The New York Times - USA (2020-10-17)

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONALSATURDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2020 Y A

HAZMIYEH, LEBANON

H

ERhands created the
gentle smile on the face
of the Virgin Mary, the
folds in the robes of the Four
Evangelists and the glow sur-
rounding the cherubic baby
Jesus.
In three decades of exacting
work, Maya Husseini had es-
tablished herself as Lebanon’s
premier stained-glass artist,
her work making the light of
the Mediterranean dance in
many of the country’s best-
known churches.
As she celebrated her 60th
birthday on Aug. 3, she was
looking forward to wrapping up
a final project and retiring. But
Lebanon had other plans.
The next day, an enormous
explosion in the port of Beirut
ripped through entire neighbor-
hoods, gutting apartment build-
ings, killing more than 190
people and causing billions of
dollars in damage. It also tore
through churches housing Ms.
Husseini’s work, reducing a
dozen of her delicate tableaus
to jagged shards and twisted
metal.
“Thirty years of my profes-
sional life were gone,” she said
in an interview after the blast
in her workshop near Beirut.
“Dust!”
In the aftermath, as her
phone filled with images sent
by distraught priests and pas-
tors showing her work obliter-
ated, Ms. Husseini decided that
retirement would have to wait.
“I wanted to stop, but I don’t
have the right to stop,” she said.
“It is patrimony. You don’t have
the right notto bring it back the
way it was.”
There have always been risks
to working in such a fragile medi-
um in a country so prone to
violent shocks.
Since its 15-year civil war
ended in 1990, Lebanon has lived
through political assassinations,
Israeli airstrikes, jihadist car
bombings and the influx of more
than a million refugees from
neighboring Syria. All of that was
before new crises over the last
year ravaged downtown Beirut
and tanked the economy.
But Ms. Husseini’s life and art
had always traversed the chaos
that before the Beirut blast only
occasionally reached into sacred
spaces.
One of those was a church
damaged in the 2005 car bomb-
ing that killed former Prime
Minister Rafik Hariri. Her first
major project, extensive stained-
glass images in the Notre Dame
du Mont church in the mountain
town of Adma, was also damaged
when Israel bombed a nearby
television antenna during its war
with the Hezbollah militant
group in 2006.
But last month’s blast, the
largest explosion in Lebanon’s
history, greatly surpassed the
other blows, and the toll on her
work was clear during a recent
visit to her workshop outside
Beirut, where the large metal
door had been punched in by the
impact. In the entryway sat the
remains of shattered stained-

glass windows from three

churches and one home, in hopes

that they could be repaired.

Inside, an energetic Ms. Hus-

seini looked on as two assistants

pieced together the paper pat-

tern of a large portrait of Jesus,

Mary and Joseph during the

flight to Egypt. She had installed

the original in Beirut’s Saint

Joseph Church in 1992 and dug

up the original pattern after it

was destroyed in the blast to

make it all over again.

Ms. Husseini grew up in a

Maronite Christian family in

Beirut, where she and her four

sisters went to church regularly

and she began drawing at age 12.

She was 15 at the outbreak of

Lebanon’s civil war, when an

array of militias battled for turf,

scarring and dividing the city.

She studied at the Lebanese

Academy of Fine Arts and did a

two-month stint focused on

stained glass at Ateliers Loire in

Chartres, France, home to the

cathedral thought by many

experts to have the finest

stained-glass windows in the

world.

A

LTHOUGHLebanon has more

Christians per capita than

any other Arab state,

stained-glass windows were not

common in its churches before

the war, Ms. Husseini said. But

after the guns fell silent in 1990,

some congregations wanted to

add them as the country rebuilt.

The first barrier she had to

overcome, she said, was the

hesitation of male church leaders

to hire a woman for what was

seen as physically demanding

work.

“It was not often that they

would trust you,” she said.

Her father, an engineer who

built churches, convents and

religious schools, helped her get

started, and she completed her

first commission in 1991 — more

than 1,300 square feet of glass in

the church in Adma, featuring

scenes from the life of Christ.

The next year, she crafted im-

ages of saints and a mural of

Jesus, Mary and Joseph in

Egypt for the St. Joseph Church

in Beirut.

