The Peace Tree, 1991
by Gert Swart and friends, including members of the Community Arts Project, Sawubona Youth Trust, Christian Outreach, and the Midlands Arts and Crafts Society
More than two years before the birth of what Archbishop Desmond Tutu, with great hope, would name “the Rainbow Nation,” a multi-racial group of artist-volunteers built the towering Peace Tree from colourfully painted and patterned rubber tyres. As such, objects (the tyres), which had come to signify horror due to their use as instruments of extrajudicial torture and execution during the 1980s (in a practice known as "necklacing") were transformed. As is fitting for the Christmas season, The Peace Tree was created to offer the hope of new possibilities during a period of great political unrest in South Africa as the recently freed Nelson Mandela, now president of the ANC, and the nation's president F. W. de Klerk were leading negotiations to dismantle apartheid.
Over the Christmas period, The Peace Tree stood, to mixed public controversy and delight, in a place of political and cultural power: the grounds of the Tatham Art Gallery in the main square of Pietermaritzburg - Pietermaritzburg is the provincial capital of what is now Kwa-Zulu Natal, and was then Natal. This was the first time that a monument representing the struggle for freedom of black South Africans had been erected in the city centre.
Below you will find photographs that document the creation and completion of The Peace Tree taken by the artist Zak Benjamin. You will also find copies of press cuttings, documenting different aspects of the Peace Tree project, discovered in the Tatham Art Gallery archives. Click on the images to find out more.
