Sekoele - An Ode to Radiant Walls

Sekoele: An Ode to Radiant Walls and the Art of Going Back to Go Forward
Anita Venter. 14/03/26

There is a bird in the Akan tradition that knows what most of us forget: that to move forward with power, you must first turn your head and look behind you. The Sankofa bird does not stumble. It holds a precious egg in its beak – the future – while its feet press forward and its eyes hold the past. Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi. It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten. Lenosa and I have never needed to learn this lesson. We were born already knowing it.

Lenosa came from the highlands of Thaba-Tseka in the Mountain Kingdom of Lesotho, from a district where the mountains hold memory in their stone. I came from a different place, a different lineage, a different language – and yet when we found each other in the red dust of Bloemfontein/Mangaung, we recognised something immediately: we were born to create together. Not as colleagues. As siblings. The kind of siblings the ancestors arrange, not the parents. We share no blood, but we share something older than blood – a calling toward the earth, toward indigenous knowledge, toward the walls that communities build when they refuse to be silent. It was this calling that led us to Sekoele.

Sekoele Holistic Living Arts Centre is not merely a venue. It is a declaration. Built in Westdene, Bloemfontein, using the most ancient of building technologies – clay, soil, animal dung, reclaimed waste, the patient labour of many hands – Sekoele stands as proof that the future does not have to be made of concrete and glass. It can be made of what was always here. Lenosa, co-founder and lead earth-builder of this living space, poured himself into its walls as a regenerative public artist and indigenous knowledge practitioner, bringing architectural precision and ancestral intuition into every layer. I poured myself in alongside him – post-natural researcher, climate activist, co-creator – because when you find your building-brother, you do not stand and watch. You pick up the mud.

And then came Keith Armstrong – Prof, as we call him – arriving from Queensland with decades of ecological and social justice art practice behind him, and the rare quality of a person who genuinely listens before he speaks. His Radiant Walls was born at Sekoele as if the space had always been waiting for it. Working with us, with Sonya Rademeyer, with Mme Mary, with poet-activist Pheello Rasello – he built a cob wall and punctured it with hundreds of glass bottles, transforming discarded waste into a stained-glass cathedral of light and language. Through those bottle-ends, Pheello's multilingual poetry was projected into the night sky above Bloemfontein – a lo-fi digital display of radiant voices shining powerfully through what had once seemed impenetrable walls. For the Vrystaat Kunstefees/Tsa-Botjhaba Festival of 2025, we held the night together and let the words burn.

This is what Sankofa / Sekoele looks like in practice. Not nostalgia. Not sentimentality. But the
deliberate, disciplined act of reaching back into indigenous building methods, into oral knowledge, into the body's memory of how to shape earth – and carrying that forward into new light, new form, new voice. The wall at Sekoele does not separate inside from outside. It radiates. It is translucent. It does not keep the community out – it broadcasts the community in. Lenosa and I have built many things together. Pixels to Perspectives in Jagersfontein, born out of devastation and turned into art of regeneration. The eARTherapy Lab at OT Spaces, National Hospital – a living studio where healing and making converge. The Litema living heritage celebrations with UFS and the Free State National Museums. Each project has been a different wall, a different light source, a different community of hands. But the thread is always the same: go back and get what was forgotten, then bring it blazing into the present. Sekoele is that thread made physical. Radiant Walls is its brightest expression yet.

The Sankofa bird holds its egg carefully, knowing that the future is fragile and must be carried with intention. Lenosa and I carry ours together – one from the mountain highlands of Lesotho, one from the flat clay plains of the Free State – moving forward, always, with our eyes wide open to what came before.

Anita Venter is a Post-Natural mentor, researcher, lecturer, climate activist and artist at the University of the Free State. She is co-founder of the Meraka concept and the Qala Phelang Tale / Start Living Green initiative, and a long-time creative collaborator with Lenosa Mahapang, Sekoele Holistic Living Arts Centre, and the broader regenerative arts community of Bloemfontein/Mangaung