As her name spread, she got

more jobs, ultimately designing

and producing stained glass for

more than 35 churches and

related facilities around Leba-

non. She also did facades and

murals for homes and the red,

yellow and blue windows of the

Sursock Museum, a private art

museum in Beirut.

In 2016, she completed one of

her most important projects: 39

windows in the 150-year-old St.

Louis Cathedral in downtown

Beirut, with the annunciation of

Mary, Jesus’s birth, Jesus wash-

ing the disciples’ feet, the cruci-

fixion and the resurrection.

Around the cathedral’s cupola,

she put 10 angel musicians.

“It was a lot of work,” she said.

Some pieces were fired in the

kiln four times because of all the

detail.

Her process has changed little

over the years. She works only

on blown glass and by hand,

with no computers. After get-

ting a commission and visiting

the site to assess the light, she

draws the design full size in

pencil and felt-tip pen.

Each section of the drawing

gets two numbers: one for its

place, the other for its color. She

then cuts them with special

scissors and uses the pieces as

patterns to cut the glass.

Panes with illustrations such

as faces and clothes are painted

by hand and fired in a kiln to

bind the paint to the glass. The

pieces are then assembled with

lead strips, welded into a frame

and covered with mastic, a kind

of sealant, for protection.

Nearly all of the supplies are

imported — the glass from

France and the lead from Cana-

da — which has made it harder

for Ms. Husseini to get them,

because Lebanon’s currency

has lost about 80 percent of its

value since last year.

“Everything is from abroad,”

she said. “Only the head and

hands are Lebanese.”

B

EFOREthe blast, Ms. Hus-

seini’s major remaining

project was the glass for

a new basilica in Jordan, near

the spot in the Jordan River

where it is said that John the

Baptist baptized Jesus. That

was to take two years, after

which she planned to shift to

instructing young Lebanese

artisans in the craft.

Ms. Husseini was in her

family’s house in the mountains

above Beirut when she heard the

blast on Aug. 4, but she did not

fully grasp its magnitude.

Her son-in-law’s grandmother

was injured and rushed to the

hospital, and her patrons flooded

her phone with heartbroken

messages and photos of her

shattered work blown across

church floors. A few days later,

she began visiting sites that had

once held her glass, and it was

the St. Louis Cathedral that

shocked her most. Of the 39

windows she had labored over

for two years, only three re-

mained.

“That’s when I felt the size of

the catastrophe,” she said.

In the weeks since, she has

returned to work, hiring new

assistants to accelerate repair

jobs and beginning the lengthy

process of getting materials from

abroad. Fixing everything could

take years, and her most exten-

sive projects are on hold while

congregations gather money for

restoration.

In Europe, the stained-glass

trade was traditionally passed

from father to son, she said, but

neither of her adult children is

interested. Her son is pursuing a

doctorate in Switzerland and her

daughter, an interior designer,

plans to emigrate to Canada.

But Ms. Husseini hopes that

the repair process will teach

younger artisans the trade and

keep it going when she finally

retires.

“If I stopped, this work would

completely stop in Lebanon,” she

said. “And it would be a shame if

it stopped.”

‘I wanted to stop, but I don’t have the right to stop. It is patrimony. You don’t have the right not to

bring it back the way it was.’

MAYA HUSSEINI

PHOTOGRAPHS BY DIEGO IBARRA SANCHEZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

THE SATURDAY PROFILE

In Lebanon, Recreating a Legacy of Stained-Glass Marvels

Above left, one of Ms. Husseini’s assistants working on a piece destroyed in the Aug. 4 blast. Above right, a sketch for a window.

By BEN HUBBARD

SENEKAL, South Africa — A
young white farm manager was
found earlier this month strangled
and tied to a pole on a farm in the
eastern part of the Free State
province, police said. Two Black
men were accused of the murder.
At a packed court hearing on
Friday, the police captain investi-
gating the case said that the sus-
pects were part of a ring of live-
stock thieves operating in the
area, and that it appeared that the
motive was robbery rather than
racial animus.
But the killing of the farm man-
ager, Brendin Horner, has become
the latest flash point for racial con-
flict in South Africa, where the
segregationist apartheid regime
fell almost 30 years ago. Tension is
particularly high in rural farming
areas where white people still own
a vast majority of the farms and
Black people still serve as their of-
ten impoverished laborers.
Groups representing white
farmers accuse the South African
government of deliberately failing
to protect them. Some white activ-
ist groups say that what they call
“farm murders” represent the be-
ginning of a “white genocide”
aimed at driving whites out of
South Africa.
Critics see this as a deeply dis-
torted narrative promoted by the
white beneficiaries of apartheid to
drum up international sympathy.
They point out that violent crime
is common in South Africa. The

vast majority of the victims are

Black.

