Images of political leaders have in popular cultures over time come to show those who make use of their likenesses in some form or other support counter-cultural and social justice work.
Since his execution by the Bolivian army in 1967, portraits of Che Guevara, the Marxist revolutionary, have become a mark of global popular culture.
In South Africa, images of anti-apartheid hero and black consciousness leader Steve Biko are reproduced on T-shirts and a thousand different types of fashion accessories and décor.
The most popular and recognisable image of Guevara comes from a picture taken at the funeral of a comrade several years prior to his death. It was not intended for public use, but had found its way into the news media, and later popular culture, fashion and an unending list of merchandise to sell.
After his murder by apartheid police in 1977, when a commemorative T-shirt with an image of his face was printed for Biko’s funeral, it was immediately banned. Today, however, images of Biko adorn local fashion far and wide, decorate high-end boutiques, and are reproduced on protest posters for different social campaigns.
Theirs are not the only such images that are used for financial gain. Images of different enigmatic figures come to hold a place in the popular imagination of especially young people from time to time appear as part of fashion trends.
Often this is not firstly the case of an entrepreneur who spots an opportunity, but a result of a sincere veneration of a figure who symbolises the struggle for justice. This is true for Ashley Kriel, the young and revered anti-apartheid activist of the Cape Flats who was murdered, also by apartheid police, in 1987.
Kriel’s life and work were recently honoured in an acclaimed online opinion piece, which introduced him as the Che Guevara of the Cape Flats – an association that draws the reader in, but also connects with populist imagery of countercultural and subversive sensibilities of popular youth culture.
Different from its attempt to return to the actual story behind the image of his face, the title of the opinion piece is reminiscent of the popularity for clothing, design and décor that Kriel’s face already holds.
It seems strange these three martyrs for justice died each a decade after the other, different in so many respects, but similar in the world of today in very particular ways.
They are similar in having struggled for justice in real terms, having died in service of that struggle, only to also become commodified images disconnected from their place in history, and left in the public imagination only as a populist sense that their faces offer evidence of righteousness on the part of the wearer.
In short: they have in the populist sense become woke – images that must lead one to think that someone is open-minded, appreciates more progressive views, is concerned with social issues, and is part of the new avant-garde of society.
They have become tools in the pursuit of wokeness with which people become able to build identity, access community, and signal their virtue as citizens of an imagined history and society. This is, however, a wokeness disconnected from the real narrative of what it means to be woke.
To be woke in reality is to be awake and alert to the reality, the dynamics and the instances of racial injustice and discrimination; to be awake and ready for the real work for change rather than the dictates of fashion.
* Dr Rudi Buys is executive dean at the non-profit institution of higher education Cornerstone Institute.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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