Having a choice. Making a change. HAM the Illustrator.
In his 27 years, HAM the Illustrator has participated in a lifetime of experiences which have created boundless energy, enthusiasm and commitment. He talks to us about the source, the development and the future of all that he has to offer in these times.
Who are you?
Hi! My name’s HAM the Illustrator, I’d like to consider myself an activist but professionally I’m an award-winning digital artist, illustrator and music producer. That’s the short answer.
Why do you do what you do? How did you get there?
I always consider myself to have three different sects as a person; you’ve got the side of me which is arts, visual arts based/ illustration, the side that is very music based/audio and the side that is very humanitarian based - politics and activism. They all work together in unity and they all started at different points. I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember. My Dad worked in finance and used to have these massive spreadsheets, kept in a box in the house. That used to be my little drawing box. I used to go on my Dad’s Windows 95 computer, type in something like “tank” or “gun” and then print off pages and pages of collaged images and just sit there copying and copying them. It became such a routine, I was doing this all the time. As I got older, it became a way that my brain stayed alert. I wasn’t able to pay attention unless I was drawing. When teachers tried to confiscate my drawing pads, I would just fall asleep. Drawing has always been a passion. It wasn’t something I ever got to choose, it’s how I could express myself.
I was really born a politician - born into politics. My mum is a freedom fighter and in political exile. She fled Namibia during Apartheid. When she was twenty-one years old and pregnant, she lived as a refugee and political asylum seeker. Since I’ve grown up, she’s been in the public eye as a politician. My mum was not a typical mother. I grew up in a matriarchal household. My dad is the quiet English guy and my mum runs the house with an iron fist! Mum would only watch three things on TV: football, tennis or the news, and she would binge watch news from day till night. From a very young age I’d ask her what’s going on, and she’d always explain, no matter how young I was: “In this world there is no good or bad, there are issues being fought.” From a young age I understood that people’s heroes and villains are different, so that always got me enticed in politics.
Music came from my African family (and I’ve got a big African family! My mum is one of eleven kids, so you can only imagine how many cousins that I have and a lot (not all) of my mom’s family live in the location which is the largest ghetto in Windhoek, Namibia. At family gatherings in the location, my elder cousins would hang around in the backyard by the car and play hip-hop instrumentals through the speakers then immediately start freestyling from person to person. I would just sit there in awe of them and think that this was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. See, even though many of my cousins live in the ghettos of Namibia and seemingly have nothing, to me they were like the coolest people I knew and wanted to be just like them so naturally rap became my favourite sound listening to DMX, Eminem and 2pac on repeat... Thing is, as I grew up I never really liked rich kids, I found them so spoiled. My cousins though, they had the arts. Music was always bigger than everything. If I wanted to do anything, it had to be music.
Thing is, growing up I always had to juggle. Everyone always wants you to stick to one thing and choose one path in life but I just can’t. I initially created Munkination when I was a kid, and I guess it was, in my way, combining all of these things - art, music, politics into one thing and using that to try and save the world. I had to start somewhere. I’m too impatient to just do one thing over and over, I need to explore, learn and continuously try out different things. I love the idea of jumping between different skill sets and interests. It saves me from boredom or creative block. While everyone else around me focused and specialised in one particular thing, I just expanded, bit by bit, across the board with all my skill sets.
How did you get here?
This is a bit of a long story but basically my dad is English. My parents got a divorce and my dad came back to England, which opened up a portal that I had been waiting for forever. See I grew up in three African countries - Namibia, Ethiopia and South Africa - until I was eighteen. Being in boarding school in South Africa I experienced prejudice and racism on levels that most people outside of Namibia and South Africa won’t truly be able to fathom but over time, to me, it became normal as it was the only thing I’d ever known. Over there segregation is a part of your everyday life. Even now, when I go to Namibia, black is still the lowest of the low.
