Mmabatho Montsho is known to South Africans as an actress but that’s only one of the jobs Montsho has done. She classifies herself as a lover, a fighter and a visual artist – the last part owing to her paintings and filmmaking.
Montsho’s solo exhibition titled A Visual Ode to Prayer Warriors was showcased for National Women’s Day at the Manyanoat Constitution Hill in Johannesburg. Oomama bomanyano are the women of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa and oil paintings of their strength, spirit and boldness are what made this exhibition.
These women are recognized as being affiliated with prayer and being the ones the community relied on to hold prayer meetings when one home was in time of need. Seeing them being honoured like this in Montsho’s exhibition makes one think of all the things women do for the communities that are taken for granted.
“Umanyano” is isiXhosa for unity and this really describes the way in which these women have held themselves and their families together, as well as their communities. This also translates to the strides Montsho has gone through to see this project through – she has remained united with the knowledge that this project was necessary. She has remained united with all these women she paints by representing them. Umanyano is a movement in itself having been started in the early 1900s by black women who sought their own place in the church, a place where they could lead and bring ideas without the direct pressures of men’s leadership.
Being a spiritual person herself, Montsho finds inspiration for her work from visions and from there creates a body of work related to that. She is a scriptwriter and filmmaker as well, and these visions sometimes lead her to believe she needs to make a film where she needs to paint and this was the case here too. The beginning stages of what would become this exhibition were a script for a movie until everything was cleared out for her, she knew exactly the route she needed to take with this project.
Montsho comes from a family of women who pray, it was helpful to have them with her during the course of this project. The exhibition is made up of twenty pieces and some of the pieces that stand out here include a beaming portrait of the late Mama Winnie Madikizela-Mandela in her own Methodist Church uniform. Having led the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, she was also a woman who prayed, a woman who held her family together as well as herself.
