Tracing the passion of a black Christ: critical reflections on the iconographic revision and symbolic redeployment of the Stations of the Cross and Passion cycle by South African artists Sydney Kumalo, Sokhaya Charles Nkosi and Azaria Mbatha
In this research I consider ways in which black South African artists working during and after apartheid have both revised and symbolically redeployed the Stations of the Cross - and more broadly, the iconographic tradition of the Passion cycle. In so doing, I demonstrate the strategic application of Christ's episodic sufferings as a means of both analogously chronicling situations of historical trauma, as well as articulating more aspirant narratives of political resistance, selfliberation and reconciliation. Concentrating initially on church-commissioned projects realised in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I trace the reinterpretation (or 'Africanisation') of the Stations of the Cross by artists such as Bernard Gcwensa, Ruben Xulu and Sydney Kumalo. Noting the emergence of a black Christ and a localised Passion, I emphasise the complex cultural and political implications of this iconographic transformation - arguing that its hybrid realisation undermined the cultural bias of a European-styled Christianity, and the racial hierarchies of colonialism and apartheid. Following this, considered in more detail are the secular reimaginings of Sokhaya Charles Nkosi's Crucifixion (1976) and Azaria Mbatha's Stations of the Cross for Africa (1995) - as series wherein the episodes of Christ's Passion are consciously and symbolically redeployed. In the case of Nkosi's Crucifixion, I show as covertly documented in a black Christ's sufferings the incarceration and torture of political activists in apartheid South Africa. On a more ideological level, I demonstrate also, as embodied in the series, the aspirant directives of Black Consciousness and Black Theology. Turning to Mbatha's Stations of the Cross for Africa, I present its visual narrative as analogously envisioning, as well as critically rethinking, the mutually embedded traumas of slavery, colonialism and apartheid. Significant to my analysis is the future vision of reconciliation posited by Mbatha, and the extent to which it both reflects and challenges that maintained within the 'transformative' programme of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Demonstrated in my evaluation of these appropriative projects is the way in which a traditionally European iconographic tradition is critically redeployed - in chronicling situations of historical trauma, as well as in the envisioning of alternative futures. As such, I hope to afford a more nuanced and challenging appreciation of these reimagined Passion narratives, as significant projects of cultural and postcolonial memory. In keeping with this, I advance in conclusion a 'rethinking of pilgrimage'. Recalling the culture of participative witness associated with devotional programmes like the Stations of the Cross, I propose that in the case of both Nkosi's Crucifixion and Mbatha's Stations of the Cross for Africa, extended to viewers is a certain imperative: to imaginatively revisit, and rethink within the present, traumatic histories of black suffering and resistance.
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