Political Illustrations

Resister was written and produced by the Committee on South African War Resistance (COSAWR) in Britain. The first issue of Resister was published in 1979.

COSAWR was an organisation of South African war resisters and supporters who went into exile as a result of their refusal to fight for apartheid. COSAWR supported international measures to isolate the apartheid regime, campaigned in support of South African war resistance, researched into the militarization of South Africa, helped to expose the threat to peace posed by the Botha regime.

All issues of Resister were banned both for distribution and import in South Africa. It was also very difficult to obtain photographs of sensitive military content. The illustrations that COSAWR artists contributed therefore made a great difference to the impact of the text. The illustrations and texts were mostly anonymous in order to protect supporters from various forms of reprisal such as letter bombs.

My first illustrations for COSAWR were made in 1986, the year that I left South Africa for Britain. I had no previous experience in illustration, having trained in fine arts, but the opportunity to work with a voluntary grass roots liberation movement in the arts was an interesting challenge. At that time, most of us were not fully aware of the extent of the people’s action in enlisting the arts to fight apartheid. But by the nineties it was clear that values had changed and the old dispensation (formalism) had been abandoned. The new approach was more confrontational and immediate.

Artists, writers and musicians from many walks of life intentionally used their skills to fight apartheid. This was the core of the grass roots attitude. However, in South Africa there were limited opportunities in the fine arts to reach a wider audience. Exhibitions were in venues cut off from the people. It now seems unbelievable that the first exhibition of art by Black artists in Umlazi township was one I was invited to curate as recently as 1983!

For decades freedom of speech was severely restricted. In Britain opportunities for expression as part of the war effort were offered by COSAWR and the ANC. Budgets were non existent but it was possible to read banned texts and to exchange ideas. Some of the cartoons in Resister were brilliantly executed by talented volunteers. The magazine was not a quality visual object, but the research and reporting hit home. It was possible not only to read the material but to write about it and to illustrate the findings. Thus my first extended exercise with COSAWR and Resister centred on the SADF as it was portrayed by bold young playwrights like Anthony Akerman of ‘Somewhere on the Border’. Other subjects were varied, ranging from mental illness in the SADF to operations in Angola, brutality in the Townships etc.

The atrocities were appalling and not at all easy to illustrate. Meanwhile tensions were escalating and by 1990 the apartheid machine indicated that it was no longer able to contain the revolt. Amazingly, Nelson Mandela walked to freedom and not long after, the London scene evaporated, the resisters went home and we queued to vote at the South African Embassy.

Altogether I did about 30 illustrations for Resister magazine. Military equipment was new subject matter. There was often little or no material to aid the visualisation process. I had to stretch my imagination on the few scraps of imagery that COSAWR could provide. I made mistakes as in the case of the tank detonating a land mine. The angle of impact is incorrect, but that did not deter COSAWR from using the image several times here and in Europe. I drew on memories of the stoned Casspirs I had seen during my travels through the Eastern Cape shortly before leaving South Africa.

For the cover portrait of Ivan Toms (conscientious objector) the only data that I received in time was an unbelievably short section of an ECC (End Conscription Campaign) video. I played this over and over, freezing the image with its multifarious dots on the screen in order to make out his features. It took hours but it was worth the effort to watch him come to life on the page.

Working to short deadlines was another challenge. There was not much time for critical reassessment. One had to make quick decisions and accept imperfection. The drawings were mostly done by hand, with a mapping pen, quite archaic compared with the computer programmes of today.

The Resister magazine was printed on cheap paper in A5 format, which meant small illustrations. Because it was banned for importation into South Africa, ingenious ways of distribution were negotiated. Helicopters dumped parcels of the magazine in remote places where the army was camping out. There was often a centre page pull-out designed to be passed from hand to hand to avoid confiscation. I did the illustrations for a number of these central pamphlets.

