Images >> Good Hope

Carla Liesching is an interdisciplinary artist working across photography, writing, collage, sculpture, bookmaking, and design. Grounded in experiences growing up in apartheid South Africa, she considers the intersections of representation, knowledge, and power, with a focus on colonial histories and enduring constructions of race and geography. Carla's ongoing project, Good Hope, was published by MACK in 2021, and was shortlisted for the 2022 Aperture Paris Photo First Book Award, and the Arles 2022 Prix du Livre in the Photo-Text Category. An excerpt from Good Hope is also featured in On Whiteness, by SPBH Editions. Carla was a 2021 winner of the Open Walls Arles competition presented by The British Journal of Photography and exhibited work during Rencontres d'Arles Festival in 2021 and 2022. She is a 2021 Light Work Grant recipient and the 2022 recipient of the Silver Eye Fellowship, culminating in a photo-sculptural installation at Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh. Carla was recently named a Foam Talent, with exhibitions at Foam Museum in Amsterdam, the Deutsche Börse Foundation in Frankfurt, along with a solo exhibition of Good Hope through PhMuseum in Bologna. Carla lives between South Africa and Ithaca. In Ithaca, she works as Visiting Critic in Cornell University's Art Architecture and Planning Department; as Lecturer in the Art, Art History and Architecture Department at Ithaca College; as faculty at the International Center of Photography; and as coordinator of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell. As part of her socially engaged practice, Carla is also a youth educator focused on image-making, visual literacy, and self-publishing as vehicles for expression and empowerment.

'As soon as you are in a proper stage of defence you shall search for the best place for gardens, the best and fattest ground in which everything planted or sown will thrive.'

—Instructions from the Dutch East India Company inscribed on a yellowing sheet of parchment, 1651.¹

I

Yes, there are facts and figures to account for, timelines to trace, but have I told you of today's newspapers? Headlines like: 'Land Justice', 'Expropriation without Compensation', 'Revolution or Reform?' Have I told you of the monuments removed in the 'riots'? Or the groundsmen in green overalls scrubbing graffiti, repairing broken fountains, collecting debris? Black men White bosses still call 'boys'? Have I told you of the doves cooing gently, perched atop the sleeping bodies of migrant families on the lawns? Have I told you of the White children from the Cape of Good Hope Seminary dressed in their afternoon 'civilian clothes'? Or of the more racially integrated group from Mseki High in their grey-and-turquoise uniforms surrounding me on the main steps leading to the garden? The cacophony of lunch-time chatter, chip packets crinkling, the flap-flap of wings as seagulls scavenge for tasty morsels? Have I told you of the signs pointing to the Scientific Pleasure Garden? Or of the gift store filled with locally sourced flower oils, handmade candles, Delft-blue china tea-sets and postcards depicting the early colony? And what of Cecil John Rhodes cast in greening bronze, flanked by a Madagascar Cycad and a Queen Palm, announcing: Your Hinterland is There? Have I told you of the small rock in the corner of the vegetable garden with a label hidden beneath weeds? The arrival of the Dutch to establish a refreshment station, providing fresh produce for the ships plying the spice route, marked the end of a free and independent existence for the native Gorinhaiqua Khoikhoi. And what of the large label at the stone-walled entrance? A story of how a garden in 1654 brought together continents and affected the course of history. A story of how plants in the form of pepper, nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon changed the world economy. Have I told you the garden is the cause of it all?

Ii

No, the cause of it all, I read, is the ocean. Or more precisely, the ocean currents. The secret to power was the currents directed by the prevailing winds, which were in turn governed by the rotation of the earth. The cause of it all, therefore, is the rotation of the earth. A circular force along 'the world's highway', onwards towards vast fortunes.

These words, I encounter in a foldout map from a 1943 edition of Life magazine, and again on the wall of the oldest building in the Company's Gardens.

It became evident that the trade winds were effective in allowing mariners to cross the Indian Ocean and approach Asia from the south. It was this that gave Good Hope a pivotal role in world commerce.²

The prevailing winds and ocean currents around the Antarctic region move from west to east, clockwise on the map. Sailing around Good Hope, ships moved into the winds and currents, as onto a turntable.³

When the Portuguese first passed what they believed to be the southernmost peninsula of Africa in 1488, on their 'Voyages of Discovery', they named it Cabo das Tormentas, Cape of Storms. However, after recognising its potential as a half-way point opening up a viable sea route to the East, it was renamed Cabo da Boa Esperança, Cape of Good Hope. On the 6th of April 1652, three Dutch East India Company ships, Goede Hoop, Reiger and Dromedaris arrived to set up a refreshment station.

