Trevor Getz's Reading List

"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."

"This is an unusual story. Part of the reason that I love it so much is because, although influenced by that Francophone bande dessinée style, it comes out of the mind of an African comic genius, Barly Baruti. It’s in the Francophone tradition, but very much Congolese. He creates an amazing story, loosely based on historical fact. The loosest thing is that it seems like the German ship that they’re all hunting gets blown up by our heroes, but that is not what really happened. It wasn’t sunk but was eventually abandoned by the Germans. I’m completely willing to forgive that detail. It’s about a real person named Madame Livingstone—a local man who was a scout for the Belgians. He dressed in a kilt, which is why he was sometimes called Madame. He claimed to be descended from Livingstone, the great explorer and philanthropist, who allegedly had a relationship with a local woman. There are two tiny pieces of evidence that this might be true, but it doesn’t matter, because it’s not Barly Baruti who makes up that story. He is this stunning figure, who guides Belgian pilots to attack this German ship. It captures the complexity of colonialism. It doesn’t pull back from the fact that the Belgians did some terrible things, but it isn’t about that. It is about this mixed-up mélange of weirdness and tribal identities. World War One is all about tribal identity: the Germans are a tribe, and the Belgians are a tribe. It tells the story of this crazy situation in the middle of Africa, where the Belgians and the Germans are fighting it out in the middle of Lake Tanganyika, with a very human and empathetic touch. I should mention the second author, Christophe Cassiau-Haurie. While I’ve focused on Baruti because he’s a genius, Cassiau-Haurie has deeply researched Francophone African comic creation and is empathetic. If you’re going to have a European co-authoring an African comic, he’s the guy you want. There are a lot of pages that need very few words indeed. This story is told by the art. The art is gorgeous, and it’s variable. There are a lot of brushstrokes on some pages, it’s really textured. Then you get these amazing dark pages that are very much black and white. A whole encounter can be told without any words at all—you get a sense of it from the sweat dripping off the faces, and just the variety of panels. This is comics work at its finest, and that’s all Baruti. Baruti is probably my favorite African comic artist of all time, and this is why. Yes, it is, but I sometimes think the forewords want to make something of it that it wasn’t necessarily. This was not a political act by Baruti and Cassiau-Haurie. This was an act of making a really good story. It’s a Tarzan-ish adventure story with a more up-to-date conscience."

"For me this is a manga . It has Japan all over it, from the way that people are drawn to the way the page is composed and sounds are represented, to the little ephemera lines that show people are moving. It’s also emplotted like a manga, with stories wrapped within stories within stories. It’s myth and history and adventure story, tied together in the way that Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli does. I’ve got a whole bunch of Japanese historical texts, which also happily push this line. That’s fascinating to me. The authors are all in Cape Town. There are three but it’s mainly the Clarke brothers. Daniel Clarke is an illustrator with a definite Japanese influence, James Clarke writes fiction at the intersection of history and literature. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The reason I love Kariba is that it’s a good comic: it lets the art do the work and makes you care about the people in it. It’s mixed with this myth of the Zambezi River god, Nyami Nyami. It reproduces that myth quite faithfully and ties it up with history, which is about the dislocation of people for projects like the Kariba Dam. People die building these dams and they also have to move to make way for the water. That has a real impact. I think that in a cosmopolitan age, when Africa is very much part of these circulating styles and narratives, Kariba represents an authentic contribution that draws upon Japanese style, and at the same time accurately represents African characters, African stories, African myths and histories. Is it history? I don’t know. But it exists somewhere in a historical universe. I read a court case where a young African woman, Abina Mansah, who didn’t speak English, went before a British judge and complained that she had been enslaved. She said, “I could not take care of my body and myself.” I wanted to know what she meant and what her experiences were. I followed that for many years, trying to understand what was going on. In my classroom, I wanted students to understand how historians struggle to hear the voices of people like her and what tools we can have to do that. It suddenly occurred to me that the way I could do that best was to give students my interpretation of her words in comic form, and then to give students the tools to question or come up with their own interpretations of what it meant. That’s what my comic book is. More than anything, it’s a teaching tool. It’s an attempt to help the students understand why we should listen for these voices and how we can do that. We made lesson plans and things, but different people use it in different ways. Truthfully, I was not prepared for the fact that it was successful. I’ve since corresponded with people who use it. Teachers come up with their own lesson plans. Some of them have students create comics in the end. Some of them have students send me comics in response. It’s in its third edition now. The responses are so good that they force me to go back and do new editions, making changes, and explaining why I made changes, based on the way students have responded. You create these things and you let them out into the world. If you create something for classroom use, you never know how teachers are going to use it. It’s been really great. I worked with a fantastic artist, Liz Clarke, who also contributed a chapter to All Rise . I wasn’t the worst kind of historian to work with on a comic because I love comics. I had read lots of comics, but I didn’t know how a comic worked. Liz taught me how they worked, and I’ve gotten successively better at making comics since then. I would say that anybody who wants to make a history comic has to know something about history and how it works, but they’d better love comics. If you don’t love comics and you’re doing it just because you think it’ll sell more copies, then you’re going to fail."