One of William Kentridge's largest productions to date, The Head & The Load, tells the forgotten stories of Africans in World War 1, who served mostly as porters for European armies on the continent.
South African artist William Kentridge became world famous for his charcoal drawings and hand-drawn animated films, but his work continued to grow in scope and he began staging performances. Today he also creates operas and collaborative stage productions combining numerous art forms.
How was the idea for the production hatched? The production came from seeing a huge space in New York, the Park Avenue Armory, which I was invited to do a performance in. It’s an old military structure 85 metres long – so the idea came for a processional piece using that length, connected to the military. And that brought us back to the idea of the First World War.
What did you find out about Africans in WW1? Only 40 years after the war did the nationalist movements in the different African colonies come to a confidence and a strength to challenge Europe and gain their independence in the 1960s. So the idea was to look at this hidden history of Africa in the First World War.
And the Head & the Load is an attempt to note their actions and give recognition and record them. So at the end we have a list of names of the people that died, the names that were never written on any war memorial. They were not inscribed in stone in the way that so many European names are, both in Europe and in the former colonies.
So some things are done with dance, some things are done with voice – with the voice for example we take a familiar song like the British national anthem God Save the King. It starts being sung as a straightforward anthem but bit by bit it is disintegrated and taken apart until the singers are saying, “Who is this king?”, “What is this king over the seas?”, “We have our own kings!” even as you hear remnants of God Save the King.
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