"(...)When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both. Some say that has now been achieved. But I know that that is not the case. The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning".

(From: Long Walk to Freedom: Nelson Mandela)

In many eyes -as in mine- South Africa is the country of Nelson Mandela, where only eight years ago freedom triumphed over apartheid in a spectacular peaceful way. A young and promising democratic republic in search of a new identity while simultaneously fighting the economical inequality and crime (both inheritances of Apartheid) and an aids epidemic.

South African artists have an important role to fulfil. They reflect and expose their country's problems and they create a new identity thus cooperating in the rebuilding of South Africa.

"My major role in art is to preach the human religion, to tear down walls and fences, and thus make a contribution towards reconciling and uniting the universal family."

(From: Thami Ka Mnyele in weekend WORLD, October 16, 1977) In Johannesburg I stayed with the artist Ilse Edit Pahl. With the family of Ilse, Christian and their baby Gabriel I find a perfect nest during the first weeks of my stay.

Moving around in the city is quite difficult without a car. The local transport is hardly working and most distances are too big and dangerous to walk. Thus you have to plan your day well. Sometimes you tend to get stuck somewhere for a while.

Ilse says many South Africans are afraid. They lock themselves in their heavily secured houses and only move outside their houses in their cars. For those who do not have a safe house or a car the fear is very real. For those who do have all that the fear is mostly in their head. We should all just go back on the streets again Ilse says, to break the vicious circle of fear and threat. Ilse and Christian belong to a small minority which one could call middleclass. Hopefully this middleclass -black and white- will enlarge rapidly. As yet South Africa exists mainly of an extremely poor black mass and a top-heavy upper layer of very rich whites.

Johannesburg is remarkably spacious and green. The city-center is for the greater part emptied and many -sometimes splendid- buildings are bricked up. Yet it has the potency to rise again like a phoenix. It is by no means a ghost town and one can experience a pleasant bustling on street-level. There are hardly white people to be seen there, they have migrated en masse to the suburbs.

On my second day I visit Alexandra, a suburb, or township, of tightly packed shacks. Alexandra was constructed in 1912 under apartheid as a dormitory town to provide a ready and accessible labour pool for the white city of Johannesburg. Under the National Party's influx control legislation, black residents of Alexandra would work as cooks, cleaners, domestic workers and gardeners for white Johannesburg by day, and return to the township by night.

Nelson Mandela lived in Alexandra:"..The township was desperately overcrowded; every square foot was occupied by either a ramshackle house or a tin-roofed shack. As so often happens in desperately poor places, the worst elements came to the fore. Life was cheap; the gun and the knife ruled at night.(...)In spite of the hellish aspects of life in Alexandra, the township was also a kind of heaven. As one of the few areas of the country where Africans could acquire freehold property and run their own affairs, where people did not have to kowtow to the tyranny of white municipal authorities, Alexandra was an urban Promised Land, evidence that a section of our people had broken their ties with the rural areas and become permanent city-dwellers(...)instead of being Xhosas, or Sothos, or Zulus or, Shangaans, we were Alexandrans."

From: Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela.

Today Alexandra can still be described as above, the area is even more bursting at the seams and now many inhabitants come from other African countries as well. When you leave Alexandra by the highway you can see how remarkable it is situated right next to the suburb Sandton, one of Johannesburg's wealthiest suburbs. I haven't been to Sandton but they say the wealth behind the big walls and high fences can easily be described as obscene. It touches the greatest problem here, the staggering gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The shacks, pollution and ill electricity and ill water supply next to the chrome and glass buildings, shopping malls, pools and fountains. Well contemplated this situation reflects today's world-picture as well.

In Jo-burg I experience a few hip openings, view a couple of hip exhibitions and meet some of the artists. For the moment nothing to write home about.

Indeed something to write home about is the art of Ilse Edit Pahl.

Ilses work and life are closely knitted. In the bigger picture Ilse deals with the search and preservation of identity. Her source of inspiration is her mothers' home, in search of her own identity and preserving her mother's by using the objects that she associates with her. In today's Jo-burg one is confronted with extreme social contrast and violence. The time has come to transform this reality. Being a young native Jo-burger Ilse is part of a culture searching for (a new) identity. It is a big stretch from her intimate personal story to that of the South African (and the universal) story of preserving and transforming identity. Ilse's work might look like a whimsical fairytale but it can just as well be seen as a reflection of reality holding a prospect of a happy ending.

In Johannesburg I also spend time with the artist Usha Seejarim. I describe her work and ask her some questions in the Hope Box Spotlight section.

