Being a Black person in South Africa, for me, often feels like being stuck in a kind of purgatory; it’s like this unregulated state where your right to life & dignity aren’t determined by your deeds, but rather how much capital (financial or otherwise) you have at your disposal. and although the reasons for this damnation are structural, they’re presented as personal failings, & that our insurmountable odds are actually of our own nature. So when people start preying on those anxieties & fashion themselves as the “Moses of Financial Freedom”, here to save us from ourselves through the “gospel of entrepreneurship” you end up with what Naledi Yaziyo, in her essay, calls, “The New Testament”, a culture of young, Black, branding-obsessed south african men who espouse, “financial success as the ultimate evidence of self-actualization”, whilst casually patronizing their followers in their well-rehearsed TEDtalk postures. And where capitalism and masculinity are left free to run a mock, gender-based violence is never far behind, as evidenced in the case of Sandile Mantsoe. Yaziyo’s writing is really brilliant, so here's a link to the article:
https://africasacountry.com/2017/12/the-new-testament
https://africasacountry.com/2017/12/the-new-testament
Process Work
Final linework
I wasn't happy with the face, so I redid it on a seperate page and deep-etched it into the rest of the composition in Photoshop
Thanks for swinging by!
