SOME MEN VALUE THEIR COWS MORE THAN THEIR WIVES

In her first solo series on canvas in eight years, visual artist and curator, Nonka Mbonambi presents a preview of ‘Some Men Value Their Cows More Than Their Wives’. 

The preview consists of a series of unexpected portraits that invite the viewer to consider questions of perception, power, and respectability in the wake of Zulu marriages and the customary payment of lobola from the husband’s family to the wife’s. 

Mbonambi approaches these questions in a large-format, roughly textured, pop-cultured merging of cow and womxn. It is an explicit and intentional unmasking of “how men perceive womxn once lobola has been paid,” she explains.

Each painting draws on a particular customary norm or ‘life-lesson’ specific to Mbonambi’s own history being raised a young girl in a Zulu household who also attended a majority white boarding school from a young age. With lines of text like, “Am I covered up enough?”, as a backdrop to an image of a womxn – part-cow, part-human - these norms and life-lessons are shown for what they are: contradictions. 

In another painting titled ‘Tavern Queen’, she challenges the idea of a respectable Zulu womxn. The image depicts one of Mbonambi’s cow-like womxn sitting at a bar drinking champagne out of a bottle and ignoring the empty, untouched glasses in front of her. The womxn is elegant yet revealing, confident yet dismissive, unbothered yet unconcerned with signalling her ‘lady-ness’. 

Liberation or frustration? Mbonambi leaves that for the viewer’s introspection.

If the title of the series alone did not suggest it, the subversiveness of ‘Some Men Value Their Cows More Than Their Wives’ becomes more tangible with Mbonambi’s use of cow dung as a key material in each painting. In keeping with the theme of challenging gendered norms, the rationale behind the use of the dung was to insist upon the complete consumption of a cow, “if that is how we use cows, and if that is how womxn are going to be used up after marriage – completely,” explains Mbonambi. 

In this way, Mbonambi’s metaphor is made manifest: if cows are a symbol of value, womxn are the objects.

There is a more tactile dimension to each work, too. Mixed with oil paints and water, the cow dung creates a clay-like paint that cracks and curdles upon drying, which gives each painting a texture that can also be accessed by visually impaired viewers – an accessibility consideration important to Mbonambi’s practice. 

In the run up to Womxn’s Month in August in South Africa, Mbonambi’s palpable frustration with patriarchal norms and resulting gender inequalities are themes that transcend culture and custom. Conversations challenging deeply embedded ideas of right and wrong, and of value and worth, are critical in a society with untenable levels of gender-based violence. 

Mbonambi’s work is no stranger to these conversations; it is a match that lights a fire of a necessary, albeit heated, discussion.