Iii

I come from the Cape, I say. I come from Cape Town, I come from a farm in the Eastern Cape, I come from South Africa, yes, a country. I come from New York, no, not American, I live in the United States. I come from Africa, no, not Black, White, yes, I am a White South African. I come from Europe, no, not European, I come from the 1652 Dutch settlers, not the 1820 English settlers, I'm English, no, not from England, South African but not Afrikaans, I speak English.

Though disorienting, these small misunderstandings are productive for my research. In the years of moving back and forth between countries, I have observed stories becoming unpredictable, changing with each telling. Movement brings confusion such that I notice acutely the meanings of words shifting from place to place. All certainty vanishes, naturally, and even the plainest of statements becomes unreliable.

Iv

Who comes from where? Who was here? Who settled here? Who settled when? What settled in? What words settled? Who passed through? Who passed on? Whose story passed? Whose story stayed? What walls were built? How did words wall? How did words kill?

Questions reverberate. They aren't new or mine alone, but they recur, over and over.

V

Now, perhaps you're already able to tell, there will be no events threaded along a straight line, there will be no forward march. Still, I'm grappling with chronologies and trajectories in a way that is maddening. It's a question of organising principles. It's the scope and breadth of it all. It's that I don't know how to tell only a part of the story or perhaps, given that time is never enough, that I'm stuck at every turn asking: which parts?

The act of traveling feels useful—a journey towards and away from the Cape of Good Hope in a repetitive motion. Not because the effects of it all are particular to the Cape, but because it strikes me as important to position myself in space and time, to find a temporal-spatial axis along which I'm able to proceed with an attentive eye, moving inward and outward, backwards and forwards.

The Cape's location at the mid-point along the spice route holds potential here, allowing for perverse extrasensory exercises, psychic historical reenactments. Not to cooperate with the triumphal procession nor empathise with 'the victor', carrying him forward, reifying the status quo, but rather—fraught or foolish as it may be—to see who travels through me, act as interlocutor, root him out, somehow put an end to it all.

Vi

And so it is that the trade winds carry me across my divide. At least this is what I imagine as I move in circles: in the ship, in the sky.

—there to here—here to there—there to here—here to there—

Unending ocean becomes a sea of Dutch-named streets (Van Wyck, Gansevoort, Nassau, Bleecker); becomes a sea of Wall Streets, border walls and canals; becomes a sea of African gold and fragile currency; becomes a sea of minerals, metal, mirrors and yellow cabs; becomes a sea of fruit, flowers, fynbos and shipping containers; becomes a sea of invasive alien Jacaranda trees; becomes a sea of protest signs, bricks, tents, tires and smoke.

Vii

At the University of Cape Town, I'm in the sun, soaking up the salty ocean breeze. I'm halfway up the stairs leading to a lecture hall when a young woman named Noma and I strike up a conversation. I tell her why I am here: to conduct interviews with students involved in the Rhodes Must Fall, Fees Must Fall and related Land Justice debates. She shakes her head, laughs, slumps her body in a theatrical gesture of exhaustion.

The Rhodes Must Fall (#rhodesmustfall, RMF or Fallist) movement made global headlines on 9 March 2015, when Political Science student, Chumani Maxwele, carried a bucket of human faeces from Khayelitsha—an impoverished 'township' or 'Black Area' designated as such under apartheid laws—and threw it on a central statue commemorating Cecil John Rhodes, a nineteenth-century British imperialist and politician who 'bequeathed' to UCT the land on which it is built. Maxwele's act signified mounting unrest on campus, resulting in occupations, walkouts, sit-ins, barricades and various symbolic happenings. Debate raged over what should be done with the statue as it grew into a potent, ready-made emblem—enveloped in excrement, garbage bags, paint, planks, tape and the bodies of protestors scaling its height. One month later on 9 April, the statue was removed and its granite pedestal was boarded up with grey plywood.

