Thatched room at Liliesleaf, Johannesburg, South Africa. Photo: Public domain.
There were two people whose recent passing gave pause for thought last week. Not least because they both knew London. The first was Nic Wolpe, visionary powerhouse behind the Liliesleaf project in Johannesburg. The second was gifted English painter Derek Boshier, later in Los Angeles.
Thanks to Nic Wolpe, Liliesleaf is today a multi-purpose public facility and UNESCO-listed World Heritage Site. He was the son of activist Harold Wolpe and knew from boyhood Liliesleaf’s importance in South African history. In 1961, fighting the institutionalised racial segregation of apartheid, it had been the mother of all safe houses. It also happened to be where Nic’s mother and father cemented their place in the internal resistance. In 2001, 40 years later, President Mbeki announced the formation of the Liliesleaf Trust. Incredible to think that while Harold Wolpe had signed the original purchase of Liliesleaf, here was his son Nic effectively buying it back. Another key player was Adam Fleming whose uncle was Ian Fleming of James Bond fame. As a trustee and businessman, Fleming worked tirelessly with Nic to ensure people can today learn first-hand and in situ all about the Rivonia trial; Umkhonto We Sizwe—the military wing of the ANC; and the Struggle in general.
One evening at Liliesleaf, as the sound of cicadas kicked in, Nic took almost boyish pride in explaining to me just how much of a nerve centre Liliesleaf had been. This was where brave people planned the overthrow of apartheid. In the course of our conversation, he brought the place back to life for me. On 11 July 1963, someone tipped off the police, he said. Arrests were made, including Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Walter Sisulu, and Ahmed Kathrada. Mandela’s diary on guerrilla warfare strategy was discovered. Mandela himself, along with Nic’s father Harold, Arthur Goldreich, Dennis Goldberg, James Kantor, Andrew Mlangeni, Elias Motsoaledi and Ahmed Kathrada, was sentenced to life imprisonment for ‘sabotage and recruitment training in the preparation and use of explosives for the purpose of violent revolution’. Amazingly, Harold Wolpe escaped and fled to the UK where his family—including a 4-year-old Nic—would later join him.
Nic was a robust human being with intellectual range. Had he still been alive today, he would have felt just as at home at Chatham House with me last week listening to Prince Turki AlFaisal’s pessimistic view on Gaza as he would have been having our usual chat about his beloved Manchester United. (He would have especially loved their 3-0 victory over Southampton on Saturday.) I was at Liliesleaf essentially to discuss—and do some preliminary filming—on the issue of Mandela’s buried pistol. This was before being gazumped by a major Hollywood director. Nic’s energy was authentic, fascinating, relentless. As Peta Wolpe, Tessa Wolpe and Alicia Chamaillé wrote in the Daily Maverick shortly after Nic’s death, ‘Nic wanted to make Liliesleaf a place of inspiration, liberation and dialogue; a place to keep memory alive.’ On a purely personal level, he kept it alive for me. It was through Nic I met deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe, Ahmed Kathrada, famously known as ‘Kathy’, and Ronnie Kasrils, who helped build the ANC intelligence service. It was also through Nic I learned what it was like for someone born into a Struggle family.
English painter Derek Boshier died ‘peacefully at home’ in Los Angeles just over a week ago aged 87. This was the same time of year another great London-educated artist Barry Flanagan left us 17 years ago—the art gods presumably needing the warm-hearted to tide them over the winter. It was actually during one summer in New York in 1985 that I first met Derek. He was 20 years older than me and an artist at Totah-Stelling Art, a new space I happened to be working at on Wooster Street opposite Paula Cooper Gallery. (Another important painter there was New Zealand-born Alexis Hunter.) Derek was prolific. Though fiercely political in outlook, an unusual wholeheartedness always seeped through the work. One of his earliest pieces, a Cuban and American flag piece, resides in a museum in Cuba.
Derek was born in Portsmouth on the south coast of England. I met him when he was living in Texas. His trips to New York we’re like high water marks for me. I had known only his works on paper; there was also the David Bowie Lodger album cover (the Bowie camp posted a picture of Derek and Bowie—‘the two DBs’—with Derek’s two daughters last week); and Ken Russell’s BBC film Pop Goes the Easel. Discovering the new work was a revelation. There was mystery AND message. Of course a lot of Derek’s generation were always political, exemplified last week for me at the Reform Club in London when time-honoured film director Tony Palmer took on a roomful of high-level conservatives.
During one of Derek’s visits he asked me to write the catalogue essay for his next show and loved teasing me about it when the New York Times saw fit to quote from it. The work consisted of boisterous snowscapes with Rastafarians in puddles, or men in suits walking calf-deep in choppy blue waters, or by Reformation abbeys. Physically I helped hang the show but the placement was all Derek’s. Tripping from his tongue throughout was one anecdote after another. One I recall vividly was of a man on a beach in Wales who every day painted the same thing—a wave breaking on a rock. Derek, who had been staying nearby, asked the man why. As I remember it, the man peered up—brush in hand—and said he had simply figured out that if he could paint a wave breaking on a rock, he could paint anything.
Another time I was lucky enough to visit Derek and his young family in Texas after he invited me to give a talk at the Houston School of Art. This was on the East Village art scene. I flew down with a rack of slides and took a kind of borrowed civic pride in doing this. Later, Derek and his Colombian artist wife Patricia Gonzalez drove me into the dry interior—Patricia telling me how foreign disease and settler violence had pretty much wiped out the Karankawa and Atakapa peoples. At one stop, a piece of snakeskin was hanging from an abandoned porch as if awaiting re-adoption. Everything felt epic, melancholic, unwatered. Derek took out a small notebook and quickly rendered the snakeskin in ink. I loved his ‘hand’. There was always the faintest of nervousness to the line, which of course was what made it his own.
On my last day in Texas we attended a party of what he called Houstonian bluebloods. This was given by a well known collector of his. There were two monk-like male guests there with shaven heads whom we assumed were Buddhists. Anyway, we entered into conversation with them about the cosmos and Japanese haiku poetry—Derek and I were both fans of Basho. Just before leaving, we went back to say goodbye to them, asking what sect of Buddhism they were from. ‘Buddhism?’ they laughed: ‘We’re trainee astronauts.’ Derek laughed out so loud, everyone at the party turned to look at him. ‘Space City!’ he conceded to a baffled audience. ‘They call Houston Space City!’
After five years later back in Blighty, Derek moved to Los Angeles where he joined the faculty of the California Institute of Arts and lived with long-term partner Thelma Gaskell. As my plane flew northwards that day from Houston, passing over Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee, I was already treasuring the time I had spent with Derek in Texas; I just regret it turned out to be the last time our two paths would cross.