Usha, her husband Raj and myself have a vivid conversation on Dutch and world politics. Many people here are curious why in West Europe -where everything seems to be close to perfect- there is this sudden move to right-wing politics. There is not much to be clarified so I just express my hope that it is a temporary backslide and that progressive Europe will fight back. (In the case of France we receive hopeful images of demonstrations, which seem to have an effect. In the Netherlands the situation only seems to become worse when Pim Fortuyn is shot).

The first and -looking back- the best exhibition-space for de Hope Box Tour, in Jo-burg is Spark! Next year the Hope Box works of art will be exhibited in what used to be the main hall of the 1930s electrical substation. A week later I go there again to meet some artists. The first to arrive is Hubert Mashaba, an artist from Alexandra. We talk about art and his work and he shows me some of his paintings, which are stored in Spark! These are his more commercial paintings with subjects like dancing women, a tourist on the beach, a businessman with mobile and two birds. Hubert works on murals and monumental mosaics in Alexandra as well. I hope to visit these in the near future.

We begin with the Cadavre Exquis kite-tail, which I took with me to South Africa. After a while Mbongeni Buthelezi arrives and after a short introduction he starts working on the Cadavre Exquis as well. After this Cadavre Exquis get together we go to Mbongeni's studio. Mbongeni comes from Dobsonville, Soweto and he makes paintings with plastic wrappings. In each painting he uses some 5000 pieces. He melts the plastic with a heat-gun and shapes it with a wet cloth on thick white plastic, the canvas. From a huge pile of plastic wrappings, his palette, in the middle of his studio Mbongeni picks up various samples and explains how he mixes the colours. Some techniques look like aquarelle while other paintings have the texture of oil paint. I am impressed by the stunning portraits Mbongeni makes. Mbongeni's work with plastic is a statement, his way of recycling as littering is a serious threat to our environment. In the first instance Durban doesn't do much for me. The coastal belt is fully exchangeable with other coastal strips in the world. When I make an orientation- tour with Birgitte Maingard though, the views over city, sea and harbour prove to be spectacular.

Birgitte is a visual artist who invited me to stay with her during my stay in Durban. Birgitte has a beautiful house surrounded by a lovely, jungle-like garden near the city-center. This makes my stay very pleasant and I can easily operate from there.

In the city-center of Durban there seems to be an exodus as well. Most companies moved to the suburbs. While strolling through the city-center I very much enjoy the livelihood on the streets. There is poverty and deterioration but at the same time one can also see the enormous potential of it becoming a dazzling city-heart. What intrigues me are the many shops and stalls where one can buy the most curious crops, hair bundles, feathers, skulls, skins (for example of monkeys, birds of prey and snakes), and other mysterious traditional medicines.

The Durban Art Gallery is located in the magnificent City Hall in the city-centre. In all probability we will bring Tigerpaws in the Fishglobe here during the Hope Box Tour 2003. Birgitte has worked with children before and will master the show alongside me in Durban.

I am lucky enough to cross paths with South Africa's most loved storyteller Gcina Mhlophe. A woman with a fantastic vision and ditto personality. When she tells about her way of working I am very impressed. Fortunately she is also enthusiastic about Tigerpaws in the Fishglobe and promises her cooperation for the shows coming year in Durban!

One of the first Durban artists I get to know is Greg Streak. Greg's work is charged with tension, images of reality inside out. Thought-through subjects concerning alienation, sinking and fear, accurately carried into effect in installations and on video.

Greg about his work: "My work deals with my pre-occupations with ambivalence, notions of uncertainty and what constitutes Truth. I am intrigued by psychological spaces that can express my own need for introspection. The complexity that is South Africa, coupled with the subterfuge of my formative years has pre-empted these obsessions with non-clarity. I am not interested in black or white, I find grey more evocative. Recent work has found form in both object based and video works. Much of this work has looked at liminal spaces between the psychological and the meditative; what I call "floating" spaces. I am more interested in the pause between notes, than the music itself. The works therefore imply reference but not the source. The video works have made direct reference to painting from Art History - a Carravagio, Vermeer, Newmann or Serrano - this eclectic pastiche perhaps more an indication of a comfort with the past than with the present or future."

Greg introduces me to Jan-Storm Janse van Rensburg, the curator of the NSA. NSA is the most progressive exhibition space in Durban where the Hope Box works of art will be exhibited next year as well.

I meet visual artist Gabi Ngcobo in the early morning. Gabi and I discuss art, her work and the Hope Box. It is a very good conversation and we seem to click well. Later the artists Zamani Makhanya and Thando Mama are joining us and the four of us continue the conversation and visit their studio which is located in a community centre outside the centre of Durban. While showing their work Gabi explains the relation between the African symbolic in her work and her search for identity. The masks (a recurring theme of both Zamani and Gabi) represent the African origin and express ambiguity at the same time. As masks are also objects where identity is hidden behind. Gabi sees her work as a process in which she tries to indicate her surrounding, to find a language to communicate what she sees and to keep concealed what should stay like that. I find the work of Gabi promising and I get the impression that she is modest and in possession of a great feeling of solidarity. She wants to play a role in the improvement of the living conditions of the community and the development of an accessible artistic climate.

