Murray’s sardonic silkscreen print Amandla, first exhibited at the Goodman Gallery as part of ‘Hail to the Thief’ in 2010, gives vent to mordant disgust at the venal abuses of the ruling party. Ripping off Jonathan Shapiro’s 1986 iconic struggle poster ‘Asiyi eKhayelitsha’ (We won’t go to Khayelitsha), which promoted the Freedom Charter slogan WE DEMAND HOUSES SECURITY AND COMFORT in the context of urban forced removals, Murray retorts with the slogan AMANDLA! WE DEMAND CHIVAS, BMW’S AND BRIBES.

Is this racist Afro-pessimism? Or is this anger generated by a sincere and deeply felt disappointment? I suspect the intensity of resentment apparent in the critique of the ruling party betrays the extent to which the artist bought into an idealistic vision of an egalitarian post-apartheid democratic society. Murray was in the very workshops in Community Arts Project where ‘Asiyi eKhayelitsha’ was produced, and where I took my first job after university, making agitation propaganda and printing posters and t-shirts in the same genre as Shapiro’s poster. Now, twenty years later, he is using the commercial art gallery to make rhetorical political art for an international art market, with the archive of struggle media as his critical point of reference.

It is something of a full circle – a return to the agitation Murray engaged in before being swept up in the activism brought on by the political confrontations that overtook us all towards the end of the 1980s. Murray’s undergraduate work critiqued ignorant white South Africa, using a pop/punk sardonic style: a chimp’s head wall-mounted in a tyre with crown and text reading ‘Dim King’, or the three heads of grinning white Mom, Dad and blond Son separated by little swastikas with the text ‘Happy | Family’. This practice critiques white power and hints at impending disaster in a similar way to the work in ‘Hail to the Thief’.

The process of politicisation that Murray and others of our group experienced in the 1980s may have been prompted by our position as white art students, but was layered with a range of influences that unfolded alongside dramatic, sometimes violent, events. As young white men whose life choices from age sixteen had been dictated by compliance with, or avoidance of, military conscription – in a period of escalating conflict on the country’s borders and in its townships – many were eager for confrontation with the patriarchal systems that had controlled our lives since high school.

This was a generation that came of age during the counter-commercial ‘do-it-yourself’ ethos of punk rock, influenced by the likes of the Sex Pistols, Crass, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, and The Clash, as well as the anti-colonial messages of reggae music, highlighted by Bob Marley playing at Zimbabwe’s Independence Concert in 1980. In the early 80s Murray played bass in James Phillips’s post-punk band Illegal Gathering, named after a law preventing public gatherings without state sanction. The live music, the nightclub scene and reggae gigs in the townships were a core part of the counter-culture of this period, opening the way for new identities challenging racial and sexual discrimination. For artists on the progressive edge, the equivalent of this independent thrust in dance-floor culture was a trend toward group shows in temporary locations, often combined with performances, entirely autonomous from the public or commercial art circuit.

Professor Neville Dubow taught a progressive theory course on Art and Power at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Arts during the 1980s. His visual presentations tracked Nazi aesthetics of power and patriarchy and drew parallels between National Socialism in Germany in the 1940s and South African Christian National education and values. His passion for Dada and the Russian avant-garde inspired young minds to build new visual languages to confront a repressed and revolutionary South Africa.

The year 1983 was key in the mobilisation of civic organisations against the state. The same year that Peter Tosh played in Swaziland, the End Conscription Campaign was established to challenge military conscription of white males, and the United Democratic Front was formed. Murray and a handful of art students were in the 10,000-strong crowd at the launch of the UDF in Mitchell’s Plain. We felt the revolutionary momentum gathering and glimpsed the enormous potential power of a broad front of civic, labour, church and student organisations, but had little idea what was coming. Within four years the townships had become ungovernable, there were two States of Emergency granting executive powers to police and military, mass arrests of civic leaders, spies reporting on our actions, and friends in detention without trial, in hiding or exile.

When the universities ignited with political activism in 1985, a small group of art students, Murray included, took a lead in producing agitation propaganda in the spirit of the Russian Revolution poster books, well thumbed in the university library and communal houses. They soon found their skills in high demand. Averse to participation in student politics per se – which represented an elite of white youth, historically forced by the confrontation of Black Consciousness politics in the 1970s to organise separately from black students – this core group serviced a range of civic, labour and political organisations, across the political spectrum, which fell into the ambit of what became called the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM). Bored by endless meetings, this visual production group elected a member to attend important meetings and bring back a brief for the group to work from, or invited a person from the larger group to brief them with a mandate from their organisation. In a mocking gesture to the endless list of acronyms emerging for new political and civic organisations, the group decided to call themselves LAG – the Loosely Affiliated Group. Perhaps the lefties were not comfortable telling their comrades that they entrusted their propaganda to such a loose and cynical crew. They somehow changed LAG to stand for Liaison Action Group. Over time we became known as the Gardens Media Group.

A very powerful network of communication was generated by the organisations within the MDM. Legitimate civic, church, student and labour groups networking together in the country were in communication with banned organisations in exile, which in turn were informed of the underground activities taking place. As a result you could not get certain information from your local organisation before the state was aware of what was happening or being planned.

