Since the beginning of the 20th century in South Africa, posters have been used for commercial advertising and political propaganda. Posters and poster culture in South Africa As a whole, they paint a picture of the popular struggle which reached its peak with the Defiance Campaign of 1989, leading finally to the unbanning of the African National Congress and other organisations, and the release of Nelson Mandela and his fellow political prisoners. Each challenges the state's attempt to hammer people into ideological submission. The posters in this book demonstrate their determination to win that right. By producing their own media, however unsophisticated, organisations claimed their right to be heard. The emerging grassroots community structures of the 1980s used posters, banners, leaflets, T-shirts, lapel badges, flags, stickers and graffiti in their fight to loosen the grip of apartheid ideas. With few exceptions, formal arts training was restricted to a small, privileged, and overwhelmingly white, middle class.ĭeliberate state impoverishment and underdevelopment of townships and rural areas ensured that resources for media production -even such basic requirements as electricity -were out of reach for most communities. Bantu education left most people illiterate or semi-literate. Even institutions not controlled by the state bowed to the constraints of the apartheid system: newspapers which questioned apartheid were either censored or banned, private educational institutions were closed down or denied the funds to operate.Īt the same time, apartheid policies deprived communities of the opportunity to produce their own media. The education system, the church, the military, the electronic and print media, and various cultural organisations, together churned out a steady diet of racist and supremacist theories. The South African government force-fed the ideology of apartheid to all South Africans, black and white. They were produced in the face of enormous odds, ranging from a basic lack of skills and resources to outright bannings, detentions, and sometimes death. They reflect a grassroots vision of the struggles of the present and hopes for the future. The posters in this book were not produced by an artistic elite, but by the people of South Africa. The story of political posters in the 1980s is the story of the people and organisations that produced them. People's power had won, though not without cost. Finally, after years of struggle, the government conceded that Huhudi could remain where it was. The attack on the poster workshop was part of a general clamp-down on political activity in the township as the state tried to force the residents to move and the people resisted. The States of Emergency imposed after 1985 eventually forced Lesedi to close. The workshop was petrol-bombed, some activists were detained, others fled the country. The people of Huhudi started printing posters at the Lesedi workshop in 1985.
So we welcomed the request of the Huhudi community that we should help them set up their own workshop. We wanted people to produce, in their own areas, the posters and T-shirts that proclaimed their struggle for freedom. But one of STP's aims was to encourage communities to set up their own production units. Members of the township's youth organisation and civic association had come to the Screen Training Project in Johannesburg to make posters to take back to their community. The government wanted to move the people to one of apartheid's bantustans, a backwater that the people of Huhudi saw as a wasteland of starvation and death. This was the Lesedi Silkscreen Workshop (lesedi meaning light) in Huhudi, a black township in the Northern Cape that was fighting for its very existence. When we went out into the fading evening light to wash the screens off at the nearby communal tap, youngsters followed us, looking, touching, asking questions. While pulling the squeegies across the mesh, we noticed that local residents had crowded outside every window of the long, narrow room, trying to see what was happening. As the sun set and darkness crept into the dusty hall, people around us lit candles so that we could continue printing.
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