Sex worker's mugshot replaces killer's artwork

The only known photograph of Nokuphila Kumalo is a police mugshot taken soon after she was arrested for soliciting.

The mugshot has now become a portrait, displayed this week when her murderer, artist and photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa, was convicted in the High Court in Cape Town.

Artist Astrid Warren used the mugshot to create the portrait that activists displayed outside the court on Thursday.    

In December the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Task Force (Sweat) successfully petitioned to have Mthethwa's work removed from an exhibition at the Iziko South African National Gallery. It was replaced with Warren's portrait of Kumalo.

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Warren, who works in addiction treatment centres and is a recovering addict, said Kumalo, 23, "needed to have her mark and for us to have an image to look to".

The painting was part of a series on sex workers Warren encountered as a counsellor.

"From the mugshot I could see how unhappy she was in that moment," said Warren. "There is something in the painting which is quite iconic of the struggle that these women go through."

Mthethwa's large-scale photographs of working-class South Africans have been exhibited in galleries around the world. In 2014 some of his paintings were auctioned for up to R120,000.

But a year earlier, according to Judge Patricia Goliath's judgment this week, he bludgeoned Kumalo to death in Woodstock.

The court heard that Mthethwa left a tavern in Gugulethu one evening in April 2013 and drove his Porsche to Woodstock, where he approached Kumalo, who was with another woman.

There he attacked Kumalo. Her liver was torn and she died of cardiac arrest.

CCTV footage was key in placing Mthethwa at the scene.

A friend of Kumalo, transgender sex worker Gulam Petersen, said Mthethwa had been a regular client of Kumalo's. He did not know what provoked the killing.

Sweat spokeswoman Lesego Tlhwale said the conviction was a rare victory for sex workers, who deserved "the same human rights as all South Africans".

She added: "Sex workers deserve human rights and we need to start saying the names of the sex workers who have been killed.

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"They were sisters, mothers and cousins and they don't deserve to be killed like animals. [Mthethwa] stomped and kicked Nokuphila to death without any pain or remorse."

Tlhwale said decriminalisation of sex work was needed to stop violence against sex workers.

During the trial, art specialist Ruarc Petters said the murder might increase interest in Mthethwa's works, but it was not clear if the artist had recently sold any photographs or paintings.

Mthethwa, 56, is being held at Pollsmoor prison in Cape Town pending sentencing on March 29.