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When a generation is in its golden years, it should be a prerequisite for it to impart an incalculable worth of cognisance to all. This will ripple into creating a bridge to learn, embrace and keeping customs. Beyond all considerations, this enables us to predict prospective advancement. The remarkable Ester Mahlangu has over decades, proved the practicality of the ideology in rationale.
During the signing of her mural at all the Market Theatre Foundation buildings, Mahlangu was living proof that reverence is far greater than age. Like many of her contemporaries in the village, who started painting early in life, Ester began at the tender age of ten.
Esther Mahlangu, Signing, Windybrow Arts Centre, 2018 ©Sipho Gongxeka x Siphosihle Mkhwanazi
Considering a limit in favourable circumstances during her upbringing, it was never in her dreamscape that she would become a renowned iconoclast through her traditional painting and beadwork. Living in a global village consumed by adrenaline, she trots with grace and numerous value statements as relevant as time.Her key tenets that have made it plausible to roll a list of accomplishments.
In the course of her hardiness, the biggest feat that she has accomplished is that of opening a contingent of possible alternatives that contribute growth in transforming the lives of her communal surroundings, even to women across all sectors.
As a remnant of an applied renaissance, Gogo Ester Mahlangu’s viewpoints on perceptual and inductive knowledge are unclouded. She is not limited to an academic education. Instead, her impact in her fixedness has denounced numerous apothegms especially that of prioritising academics in lieu of artisanship, – principally when a learner is not yielding expected average results. At the same time as a senior inhabitant, she advocates for a dire need to create more vocational institutes for learners that achieve below average scholastic results. However, she does not refute that both are important and interlinked with each other.
Esther Mahlangu, Signing, Market Square 2018 ©Sipho Gongxeka x Siphosihle Mkhwanazi
In replying to begging the question, the well over eighty year old marvel regards the youth as the sinews of the world. Meaning: Parents should not be indifferent to changing times, but rather, together with their children rather seek to not forge and emulate values that are not in parallel to keeping our heritage and empathic values it enshrines, as the African pedagogy is rooted in instilling apposite resurgence.
Like her artwork , Ester Mahlangu is an iridescent human being, brightening with multi colours of diversity. Each of these olours is of huge significance in creating a sight that we all find irresistible and intriguing. She is a personification of legacy, and that even the lowest fire bring warmth. Above all, she is a staunch congruent of love, and indeed love is eternal.
