Going into Labor: Surreal Life Under Colonial Rule and the Painting of Malangatana Valente Ngwenya

Abstract: Described as early as 1968 as a surrealist with an everyday world invaded by spirits and monsters, where the boundaries between reality and the supernatural become porous (Beier), the late Mozambican artist Malangatana Valente Ngwenya (1936–2011) employed the easel, charcoal, and oils to bear witness to the unlivable, unthinkable, invisibilized lives of men, women, and children of his country in the late colonial period. This text centers the practice of forced labor, otherwise known as xibalo , to illuminate the artist's unique "decolonial surrealism." Rather than the marvelous or supernatural, it addresses how the artist represented the monstrous and cavernous to convey and denounce the nefarious effects of migrant labor on the Black body and household, positing Malangatana, as he is known, as a reluctant surrealist, working in a then-crepuscular world at the service of a project of Black and nationalist freedom.