Murray took an active role when the Gardens Media Group designed and produced multiple screen prints for paste-up banners supporting campaigns for such causes as the release of political prisoners on hunger strikes, the release of the Treason Trialist Govan Mebeki, as well as media for labour unions and posters for the ECC. We curated the photographic show South Africa in Conflict, which brought together 300 images of state violence and popular defiance. This ran concurrently with the ECC’s anti-war film festival held in Cape Town, for which Murray designed the poster. He was also the chief designer, with Jane Solomon, for the poster and logo for the nationwide Save the Press Campaign, in response to the state’s draconian censorship laws. We worked with Cosatu designing worker diaries while Jane Solomon designed the Food and Allied Workers’ Union (FAWU) logo which remains in use today. In 1989 we assisted in media design for the Towards a People’s Culture Festival, which was to be held in Cape Town. The festival was eventually banned under State of Emergency legislation.

With Jann Cheifitz, another member of our collective, we established the t-shirt printing wing of the Community Arts Media Project. Our job was to facilitate workshops and design and print t-shirts for many organisations, including unions, church groups and detainee support groups, for May Day celebrations and International Women’s Day events. We produced t-shirts for crowd marshals at funerals, for striking workers, to celebrate May Day and Women’s Day, to celebrate the memories of assassinated comrades such as David Webster, Ashley Kriel and the Gugulethu Seven, and for many other events and organisations.

The designs and posters produced by the Gardens Media Group were undertaken in communal situations and no single author was credited. Production was not confined to the workshop but sometimes involved illegally sourcing materials and getting the work up on the street. Late nights were occasionally spent wheat-pasting large multiple silkscreen prints on highway bridges and stadiums or using university printing facilities to make illicit media with materials we had stolen from a military base.

During this period of sustained civil unrest we were subjected to powerful experiences that galvanised our senses and sharpened our resolve. Attending funerals of slain activists was a regular occurrence. On the occasion of the funeral of the murdered underground military activists known as the Gugulethu Seven in March 1986, police blocked off the township to prevent media and activists from attending the event in solidarity. We were among those from the city (including the banned Communist Party poet, Jeremy Cronin) who slept the night before the funeral in the homes of township activists, grateful for their generous hospitality. Putting oneself as a white person on the other side of the barrier, beholden to your hosts for your safety, was a powerful trust-building experience. It was exhilarating to be part of an enormous crowd of activists united in song, dance and militant salutes, evading police teargas and shotgun pellets. On another occasion we found ourselves, acting on a tip-off from a photographer friend, at the onset of riots in the suburb of Athlone. Within an hour the calm streets were transformed by a group of youth activists into a battle zone, with dozens of commercial vehicles on fire across several streets and police and military streaming into the area with heavy weapons. This public eruption came a few days after the Trojan Horse incident, in which policemen hid on the back of trucks and lured youngsters to pelt them with stones. This resulted in the shooting and killing of three youths and the serious wounding of another thirteen. In 2005 ACG Architects were commissioned to design and construct a memorial to this event, which was erected by the City of Cape Town on the site in Athlone. Murray assisted with the design, the metalwork and the installation of this memorial.

As violence escalated in this period our positions became increasingly insecure. Workshops we had set up or worked with were raided by police and closed down. A fire destroyed most of the workshop at the Community Arts Project in Chapel Street. A while later a bomb was detonated in the replacement workshop at Community House in Salt River, destroying the facility, fortunately without injuries. Spies working for the police infiltrated most organisations. Friends were often detained. The security police approached an art-school friend and, armed with a suitcase of cash, tried to entice him to spy on us. He declined. Others spied on us of their own accord. Phones were bugged. A trusted friend approached Murray to hide weapons at the art school. Though Murray considered and then declined, it was not long before the friend was arrested. She had assisted an MK unit on a sabotage mission that had been infiltrated by police spies. After a long period in prison without being charged, she was then tried alongside thirteen co-accused, including the military leader of MK in the Western Cape responsible for the unit, Tony Yengeni. Yengeni and his co-accused were granted amnesty in 1991 as part of the political transition process. On his release he was elected ANC secretary for the Western Cape.

Yengeni went on to serve as ANC chief whip and chair of the joint standing committee on defence in the first democratic parliament ­– where he was at the centre of corruption allegations in the arms deal of the late 1990s. Yengeni, perhaps more than any other leader, represents the fall from idealistic goals to self-serving, base venality which has become the target for Murray’s acerbic art. After Yengeni’s conviction on fraud charges in 2001 for receiving a luxury Mercedes-Benz from sources linked to successful German arms dealer ThyssenKrupp, he served only four months of a four-year sentence, shortened no doubt owing to political meddling. He was re-elected to the ANC’s National Executive Committee in 2007, though hard evidence of corruption continues to surface from the German investigations into the multi-billion-dollar arms deal which has destabilised the South African government for over a decade.

When the Cold War drew to a close and apartheid finally crumbled, we felt an incredible sense of relief and took some pleasure in the knowledge that we had asserted pressure at sensitive points in the political system at the right time and in some of the right places. Murray’s cynicism is certainly fuelled by his experience of having taken risks alongside a number of cadres who have subsequently dropped their ideals for personal gain.