When your freedoms are taken from you, visual expressions of your frustration are all you have left. Willie Bester is a South African artist who uses his art to display the cruelty of apartheid. Born in 1956 in Montagu, he was classified as ‘other-coloured’ as his parents were ‘mixed-race’ – Xhosa and ‘coloured’. This meant that they were not allowed a home near European or Coloured people, so he spent his childhood living in people’s backyards.

His exposure to art was unconventional. He was gifted some art materials as an unemployed teen at an apartheid army training centre where he was forced to stay for a year.

The racism he witnessed on a daily basis had a significant impact on his life. He joined a collective of artists where he began to express himself through mixed-media, using found objects, photographs, and bright paints to represent the greed, corruption, and commodification of people that occurred. He played an active role in the anti-apartheid movement, depicting the reality of life in the townships. While European journalists visited South Africa and took photos of poorly constructed shacks and naked children surrounded by debris, Bester shows solidarity amongst residents and strength through struggle. They aren’t victims, they’re survivors.

In his work Tribute to Steve Biko (1992), Bester honours a fallen anti-apartheid agitator so people remember what was needed to end apartheid — not pandering to the oppressors through lobbying and ‘debate’, but mobilisation on the streets.