Haroon Gunn-Salie was born 20 years after Imam Haron’s death but his life is intrinsically linked to his namesake, writes Gasant Abarder.
Cape Town - How do you bring to life the story of a man’s death and his legacy when the circumstances are shrouded in mystery and tied to the ghosts of our past?
You won’t readily find accounts in text or reference books of Imam Abdullah Haron - the anti-apartheid cleric, from Claremont’s Stegman Road Mosque, who died after being tortured for 123 days in police detention in 1969.
There is a street in Lansdowne (a section of the old Lansdowne Road) named for Imam Haron. But it is an almost stark and lonely reminder of the imam’s martyrdom against injustice and the significant role he played in our fight for liberation.
The imam’s crime was that he dared to preach against oppression.
Last Sunday marked the 46th anniversary of his death and the keynote speaker at the commemoration at his gravesite in Mowbray was a young artist named after the imam.
Haroon Gunn-Salie was born exactly 20 years after the imam’s death but his life would become intrinsically linked to his namesake. The 26-year-old artist has made massive strides to immortalise the legacy of the imam through his work.
Last month, Haroon celebrated his first solo exhibition, called History after Apartheid at the Goodman Gallery in Joburg to critical acclaim. Most memorable of the pieces exhibited was a work entitled Amongst Men, dedicated to the late Imam Haron.
But it was his own search for answers about his childhood that started Haroon on his journey.
In an uncanny turn of events, before he was even two years old, Haroon found himself in a prison cell, just like his namesake. Like Imam Haron, the young artist too had a history with Claremont. Both the cleric and Haroon’s father and his family were forcibly removed from the suburb, which was declared a whites-only area under the apartheid Group Areas Act.
Born to parents - activists Shirley Gunn and Aneez Salie - who were both uMkhonto we Sizwe soldiers, Haroon lived in the underground from birth. Later Shirley was arrested and Haroon was detained with her.
As a form of torture, Haroon was later removed from Shirley and sent to a children’s home. Security police played back recordings of the toddler crying to torment the mother.
“It was the driving force behind me getting involved in this sort of work. I don’t have direct memory of it, but I have memory told through narrative. I think I’m able to re-tell my early childhood experience by being a witness; being retold a story as opposed to my own recollection, which is very important.
“By the age of two, by the time we had been released from prison, my mother and I were living with my dad’s father in 2nd Avenue, Crawford - the house they were forcibly removed to from Claremont.
“I was playing in the front garden and a cat came by and I freaked out and started crying. I had never seen a cat before and I was two years old. While Boeya was consoling me, a police van drove past and I started screaming: ‘The boere are here, we have to go inside to hide so they can’t see us.’
“I didn’t know what a cat looked like but I knew exactly what to do when the police came by. This is the uniqueness of experiencing something in utero.
“In those first two years I had no interaction with children so I could speak fully because I had only seen adults. There was no normal early childhood development. It was actually a very tense, highly-fuelled situation.
“Part of my fascination with Imam Haron is that I’m named after him. The other part of it is 30 years on from when he was killed, my mother and I could’ve had the same fate, under the same hands. The difference I suppose was by the late 1980s, the mass democratic Struggle was able to come to the streets and mobilise.
“There were marches down Wale Street with the message, ‘Return Baby Haroon to Shirley’. They had removed me, as a form of torture to my mom, to a children’s home and she had no idea where I was.
“People took to the streets to protest for my return to her. This, I suppose, if I think back to it, is the same community that rallied around Imam Haron’s death.
“It was the Cape Town Muslim community largely who petitioned for our release. There is very much a feeling of me being indebted.”
Haroon was reunited with his mom after then-advocate, now judge, Siraj Desai obtained a court order on his behalf. Haroon was the youngest political prisoner and Desai’s youngest client at 18 months.
Amongst Men features the casts of more than 400 kufiyas (traditional Muslim headwear for men) suspended from the ceiling, representing the mourners who buried Imam Haron at the Muslim burial grounds in Mowbray.
It led to two other pieces in collaboration with the imam’s family. The second piece depicts Imam Haron’s body, cast in Haroon’s image and based on his interviews with the imam’s widow, Galiema. The third piece is a hand-blown lightbulb suspended at the height of a child - based on interviews Haroon conducted with the imam’s daughter, Fatiema Haron Masoet.
Of Amongst Men, Haroon says: “A man amongst men is someone raised to incredible stature; but there’s also you as a viewer being able to walk in and your presence fulfils the scene. It’s the scene of Iman Haron’s funeral… more than 400 kufiyas hung at the exact height, the angle and tilt of all the men in attendance at his burial.
