Writer: Dineo Diphofa | Artwork: Helen Sebidi
On the occasion of her 81st birthday, Mme Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi welcomed me into her Parktown home, alongside additional visitors from the William Humphreys Art Gallery in Kimberley. Poised with purple orchids in my hands, I entered her long front yard and instantly felt like I was coming home.
Mme Sebidi is a celebrated South African artist whose work is known for powerful depictions of social and cultural themes. Her oeuvre spans several decades and includes a wide range of media, including painting, drawing and sculpture. Already having this knowledge, I was particularly excited to meet the very artist I had studied in my secondary and tertiary school years. At the gate, I was introduced to her son Medupi prior to meeting Mme at the door soon after. “These flowers match my shirt!”, Mme Sebidi happily remarked. She proceeded to invite me into her home where she sat on her favourite couch. Accompanied by Gabriel Baard, co-curator for Mme Sebidi’s Ntlo E Etsamayang exhibition held at the UJ Art Gallery in April this year, I was taken on a brief tour of the house and bore witness to then-unseen works that were scheduled for the exhibition. I sat closest to Mme Sebidi, eager to hear from her about the production process and infamous disappearance of her works in Sweden. My questions were not directly answered. I quickly learned that she is not someone who can be prompted. She talks freely and delivers through story. As she set her walking cane aside, Mme Sebidi shared the importance of where this all began – her grandmother. “Before I can talk about the show, I must speak of my grandmother,” she said. Her grandmother repeatedly emphasised the importance of making art as work. She remarked that cleaning and cooking is not to be the young artist’s priority; she must simply “do my work.” Make art.
After the story about her grandmother, Mme Sebidi recounted the narrative events leading up to the production of the works. She emphasised the collaborative nature of naming her pieces and her refusal to claim ownership. “It’s not my work, it’s my grandmother’s. It’s her working through me. It’s my communications with the ancestors,” she stated. On the note of Mme Sebidi’s ‘work’, as seen through Bayeng (1990-1991), for example, I would be careless to not consider the language of her visuality. I have come to know her practice as a dynamism of colour and a delicate balance of abstraction and realism. The sensitivity of this balance is often interwoven through Mme Sebidi’s painterly intensity – which is very evident in the mark making. The composition in Bayeng appears as a swirling mass of human as well as human-like figures and parts, rendered to distort and exaggerate their features. The figures and parts intertwine, creating a sense of movement and tension that Mme Sebidi calls “searching”. Her textured use of colour is darker, for Bayeng than her brighter palettes. Here she layers paint and scratches to reveal a depth of entanglement with deep reds, purples, greens, and blues dominating the palette, leaving the human-like with plant-like veins. The “searching” energy draws inward as colours blend and clash in a way that heightens the emotivity of the work. Mme Sebidi’s delicate balance of abstraction and figuration is reflected in the relationship between her colours and her emotions. The figures themselves are abstracted to a point where they meld into one another, their limbs and faces becoming almost indistinguishable at points. The sense of unity here is probing and energetically longing.
Mme Sebidi, Kim Berman and UJ Arts & Culture staff collaboratively naming artworks (5 March 2024), Auckland Park, Johannesburg. Image Courtesy of Gabriel Baard.
The title of her exhibition, Ntlo E Etsamayang (2024) loosely translates to ‘the walking house’ in SeTswana. The artist recognises herself as vessel for continuing the grandmother’s spiritual, artistic work – a vessel that must be malleable for the communication of her ancestors. Mme Sebidi additionally recognises that there is a malleability necessary for her to be a home that can ‘walk’ with her grandmother as she produces artwork. As an artist trained through the indigenous tradition of apprenticeship, she shares a worldview that is different to the ownership demanded of capitalist art markets where the question of ownership is also part of global North traditions that have shaped the idea of the artist as individual genius. Mme Sebidi’s understanding of her sense of self as an artist is not fixed to the material world of art economies, she must continue to move and be in flux for her work to communicate its stories of searching beyond the ground. Her refusal to claim ownership is also consistent with her decision to decline an honorary doctorate (or in her words “It’s not a no, just not yet!”), as she does not want to take acclaim for work that she views as not solely her own. “This work is not my own, and it is not done,” she asserts. Again, as she is not one to give direct answers, the meaning of this statement could allude to several things. It could be the work of her grandmother, as well as the construction she’s doing at her homestead – which she is considerably prioritizing for her ancestors and the knowledge-sharing she is called to. Acts of refusal play a significant role in Mme Sebidi’s practice as well as in the conception of the exhibition. According to the exhibition’s co-curator Gabriel Baard, they could only make suggestions and present perspectives for Sebidi to consider, adopt, or discard at her own discretion.
