The Protea, Flowers, and Symbolic Violence

Zeits MOCAA - A Protea Is Not a Flower -installation detail. Picture: J Scott

-Johannes Scott, November 2025

In the apartheid archive, Bessie Head appears as a stain that resists erasure: a name without a nation, a citizen without a state—not a cut flower, but the surplus of a Protea, stripped bare. Her symbolic undoing began at birth, deepened through adolescence, and culminated in symbolic assassination—an unfinished sentence in the archive, awaiting reception, where the wound resists closure.

A Protea Is Not a Flower is the title of an exhibition currently on view at Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town. Curated by Khanyi Mawhayi, the installation— bringing together diverse artists—positions Bessie Head as an Afrocentric protagonist, inviting viewers to reimagine her exilic experience within the fraught transition from traditional to modern. Don Mattera’s poem Protea … deepens this resonance, evoking the ill‑fated debris of a 300‑million‑year‑old Cape bush as it passes symbolically from Real to Imaginary nationhood. At the very moment the Protea flower was enshrined as South Africa’s emblem of unity, Bessie Head was cast into statelessness and symbolic erasure.

The entrance hall opens onto an ancient world eclipsed by modernism. Dedicated to Bessie Head, Lerato Shadi’s lightbox installation reclaims the traditional world as ontological ground for being African. Titled Mo khubu e tla Lalang teng, the life‑size work depicts a pastoral landscape. The Setswana phrase recalls the practice of burying the newborn’s umbilical cord—a physical site that unfolds into an imaginary space where myth metabolises the Real biological Thing, binding the subject symbolically to a primal home, tribe, and ancestral land.

Juxtaposed in the adjacent hall, an installation defines modernism through its rupture with traditionalism. Here, the umbilical cord’s mediation of cultural identity is displaced by arbitrary mediation—the modern typewriter as processor of imaginary difference. Modernism, as universal ideology, erases the local analogues of traditional life—economically, intellectually, and culturally. Bessie Head’s illuminated typewriter, set upon a red platform and encircled by archival documents, stands as stark testament to the administered registry of modern symbolisation.

Banners in red set the stage for theatrical fantasy. Across the halls, Bessie Head’s role is cast as protagonist, her name consistently preceded by the pronoun “modernist.” One banner reproduces Mattera’s poem The Protea Is Not a Flower, echoing Magritte’s caption, This is not a Pipe. Much like refusing to see a flag as a nation, the phrase exposes the gap between signifier and signified, between Real and symbolic artifice. The Afrocentric poem reframes the national floral emblem of unity, progress, and statehood as an emblem of symbolic alienation.

What these banners dramatise is the moment when the passage from Real to Symbolic loses its imaginary mediations, exposing aesthetic reception to the raw task of distinguishing collapse from meaning. When the passage from Real to Symbolic is not mediated by imaginary forms such as culture, religion, or science, symbolic relations of difference collapse. In ethno‑nationalism, the biological marker—such as epidermal trace—is stripped of nuance and mediation, becoming a raw signifier that stands in for an entire system of exclusion. Instead of being filtered through cultural meaning, relational complexity, or imaginative fantasy, the biological organism is treated as direct and unambiguous sign. With curatorial precision, it is precisely this foreclosure of symbolic order that awaits reception, to be distinguished, interpreted, and signified.

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At twelve, she met her first symbolic violence, as authorities abruptly dissolved her role as daughter within the familial fantasy she had assumed to be naturally her own. A similar rupture had unfolded earlier: her first foster parents rejected her when her colour proved not to be white, as expected. Her second foster family, the Heathcotes—the only parents she had known and believed to be her own—rejected her upon learning the circumstances of her white birthmother, a patient at a mental institution. Bessie Amelia Emery—named after her mother because her father was unknown—was consigned to an Anglican boarding school, from which she fled to return to the Heathcotes. Rejected again, they insisted on her exile. Traumatised, she became emotionally withdrawn. Alienated from the only home she had known, she turned to the Symbolic for rescue, seeking in books the paternal law that promised coherence against exile.

Briefly reintegrated into the social order of Symbolic Law, she was declared an adult at nineteen. Her Junior Certificate and Teachers Training Certificate secured her a teaching post, a position that seemed to anchor her within the civic fabric. Two years later she resigned to become a journalist, first in Cape Town and then Johannesburg, writing under her birth name, Bessie Amelia Emery. Immersed in the norms of social reality, civic duty, and the pleasures of symbolic fantasy, she joined the Pan Africanist Congress. Months later the political party was banned, and she became a target of surveillance and interrogation by the Security Police. Arrest, betrayal, attempted suicide, a tragic marriage to Harold Head, and hospitalisation followed—each a repetition of symbolic violence, each a reminder that the Symbolic order she had turned to for coherence was itself unstable, precarious, and subject to erasure.

Seeking a new life beyond South Africa, she applied successfully to Botswana for a teaching post. But when she requested travel documents, symbolic assassination followed: her South African citizenship was revoked, and she was exiled. Her statelessness was not merely bureaucratic; it was ontological. She was not erased in silence but processed, stamped, archived. The horror lay not in absence of record but in its abundance—forms, permits, racial classifications filed with obsessive precision. The very system that sought to erase her ensured her trace. In trying to make her disappear, it left behind a bureaucratic fossil—proof of its own obscene logic and symbolic perversion. In A Question of Power, her narration performs the breakdown of symbolic coherence, as the protagonist confronts the psychical violence of surveillance and identity fragmentation.

Thus, Bessie Head survives—not as reconciled subject, but as provocation. She is the protea that refuses to bloom on command, the flower that cannot be named. She is the symbolic wound apartheid could not cauterise, the trace that exposes the violence of its own exclusions. Cast as both “modernist” and “protagonist,” she unsettles the very categories meant to contain her. In her life and in her writing, the emblem of national unity becomes its opposite: a reminder that the promise of modernity, under apartheid, was built on erasure. To read her is to encounter Symbolic Desire itself—an order always to be renewed, always to come, where the wound resists closure and the future remains open.

Johannes Scott holds a BA in English and Theory of Literature (UNISA, 2011) and pursued postgraduate honours studies in Theory of Drama (2013), Narratology (2014), and Critical Theory (2015), earning distinctions in all three, with a specialisation in Derridean deconstruction and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of aesthetics.