Mlungu - The people that came from the foam

White Horses, Sea Foam & The Stories That Arrived by Water

Some paintings arrive quietly. 

Others feel like they have travelled across oceans before landing on the canvas.

Mlungu was one of those works.

The word “Mlungu” is believed to have been used along parts of the Southern African coastline to describe the first white seafarers arriving by ship — ghostlike figures emerging through sea spray and white water. Some interpretations link the word to the foam of the ocean itself, to spirits arriving from another realm, to travellers crossing between worlds.

That idea stayed with me.

Because water has always carried stories.

Growing up in South Africa, folklore was never something locked away in books. It lived in conversations, in warnings, in whispers around fires, in rivers, mountains, oceans, and in the way older generations spoke about the unseen world. Across cultures, water is often viewed as a threshold — a place between memory and mystery, between the physical and spiritual.

In Mlungu, white horses emerge almost like moving spirits through layers of marks, symbols, and abstract landscapes. Horses themselves have long symbolised freedom, movement, power, and transition. But here they also become echoes of migration, ancestry, and arrival. Not just the arrival of people, but the arrival of ideas, cultures, conflict, mythology, and change.

The work became less about illustrating a literal story and more about capturing a feeling — that strange human experience of being pulled toward something ancient you cannot fully explain.

As a contemporary South African artist, I am deeply drawn to the collision between folklore and modern life. We live in a world obsessed with technology and speed, yet people still search for meaning in symbols, rituals, dreams, ancestry, and storytelling. I think that longing remains deeply human.

Visually, Mlungu carries the layered language that runs throughout much of my work — tribal-inspired mark-making, childlike freedom, aerial landscapes, and intuitive abstraction. The palette moves between softness and tension, much like the ocean itself. Calm one moment. Unpredictable the next.

There is also something deeply personal in this work.

As someone living in the bush, far from the sea, I still feel constantly pulled toward water. Perhaps it is memory. Perhaps ancestry. Perhaps imagination. Or perhaps creativity itself behaves like water — always searching for movement, connection, and flow.

That is the beauty of folklore. 

It changes shape depending on who is telling the story.

And maybe that is why these old legends still survive today.

Because beneath the mythology, they are ultimately stories about us.

Part of the Lore & Legends Collection