"Of the Europeans who scrambled for control of Africa at the end of the 19th century, Belgium's King Leopold II left arguably the largest and most horrid legacy of all." So said former BBC Kinshasa correspondent Mark Dummett in 2004, on the occasion of that broadcaster's airing of the film Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death.His assessment rings true; the estimated scale of Leopold's holocaust on the people of the country he claimed as a private enterprise in 1885 and ran as a labour camp range from 1 million to 15 million dead. By 1908, when the evidence of his abuses against the Congolese became too much to ignore, the Belgian government stepped in.Young South African painter Blessing Ngobeni uses the now Democratic Republic of Congo's dark past as a lens through which to consider South Africa's current predicament.The DRC's forging in blood set a template for future leaders; from Mobutu Sese Seko to the previous president, the late Laurent Kabila who was assassinated in 2001, leadership in the Congo has mostly involved the widespread use of force.It's easy to see the parallels in our own situation; one of apartheid's worst hangovers is that its corrupt leaders wrote a playbook by which future leaders could continue the self-enrichment process.The title of Ngobeni's show, The Song of the Chicotte, is a reference to this violent history: the chicotte is a leather whip similar to the sjambok. It was used widely in Leopold's reign and after, as a means of coercion and punishment.Ngobeni's figures look like hybrids between Picasso's tortured souls in Guernica and Neill Blomkamp's extra-terrestrial ''prawns" in District 9. They occupy flat spaces, tumbling into the viewer's space and reality; yet they're alien, mutated by the ravages of South African post-apartheid life.In Song of Chicotte, which features a mother-and-child pair, it is clear that the awful past is passed from parent to offspring. Not since Dumile Feni has a South African artist represented the terror of bringing up children under these circumstances.Ngobeni's are no stock-photo images of maternal bliss. This mother clutches her child in an animal-like manner, and we're not sure if she's devouring or protecting him. Woven into the figures of this work are ghostly, printed copies of those notorious photos of white children riding their black minders like horses: the mother-and-child relationship mutates one step further.In Brutality, the first and last work one sees in the ovoid Circa Gallery, hidden away amongst the slashes of paint and thinners printing, are two words that remind us of what remains in the psyche of many, and are the reason so many can't ''just get over apartheid" as amnesiacs would have us all do. The two words? ''Nobody's safe".The Song of the Chicotte is on at Circa Gallery until August 21..