Reported to be the largest wave of protests in post-1994 democratic South Africa, RMF mobilised widespread direct action at universities across the country, opposing institutional racism and the continued colonial structuring of education and knowledge-production. Goals were to be realised not only in the removal of colonial symbols, but also in a counter-curriculum, and tangible solutions to the problem of socio-economic exclusion and unequal access to learning along racial lines. 'The fall of Rhodes is symbolic for the inevitable fall of White supremacy,' declared UCT RMF representatives.⁴

Noma tells me how she was in her final year at a nearby high school when the first wave of protests began.

I would come to the university campus after school every day to protest on the periphery. I was with them, you know? But I couldn't get too close. I had my future to worry about. Especially in the second wave with Fees Must Fall. The police were everywhere and protestors were being shot at with rubber bullets, there was teargas, some of the student leaders were academically expelled and even criminally charged. And the next year, my first year here, there was Shackville, there was the burning of artworks outside Jameson, then there were the total shutdowns, the classes were constantly cancelled for safety reasons, we couldn't write exams, it was mayhem. I actually ended up deregistering—a lot of us did—so a whole year was wasted. And we were being called 'undemocratic heathens and barbarians'. It took an emotional toll. I just kept asking myself: why am I even here?

Noma and I discuss democracy on campus. 'Why undemocratic? And who exactly was making these accusations?' I ask. 'Well, a lot of people …' she replies. 'The administration, a few professors and students, the press … it was just floating around. Mostly Whites. They were saying that the Fallists were actually not a majority of UCT students, so our complaints and rallies were undemocratic because we supposedly weren't respecting the majority consensus, you know?' I can't help but wonder aloud what seems like an obvious question. 'What value is there in a 'majority consensus' if the majority are unimpeded by the issues in question? Isn't unevenness of access and financial exclusion the very problem?' 'Ja,' replies Noma. 'Democracy's a charade here, no matter how you look at it.'

We fall silent on the stairs, looking down on the makeshift plywood structure covering up the statue's pedestal, then up at Jameson Memorial Hall standing tall on the emerald-green slope, its rooftop echoing the triangular shape of Devil's Peak in the background. 'It's all so beautiful … so beautiful … but … those white columns!' she laughs.

I am reminded of a book on my shelf at home, Whitewashing Race. It considers the effects of organised White privilege across North American institutions: 'White Americans can be sanguine about racial matters because their race has not been visible to the society in which they live. They cannot see how this society produces advantages for them because these benefits seem so natural that they are taken for granted … they literally do not see how race permeates the very rules of the game.'⁵ This feels accurate, except I pause when reading 'the society'. Who is being made invisible here?

'I mean he was right in the middle of campus!' Noma says. 'We had to walk around him every day. And the whole point was to say that he held in place a certain version of history that felt dehumanising for Black students and staff. It was alienating. But we're tired now. We're in self-protection mode … The anger though … the spirit of it all is still simmering underneath, you can feel it, it could surface at any moment.'

'Whiteness,' Sara Ahmed writes, 'is only invisible for those who inhabit it … Spaces are oriented "around" whiteness … [and] the effect of this "around whiteness" is the institutionalisation of a certain "likeness" which makes non-white bodies feel uncomfortable, exposed, visible, different, when they take up this space … To be comfortable is to be so at ease with one's environment that it is hard to distinguish where one's body ends and the world begins. One fits, and by fitting, surfaces of bodies disappear from view.' She adds that it is important to remember: 'When we talk about a "sea of whiteness" or "white space" we are talking about the repetition of the passing by of some bodies and not others, for sure. But non-white bodies do inhabit white spaces; we know this. Such bodies are made invisible when we see spaces as being white, at the same time as they become hyper-visible when they do not pass, which means they "stand out" and "stand apart"'⁶ from the so-called sea.

Table Mountain is known as Hoerikwaggo by the Khoesan or Khoena and /Xam or San, indigenous people of the Cape. Hoerikwaggo, meaning 'the mountain which arose from the sea', was named this way for the seashells found all the way up the summit.⁷ Sitting on the steps with Noma, squinting up at the mountain against the midday sun, I glimpse for a second the six Roman columns of Jameson Memorial Hall falling. The pale granite crumbles downwards. The garden at the foot burns and debris fills the air. The seashells pile up like funeral pyres. Hoerikwaggo. What hopes can grow here?

