Michael Selekane
Paintings
From a history of abandonment, not being raised by his mother, and having to move to Mabopane, Migration is a concept that Michael knows and understands very well. Back home in Uitvlag village Selekane was exposed to agriculture as they used to grow their own vegetables, a life the artist refers to as simple.
After moving to Pretoria, Mabopane, Michael had trouble adjusting to his new family structure and experienced a culture shock, as his new township home was far too different from his humble beginnings in Mpumalanga. He also experienced a form of bullying as children would often make fun of him for his language and pronunciation which was village based. Often finding himself in isolation because he couldn’t find a safe space at home and socially, Selekane found himself wandering around the dumping sites where he would pick up scrap material and made structures. Michael’s early work developed from this personal narrative and this is shown in some of his artworks where the artist depicts a woman at a dumping site. His work features mostly female figures, looking at the lengths a woman/ mother wold go through in order to provide for her family.
The Group Areas Act of 1950 was one of three title acts enacted under the Apartheid government of South Africa. The act assigned different racial groups to different residential sections in urban and other underdeveloped areas in South Africa. The enactment of the act saw many black and non- white people being moved (forcefully and otherwise) from their homes to lesser developed areas that were far away from amenities. Overtime this led to the development of Townships such as Mabopane, Soshanguve, Attridgeville and Hammanskraal in Pretoria. While the black people were forced out of urban areas, they were still required to work in the urban areas some as domestics, gardeners and general workers. The fore mentioned act, and the ramifications after led to thousands of black people residing in townships having to struggle every day to get to work. While some used the newly developed taxi system, others relied on the train as it was the most affordable option, besides being affordable the train offered another form of strain on black bodies as trains would be highly and densely overcrowded, badly maintained, crime ridden and extremely unsafe. Michael himself, who had to take the train from time to time in order to get to school at TUT experienced this turmoil first hand, years later after the Apartheid regime and in the new democracy which did not seem to be bringing adequate change to the lives of the previously and still presently disadvantaged.
In one of his work First Class, you see a crowd of people pushing and pulling to get inside a train, the train which is supposedly first class is already filled to capacity with many people standing, crammed and uncomfortable. The artist comments on this stating the inequality that still persist within the different races even after we were promised a better South Africa for all who live in it. In another artwork, The Left overs, Michael shows a group of women, supposedly after knocking off from their places of employment in the white suburban kitchens. At first glance one could mistake the women as coming back from shopping, because of the filled bags they are carrying with them. But upon further consideration, one learns that the women are carrying the left- overs that their madam’s have given them to take to their families. There was a practice back in the day where the mother’s that worked in the suburban kitchens used to bring a form of delicacy referred to as “dikromola”. This supposed delicacy was actually bread left overs, when the Bass, Madam and klein basses had not finished their food, the women would then collect the bread and dry it up and once they had collected enough, they would then take them home to feed their children. Since the black people were paid very little money in the kitchens and their various jobs, they were not able to afford luxuries such as bread and therefore things like dikromola became a delicacy. Michael comments on this notion of underpayment of black people and poverty that still plaques black existence even fifteen, twenty years after the new government promised better to black people.
