Mark Smith’s “Emerging” is an iconic sculpture that shoves your mind off the tracks of mundane thinking, especially when you see it in person.
Standing from a Pan-African stage and looking out to the world, it brings to mind two things
One: The revolutions that begin and end prematurely in African countries that have spent 30 to 70 years trying to build a nation with a common identity. One is Kenya’s Gen Z revolution that blasted on to the global stage on June 25, 2024 and left a lasting imprint like a comet’s trail. It is not that these refreshing revolutions die out, but that the spirit of that uprising sips underground to emerge later as a new front. The challenge is to sustain this spirit, keep its fire burning, enrich its intellectual inquiry, strengthen its members’ backbone as a generation that will end up leading that country into new reform.
Two: The reminder of the shocking scourge of homelessness in cities of rich and powerful economies. Walking through downtown Atlanta shocks you. You see the opulence of sleek skyscrapers and expensive hotels and right around the corner are hidden alleys of homeless humanity is near-decaying states of unwashed lives. They wake up hollow, hungry and angry and throwing an occasional fight with a fellow homeless person; they spend the day wondering or sleeping around waiting for a chariot to swing down low from the top-most floors of capitalism’s skyscrapers; but mostly, they stare at the world, hollow, forgotten, as the lies are woven over and over again about the richest nation in the world where the American dream happens to the least of us. Smith’s Emergence reminds you that there are those who never could go beyond lifting their heads above the gutters. That is a systemic failure.
When the sun shines on that work of art and hope comes flooding back in, you realize that much like this sculpture, a young generation in African countries is emerging– downloading itself into its own light, connecting their daily pain to the inhumanity inherent in extreme capitalism. At its core, at its apex of insane success for a shockingly few, capitalism is an unloving system, cold and uncaring. This generation dubbed Gen Z has had enough.
Much like this sculpture’s silent presence, a silent suffering in Africa’s nations replicates the same suffering of those vomited out by the flames of a flawed economic system in Atlanta. The despondent faces of homeless people living and defecating right beneath the glitter of the city’s skyscrapers is shocking. This stench of living at the point where the shoe meets the pavement exists in every nation that thrives on the freedoms and cruelty of capitalism; unless that nation has mastered the application of social programs that act as antidote to capitalism’s extreme.
Unfortunately, a fall from an opulent office in the sky is not uncommon. Some of those dragging putrid blankets were once CEOs in those buildings. Some of them have made it back on to wealthy lifestyles because they had social programs that fed them at their lowest point. Civilization only makes sense when human dignity is deliberately calculated into our systems of governance.