Johannesburg is a place where wayfarers and wonderers converge to meet the versions of themselves that are often kept hidden by the boundaries of home. It is a place of unknown and unseen euphoria, a utopia of sorts. Growing up, Johannesburg was not just a place—it was a representation of the hopes and dreams of the wanderers who were brave enough to leave home and find greener pastures. In the village where I grew up, we would hear stories about how Johannesburg was a corrupted Gomorrah, a place where our fathers and uncles got lost, never to be found again. We heard it was a place where knife-wielding tsotsis and collar-wearing priests walked the same streets. I felt a sense of freedom in the city when I first moved here: I was only five years old, but I can still remember the thrill of the fast cars and the high-rise building that were much more vibrant than the tranquillity of the home I left behind in Lephalale. The violence of the city, its ugly chokehold on the Black and poor who live and work in it, was not yet clear to me.
My mother and I lived in Hillbrow, and she worked many jobs to make ends meet. I have a memory of us in that apartment building on Caroline Street. She was telling me about the massive scar on her face while we shared a plate of pap and canned pilchards. She spoke of how when she worked as a domestic worker, her employer’s dog— which was trained against Black skin—pounced on her and scratched her face as she entered to clean their house and cook their meals. The memory of my mother telling me this story made me understand the violence of Egoli, the city of gold.[1]
It is this memory that also pulled me towards Puleng Mongale’s earlier works. Mongale was born in 1991 in Orlando East in Soweto, where she lived with her grandmother and mother. She then moved to Naturena in Johannesburg South, where she lived with her parents and brother. Her artistic practice started with an ending: she left a career as a copywriter to practice as a digital artist. There is a sense of ancestry in Mongale’s work, in her renditions of the matriarchs we often meet. When I first encountered her work, I was compelled to revisit her images and words many times while questioning the reasons it spoke so directly to me. In her digital collages one finds a vulnerability that is as brave as it is surprising.