“You are invited as the viewer to become one with the men… one of these people. It’s essentially the opposite of a monument because a monument makes a hero out of the individual; it’s linear and high. This is representing the mass. All the multitude of voices touched by the imam who came, in this act of defiance, to attend this funeral.
“The kufiyas became the markers because it’s the connection between the divine and the mortal. These points raised in the air were importantly taken from archive photographs so the way they are hung is exactly to specifications. Because the brave photographers climbed up the trees on that day and took these photographs from above, once again it comes down to these markers of public memory.
“The audio in the piece is a poem by James Matthews. He wrote this poem Patriot or Terrorist as part of his first anthology called Cry Rage. He was imprisoned for this literature. It’s a piece that is as relevant today as when it was written in 1969 because it speaks to the global context of Islamophobia and hatred that is spread by people completely misguided by propaganda.
“James’s poem is asking whether the imam was a patriot or a terrorist and whether his martyrdom is there as an example or whether it is a crying shame.
“The audio is of him as an 85-year-old performing this poem. It was always a written piece and never a recorded and performed piece. His words ring out above the people… at the installation.
“Of course, James lived in the imam’s legacy. He was the second editor of Muslim News after the imam. He wrote this incredible piece right after the imam passed away, describing the funeral and the feeling of mourners on the street that day. It was absolutely important for me to include James’s voice within the representation of the story.”
Haroon ran late for his Friday Files interview because he was visiting Galiema and catching up with the family news. He had come to know the family well because he spent hours interviewing them as part of his research.
“Amongst Men was the catalyst for me working with the family. I didn’t want to do this piece and then have it as a finish-and-shut process. I’ve been working on this process by using interviews and dialogues to come up with concepts for artworks so that they become carriers of narratives.
“I approached the imam’s widow and daughter because they are really the ones continuing his legacy. There’s an engendered nature of who carries the sacrifice.
“These two new collaborative works are very important. The first one is with his widow Galiema Haron. She’s the most powerful, resolute woman. Never once did she shudder during two- to three-hour long interviews. The only time she raised any emotion was when she spoke of how wonderful life was in Claremont before they were forcibly removed and what an absolute turning point the Group Areas Act, the forced removals and the racialising of space was for the imam.
“That was what drove him. She described the day when she went to identify his body in the morgue, looking at the 28 bruises that lined his body. This was something that only she could know about, which is also the point of working inter-generationally.
“She said the one side of his face was crying and the other side was laughing or smiling. The split, two-sidedness of the injustice on the one hand, but also suffering the greatest injustice, that she thought he felt he had proved a point. This work is the bier that is being carried to the funeral but it’s my own self cast in the imam’s image.
“We worked with the Pretoria Muslim Burial Society who shrouded this cast of my body as per ritual and we then cast it in the same material as Amongst Men, as the kufiyas, which is plaster. That sits there as a very powerful work and it’s emotive.”
For the third piece - the lightbulb - Haroon collaborated with the imam’s daughter Fatiema Haron Masoet.
“She was six when he died. When I interviewed her she kept saying, ‘I was too young, I don’t remember’.
“Then I asked her the question that broke through: ‘What was the one message he left for you, and for us?’
“She said it was simple: always to remember, and that he loved her, and that he loved us all.
“How we represented this was with a hand-blown glass bulb, that hangs at the height of a child, so you as an adult have to go down to the height of a child in order to read this message, the same way you’d impart this wisdom when you talk to a child, you go down to their level.
“It’s a humbling thing. The words on the one side was ‘remember’ and on the other side was ‘I love you’ protruding from the surface of this light bulb, which is also a representation of the light, the transcendental spirit that lives on in the continuation of his legacy and his work, and achieving these goals that are still being fought for.”
Like Amongst Men, Haroon’s body of work is dominated by the highlighting of injustices of the past and how injustices continue in the present. As part of his History after Apartheid exhibition, Haroon cast the hands of actual statues of colonial figures of South Africa - including Cecil Rhodes, Jan van Riebeeck and Paul Kruger - in red, depicting how they had blood on their hands.
Two years ago, among other work based on District 6, he replaced the name “Zonnebloem” on road signs near the area with “District 6”. He has since started a process for District 6 to replace Zonnebloem permanently in maps and reference material.
“This is a serious case because they’ve moved families back but their address is ‘Tennant Street, Zonnebloem’ and there was never a Zonnebloem to the people. It was changed so that no matter what happened, if it was redeveloped, it would always erase the history of the people of the place. The struggle for land restitution is a big one but the symbolic redress of the past is also important. My work is less about social commentary and more about social intervention.”
* Gasant Abarder is the Editor of the Cape Argus
Cape Argus