Two years after the 1982 Culture and Resistance Conference of Gaborone, Botswana , a group of around 20 “cultural workers,” carrying the emancipatory seeds that germinated during the landmark conference, took to producing posters on their own turf and on their own terms. Not only did they carry the iconic Medu torch handed to them by two of the event’s key-note speakers, Thami Mnyele and Dikobe wa Mogale Martins, but they also took to making art as a social activity, producing and smuggling subversive calendars—despite the banning orders on these materials. The collective, known as the Vakalisa Art Associates, used their calendars to turn what is otherwise a violent European unit of measure, used to compute industrial time vis-à-vis the indigenous lunar month, to serve in the struggle against racist domination, calling for daily and monthly defiance in the oppressive face of apartheid… read more
An annual awakening