Biography
Born in 1923 at Nkanyani, NorthernProvince, Jackson Hlungwani is one of the best known and critically acclaimed South African artists. The son of a Shangaan migrant worker, he started carving fulltime after losing a finger in an industrial accident. Today he lives at Mbokota village near Elim.
Jackson is probably best known for his carvings depicting fish and themes around them.
Jackson has exhibited since 1985 and his works are housed in the following collections:
- Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town
- S.A. National Gallery, Cape Town
- University of Cape Town (Dept. of African Studies)
- University of South Africa, Pretoria
- University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
- Tatham Art Gallery, Pietermaritzburg
- Sandton Convention Centre
- USA, Japan and Europe.
Some of Jackson’s latest works can be viewed at Gallery 181.
Preferred media: Wood Sculpture
LITTLE DONKEY
By Pat Hopkins
Jackson Hlungwani’s innocence is the artistic type that seems to have no particular axe to grind. While he believes he is living among lesser mortals, that he has a direct connection to God and His heaven, he makes no fuss about it.
By most standards the man is eccentric, an almost ludicrous figure of diminutive impishness. He wears a none too clean army issue coat over old pants that fall on a broken pair of shoes. His body though, looks glowingly clean, which is another paradox of sorts. For his cleanliness is more than bodily, it is almost spiritual. It is induces also by an engaging charm and honesty that is open and interesting.
The cleanliness is made striking in a bizarre way when he lifts his pants to show his grotesque scars, livid with what seems to be a form of cancer, eating into his lower limbs. Instead of turning away in disgust, instead of experiencing the expected nauseous smell, instead of shying away in dismay, one is left with a fascinated awe.
For just as dramatically, the pants are dropped, the subject is dropped, the legs are forgotten and the artist goes cheerily on to the next subject.
You can call him a crazy old man, a mystic like William Blake, a rustic philosopher with decidedly quirky religious views. But you cannot ignore, underrate or dismiss his art. Nor can you miss the serenity and harmony that connects this diminutive sculptor to this world. Walking, almost skipping like a sprite on grotesquely scarred legs, Jackson Hlungwani is a born communicator. He says the most unusual things, with a childlike innocence that is quaintly genuine. It is inoffensively generous this offering, so totally without the slightest wish to impress or be rewarded.
Aggrey Klaaste in an essay title an Intriguing Encounter.
Jackson Hlungwani’s big game hunting father, Bhandi Pavalala, died a week before Hlungwani was born into a prosperous Tsonga family at Nkanyawi in the Northern Province in 1923. The baby refused to be breastfed – a sure sign for the community that his mother had committed adultery. To clear her name she consulted a traditional healer who divined that her version was true and that the problem was in fact caused by the grandfather who had been reborn through the child.
Before I was born I remember my grandfather appearing to me to inform me that I was a prophet of heaven sent to work with our people,’ confirmed the dread-locked Hlungwani who has spent his whole life honouring this injunction from God.
Hlungwani’s upbringing was little different from other Tsonga boys, but was invaluable for when he later formulated his religious ideas and began making art. The countryside, as he herded his father’s longhorn cattle, was the perfect environment in which to come to grips with the natural universe. He studied the rivers, the movement of fish, the plants, the wildlife, the climate, the cosmos and, in due course, amalgamated what he had observed with teachings about the traditional ancestral world, Tsonga concepts about community and Christian beliefs in a rhythmic, evolving, all embracing cycle of life that never appeared contradictory. And when the day was done his father taught him how to fashion functional items from wood and metal.
Like other men, too, he was sent to find employment in the city when he came of age. In Johannesburg he worked for tea and coffee merchant but was dismissed and repatriated home in 1941 after loosing a finger in an accident. There he joined the African Zionist Church and was ordained as a minister in 1946 leaving shortly afterward to start his own sect, Jerusalem One Christ, in Mbhokota.
In Mbhokota, he became Xidonkani, the Little Donkey, the mount that brought the Virgin Mary to Bethlehem. On a hill, atop which was an Iron Age site, he and his small band of followers began enhancing the instrinsic qualities of the site by creating a Great Zimbabwe like labyrinth of dry packed stonewalls that he called New Jerusalem.
‘The New Jerusalem is conceived as a pilgrimage route where normal life is viewed as a journey’, wrote Peter Rich in an essay title The New Jerusalem. The plan of the New Jerusalem is referred to by Hlungwani as ‘The Map of Life’. It is a route with a beginning and an end, an entrance and an exit, an ascent and a descent. Upon visiting the acropolis one returns via the same route that one came. Hlungwani reiterates that he will return in another life to complete the task bestowed upon him. This does not, however, deter his obsession to complete what must now be done towards its building in this life.
