 |
Forces Favourites
It is said that the real era of south african posters began in the 1980s, a fact largely Attributed to the formation of the screen printing project.
A quick gloss through the general archives
throws up names such as James Montgomery
Flagg, famous for his 1917 conscription
poster for the US army, or, on the other end
of the spectrum, Seymour Chwast, whose
1967 antiwar posters can be seen in New
York's Museum of Modern Art. But what
happens if you tighten the focus a little by
concentrating on South African posters,
especially that great body of work produced
during the 1980s?
It is said that the real era of South African
posters began in the 1980s, a fact largely
attributed to the formation of the Screen
Printing Project (STP) in Johannesburg and
the Community Arts Project (CAP) media
project in Cape Town. Thus despite some
interesting anti-fascist pro-Allied posters
dating back to the 1940s, the most interesting
political posters to concern themselves with
the theme of war and militarism date back to
the 1980s. The history of these posters is
particularly tied up with that of the End
Conscription Campaign (ECC), a grassroots
organisation that used design activism to
challenge the mandatory conscription of
white South African males.
The story of the ECC is a short one, but
nonetheless offers a meaningful account that
is intimately a part of the larger narrative of
South Africa's struggle for freedom. Formed
in August 1984 by a small number of white
students at the University of Cape Town, the
organisation played a key role in late 1980s
grassroots politics, tirelessly campaigning
against white male conscription. But there
was more at stake than just conscription; the
ECC openly questioned the increasing
militarisation of South African civil society.
Such a policy, of course, garnered the group
enemies.
Former Defence Minister Magnus Malan, in
a rather conceited outburst, branded the
organisation "anti-South African", while
Gavin Evans, an ECC activist and Weekly
Mail reporter, narrowly escaped being
murdered when apartheid agents sent to
despatch him went to the wrong address.
(The plan had been to stab him and make it
appear the work of burglars.) The ECC's
political career, if one could call it that, only
spanned a meagre four years in total. The
national State of Emergency of June 1986
effectively heralded the organisation's
demise, as calls for an end to conscription
were made illegal. Undeterred, the ECC
soldiered on, the government finally
resorting to banning the organisation from
"continuing any activities or acts", in the
spring of 1988.
Why so much fuss over an organisation
comprising 40 offices (mostly campus
branches at that), an organisation seemingly
concerned with one detailed minutiae of the
apartheid monolith: ending the mandatory
conscription of white male South Africans?
The answer spans more than the short
period of the ECC's existence, and starts in
1912. The Union Defence Force was South
Africa's first national military force,
established some two years after the
formation of the Union of South Africa. Early
on in its history the South African military
played a key role in 'policing' civilians,
troops used to suppress strikes by white
mine workers in 1914 and 1922.
It was not until the 1960s that expenditure
on defence started to become a priority for
the state. A United Nations sanctioned arms
embargo, as well as the concurrent
development of Armaments Development
Corporation (ARMSCOR) were formative in
shaping a burgeoning military culture within
the pariah state. By the mid-1970s, South
Africa had built up a powerful and
significant arms industry. In 1979 over 14%
of state expenditure was allocated to
defence, the newly empowered military
flexing its muscle all over the subcontinent.
While much of Africa was coming to terms
with the winds of change heralded by
decolonisation, South Africa intensified its
own form of military (and economic)
destabilisation of the subcontinent. The
defence force were involved in invasions
and "hot pursuit" operations into Angola,
pre-emptive strikes against the South West
African People's Organisation (SWAPO) in
Namibia and Angola, actions against the
African National Congress (ANC) in exile in
countries such as Mozambique, Swaziland
and Lesotho, and military support for rebel
anti-Marxist groups such as RENAMO and
UNITA.
All this activity was paired with increased spending on the military. In 1982-83, for instance, defence
expenditure had risen to almost R3 billion, and by the mid-1980s almost 20% of the government's
total annual budget was devoted to defence. Not that money was the only fuel needed to bolster this
system; a constant supply of ideologically sound young recruits was equally essential.
"Conscription was the most intimate connection I had to the struggle being fought on so many fronts
in my country," recalls ECC activist Kathryn Mathers. If the war in the townships was an abstract to
many white South Africans, the militarisation of everyday life wasn't.
Retail stores displayed 3D posters of anti-personnel
mines, triangular roadside signage indicated where
it was okay to pick up young recruits on leave, and
white schools enforced a weekly regime of cadets,
or youth preparedness programmes. Alongside the
promotion of war toys and games, there was a
compulsory system of registration of 16-year-old
white boys for conscription and the progressive
extension of compulsory military service for white
male youths to two years (in 1985) plus annual
camps.War was omnipresent - quite literally.
From 1981 to 1988 the SADF was also more or less
permanently inside the provinces of Cunene and
Cuando Cubango in Angola. On the home front, in
1985 alone, some 35,500 troops were used in the
townships to evict rent defaulters, occupy
classrooms, identify the injured seeking treatment in
health clinics, and break strikes - a key
campaigning point for the ECC. The creeping
military empire sponsored by the government did
not come cheaply. In 1986, at the height of South
Africa's counter-insurgency war, 453 SADF
members committed, or attempted to commit,
suicide. As Kathryn Mathers states, conscription
depended on misplaced patriotism and relative
poverty. For many white youths, the border also
became an ephemeral place, a place "more
ideological than geographic."
