All Rise: Resistance and Rebellion in South Africa

"Conyngham is the mover behind this book, but he found a whole bunch of different South African artists to do the art. It’s a collaboration. Although there is coherence across the chapters, you have some very different kinds of art, which is quite interesting. It’s about resistance and rebellion in South Africa, but it takes place almost entirely before apartheid (though the last chapter does go into the apartheid era). It’s a book that comes out of the archives of South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal. At the end of apartheid, the new government built this incredible Supreme Court, with an archive, to provide a beacon of law, if you will, for across the continent. You can go there, it’s open. Richard Conyngham looked in this archive and pulled out all these stories about resistance and rebellion. They’re not all about race. Some are about class and labor, which may be surprising to some people. But before 1948, that’s appropriate, because class mattered as well. They are sketches of stories of the people who make up South Africa. It’s about Indian resistance to being forced to register. It’s about mine workers who are on strike because of horrible conditions in the mines. It’s about the way that colonialism appointed these state-controlled chiefs, and the way people revolted against these chiefs acting as stooges to control their movement and labor. Part of the reason why I think it’s a great work of history is that each chapter has not only the artist’s work (and as a historian, I can tell how deeply they had to delve into photographs and such to get the context and images right), but also a section that gives you, the reader, a sense of what came out of the archive—what this is based on. You can look at the original sources, you can look at the photographs they used, and then you’ve got the chapter. Now, because this is a comic, there are times you need conversation. You don’t necessarily know what people said, but you have a sense of what might have happened in certain conversations or what was reported. There’s a little bit more imagination that needs to be used to have the dialogue, but in general, this a solid historical archive of these six court cases in comic form. Essentially, yes, because most court cases don’t involve a class action suit but follow the prosecution of a particular individual within a wider court case. That is one of the things about comics. They work because there are humans you identify with. The most boring comics—often—are ones where there are no characters you can really identify with. All of the art in here is good. There’s a chapter called “The Widow of Marabastad”—Dada Khanyisa is the artist. I find the soft colors, and the figures, the way that the noses and the faces are drawn—it is not an attempt to be hyperrealistic, it’s representational. It’s beautiful art. Artistically, it’s my favorite chapter."