Fort Hare Donates Art Work To Port Elizabeth’s South End Museum

The University of Fort Hare donated a set of four Hilary Graham lithographic prints, depicting scenes of the Eastern Cape to the South End Museum in Port Elizabeth at a ceremony held at the museum last month. The prints also have poems by Eastern Cape poet and former Catholic priest at South End, Cathal Lagan, who teaches in the English department here at Fort Hare. Lagan’s poems reflect the destruction of the region by the apartheid National Party government of South Africa.

The set of prints emanate from a project between the poet and the artist that combines poetry and images of the Eastern Cape landscape. Graham’s sketches of the area, made while he was teaching in Port Elizabeth, add drama to Lagan’s poems of righteous anger at the destruction of the community by agents of the apartheid government.

The new set of prints will join a twin set by Graham and another Fort Hare poet, Dr Brian Walter, which is already on display in the museum. “My poems,” said Lagan, “pick up the narrative thread from Walter’s work, which recalls the spirit of South End through engagement with the communities who lived here. His works evoke the past, with questioning, underplayed anger. In my pieces, that comes alive the soul figure who demands confrontation with the past, who doesn’t want memories in peace songs, who toyi-toyis at the edge of the Baakens Valley. Hilary’s lithographs capture the drama and setting superbly. But most symbolic for me is the bringing of two sets together, at the museum in South End, for united they form a single eight piece narrative.”

The collective works of these artists blends together very well to bring together their shared memories of the now destroyed Port Elizabeth region.