Inyongo 2

For Inyongo 2, South African artist Cinga Samson depicts a group of young men and women posing together at the Rhodes Memorial in Cape Town. Cecil John Rhodes was a British imperialist and mining magnet who has been at the center of discourse around decolonization. His statue was removed from Cape Town University, following a protest that subsequently sparked wider discourse around the decolonization of education across South Africa. Samson says, “My own thinking was that we are going to shoot at night and we’re going to haunt this space…this legacy. We’re going to haunt Rhodes. I wanted us [Black people] to look good in that space, to feel like we own it, like we belong—the way our ancestors might have felt.” The word inyongo can have several meanings in Xhosa (Samson's mother tongue) and Zulu: bile, gall-bladder, and more metaphorically, bitterness or resentment. Additionally, as the work relates to notions of African spirituality, it is worth noting that an inyongo (gall-bladder) is also used in Xhosa divination ceremonies.