Azibuyele Emasisweni: Pitika Ntuli’s Return to the Source at Ditsong Museum
Reclaiming the Ancient in Contemporary Form
Open until the end of June
Prof. Pitika Ntuli’s award-winning solo exhibition, curated by Ruzy Rusike, is currently on view at the Ditsong National Museum of Cultural History, Pretoria, presented by the South African Gallery of Legends in partnership with Ditsong Museums.
Comprising 45 bone sculptures created from elephant, rhino, giraffe and horse bones, the exhibition draws on African spiritual knowledge systems to address questions of healing, memory and reconnection with nature. This is the first opportunity for Gauteng audiences to experience the exhibition in physical form, following its national tour from the National Arts Festival to Oliewenhuis Art Museum and Durban Art Gallery.
Azibuyele Emasisweni remains on view until June 2026.
Seventy years after the Freedom Charter was adopted at Kliptown in 1955, historian, sculptor and academic Professor Pitika Ntuli is sounding a sobering note. Speaking to SABC News as South Africa commemorated the anniversary at Walter Sisulu Square in Soweto, Ntuli argued that the majority of the Charter's promises have been abandoned, and that the document which once mapped the moral and political horizon of a free South Africa has lost much of its value in practice.
For Ntuli, the problem is not a shortage of good ideas. South Africa, he points out, has produced no end of visionary frameworks — from the Reconstruction and Development Programme to the Chapter 9 institutions created to safeguard constitutional democracy. The question he poses is disarmingly simple: what exactly are we reconstructing, and what are we developing? The blueprints exist; what is missing, in his view, is the ideological backbone to carry them through.
Ntuli traces the drift to what he calls a template of oppression that has quietly reasserted itself in the post-apartheid era. Neo-colonialism, he suggests, did not arrive with tanks but seeped into the ruling class through self-interest, greed and corruption, bending institutions away from the people they were built to serve. The Charter's call for the land, the wealth and the country to be shared among those who live in it has, in that telling, been slowly unlearned.
The 70th anniversary is therefore less a celebration than a summons. For Ntuli — whose life's work in sculpture, poetry and scholarship has long insisted on returning to the source — the Freedom Charter still holds its original power. The task is to recover its spirit, match its ideas with political will, and refuse to let a founding promise become a museum piece.
Commentary based on reporting by Kholo Tefo for SABC News, 26 June 2025.
