By Trevor R. Getz
Canadian Journal of African Studies
Crossroads: I Live Where I Like, by Koni Benson, André Trantraal, Nathan Trantraal
and Ashley E. Marais, Foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley, Oakland, PM Press, 2022, 145 pp.
One day in Cape Town in 2010, historian Koni Benson placed a call to local artist André Trantraal. She sought to enlist him and his brother, Nathan, in transforming her PhD dissertation –the product of many hours of working closely with activist women of the Crossroads community in Western Cape Province – into a comic book. The two brothers accepted the challenge.
Later, they were joined by artist Ashley E. Marais. The topic was a graphic history of the women who had suffered, struggled, organized and created ceaselessly in defense of their community, the “informal settlement” of Crossroads, during and after the apartheid era. The result was a marriage of scholarship, activism and art that is a model for meaningful, democratized historical work. Crossroads: I Live Where I Like interprets the recent history of a community subjugated to white supremacy and patriarchy and held together largely by the organizing of mothers and aunts. It is a history of women’s struggles against international capital and paternalism that features the oral histories of women themselves, frequently cutting through the official and written sources that seek to sideline them. Within its pages, women like Regina Ntongana and Nomangezi Mbobosi are able to relate their personal experiences not only as victims of violence but also as organizers of resistance to relocation and subjugation. Their strategies are diverse – they create plays and literature, occupy government offices, march, and sometimes simply survive. Their successes are many, although often short-lived, as time and again they are beaten, betrayed and sidelined.
The main narrative thrust of the book focuses on both the continuity of oppression and the women’s victories that sometimes punctuate it. It is a story largely sustained by the text of the comic, which is profuse. Frequently, however, the argument is delivered most effectively in the artistic renderings and large blocks of color that characterize the work of Marais and the Trantraal brothers. On one page representing negotiations that took place in 1978, for example, a biblical metaphor reveals the way that male community leaders betrayed activist women. In the image, apartheid-era Minister of Cooperation and Development Piet Koornhof is seen as a snake, tempting a short, almost childlike naked man with an apple. The proffered fruit represents a deal that would benefit only a few. Meanwhile, a similarly naked woman is facing away from the scene. She is excluded – as the women’s committees of Crossroads actually were – from the negotiations. A page with a similar message appears much later in the book. It depicts an official report on the resolution of episodic violence in Crossroads. The report identified two male leaders – both much implicated in the fighting – as resolving the situation, but entirely ignored the work of women who mobilized against the fighting. The artists illustrate this erasure by gradually removing a nameless woman from the page, panel by panel.
Throughout the project, Koni Benson works to reverse this erasure, instead committing to honoring the work of the women activists who worked continually to try to improve their community. I hope in this review to similarly honor the monumental task that Koni Benson set herself in conceiving this project and her success in carrying it out. Without for a moment devaluing the contributions of the three male artists, it was Benson who sought a way to reach a popular audience that included the subjects of her study. The dissertation, of course, could not do this work (although it is, itself, quite marvelous). So, she adopted a new genre – the graphic history. Lacking the skills to draw and design in the comic medium herself, she located local artists and convinced them to work with her. She work-shopped the idea across scholarly communities like the International Labor Research and Information Group’s Globalization School. She raised money from numerous sponsors and enlisted an international cast of helpers. Finally, she found publishers — first in South Africa and now PM Press in the United States. Throughout all of this labor, she remembered her duty to the community of activist women depicted in the volume.
Of course, I can append here some obligatory criticisms of the project. The first chapter has some lettering problems and is at times difficult to read, a problem resolved in later chapters. There are no page numbers, which makes the book difficult to review and discuss in classes. I wish, as I often do when I read graphic histories, that the author had found a way to cite or otherwise connect to the many sources from which she draws: oral histories, court records, meeting minutes, testimony to government commissions. Finally, some of the local events in the book might have been more clearly contextualized within national political and socioeconomic events and transformations.
Yet I almost want to delete that last paragraph as unnecessary. In my opinion, Crossroads is an extraordinary project on many levels, and small critiques do nothing to change that evaluation. Altogether, it is a successful social history of struggle and resistance that helps call into question the possibilities for transformation in a country (and world) still governed by capitalism and patriarchy. It is also a beautiful work of art and an extraordinary collective act of activism. It is the kind of history that many of us would strive to create, had we the energy and acumen of Koni Benson.
