Fashioning Modern Africanism

Botho Project Space is proud to present from 16 th  to 19 th  of February 2023, Bahati Simoens’ first solo show in South Africa through  a Halfway Line through history . With  ‘The Halfway Line’ , a western love-story, Bahati is offering a black-owned story that explores the black cowboys narrative anchored in a South African context. By re-inventing a vision of a community, she shines a spotlight on the whitewashing that Hollywood spread around the Black cowboys. Throughout history, all the cowboys and renegades on horseback offered by the entertainment industry were marvellous utopias of white heroism. Western movies were meant to capture the essence of America, including the freedom of the open frontier and the self-determination of man through the figure of the cowboy himself, commonly understood to be an excellent shot who rides horses and who, above all, is white. That’s what Hollywood has tried to make the public believe for many years but the true origin of cowboys comes in the