The Lands of Azania (2014 - 2094)

Provenance

WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town.

Private Collection.

Exhibited

WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town, The Future White Woman of Azania Saga (2014-2094), 27 November to 1 January 2014.

Somerset House, London, Of Gods, Rainbows and Omissions, 2018.

Literature

Chad Rossouw (2016) ArtThrob, The Map is Not The Territory, online, accessed 4 August 2026.

Anna Stielau (2015) 'Towards a queer futurity: The utopian impulse in the work of Athi-Patra Ruga and Milumbe Haimbe', Agenda, 29:1, pages 127 to 139, illustrated in colour on page 129.

Map making is the first step of nationalism. I decided to create a map of this fantastical world of Azania and added countries around it in response to things that were really happening in the world. I stitched Sodom and New Sodom on there when Uganda was going crazy with homophobic stuff. - Athi-Patra Ruga

Notes

The present lot, The Lands of Azania (2014–2094), forms part of contemporary artist Athi-Patra Ruga's ever expanding mythology of Azania, in which invented characters and territories serve as a vehicle for engaging with the legacies of apartheid.¹

Azania is a name of ancient Greco-Roman origin, used historically to designate territories along the eastern coast of Southern Africa. During the apartheid era, the term was adopted by Black Consciousness and Pan-Africanist movements, including the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and, later, AZAPO (Azanian People's Organisation), as an alternative to "South Africa," a name these movements associated with colonial and apartheid rule. ²

In this work, the artist's map reworks this idea into an invented cartography populated by territories such as Palestine, Sodom, Kuntistan, Zwartheid and Nunubia, names that draw on pre-colonial, colonial and biblical associations to evoke sin, excess and contemporary political tension. The work recalls the embroidered political maps of Italian artist Alighiero e Boetti, though where Boetti mapped existing geopolitical divisions, Ruga's fictional territories suggest that the politicised meanings attached to place names precede, and perhaps outlast, the nation-state structures those names come to represent.³

^1. WHATIFTHEWORLD (2014) WHATIFTHEWORLD, The Future White Women of Azania Saga, online, accessed 12 August 2026.

^2. Unknown Author (2018) The Journalist, East African Trade and The Origin of the Name Azania, online, accessed 12 August 2026.

^3. WHATIFTHEWORLD (2014) WHATIFTHEWORLD, The Future White Women of Azania Saga, online, accessed 12 August 2026.