His dualistic world view, which is made apparent to us in religious metaphor, is composed of opposites – first and last, beginning and end, life and death, entrance and exit, male and female, left and right, good and evil. These opposites are articulated in the route, and are experienced on the various thresholds and space on the acropolis.
Included in Hlungwani’s New Jerusalem were living quarters, The Temple of Jupiter, altars, raised platforms, healing rooms, Christ’s office, God’s aerial and, at the top, Golgotha, the place of skulls, of the dead, from which one turned resurrected and walked back into a new life. Within these walls he preached a religion that moved with great ease between Christianity and African beliefs, God and gods, Fathers and ancestors with traditional remedies, amulets and a Bible that served the same function as divining bones. It was a brand of mystical Christianity firmly rooted to the African soil that was Hlungwani’s own.
New Jerusalem, before 1978, was decorated with restrained, undemonstrative woodcarvings. That all changed when he became embroiled in a conflict with the devil that drove him to the brink of suicide before Jesus saved him.
‘I saw Satan with my own eyes and he shot arrows through my legs’, he told Reverend Theo Scheider. ‘I managed to shake off one of these arrows, but the other remained inside my flesh. It disappeared completely into my body, becoming a snake. The following morning I saw abscesses on one of my legs, discharging puss and a little bit of blood. The other leg was swollen and dry, but itchy. It remained itchy for a long time without bursting, but when it eventually burst it occasioned a large wound which went from bad to worse. It smelt horribly. Life is sweet smelling, but I smelt like the smell of death, like the foul-smelling flowers and fruits of the muhatamba tree.’
‘I was planning to commit suicide because I could not stand it anymore. I decided to wait for the sun to rise the following day before I put my plan into action. The night had come and I was lying down, thinking of the coming day and what I was going to do, when suddenly Jesus appeared. Actually, there were three persons. They came from the northern horizon, the Kalanga country. I was lying on my back, looking up at them with my head at the level of their feet as they were steadily approaching; then, they had arrived.
Jesus was standing on one side and his companions took me by the armpit and made me sit. Jesus stretched out his right arm and grasped my right hand. While speaking, he would emphasise his words by pointing at me with his left hand. Number one, he said, ‘You see, today you are healed, you will not die. Then, number two ‘You will serve God for your whole life.’ Number three, he said ‘You will see God Himself. Look over there.’ He was pointing in the direction from which they had come. I did not, in fact, see God’s full stature. I only saw his legs, from the knees down. I watched the legs passing by, going in the direction of KwaZulu.
The Jesus ceased holding my hands. The other two also stopped supporting me on both sides. They began moving away, and they finally disappeared below the horizon. When they had gone I remained in the sitting position. I was wide-awake. I had watched all the happenings with my own eyes. I became drowsy and slept for a while. All of a sudden I woke up and jumped as high as the roof of the hut. When I fell back I found myself standing on my two legs’.
This ecstatic religious and healing experience filled Hlungwani with an enormous energy that he frenetically expended on sculptures for New Jerusalem – artefacts imbued with passion and humour intended to fill his faithful with inspiration. Heaven and earth met in works that included powerful images of the supernatural, crosses, traditional medicine gourds, birds, animals and the joy of life. In cairns in the walls he erected angels with overarching wings, birds eggs on God’s legs to remind him of the ulcers on his own, and aeroplane for Cain, Adam in shorts and sandals, a necktied Angel Gabriel with a satchel on his back and an athletic Jesus playing football. And everywhere there were fish that were the symbols of Christ and the people of the Northern Province.
‘Fish don’t fight, fish are happy, fish teach, I teach’, he proclaimed.
New Jerusalem, after Hlungwani was discovered by the art world in the 1980s and brought to Johannesburg, was plundered by collectors and left to grow over with tropical bush and weeds. The artist was feted and pampered until the illuminati tired of him and he returned to his home to sculpt under an avocado tree, greeting visitors with a wave and an exuberant ‘Hallelujah’. His sculptures, round the side of his hut, lie weathered and mixed with the works of his students against a wall. Beaming, he is happy to anyone these works and divulge little secrets about each one. Inside the hut a hen sits on her eggs on the table among religious posters and books which he flips through for ideas. And when people leave, he refuses to say ‘Bye-Bye’ preferring ‘Until we meet again’.
He crosses many cultural barriers, yet he has found a unique identity, concluded Klaaste. He, by virtue of his convictions and aspirations invites us to reassess our preconceptions. He invites us to enjoy, to be educated by the creative free spirit in a man.
He reminds us of universal truths. Especially, he reminds us that man has free will, the creative space to express himself and his world in many ways. It is up to us to express this difference, this unique creative spirit, in sincere and genuine ways if we are to change the world, if ever so slightly. It gives people, through the creative experience, the happy feeling that the eternal truths can be reached in many ways.