It was a really dark place to be, growing up - being mixed race, a black Mum and a white Dad, not speaking my local language. I never really fit in, even though my family tried to incorporate us and love us. We were always the outsiders because they were speaking in Damara (the mother tongue) and my sister and I couldn’t understand them. When I went to boarding school, the same trends followed. I was too black for the white kids and too white for the black. There was no place for me anywhere and I really felt it. How do you value yourself as a person of colour in the environment I come from? You’re in a boarding school made up of 80% white people, you’re constantly being bullied by white people. I wanted to get out of that school from day one. Both my parents went to boarding school so they just thought of it as the rite of passage of growing up. They said that my claims of distress were just me being overdramatic. I begged them, every day for the first two years. My dad said that if I got to sixteen and I still wanted to leave, they would take me out and when that time finally came I applied to a boarding school in England and got accepted. As I prepared to make my move, my dad called me up and told me that my mother had decided that I wasn’t going to England anymore. Apparently she wasn’t comfortable with me going that far away and wasn’t going to allow it. I felt so betrayed. I felt truly stuck in that prison, in that hell hole. I pushed through and tried to make the best out of a really horrible situation but I suffered more abuse and more violence and ultimately went through a lot. Before I graduated, I won a full scholarship to go to Rhodes University. My plans were set in stone. When we graduate in South Africa, we have a type of spring break where all the students from predominantly black schools go to one part of the country and the whites, another. Because I was in an eighty percent white school, most of my friends and schoolmates were white so it made more sense that I went to the white South African version of spring break known as Plett Rage- it was horrible. We had just finished high school so what was essentially meant to be a time for us all to come together and celebrate, in reality was actually something much more sinister. White people wanted nothing to do with blacks there and you could feel the tension. I remember talking to a white girl in a smoking area who turned out to be really lovely and friendly but just as we were getting to know each other this enormous white Afrikaans rugby player appeared, and stood in front of us. We were on picnic benches in this smoking area, surrounded by tons of people when he approached us. “Oi, what are you doing?” I said “Excuse me…?” “You kaffirs need to stop talking to our women. Get your black ass and F$%@ off.” I was shocked and had no idea how to respond to what I’d just heard. I turned to the girl I was with and asked her if she knew him but before she could respond the guy shouts at me: “Listen boy, I’m not going to tell you again. Get your kaffir ass and go right now or there is going to be big problems.” Staring up at this person who was easily twice my size, I decided to stay out and stand my ground but without a moment’s hesitation the guy grabbed me by my neck and immediately started strangling me. As I struggled to free myself from his grip the girl I was with immediately began screaming in panic and shock. We were in a public area surrounded by bystanders who witnessed and heard the entire thing but they just watched and did nothing. It wasn’t until the girl got more and more hysterical and things began to get out of hand that this guy’s friends pulled him off me and ran away. Gasping for air I fell to the floor in complete shock of what had just happened to me with this girl I’d just met weeping next to me, saying over and over again that she was sorry, so sorry for what had just happened to me. She was in shock as well but for me, this was the last straw. At that moment I knew I was done with that country, I needed to leave South Africa for good. Scholarship or no scholarship, I was done. I told my Dad that I was moving over to England. I had no university place, I didn’t even know about UCAS, I just came. It was such a pain, integrating back into UK education without the right qualifications but I didn’t care at that point so I abandoned my scholarship and moved over to England and started a new life here.
There are three very strong strands: the drawing (you), the political (your mother) and the music (family). Do you think that, at one point, your focus might just be the drawing?
