Belongings
Belongings is a layered, mixed-media drawing responding to the death notices of “Bantu” mineworkers in 1980s South Africa. My partner Dr. Chris Conz, a historian, discovered these documents during research in the archives, and I was struck by their stark brutality. The notices recorded minimal personal detail, yet offered haunting glimpses into lives lost underground—often described only by clinical, violent causes of death such as “Crushed head and face” or “Open fractured skull.” Many of the deceased were migrant labourers from neighbouring countries such as Mozambique, Malawi, and Lesotho.
One notice in particular stood out: Joseph Letsela, a Mosotho from the Qacha’s Nek district of Lesotho where I once lived as a US Peace Corps Volunteer. Alongside his death notice was a "List of Belongings"—the few items returned to his family after his death. This intersection of bureaucracy and grief resonated deeply, especially in the context of contemporary xenophobic rhetoric and the harsh treatment of so-called “zama zamas”—undocumented miners risking their lives in abandoned shafts for illegal mine operations in South Africa.
In Belongings, large washes of Payne’s Grey paint form the background, layered with hand-drawn reproductions of archival documents including Joseph Letsela’s Death Notice and List of Belongings. Over these are pencil, acrylic, and watercolour drawings contrasting the mining towns of South Africa with the rural life of Lesotho—its mountain landscapes, common plants, rondavels, and cattle.
A clothesline stretches across the drawing, visually linking these two geographies. Hanging from it are the garments listed in Letsela’s belongings—shirts, trousers, gumboots—connecting his place of origin, where he likely lived and loved, to the site of his exploitation and death. The clothesline becomes a quiet but insistent gesture of care, memory, and resistance, reclaiming a narrative flattened by the cold bureaucratic language of apartheid.
Detail images of Belongings shown below
Belongings was featured in a group exhibition titled “Breaking Ground: A Stethoscape Exhibition” at the Vrystaat Kunstefees Arts Festival in Bloemfontein, South Africa in July 2025.