Sweat stings my eyes and my vision blurs, while Noma continues. 'There was an open letter published in the newspaper comparing RMF to the Taliban, ISIS and Boko Haram, calling the vandalising of the statue and colonial artwork terrorist attacks.⁸ But you know, let's not forget this nation was always built on obliteration.'

In a document that formed the basis for a public lecture addressing UCT students in 2015, Professor Achille Mbembe declared: 'Democracy will either be built on the ruins of the versions of whiteness that produced Rhodes or it will fail. Those versions of whiteness must be decommissioned if we are to free ourselves from our own entrapment in white mythologies and open a future for all here and now.'⁹

Noma suddenly realises the time—she has to go to class. But before she leaves, she smiles warmly. 'I feel optimistic these days. It's a new year, I'm looking up, I'm keeping my head high.' We embrace, then she turns, continues up the stairs.

The site of the removed statue is not empty. The plinth where it was cemented is still in place. The encasing of the foundation in plywood gives an impression that Rhodes has been unseated, yet more telling is the shadow of Rhodes spray-painted anonymously on the ground immediately after the removal. The painted shadow spreads 'from the base of the empty plinth, descending the full flight of stairs, ending in a stooped shoulder, a curved head resting in the crook of a fist.'¹⁰ This tracing hints at the remaining issues of institutional racism and financial exclusion—as a poster read the day the Rhodes statue was removed: 'Next, the invisible statues.'¹¹

Rhodes Must Fall defines itself as a student, staff and worker movement mobilising against institutional White supremacist capitalist patriarchy, for complete decolonisation of the university.

Cecil John Rhodes's professed primary motivation as Prime Minister of the Cape was his belief that the White race was the most superior in the world and therefore 'the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.'¹² Rhodes is considered an early architect of the Natives Land Act of 1913, the first major piece of segregation legislation passed by the Union Parliament, arguing that 'the native is to be treated as a child.'

Viii

In the shadow of the statue, I sit silent and sunburned. For eighty-one years he, Rhodes, rested on his regal pedestal. Lord of learning. Champion of exploration. Facing north-east toward his envisioned Cape to Cairo road. Though he is no longer here, a silhouette is traced onto the concrete, charred and scorched in the shape of a man. I take note of the city below: rich suburbs partitioned off and separate from poor townships, rubbish dumps smouldering, clouds of smoke obscuring the horizon.

The Land Act of 1913 set aside 92.5% of total land for the exclusive use of White settlers. This and various other segregationist laws were consolidated into the Group Areas Act of 1950, which declared certain geographical areas to be for the exclusive occupation of one of three distinct racial classifications: 'White,' 'Coloured' and 'Black/Native.' These laws were abolished after the fall of the apartheid regime in 1994, however the legacy and patterns of apartheid geography remain largely unchanged decades into democracy.

Ix

Another statue sits higher up the slope behind the university. This one is mausoleum-like, encased in granite pillars quarried from igneous intrusions in the continental crust below. It is guarded by eight lions and a rider astride a rearing horse at the foot of forty-nine stairs—one for each year of Rhodes's life. The bust was covered in red paint in 2001, nose cut off in 2015, and head decapitated in 2020 in what the volunteer restoration group Friends of Rhodes Memorial called 'an act of war against history'.¹³ After recovering the colossal eighty-kilogram head from the brush about fifty metres away, the volunteers welded it back onto its bronze shoulders, also installing a GPS tracker along with 'other electronic alarm gizmos' for extra protection.¹⁴

Photographs of the restoration day show a young blonde girl of about twelve carefully repainting the memorial's inscription—words penned by Rudyard Kipling on the occasion of his friend Cecil's death:

The immense and brooding spirit still shall quicken and control. Living he was the land and dead his soul shall be her soul.

X

'Her soul.'

I think of Noma. Fatigued, optimistic, walking up the slope. I think of the obscured horizon, the ludicrous language, spirits still simmering and quickening, his dead soul still so stomach-turning, but

— — — — — — — — — — Living — — the land — — — — shall be — —

Someone has scrawled a redacted version of the script onto a pillar.