Pitika Ntuli: Who is this man whose words bruise and heal?

I recall how in my teens I joined hordes of giggly village boys and girls to watch the Saturday graduation rites of traditional healers. This phenomenon, which takes place amidst the thunder of the pulsating rhythm of African drums, will hypnotise any curious young mind. For Pitika Ntuli, one such occasion changed his life forever. Whatever he would become or do in life he was going to be it and do it as an African. Thus started the awesome story of the boy from the shanty town of Blesbok Masakeni outside Witbank.

At a young age, Ntuli responded at once to the call of his ancestors and the Africanist liberation message of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe. Sensing a deep resonance between Sobukwe’s call for political liberation and the ancestral project of cultural and spiritual liberation, the young Ntuli immersed himself in political and cultural activism. Comrades and ancestors were drawn to him as if to a magnet. But he also attracted the attentions of the apartheid police. In the year when Nelson Mandela’s “Black Pimpernel” days were put to an abrupt end (when he descended into the hell of jail, there to stay for the next 27 years) 20-year-old Ntuli fled South Africa. Swaziland was first and he nearly died there. You do not get closer to death than being on death row! Thirty-two years later, several countries later, a dozen qualifications later, several artistic works later, Pitika joins thousands of fellow South African personae non grata. He arrives back home to “rejoin an ever-fluid flow of my umbilical cord”.

But I digress. This was meant to be brief review of Ntuli’s new book, published by Unisa Press, and launched on Sunday, August 22 at the Africa Museum, Newtown. Sitting in a packed auditorium last Sunday, mesmerised by the eloquent poetry of Pitika and his collaborators (Bra Don Materra was also in the house!) I rediscovered what I had known for some time. Ntuli is a one hell of an intellectual!

But how do we define him? How do we define an intellectual who insists on being an African even when it seems either unnecessary or detrimental to do so? And how does one so diverse, so educated, so well travelled, so knowledgeable about peoples and their cultures, insist on privileging his Africanness? What words and what categories do we use to explain the things he does?

I bathed in the soft rain of his finely chiselled words, deftly sprayed upon an audience in semi-trance. I conversed with his life-like human busts and figurines of wood, stone, bone and metal on display at the Africa Museum in Newtown, Johannesburg. I looked at them. Some of them looked right back at me. Others hid their faces. Others looked away. The works of Ntuli form a community of interlocutors. I gave them answers, but their questions were sharper. This book, which I am failing to review — if I may admit this upfront — is no ordinary book.

It is at once a manual, a collection of academic essays, an artistic biography, a compendium of poems, a book of healing, a book of romance between Pitika and the “goddess of his heart”; a book of struggle between Pitika, stone, wood and bone; a book of love between Pitika, his country and his people. The department of education will be at a loss as to how to classify this book.

Who is this man whose words tease, soothe, bruise and heal? Who is this man at whose touch dead wood comes back to life? Who is this man who battles with stone until it smiles? Who is this man who, bypassing flesh and blood, goes back to the bone to draw meaning and invoke immortality? Who is this man who causes an uprising of the debris of Western industrial culture, instigating them to revolt against their users and their uses? Under the spell of this man, derelict wheelbarrows, abandoned exhaust pipes and irreparable motor engine parts come back to haunt us — as works of art!

This is the son of preacher man Ndlebe ka Ntuli. Sompisi! Mphemba ngamabele abafokazi bephemba ngezibi. He is healer, sculptor, subversive bricoleur, philosopher, writer, poet, performer and academic.

Do yourself a favour and visit Museum Africa where Ntuli’s work is being exhibited till August 31. Do yourself yet another favour and get hold of his book Scent of Invisible Footprints: The Sculpture of Pitika Ntuli. This is a book you must read. It will read you back — backwards and forwards. It will blow your mind. You shall be healed.