This intrusion, of the mechanics of the apartheid
state on white privilege, proved fertile territory for
the ECC. As Judge Edwin Cameron, a tireless
campaigner for the ECC, recently pointed out in a
Mail & Guardian interview, the ECC's success
largely derived from the organisation's pinpoint
focus. Rather than attempting to confront a broad
range of issues, the ambit of their assault was
specific: conscription, troops in the township, the
fractured psychology wrought by a faltering system.
Not that the various remnants and artefacts of the
ECC's enthused campaigning are by any means the
apotheosis of the graphic form they exploited: the
political poster. Like many artefacts of the South
African anti-apartheid movement, the visual style of
the ECC was visually naïve, stylistically raw, in short
a mess. Which isn't to say that the output of the antiapartheid
movement (or the ECC) isn't interesting.
Forced to operate on modest budgets, sometimes in
clandestine cells subject to police harassment and
sabotage, the rough-hewn style of the anti-apartheid
poster is as much a testament to a haphazard process
that birthed every poster, as it is a celebration of a
tireless spirit of activism. The jarring colour schemes,
erratic selection of typefaces, some of which were
even hand-lettered, even the plagiarised antiwar
motifs used by largely volunteer designers, all attest to
a visual style that was shaped from the ground up.
This is quite significant given the current propensity
for advertising focus groups to dictate the content of
anti-Aids posters.
Some of the group's posters were however quite
sophisticated. A good example is the poster calling for
troops to remove themselves from the townships, an
image also used for the cover of the Forces Favourites
album, a musical compilation sponsored by the ECC.
Imprinted on the sleeve is one of the ECC's most
striking graphic images, the outline of a Casspir
armoured vehicle set against a yellow backdrop, the
unmistakable chain-link logo running across the
bottom of the image. The whole concept for the album
is striking example of the Situationist trick of
detournement, or the theft of aesthetic artefacts from
their contexts and their diversion into contexts of one's
own device. In this case the album's title was a loaded
reference to a popular nationalist radio show, that
every Sunday broadcast letters and dedications to
conscripts on the border. It predated Laugh It Off's
corporate hoax T-shirts by almost two decades.
This pop-political approach proved quite successful in
attracting members to the ECC, people from disparate
ideologies and backgrounds. As with any political
organisation, the broad framework of 'the cause' had
to resist its own internal contradictions. Ivan Tomms,
for instance, a gay doctor in the township of
Crossroads, was one of the ECC's most prominent
activists. He had conducted a 21-day fast as part of
the ECC's 'Troops Out of the Townships' campaign,
and was later jailed for refusing to attend an army
camp. As part of his defence, Tomms had discussed
raising his homosexuality as a primary reason for
justifying his conscientious objection to the army.
Daniel Conway, an academic researcher at Wits, recently revealed that fellow members of ECC
prevented Tomms from incorporating his sexual identity into his objection. "Gay activists in the
ECC were amongst the most opposed to Tomms using his sexuality as a basis for his objection,"
says Conway. "The ECC's reasoning was undoubtedly influenced by the states conflation
between their individual political stances and their personal sexual identities. "Not known to
overlook the power of parody (fascist detournement?), state-sponsored groups were known to
promote slogans such as, 'ECC gets you from behind' and 'Every Cowards Choice'.
That there is a darker subtext at play is borne out by
recent findings published by Noel Stott, a researcher at
the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation. In
an extensive review of the South African military he refers
to findings implicating the SADF in a secret project to
"cure" homosexuals, by means of sex-change operations,
medical torture and chemical castration. Psychiatrists, with
the assistance of army chaplains, identified suspected
homosexuals amongst new conscripts. Those who were
identified were sent to Voortrekkerhoogte military hospital
in Pretoria for screening and "rehabilitation". Those who
could not be "cured" by drugs and psychiatry were given
sex-changes or chemically castrated. One Mail &
Guardian report claim that about 50 sex-change
operations were performed annually between 1971 and
1989.
Not that the ECC posters always confronted these darker
secrets. But ECC's activism did touch on issues far deeper
than simply the erosion of white privilege by the apartheid
state. Unbanned in 1990, alongside the African National
Congress and a host of other liberation movements, the
raison d'etre for the ECC's existence dissolved on the eve
of 1994's first democratic general election. The SADF was
replaced by the South African National Defence Force, a
new military structure that integrated the non-statutory
forces of MK and APLA with the SADF and homeland
forces. Mandatory conscription was done away with.
While the South African military is heralded as one of the
most successful state sectors to deal with transformation
the presence of South African soldiers in Burundi and the
DRC, as well as the furore surrounding the recent armsprocurement
deal, suggests that the semantics of power,
particularly military power, are still a constant of South
African life. Quite possibly it will take a new batch of
graphic activists to craft a visual language to challenge its
threats.
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
|
|
