench which has a group of soldiers walking in a line through the mud. A warplane soars over the exhausted soldiers. This is an astonishing reenactment of the Great War. It is one of the breathtaking sections of the 48-acre National World War 1 Museum and Memorial in Kansas City in Missouri State.
Since 1920, the National World War 1 Museum and Memorial, previously called the Liberty Memorial Museum, collected artefacts and documents from around the world. With about 75,000 items – ranging from a British soldier’s belt to a huge aircraft – the museum, in partnership with the Edward Jones Research Center, is home to one of the world’s largest Great War collection. This is how obsessed the Americans are about the war; despite the fact the country sent troops to the bloody trenches only in June 1917, nearly three years after the first shot was fired.
One would think the US alone won the war against Germany. They didn&#8217;t, the allies did – including hundreds of thousands of troops from a score of African nations.
Regardless, the grandstanding illusion stands. At the very least, the experience made some sense to the convoluted verses of outstanding poets, TS Eliot and Seamus Heaney, that I struggled to decipher two decades ago.
A short drive away there is life and style in the shape of the American Jazz Museum, that also houses the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. This is a world away from the gore of war.
Jazz legend Charlie Parker, known as ‘Bird’, grew up in this neighborhood. His huge portrait hangs over the entrance and his Grafton saxophone is here. There are many relics to rave about here, but we shall keep it tight: Ella Fitzgerald’s passé sequined gown and matching glasses; Louis Armstrong’s booth with the cover of TIME magazine, priced 20c, dated February 21, 1949. It is a cool portrait of the young Armstrong with eyes cast skywards; a golden crown made of six trumpets rests on his head. Armstrong was the first jazz musician to make the cover of TIME; quite right too.
Then there’s Arthur Bryant’s Barbecue around the corner on Brooklyn Avenue. They say it’s the first grilled meat shop in the US. It dates back to 1908 and its first owner was Henry Perry. The Bryant brothers, Charlie and Arthur, worked for Perry. When the founder died, in 1940, it was up to the brothers to run it and they named it after Arthur. The name stuck, despite ownership changes.
I couldn’t fathom why Arthur Bryant’s is still in business. For over five minutes, tables were heaped with fries, left-overs and leaked barbecue sauces that could drive your appetite out of the window. So, I cast my eye to the wall-of-fame.
Years before Barack Obama, the one who thinks Africans should be grateful for US toxic chicken, was elected as president of the United States, he dined here and took photographs with the staff. So did director Steven Spielberg, actors Danny Glover and Harrison Ford, and Republicans Sarah Palin and John McCain. Anyway, I still prefer my Stellenbosch braai back home to the dry ribs I had. Their famous sauces saved the day.
Phew! A day’s excursion to Kansas was a welcome break from a year’s study, squeezed into two weeks, for this journalist. Back in Columbia, my host city, after a two-hour drive, a New York band called The Wood Brothers was playing at the Blue Note bar. Forty dollars got my Turkish fellow, Gokce Aytulu, and I in and the drinks weren’t too bad for $6 a jug. For the first time in my life, I stuck out like a sore thumb in the crowd of 100 or so whites who found my accent akin to gibberish.
As they say, music is a universal language – who cared about being understood when The Wood Brothers were slaying it?

