Madiba and Child
“Children have walked in to my studio, and insisted he smiled back at them when they waved.” Kurt Lossgott, on Madiba and Child
In 2002, Kurt won the competition to create a four-metre bronze sculpture for the Nelson Mandela Academic Hospital in Umtata. Kurt's idea was to show the president with an injured child, facing the hospital — the eye contact between the old man looking protectively down and the young child looking up. Named Madiba after Mandela's Xhosa clan name, the figure stands at the hospital's main entrance.
The commission began as a public tender. On 8 April 2001 the Sunday Times classifieds carried a Design Proposal — New Statue of Nelson Mandela at the New Nelson Mandela Academic Hospital, Umtata: the Department of Public Works, Province of the Eastern Cape, “requires the services of an experienced sculptor to produce the required statue which will occupy a prominent, external position at the entrance of the hospital.” The budget had to include the base, VAT and transport. Track record and a one- to two-page concept were the only documents asked for. Kurt's submission won.
About two years of studio work followed. Kurt built the four-metre original by joining blocks of the dense foam used in the film industry and carving them down to the form. The surface was then modelled in plasticene and wax. A small AIDS ribbon was placed on Mandela's lapel — a charged detail in the context of Umtata, then one of the regions in South Africa hardest hit by HIV/AIDS, where the new hospital was being built to serve a community in the thick of the epidemic. From the finished positive, silicon-rubber moulds were taken and trucked to Hendrik Joubert's bronze foundry in De Wildt, near the Magaliesberg.
The casting itself took twelve weeks. The wax-burnout phase ran thirty days. The four-metre sculpture was cast in seven sections and welded back together. Over fifteen hundred kilograms of bronze went into the final piece.
The Umtata local press wrote Umtata gets own Mandela statue, and showed project assistant Mpumi Beja looking up at the four-metre figure beneath the R400-million hospital complex.
On the hospital's official opening in 2004, the Daily Dispatch carried the installed bronze on its front page, with Mandela's own words on the page.
“This hospital will not only enhance the level of health care in the region but will also attract South Africa's leading specialists, health workers and academics to do research and train young nurses and doctors … I am honoured to have my name associated with a facility that will provide hope to so many South Africans.”
— Nelson Mandela, Daily Dispatch, on the opening of the Nelson Mandela Academic Hospital, Umtata, 2004
