Lucas Sithole: Lazy watchman (Night watchman) (LS8006), 1980

Rembrandt's 'The Night Watch', with its group of militiamen whose leader is illuminated by a shaft of light, has influenced artists throughout the ages. But the idea of the nightwatchmen and their representation within a South African context has a distinctively disparate history. Not unlike Rembrandt's subject, the nightwatchmen on the mines were in many senses a private police force or militia, employed by the white mine owners.
 
In the literary works of African Modernist writers such as Peter Abrahams, the Dhlomo brothers, and AS Mopeli Paulus, the figure of the nightwatchman plays a very distinct role. Photographers such as David Goldblatt too captured this liminal figure of South Africa's social landscape. Not unlike the Askari (African men who served in the colonial armies), the nightwatchman was often the unwilling enforcer of oppressive laws and regulations.
 
More recently, Francis Alÿs created The Nightwatch, a twenty-channel synched video installation that documents an action he realised in 2004 in which he released a fox into the National Portrait Gallery of London in the middle of the night and used the museum's CCTV system to follow its movements.

Many representations of nightwatchmen in South Africa, particularly in literature, often characterise them unsympathetically. However, Sithole's representation portrays the figure with a little more empathy. Wisened, perhaps by the nature of his work, with his arms pressed tightly against his body, Sithole's attenuated embodiment bears a distinct vulnerability. His long pocked and scabrous trench coat, his peaked cap forced over his head, covering his eyes, suggest something of the bitter environment under which these men worked. His bare feet evince his poverty.

 

The nightwatchmen may well have been a character of loathing for many, but in Sithole's rendering, the man's abject helplessness, of being caught between capitalism and apartheid, is masterfully rendered.