The American Shock

In his lifetime, Vincent van Gogh created 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches, but only ever sold one painting, a few months before his death. A century later, a song has been written about him; a museum dedicated to his work; and cafes are covered with his signature blue and yellow pieces. Van Gogh would have probably enjoyed a few stories over beers with Louis Chamane. In 20 years of sculpting, after 11 years of sweating and working his fingers to the bone in the mines, living hand to mouth and relying on his wife as the bread winner – Chamane has just made his first sale late in life.
His face is hardened by the years of toil but he has a cheeky grin as he tells his story. Chamane traveled to ‘Egoli’– the city of gold as Johannesburg is known – in the 1980s. He worked as a lasher and later as an electrician; it’s grueling work underground. Egoli’s fortune wasn’t his by 1995, he was one of hundreds of miners from rural KwaZulu-Natal who were retrenched.
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“I enjoyed mining. When they retrenched me I was so cross. I thought they would call me again, but nothing. All the people from KwaZulu-Natal, they didn’t want them here in Transvaal (the old name for Gauteng) anymore,” he says.
He poured his anger and frustration into sculpting a series that tells a story of the goldmines – tracing every aspect meticulously. The Mineworkers Investment Company (MIC) celebrated 20 years by paying tribute to South Africa’s fallen mineworkers with his collection, which will be permanently displayed at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg. It hasn’t been easy.
A solid block of wood carved into figures of miners is given life with clay, rock, chains, wire and tubing. Chamane is a man of few words but his sculptures speak volumes.
“The story of the sculptures is the underground. The theme of these works is ‘abasebenzi’ (workers). The helmets are different colors. It’s not decorative, I’m showing the different work. The yellow is the shaft department, the red is the electrician, fitting, rigor, blue is lashing, white is team leader,” he says.
“I’ve decided to stick with the mine. Because I know exactly what happens underground, if I stick with the underground, I tell people something that I know. It’s not imagination, it’s based on my life.”
On a hill, overlooking the whole of Johannesburg, in the heart of the city – Constitution Hill Precinct is one of the city’s heritage sites. As the country transformed post-apartheid, the precinct signified the change. An old prison, where Mandela and Gandhi were jailed, became the site for the Constitutional Court and three museums. While the court boasts an art collection, that could rival the Tate Modern, Chamane’s sculptures are just the start of a large permanent collection.
“I’ve never been to Constitution Hill before. I don’t know this place. You can see the whole city from here,” he says timidly.
He taught himself how to sculpt by watching his father and learning from other artists. In spite of his hardship, Chamane is finally living out his dreams.
“I was an artist before I was a miner. Not professionally, naturally,” he says proudly.
“What I like so much in art is that you do what you feel. If I’m asked to do something and if I do something that I feel – it can never be the same,” he says.
He’s one up on Van Gogh with an exhibition, but it’s just the start of a legacy that the Dutch painter probably would have taken an afternoon to view.