In November 1990, the exiled war resisters of Britain staged a mass return to South Africa in order to increase the pressure on the De Klerk regime. Negotiations with the ANC had begun. This event coincided with my solo exhibition at Midlands Contemporary Art in Birmingham and nine Resister illustrations were hung in support of the SAFE RETURN CAMPAIGN. Before the resisters boarded their flight a full page feature appeared in the Birmingham Post illustrated with the suicide paintings. That was fourteen years ago. It is no exaggeration to say that there has been a major transformation in South Africa during this period.

Mandela’s release in 1990 heralded great changes for the resisters. The design for a post card portraying the new expectations for conscripts was the last piece of work that I did for COSAWR. The image is of a soldier back home sitting in a chair with a gun and a flower in his lap. The style is deliberately reminiscent of Picasso – a time to think about art instead of war. But the soldier’s face is bleak. It is a caricature of Picasso’s style in an attempt to acknowledge the untold aftermath of post traumatic stress disorder experienced or witnessed by so many conscripts. The most problematic legacy in South Africa today remains the psychological aftermath of violence in all sectors of society.

Absent from South Africa during the period when these illustrations were made for the RESISTER publication, they come to me as starkly grim and graphic reminders of a violent society during a violent time. These were the final years of the South African apartheid regime, desperate to hang on to power and a despised creed during its dying throes.

Diana Hulton's drawings hit an extremely hard punch in her disturbing and evocative images of brutality, cruelty and suffering – Troops Assault Township Residents (No 17) – quite literally an in–your–face graphic depiction. Close-ups of inhumanity and savagery are epitomised in the snarling faces of police dogs – SADF Alsatian Dogs on Campus 1988 (No25). If this is the face of animal aggression, they are but pale reflections of the human kind – chilling in their conscious dedication and execution. Witness the torture scenes from the Military Psychiatric Wards (Nos. 3–6), Intimidation by SADF (No 12a) and Torture by SADF (No 12b) – visceral and gut-wrenching in their crude yet effective purposes. The horror of torture is depicted in its many repulsively inventive guises – Intimidation with Buffel Wheel (No 14), Soldiers Roasted My Body over a Fire (No 16) and chillingly in Soldier Sets Petrol Flames on Children in Zambesi River (No 18).

The artist does not shy away with depictions set at a safe distance within the frame – the images are mostly thrust up in the forefront, even squashed on to the picture plane, emphasising an almost visceral reality of intimidation and torture. Man with Cut Wrists (No 22) and death, Hanged Man (No 23) bring the viewer in intimate proximity with the victims' suffering. 

Hulton has used different graphic styles with powerful effect to express the often inexpressible. At times her graphic style is reminiscent of the German Expressionists' use of harsh angles and jagged edges to emphasise the subject matter, as in the drawings of Military Psychiatric Wards (Nos. 3–6). In other drawings the brashness of the comic-strip cartoon underlines the crude brutality of the Military Psychiatric Wards (Nos. 3–6), Intimidation by SADF (No 12a), the Torture by SADF (No 12b) and Suffocation of Mr Gxaleka, Goldfields Mine Worker, By Mine Security Reserve (MSR) (No 13). Then again the artist employs graphic–style photorealism in such scenes as Turfloop Campus Occupied by SADF (No 24) and Township Funeral Procession (No 33), as visual documentary reportage of political events.

One of Hulton's final paintings for the series, Soldier with Gun and Flower (No 29), is movingly and ironically bright with colour, a visual metaphor and pastiche to the end of the black and white starkness of the apartheid end-game. But, as Hulton has said:

"It is a caricature of Picasso's style in an attempt to acknowledge the untold aftermath of post–traumatic stress disorder experienced or witnessed by so many conscripts. The most problematic legacy in South Africa today remains the psychological aftermath of violence in all sectors of society."

For this viewer, Diana Hulton's illustrations for the RESISTER series are not only powerful images of a painful era in South Africa's history, but a potent reminder that man's inhumanity to man remains as yet ever-present in the world at large.