The Head and the Load (review)

Ever since Hegel (1956) speciously framed Africa as “the land of childhood, which lying beyond the day of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of Night,” Africans have been written out of history. William Kentridge’s The Head and the Load brings African agency back into focus and onto the stage. When in his Ted Talk “Can Art Amend History?” Titus Kaphar whitewashed the faces of the Europeans in Franz Hals’s Family Group in a Landscape (1645–48) to reveal the anonymous black boy standing amid them, he made that child visible to history. A boy, otherwise unknown and unmarked by the European sensibility that wrote people of color out of their historical narratives, took center stage. Part of the postcolonial imperative is to reassess the historiography of World War I that egregiously omitted the contributions of Africans to the war effort, following the colonial logic, South African artist and theatre-maker Kentridge explains in his director’s note, “Lest their actions merit recognition, their deeds must not be recorded.”

The Head and the Load, which draws its title from the Ghanaian proverb “the head and the load are the troubles of the neck,” attempts to correct that omission. The piece was structured in three acts— Manifestos, Paradox, and War—and premiered in December 2018 in the cavernous space of the Park Avenue Armory on New York City’s Upper East Side. This audacious multimedia performance installation addresses the historic erasure of the hundreds of thousands of Africans who served as porters in World War I, literally carrying Europe on their backs. The piece does important labor of remembering absent African subjects, of reframing the war as global and not solely European, and of telling African stories from a postcolonial point of view.

Joanna Dudley (left), Xolani Dlamini (right), and Mario Gotoh (with viola) in William Kentridge’s The Head and the Load. (Photo: Stephanie Berger.)

During The Head and the Load, multimedia projections, live actors, opera singers, moving dancers, and stage props filled the fifty-five-meter stage. African performers in the present populated the empty spaces of history out of which Africans have been written. Kentridge claims that the piece acknowledges and documents absent Africans and marks the “historical incomprehension (and inaudibility and invisibility)” that has erased them from history. A central question he explores in the work is how to think about history as collage, not just narrative.

Playing on the notion of history as collage, and inspired by the Dada movement of the postwar moment, the text of the work is an amalgam of sources juxtaposed and sutured together: Fanon translated into siSwati; Tristan Tzara in isiZulu; Wilfred Owen in French and dog-barking; phrases from a handbook of military drills; Aimé Césaire. Rendering some of Europe’s great thinkers and innovators in Bantu languages is itself an act of reclamation and dissent; it ruptures the tyranny of global English and articulates philosophical complexities in idioms often deemed less sophisticated. Africans speak back to empire. And Kentridge’s Dada framing of the piece marks the futility and nonsensical nature of the language of colonialism.

The musical score by Philip Miller and Thuthuka Sibisi is equally complex in its sampling: a cabaret song by Austrian American composer Arnold Schoenberg, percussive slaps on hymn books, a Viennese waltz by violinist Fritz Kreisler. Amid this cacophonous Eurocentric soundscape, Kentridge has Africa talk back to Europe through rhythmic chanting and war songs.

Mncedisi Shabangu (center) in William Kentridge’s The Head and the Load. (Photo: Stephanie Berger.)

The dynamic projections designed by Catherine Meyburgh cover the expanse of the stage on three immense screens. They include colonial maps; Kentridge’s signature animated charcoal drawings; data about the numbers of porters recruited, black lives lost, and causes of death; typewritten phrases such as “this is a fair idea of progress” and “darkness has eaten her own child.” Taken together, the live...