I did a lot of things when I came to this country, some good, some bad. After a long and painstaking process, I finally somehow managed to hustle my way into university and went to study architecture at the University of Newcastle. Architecture made sense. I was already doing graphic design, art and illustration for people and from my Dad’s standpoint, I should get a solid degree that I could fall back on and then go and do whatever I wanted. I was always strong at Maths and Sciences so it made sense to go and do either civil engineering or architecture. I like to describe architecture, illustration and music as different kinds of relations people have in their lives. See Illustration for me was the childhood sweetheart. You were raised together, have family and friends in common and everyone was certain that one day you’d be married. Architecture, on the other hand, was the arranged marriage. It made sense, it brought in the security and made my parents feel comfortable. Music was the passionate love. It’s like the love you find in your adult life, where you’ve already had experiences, you’ve had girlfriends and you’ve gone through the dramas. Now you really know who you are, where you are and you’re focusing much more on your internal feelings. Music felt like the thing that drew me most because it’s the thing I care about most. It’s also my biggest insecurity. Because drawing comes from me, it’s something that I have quite a lot of confidence in. I have no problem selling myself, speaking about it and marketing myself. But music - I don’t actually think I’m that good. I’ve got a lot to say and a lot that I want to achieve in it but I don’t have a lot of that self-confidence. Even when I became a musician, my first name was Trappy HAM then later changed to HAM the Illustrator. But under that name no one ever placed me as a musician, people just focused on my art. It really frustrated me because I never got the recognition that I wanted as a musician. That meant far more to me than being an illustrator. In my mind, music is how I can change the world. That’s my heartbeat. How do I change human behaviour? How do I change human psychology? How do I change our attitude about the way we treat the planet? How we treat each other? How we treat the animals? How we treat all living beings? I didn’t think I could do that by designing big buildings for millionaires. I didn’t think I could do that by creating some cool paintings.
Where did that feeling of responsibility to “change the world” come from?
My mum. Very big shoes to fill. I live in the shadow of a colossus. Even though she’s tiny in height, she’s gigantic in persona and attitude. My mum has accomplished more than most people can dream and survived more than most people can endure. Every year I grew older, I learnt new chapters of my mum. She didn’t like to speak too much about what she went through but there were books, there were interviews. Sometimes I’d get her on a good day and I could learn a little bit more. I also learned some from my dad and siblings. The more I learned, the more I was in awe. The only reason I have my freedoms, the only reason I have my liberties are because of the sacrifices made by people like my mum but that battle’s not over as far as I’m concerned. The baton needs to be carried on and so I feel like I have these shoes that I need to fill.
Where are you in all of this? Are you creating your own “shoes”? Or is most of this energy about filling other’s?
I’m very different from my mum and those battles. I’ve inherited a lot of skills from both my mum and my dad. My dad is often underrepresented in my storytelling but I wouldn’t be the man I am today without my dad. No matter what I did in life, my dad would always tell me I could do better. He always pushed me and I feel that the combination of both of them... my dad is more introverted, calculated and much more well thought out, and my mum is all guns blazing. The thing is - neither of my parents are creative in the way that I am. My dad works in the financial sector and my mum works in the political sector. It’s always been a big temptation of mine to go into politics, to follow in my mum’s footsteps but that didn't feel like me. I am a creative, I create. I chase this crazy dream of trying to be an artist. I’ve really gone out on a limb to fight for what I’ve always wanted and that’s to make this music thing happen. I’ve worked as a photographer and as a videographer, I’ve shot house festivals in Malta, I’ve interviewed celebrities as a radio presenter. I’ve really tried to explore my life and come up with my own kind of skill sets and figure out what really clicked for me. I’m passionate about everything. Where I come from, where I am now in all of this is that I’m not really concerned in changing the world anymore. What I really want to do is unlock human potential and I want us to change our behaviour and how we treat this planet. I want to grow exponentially in my skill sets, with the intention of paying it forward in the future to other people. I don’t want to die with all the knowledge I’ve learned so I hope one day I can create an an academy or a mentorship programme and help develop the next generation of creatives, constructing a bridge to opportunity for others like me back home. But in order for this to be possible I need to keep growing so I’m constantly going to be taking information and sharing it on.
I’m so lucky to have that tenacity. I think deep down I’ve always known that my calling on earth is to support the people that want to go on this route but don’t have that self-belief and confidence within themselves. What I’m best at and where I want to be is with that human connection. I need to invest and get the accolades that I have so that I can sit in front of people and be believable, so that I can learn, make notes along the way, streamline it and then see how many people to get to their dreams.
