By Linda Stupart

It strikes me as wonderfully appropriate that the anemically pale and moneyed crowd oozing through the Joburg Art Fair is being watched over by a monument of epic proportions; with Sophie, a woman cast off of Mary Sibande’s body, balancing majestically on a rearing bronze horse, her maid’s uniform billowing behind her as she performs a daring equestrienne feat; at once absolutely free and completely in control.
Mary Sibande’s The Reign is the latest in a series of works featuring Sophie, a domestic worker who is an amalgamation of South African history (and present) and Victorian stylings, a character who carries the weight of hundreds years of colonial history while still living firmly in the present. And though many of Sibande’s sculptures cast Sophie still within the role of the subjugated on the edge of emancipation, demurely knitting a Superman outfit in They don’t make them like they used to, this year Sibande’s character has escaped into a space of daydream and power, and a place where she claims her position in South African history – a narrative marked by monuments of dead white men riding well-endowed steeds.
And it is important to note that this horse is indeed a stallion, no tame asexualized Gelding who would kowtow to its rider’s wishes without a fight. The stallion is possibly the most widely recognised symbol of virility and sexual power, with Sophie, like many horsewomen and girls before her relishing the thrill and control that comes with holding such a beast between their thighs. Freud, of course, thought that little girls liked horses because of penis envy, that they longed to claim ownership of the cock they lack. Freud, however (as I like to say), can suck my dick.
While women and girls may gain autoerotic pleasure (note auto, as they pleasure themselves), from riding horses, it is power and control that girls and women, denied this right in everyday life, claim through horses. Equestrian sports are the only sports in which men and women compete equally, and the horse Sophie rides provides her with the right to enter the art fair, to claim agency as a woman on equal footing (or hoofing) with men. More than anything, horses relationship to women is one that reverses the traditional colonial gaze, where women are passive receptacles of desire. When with horses (in real life and literature) it is women who have the strength and the power, who project their desire on to the horse they master (or mistress as the case may be). As Enid Bagnold wrote of Velvet Brown’s virulent horse in he 1935 classic National Velvet: “He handed her the glory of command”.
While riding horses is a fantasy often made real for women, the equestrian world is still almost entirely the premise of the privileged, white classes. Certainly in South Africa, which exactly mirrors the British model of equestrianism, horse riding is almost entirely white, and completely privileged, with well-groomed men and women on well-groomed (by someone else) steeds drinking sherry and gallivanting around the countryside, only to leap off and throw their reins to a black helper while they go off to lunch. Thus, a domestic worker riding a horse is an almost ridiculous image, throwing immediately to light the colonial histories that keep race and class so intricately tied in South Africa, and giving Sophie a way to heroically break free of these ties herself.
Cast in bronze and rearing from the Art Fair floor, The Reign not only signifies horse-ness, but also the specificity of the equestrian monument; a well trodden trope with a history that spans centuries and a prevalence all over the world. Almost every great leader ends up immortalised on horseback, Louis Botha, for example, still stands proudly on horseback outside of parliament in Cape Town. Statues of horses, as well as all the images of virility, power and control discussed above, signify leadership in their rider – revolutionaries, heroes, kings are all cast on horseback, the medium through which they bring their people to victory, to power.
And the rearing horse represents even more: a daring, a fight, a war hero; the kind of frontier heroism St George exemplified when he slayed the dragon for his countrymen. The rearing horse suggests that Sophie is at war, and that she’s going to win. Is Sophie leading a revolution then, a takeover? Perhaps, here, like in her secret Superman costume, she is about to lead domestic workers to freedom. Perhaps she is about to take over her own history…
There is, however, another element to the rearing horse monument. For the rules of equestrian statuary state that a horse with two hooves off the ground signifies that the rider has died in service to their country. Does this mean the end for Sophie, or is this just one of the possibilities she must face, and one of the legacies of her history as woman, domestic worker and African?
The Reign is at once a monument and a memorial to the South African domestic worker. Here, Sophie once again claims a voice that she is traditionally denied, with her faithful, though turbulent, steed helping her to shout all the louder.