Van Gogh With A Pickaxe

Forty-six-year-old Dean Simon is a simple man. Wearing a printed t-shirt, jeans and black shoes, his house appears as normal as any family home. Well, at least until you turn into the dining area and see three giant Wurlitzer jukeboxes shining brightly at you in their green, red and yellow colours. If you take a closer look inside, you’ll see stacks of vinyl loaded with songs dating back to the blues of the 1950s. You can pick a track, push a button and watch as the selected record slides out and the needle glides on top, playing the tune, indeed a rare sight these days.
<div id="attachment_478" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-478" class="wp-image-478 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/317-6_1-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />Artist Dean Simon at his home in Johannesburg; 19 January 2012 &#8211; Photo by Brett Eloff</div>
For an artist who has sold out his work before the opening of an exhibition and has clients in Africa, the Middle East and the United States, Simon shies away from the limelight. He has no website, no Twitter account or Facebook page. He says he tries his best not to associate himself with projects that require hype or media attention.
“Stay under the radar and let your work speak for itself,” he says.
Simon has done this so well that even those in the Johannesburg art world claim not to know him.
His work is confusing; one of his works on Mandela has hung for years, without drawing much comment, on the walls of the plush Saxon Boutique Hotel in Johannesburg.
By contrast, another of his works on Mandela drew fire from the media and art world. The work for a private client, called The Last Supper, depicts Mandela in the place of Jesus, with Ghandi to his right and Martin Luther King Junior to his left.
“It’s always been word of mouth and low key. I find that it is more peaceful not to stick your head out,” he says.
“The gallery scene is based on hype and ego and I’m not interested. By the time you are done with a gallery, they have taken a chunk of your salary. People come to me to buy my work.”
This explains why most of Simon’s clients are private collectors, so most of his best work is kept away from public eyes.
“It’s a double-edged sword, though, because collectors keep their stuff private, but for me it is about building a reputation with the people who are going to buy my stuff.”
Would that explain, to an extent, why he may not be a household name in his own country? Whether it does or not, Simon’s work has managed to land him an exhibition in a museum in Los Angeles in April. It is called From Hurt to Hope, a series of works he had initially compiled into a calendar. It is now to be exhibited at the Museum of Tolerance, a museum aimed at educating people about inequality and injustice.
“My theme is people who had a bad upbringing or hard backgrounds but despite that, not getting bitter, but becoming icons. It’s also based on racism; if these people had been murdered or assassinated, the world wouldn’t be the same,” says Simon.
The aim is to educate the world about people who are not necessarily famous, but who have had an impact on the way the world is today—people such as holocaust survivor Felix Zandman.
“He survived the war; he lived underground for 17 months with his uncle, who taught him maths to keep him from going mad. It’s not stuff people know about.”
Two of his subjects are genocide survivors.
The first is Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who survived the holocaust. He coined the term genocide (derived from the Greek word genos; meaning tribe or race, and the Latin word cide; meaning killing) in order to make such mass killings a crime against humanity. Lemkin died in 1959, aged 59.
Another of Simon’s subjects is Rwandan genocide survivor, Imaculee IIibagiza. Her entire family was wiped out during the war by the time she was 23, while she hid crammed in a church bathroom for 91 days. Since then, she has spread the message of reconciliation and forgiveness among victims and perpetrators, working for the United Nations, writing books and speaking on public platforms.
<div id="attachment_480" style="width: 221px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-480" class="wp-image-480 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Army-camo-Dean-Simon-211x300.jpg" alt="" width="211" height="300" />Camouflage</div>
“Had they been terminated, the world wouldn’t be the same. The exhibition says these people came from nothing and did something selfless that changed the world,” says Simon.
The amount of research and preparation for each work is crucial; the small details can make or break an image.
Talent without preparation is wasted, according to Simon; just doing research on a piece can take him anything from three to four months, excluding the actual time spent drawing. That, on its own, can take a month or more, with 13- to 16-hour days spent working on completing the image.
“You have to make sure the detail is really accurate; it’s like starting a jigsaw puzzle [in your head]. The work is very tiring, though.”
His arched back tells the tale of his labors on the floor of his office.
“I wish I had a more conventional mind, it would make life easier.”
Simon realised during his years at the School of Art and Design in Johannesburg that he could visualise three-dimensionality. Soon after graduating from school, he was conscripted into the army, as were most young white males in pre-democratic South Africa. This is where he realised he could make a comfortable living off his talent.
While being your own boss is something most people aspire to, he admits that it does not come easily.
“Working for yourself involves long hours because if you’re disciplined, it means you never take time off. You work seven days a week. My work starts at three in the morning and never ends before eight or eight thirty in the evening.”
The private client who commissioned him to do The Last Supper (and requested to remain anonymous) says he chose Simon after seeing his work in the Saxon. The original copy received a $2 million offer from a banker.
“Dean is very passionate. It’s what makes him different; he changes his topics. He always does all his work on topics he believes in. He’s a good man, but people were like, ‘How could he have done that?’ [But] when Madiba saw it for the first time, he said, ‘What a brilliant idea’, that it was important for people to learn about these people [in the picture].”
The message behind Simon’s most controversial piece to date was to highlight the good that has come out of Africa, and not to dwell on the ‘dark continent’ stereotype.
“The Last Supper was solely for the client, no one was meant to see it except [them]. We wanted to make a statement about Africa; the people [in it] represent tolerance and principles of peace. There are people in that drawing whom I don’t like. It is not about my own personal feelings, it’s about ideals, it was not meant to be blasphemous. I’m not making any apologies for it.”
<div id="attachment_481" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-481" class="size-large wp-image-481" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Final-RW-1024x696.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="322" />Imaculee Rwanda Lady</div>
His latest project, he says, is set to cause even more controversy than The Last Supper.
“I’m not looking forward to it. Next lifetime I’m coming back as an accountant.”
Surely, most people will look forward to it.

Tag: Museum

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Pythons And Peacemakers Down Vilakazi Street

The American Shock

Van Gogh With A Pickaxe

The Secret Artist