http://www.timeslive.co.za/sundaytimes/
or on the other er.... hand:President Jacob Zuma's brother and daughters have criticised artist Brett Murray over his controversial painting, labelling it "disrespectful", "savage-like", "Eurocentric" and "disgusting".
After a week of high drama over the painting, currently on display at the Goodman Gallery in Rosebank, Johannesburg, Zuma's daughters yesterday said Murray lacked respect and accused him of racism.
''The depiction is vulgar and lacks humanity. It seeks to take away our father's dignity and destroy his true character and stature as a man, a father and a leader of the ANC and South African society at large," the statement said. It did not say which of Zuma's daughters were behind the statement.
They said the painting was not an issue of freedom of speech or expression. Rather it was about Murray's depiction of Zuma ''in a disrespectful, savage-like manner [and] something that can only be justified through a Eurocentric and negrophobia lens".
'Parody is part of the satirist's arsenal and it is through this that I hope to expose the new pigs. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on where you stand, nothing is sacred." And so Brett Murray, an artist with whose work I am completely unfamiliar, set off an avalanche of outrage, disgust and affront - all due to our president being depicted with his penis hanging out.
There are so many ironies here - the fact that the ANC did not know about the exhibition that opened last week, or its content, until a City Press article last Sunday tipped it off. It took the party four days to issue a statement, and then it was with proper gusto and condemnation.
Jackson Mthembu said: "It goes beyond disrespect - not only for the president, but anyone. It also goes against the grain of what is entrenched in our constitution. This is probably done in the name of freedom of expression, but such freedom must respect the dignity and rights of others." And on Mthembu went, threatening legal action against just about anyone who had anything to do with the production and exhibition of the portrait, including City Press.
Of course this alerted the whole world and sent all of us scurrying to the Goodman Gallery on Thursday to take photographs of the offending portrait. And if Mthembu wanted the painting removed, his outrage led to almost every daily newspaper publishing the portrait on Friday.
Some went as far as putting it on their front pages, coyly censoring the offending bits. At The Times, we had a robust debate about what to do with the portrait. No matter how hard the photographer tried, she could not find an angle which would obscure Zuma's genitals. Eventually she placed a sculpture in front of it, but when we looked at the picture back in the office, we realised the sculpture was of two pigs having sex, which would cause even more offence. In the end, we hid the picture on page three.
But the debate in our newsroom very much reflected the one raging across South Africa - did the Murray portrait attack the president's right to dignity; does his office include an automatic right to respect? Was this, as has been the case in the past, part of an obscene and insulting obsession with the sexuality of a black man? Does it play into what has appeared at times to be an eternal obsession that has produced supposed works of art that strip black men of their dignity and transform them into humping, predatory sexual beasts?
Certainly, that interpretation was very evident in radio and Twitter discussions. A commentator said this would not have been done to P W Botha or Helen Zille. But neither Botha nor Zille ensured that their personal lives entered the public domain in such a degrading manner - to themselves or the office they hold. In any case, both Botha and Zille have been lampooned for other reasons. There certainly exists in art many depictions of Botha as a cruel oppressor, as a man driven by an unswerving belief in apartheid. And there have been, in recent years, images of Zille as a power-hungry, impulsive woman.
Zuma, in the context of his personal behaviour, took occupation of the main office at the Union Buildings as a man with a sullied reputation. His utterances in court during the rape trial - where he was acquitted - offered an uncomfortable insight into a man to whom sexual pleasure mattered more than safe sex and common sense. And - as an aside, and at the risk of being labelled disrespectful of African culture - the practice of polygamy does not sit comfortably with me.
The ANC, when it made its "anything-but-Mbeki" decision in 2007, must have known it had settled for a flawed compromise. By then, the nature of Zuma's character was a well-established fact. The Goodman Gallery has decided not to remove the exhibition and rightly so. There are other art works in the Murray exhibition that should cause the ANC far more discomfort and should lead to introspection.
The work with the party's logo with a "For Sale" sign, over which "Sold" is printed, speaks to the heart of much that is wrong with the ANC. Its soul has been sold - to businessmen and to cadres out for self-enrichment since the party came into power in 1994. And 18 years later, the ANC's senior leadership must surely worry about where they find themselves. The party's response to the Zuma artwork - litigation - is quite a silly one. Much sillier - or rather hysterically scary - is the possibility that Zuma might be installed in the Union Buildings and Luthuli House for another term