Baratani (Lovers), 1990, Pastel on paper. Image courtesy of Gabriel Baard
I drew from Lilian G. Mengesha and Lakshmi Padmanabhan’s introduction to Performing Refusal/Refusing to Perform, which contextualises refusal within the realm of performance and artistic practice. They argue that refusal is a multifaceted act that can involve the rejection of certain roles, expectations, or identities imposed by society. This perspective reinforces my understanding of Mme Sebidi’s artistic choices, as she consciously rejects the conventional role of the artist as an individual genius. She continues to emphasise that the work she does is not hers alone, but her grandmother’s. By positioning her work as a collaborative effort with her ancestors and her communities, Mme Sebidi performs a radical act of refuting a singular position of greatness. This refusal is not merely a negation of current institutional frames of knowing but an important affirmation of a different way of being and creating, one that is deeply rooted in pluriversal ties – a concept that recognizes the coexistence of multiple worldviews, knowledge systems, and cultural practices. In this way, her practice is not the monopoly of a single perspective but is shared and co-created among many voices and influences.
My encounter with Mme Sebidi challenged me to distinguish refusal from resistance. Refusal involves distancing from state-driven recognition and social norms, yes, but it is crucially about affirming tactics that lie outside traditional political action, say Mengesha and Padmanabhan. From Mme Sebidi I learned that refusal can be the choice to speak in stories. To choose to be opaque and to exercise inaction when asked to receive an honorary doctorate, but it is not yet time. In refusing the honorary doctorate, her actions reflect a deeper philosophical stance, challenging the conventional expectations placed upon her as an artist and public figure. By opting not to engage with the symbolic gesture of accepting the doctorate, she disrupts the traditional narrative of recognition and validation. In Mme Sebidi’s case, her refusal is not merely a rejection but a deliberate act of self-determination and autonomy. It challenges the prescriptive roles often imposed on indigenous voices, where officially sanctioned recognition is sometimes laden with expectations of gratitude or compliance. By not acting ‘as expected’, her stance becomes a form of quiet resistance, undoing the very act of acceptance that would otherwise frame her as a passive recipient of institutional approval. She prioritises her ancestors call to build and share knowledge at home.
Mme Sebidi’s invitation to listen to different voices and tell their stories is how she answers questions by bringing attention to home. This act resonates with her broader philosophy, where the focus is on staying true to one’s work – refusing imposition or distraction. This philosophy became palpably clear during my visit with her—a visit that left me questioning my own aspirations within academia. My visit with her lasted four and a half hours. After singing happy birthday and eating cake, the visitors and I made our way home respectively. As a black woman in academia, aspiring to the very thing that Mme Sebidi presently refutes, I initially became unsure of my footing. I was not certain of what my aspiration meant for me going forward. I have realised my aspirations toward scholarship are still legitimate on my terms; however, my journey may look somewhat different now, and I have the freedom to refute any projections that say otherwise. Artists like Mme Sebidi are often seen as heritage workers, as though this is less than the pursuit of the artist who follows traditions of so-called individual genius. In spending almost five hours at home with Mme Sebidi’s heritage of artistic practice and underlying philosophical searching, she reaffirmed that whatever path I follow with my writing, it must be part of ‘my work.’ My words are my work. I can, and shall, choose what I write, just as Bantu Biko did; who incidentally refused to leave South Africa when the apartheid government offered him free study at Harvard. I am subsequently becoming aware of my heritage of refusal as a black South African who practices thinking as part of their work. I will determine how I work with my words. This notion of refusal as a practice has begun to take on a new meaning for me. It has come home.
Bayeng -Visitation
I am reminded that Mme’s refusal was not just an act of defiance. Mme Sebidi’s refusal is an affirmation of autonomy and self-determination. Upon exiting her house, she walked me to the door and said, “o neo ka nnete, tswela pele o dira mereko wa gago.” Her words will stay with me, reminding me that refusal, in its most profound form, is a practice of radicality.
Dineo Diphofa is a curator, scholar and writer who has previously worked at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD) at the University of Johannesburg.