Has the pandemic changed any aspect of your activity, the learning, the discovery, your output?
It made me realize that I need to level up and level up quickly. My life was just about to take off before the lockdown. Munkination had just been selected to showcase at South by Southwest in Texas, which is probably the biggest festival for tech and arts in the world. I’d been scheduled to do the opening night, which means I was scheduled to be on stage rapping alongside a world class opera singer. A couple of weeks before SXSW was meant to start I’d managed to organize to spend a couple of extra week out in Atlanta. While out there I teamed up with a bunch of producers and artists, spending most of my time there in recording studios having the time of my life. I was in a black owned city - the absolute incredibleness of it all! My career was about to take off, I was so excited. A few days before the show I got a message saying that the festival was cancelled due to the growing risk of COVID-19. The Royal Opera House called and told me that everything has been shut down. A ticket was booked to get me home and I returned. Dream over. And just as things couldn’t get any worse the UK announced a full lockdown was on the 24th March, the day before birthday. I was hit in the face, time and time again. I imagine that for a lot of people events like that might bring them into some sort of depressive state but I’ve been somewhere like this before so it wasn’t too bad. “Ha ha life! You got me again!”. Lockdown was tough. Munkination ran out of funding but I still considered myself lucky. See, I have an incredible team that didn’t stop fighting for our project. Throughout the lockdown they looked for new opportunities and avenue streams, flying through grant applications and proposals. My attitude was - whatever was going to happen, was going to happen. Life will be what life will be.
Watching all the people around me go into furlough, that was a very big hit. I was hustling every day as a freelance illustrator, trying to find new streams of income to pay my rent. I realised there was no protection for me, that when push came to shove nobody had my back. No parents, no employers, just me. I couldn’t even get income support from the government. I was working with the Royal Opera House and was the only person that wasn’t on furlough. I was a self-contractor. The only person who had my back was me. After coming out of lockdown the first time, I decided I needed to be a different tier of freelancer. At what cost will I start living the life I want? So the moment lockdown ended, I just changed. My minimum rate for drawing anything had at least doubled, any deal that was on the table was big. I wanted to go for the biggest clients, I wanted to have the biggest contracts. I wasn’t stepping backwards, I’m just looking upwards. I’m not settling for anything less because I don’t have an employer or a safety net. I’m 27 years old now. I want to get a mortgage, a house and build a future. I want to move into this world of being an adult so Lockdown really gave me the slap upside the head that I needed. It was a hard struggle but worth it.
Do you think that the George Floyd episode will make a change?
More awareness is happening than ever before and that’s amazing. Being a programatic person I tend to be on the skeptical side about actual, tangible change. Black Lives Matter isn’t new, and we’ve been campaigning for years. What’s to say that this won’t happen again in five or ten years’ time? Right now seems just like a massive social media trend but when I went to the protests and marches I couldn’t help but wonder what are the specific actionable goals or legislative changes we were fighting for? and where are the leaders that we can follow and who would fight represent us? I don’t see any of that. I don’t see any strong leadership. That’s the part that worries me.
Where is your art in all of this?
My music alias talks about colonialism, structural racism and oppression. It is about my plight, my struggle and my humanity. Not just the struggles I’ve gone through but the struggles of my people. I’m starting debates, I’m talking about police brutality and race violations, those sorts of things. I galvanize and start conversations. But admittedly, I haven’t yet found a way to bring that energy into my illustration but I’m trying to get there. I did a tribute piece to BLM and George Floyd but other than that I’m still figuring things out, at least through Munkination I’m able to combine the art and music I create and begin conversations about climate change and the impact we have on the planet
Who are you?
Honestly, I’m just an African boy who acknowledges the intense amount of privilege I’ve been given. I’m just trying to figure out with all these privileges, how I can help to make this world a better place. No matter what form it takes, I have to do this, or I’ve failed.
HAM the Illustrator