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Pulled From the Shadows: William Kentridge's African Dance of Death

In what may be his most haunting production to date, The Head & the Load, performed at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, December 4–15, 2018, William Kentridge has created a living panorama commemorating the one million Africans who died on their continent as cogs in the military machinery of the First World War’s battling empires. They died as “counted not named” masses, without rank, without tributes, and without voices—for kings and countries (Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany) that were not their own. Commenting on the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, one of the African narrators laments, “Even if I could persuade myself that Franz Josef is dead, I could never persuade myself he was ever alive.” If only they could have fought instead for their own leaders, like the king of the Ashante, imprisoned by the British for decades. This is the darkest side of colonialism, foretold by atrocities like King Leopold II’s ten million mutilated Congolese dead. Regarded as sub-human, and denigrated with monikers like wogs, their lives were spent in hunger, fatigue, and disease, unmarked by anonymity in death, on a vast continent shown in the performance through projections of old maps.