Okaganga

2007

Mixed Media

David Jacobson: “The next image is very personal and also I think one of my favourite of – well, it’s hard to say because I’m vain, and I like them all actually. But this piece was the “Okaganga River” from 1964. I would have been thirteen years old and the year of my Bar Mitzvah. Being a Jew born in an ex-German colony just after the war under the jurisdiction of South Africa is something, which has informed my life obviously, very, very much. And during this informing of my life, I have become very much anti-nationalism and anti-belief in general, I am an atheist, and so I felt I could give up some of the things that had belonged to me prior to these conversions. And so what has been given up is the original Siddur or Bible, which the Jewish community gave me, which no longer exists in Namibia. And there is the original page from the Rabbi Rachman, telling me that I have successfully graduated from boyhood to manhood at the age of thirteen. And, oh yes, I cannot forget that, those are actually bulls on the side of the gate. They’re paintings of bulls. And this idea of graduating from boyhood to manhood is rather implicit in the idea of being a bull – now you can get your herd together.”