It’s always fascinating to discover the anonymous designers responsible for our national identity – the people behind everyday items such as coins, flags and emblems that we rarely pay attention to. One of these is calligrapher Andrew van der Merwe, who redesigned the first post-apartheid Freedom of the City of Cape Town document 25 years ago for former president Nelson Mandela, and later for other heroes such as Ahmed Kathrada and recently for Barack and Michelle Obama.
“When the ANC took power of the Cape, one of the first things they did was to bestow Civic Honours on struggle heroes like Achmat Davids, Imam Abdullah Haron, Dorothy Zihlangu and Adele Searll – all of my own personal heroes. But we couldn’t keep the document the way it was; it just seemed so out of place to decorate their names in a European tradition, the same style used during apartheid,” says Van der Merwe.
So they redesigned – a significant aesthetic transition for the time – and it evolves in his latest work that is a spectacularly detailed, hand-drawn and illustrated scroll for Archbishop Emeritus Njongonkulu Ndungane. Indigenous flowers, African textile patterns, animals and writing symbols adorn the document, created in the traditional style of an illuminated scroll with wooden Protea-shaped finials, gold leaf and specifically developed scripts.
The techniques date back to ancient European manuscripts, he says, a “Eurocentric tradition” adapted for South Africa. “What we’ve got locally is fundamentally European, so I had to depart from that because it has very little relevance locally. For the Freedom of the City we looked to African beadwork, graphics and writing systems. “Southern Africa never had a writing system when the Europeans came here and the ancient west, central and northern African writing systems were actually actively squashed by the colonialists, so to use local writing systems became an act of defiance – a big part of the reason I embraced the writing systems in the designs,” he says.
But what is the Freedom of Cape Town? “A joke Patricia de Lille makes when she hands it over is that you don’t need to pay your way any more,” Van der Merwe responds, laughing. “But really it’s the highest acknowledgment the city can give for a person’s service; that’s what makes it so special for me to work on.”