Gabi, Zamani and Thando are part of the art-collective Third Eye Vision. The aim of Third Eye Vision is to bring the fine arts, theatre, music and poetry together and improve the transmission to the community. While discussing the past and present situation in South Africa Zamani says: "Our children are going to school together now, they will learn about each others culture and through that they will learn how to deal with each other peacefully".

I visit Thando Mama later that day at the Technicon Fine Art Department where he shows me work on paper and video. What impresses me the most is the video work (un) hea(re)d, where one sees an intense over-exposed close-up of Thando's face. The face makes incomprehensible (in slow-motion and backwards, in Zulu and English) pronouncements. The feeling that the image brings across is nevertheless comprehensible and confronting. Thando is enormously driven and has set himself goals that are difficult to achieve. With his activities he wants to make social problems debatable and give a voice to people who are not heard.

In a studio on the Technicon Natal Sculpture Department, visual artist Langa Magwa is working on his masters. Langa is beginning to break through with his work with animal skin. Through cutting and burning, paintings on the animal skin arise. In his three-dimensional work, animal skin is his most important material as well. Langa's starting point is identity, his own to begin with. He has experienced the rituals of his Swasi, Zulu and Xhosa inheritances.

Langa looks upon his artistry as a gift and doesn't have role models, or it should be his grandfather who seemed to be able to control any kind of material. The controlling and inspiriting of rough material intrigues Langa and he uses techniques of traditional rituals in his work.

One of Langa's works I find very powerful. It is an installation that consists of big monumental butterflies of steel wire, plastic, animal skin and fur. The work is about the fate of children who are left behind due to the big aids epidemic or other forms of sickness or violence. Before making this installation, Langa had conversations with the orphans about their social reality. "You wouldn't believe what some of these children have gone through," says Langa. Quotes of the children are incorporated in the installation. Langa took fingerprints of the children that can be seen enlarged on the skins that hang under the butterflies. In my first week in South Africa I already visited Pretoria to present my plans for the Hope Box Tour to the Dutch Embassy and to visit the Gallery Minds I. The gallery is managed by artists and is situated in a nice and open space. Next year they will exhibit the Hope Box works of art too.

Later in Pretoria I have an interesting viewing session of the Fopspeen animation-films at Diek & Mari Grobler's house. Diek is an artist and one of the founders of Minds I

The highlight in Pretoria is meeting Titus Matiyani at the UNISA Gallery. Titus currently has an exhibition there of exquisite meters in length panoramic drawings. Cityscapes which he deduces from city-plans. He is fascinated by geography and tells me about his way of working. What he knows he reproduces faithfully and the other areas he draws from his imagination. Thus fantastic drawings of cities, he often has never been to, come into being. I am impressed by Titus' rare and distinct talent and personality, self-willed with heaps of spirit and imagination. On top of that he wears an ochrous double-breasted suit, bright blue shirt and tie and snakeskin shoes. Titus tells me he has met the Dutch Queen and starts to hum-buzz-knock (human beat and string box) the Dutch national anthem. The whole thing without missing a note! Diek says that although Titus can be considered established he is also an outcast. After seeing his works of art I tell him about Weather Report and show him some of the works of art. He is highly enthusiastic and says he would like to join in, 'I like mind-travelling'.

I am in Pretoria for too little time to have a proper impression of it and I am rather eager to return to Jo-burg. When I call Ilse from Pretoria she says: "When are you coming home?" Back home in Jo-burg I try to finalize the travel-drawings for Weather Report. I notice they are chock-a-block content wise and that they lack form. In a way that is how I see South Africa.

On my last day in Jo-burg I meet Robin Rode. Robin creates stunningly drastic and effective art in performances and on video. What strikes me most is his self-awareness and determination. He knows who he is and what he wants to bring across. First and foremost he wants change and he wants it now. The message he propagates in a pure and true form, preferably with likeminded from various disciplines. I visit his 'studio', a black painted wall in a street round the corner of New Market. On this black wall he draws in white chalk during performances which he records on video and edits further. He convincingly mimes some of the projects he did there, one can really visualize it. Robin is Moving Image!

On my last day I meet up with all Jo-burg Weather Reporters: Mbongeni, Ilse en Usha.

Langa and Greg are the Durban Weather Reporters and in Pretoria Titus is Weather Reporter. I have invited Gabi and Robin to make an appearance as well. All wonderful Weather Reporters with Heart & Soul. We will have to wait a while for this Weather Report to come together but the prospect is great!

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