Windhoek City Graffiti

Three Circles looks like a place ripe for sacrificial slaughter. It’s got the graffiti to arbitrarily mark it as a haunt of n’er-do-wells, a view that lends itself to looking villainously out over the city and thanks to street artists like Teaboy, Ci/A, ABC and CBV, it is also luridly beautiful.

But only if you like your art spontaneous, subversive and displayed anywhere other than in galleries. If you enjoy the thrill of walking through alleys and finding anonymous and new images on the once pristine walls that beg you to reconsider your heroes and your prophets.

In the walk way between Tal Street and the Old Breweries’ courtyard, the art snakes imposingly up the walls. A village scene, a cool sneaker wearing woman, an urban piece clearly commissioned. But then somewhere inbetween it all, someone has brusquely stenciled an image of Mandela asking ‘Hero/Traitor?’ not far from a stencil of Christ the ‘Profit’.

The basketball court behind the post office in Klein Windhoek used to be a hub of such artistic misbehaviour. Tags and tumultuous scenes used to adorn the back wall but a recent visit has found the wall grey, painted over, the transient art erased and a canvas beckoning in all its blankness.

Like the corner of the old Air Namibia building which grew a stenciled rat or the random electricity boxes sporting smiley faces downtown.

Though Windhoek’s graffiti scene experiences a spike every now then for those paying a particular kind of attention to familiar spaces, this spray painted and stenciled form of street art remains largely unexplored with regard to the forms political, intellectual and tongue-in-cheek origins developed so well by artists like Banksy, Shepard Fairey or the ballsy artists commissioned to add some authenticity to a Syrian refugee camp scene in ‘Homeland’ who used the opportunity to write ‘Homeland is racist’ in Arabic as condemnation of the hit show’s depiction of the Middle East.

Notoriously a tool of the marginalised, the disgruntled and the dissenting youth, this form of urban expression is perhaps most locally legitimised by Neo Paints who have embraced its commercial possibilities to advertise its products with a whirl of spray painted black dogs looming large on their bright yellow walls.

Paint, of course, you can get inside.

With walls waiting and a local graffiti map just itching to be drawn as a tourist treasure trove and temperature gauge of the urban youth, Windhoek’s graffiti artists have the rare opportunity to create a scene in a city lacking alternative voices fuelled by street artists who consider the nation’s issues and challenges, celebrate its heroes or decry its villains with the writing on the wall.

Note: Defacing private property is a crime and absolutely illegal so don’t say you weren’t warned. However, if you’re a potential street artist with a can of paint and a steady hand but you’re still wondering about the point of it all, take heart in the words of Banksy:

“Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don’t come up with a picture to cure world poverty, you can make someone smile while they’re having a piss”.

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