11 - Re-Historicising Credo Mutwa’s Kwa Khaya Lendaba Cultural Village in Soweto
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 June 2021
Summary
Soweto's township of Central Western Jabavu is home to one of Credo Vusamazulu Mutwa's unique and strange installations – part public art and open-air museum and, according to some, site of spirituality. Kwa Khaya Lendaba cultural village is located just off Mphuthi Street, on the corner of Ntsane and Majoeng Streets, atop a hill beside the Oppenheimer Tower. Not far from this is the June 16, 1976 Interpretation Centre created in 2006 as part of the commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1976 uprising, and carefully sited opposite the historic Morris Isaacson High School. The latter forms part of the mapping and reimagining of routes that were used by protesting students on that day. There is, however, an uneasy and disconnected relationship between these developments which include the Kwa Khaya Lendaba cultural village, the June 16, 1976 Interpretation Centre, and the Student March Trail. As part of envisaged tourist attractions in this sector of Soweto, they constitute a disjuncture when it comes to Mutwa's site.
Kwa Khaya Lendaba cultural village is the artistic work of Credo Mutwa. Established in 1974 under the patronage of the West Rand Administration Board (WRAB), the village is in many respects an expression of the WRAB's ideological outlook and tribalist rhetoric. Indeed, Mutwa's relationship with the municipality and the village constitutes a blurring of his ideology with that of the apartheid government. His vision for the village was an open-air museum preserving ‘African Culture’: Museum Africa records from 1967 indicate that Mutwa was consulted as an authority on African objects as he was presumed to have an understanding of museums and their propensity to ‘ethnologise’ the very practices in which he engaged.
After the 1976 Soweto uprising and ensuing media coverage of the Cillié Commission of Inquiry into the Riots at Soweto, where Credo Mutwa's statements were widely interpreted as in direct conflict with the anti-apartheid movement, both the Kwa Khaya Lendaba cultural village and Mutwa's home in Diepkloof were set on fire. Following the incident, Mutwa relocated to Mafikeng, where he established another cultural village, supported by the bantustan of Bophuthatswana. David Chidester, a scholar in the field of comparative religion, writes of this development: ‘At Lotlamoreng Dam Cultural Park, beginning in 1983, Mutwa supervised the construction of small adobe villages, each representing the traditional culture of one of South Africa's tribal African peoples.’
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- Falling Monuments, Reluctant RuinsThe Persistence of the Past in the Architecture of Apartheid, pp. 212 - 233Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2021