Of 21,325 murder victims last

year, 49 were white farmers — ac-

counting for much less than 1 per-

cent of the country’s total, accord-

ing to police statistics. White

South Africans make up about 9

percent of the country’s 58 million

citizens.

At Friday’s hearing, white

farmers and motorcycle riders

faced off with Black protesters in

the red polo shirts of the leftist po-

litical party Economic Freedom

Fighters, or E.F.F., outside the

small rural courthouse in Senekal,

a town on the banks of the Sand

River. Police erected barbed wire

to separate the groups, but at one

point they stood nose to nose — a

situation defused when volunteer

marshals from both sides inter-

vened.

On a hill outside town, white

farmers waved a banner with the

face of Mr. Horner and carried

white wooden crosses. Some wore

bulletproof vests. After reading

the Bible and praying, they sang

South Africa’s apartheid-era na-

tional anthem.

Some of the farmers said in in-

terviews that South Africa’s lock-

down in response to the coronavi-

rus pandemic, and the resulting

economic downturn, have made

poor Black South Africans more

desperate.

“Usually they steal for food on

the table, now they’re killing,” said

Derek Meyer, a farmer at the pro-

test.

Khanyi Magubane, a political

commentator and journalist, said

of the white farmers, “They don’t

see the bigger picture of dysfunc-

tionality in South Africa. Every-

body is being targeted, everybody

is being robbed.”

The farmers jeered as buses

and minivans ferrying supporters

of the E.F.F. drove by, some pas-

sengers singing “Kill the Boer,” a

liberation-era song that has since

been declared hate speech.

The founding leader of the

E.F.F., Julius Malema, a firebrand

expelled from the ruling African

National Congress party, ad-

dressed the crowd of about 2,

from a portable stage outside the

courthouse, saying, “We are here

to fight and die against apartheid,

because South Africa still has got

apartheid.”

He has tapped into long-sim-

mering anger by calling for land

redistribution. In Parliament, the

E.F.F. controls 44 out of 400 seats,

and accuses the majority party,

the African National Congress, of

moving too slowly and too cau-

tiously on land redistribution.

A 2017 government survey

found that white farmers control

nearly 70 percent of farms held by

individual owners in South Africa.

Much of that land was brutally

confiscated from African inhab-

itants generations ago. Of the vast

tracts in Free State, where Mr.

Horner was killed, three quarters

of farms are owned by white South

Africans, while Black South Afri-

cans own just 3 percent, the sur-

vey found.

South Africa’s president, Cyril

Ramaphosa, spoke out about the

killing of Mr. Horner on Monday,

expressing horror and sympathy,

but cautioning against falsely

equating the murders of white

farmers with ethnic cleansing.

“They are not genocidal. They are

acts of criminality and must be

treated as such,” Mr. Ramaphosa

said in his weekly presidential ad-

dress.

“What happened in Senekal

shows just how easily the tinder-

box of race hatred can be ignited,”

he said.

In a nation with the world’s

fifth-highest murder rate, Mr.

Ramaphosa has in recent months

used his addresses to name mur-

der victims, particularly women

killed during the lockdown. He

pointed out that three young

Black men were shot dead in a car

in South Africa in the same week

that Mr. Horner was killed.

But the violent protests over the

killing of Mr. Horner grabbed im-

mediate and outsized attention.

On Oct. 6, several hundred

white protesters gathered outside

the courthouse in Senekal where

the two suspects were appearing

for a hearing. Some protesters set

a police van on fire and stormed

the court holding cells, demand-

ing that the defendants be turned

over to them.

A 51-year-old white business-

man, Andre Pienaar, was later ar-

rested and charged with at-

tempted murder, malicious dam-

age to property and public vio-

lence. He was denied bail.

AfriForum, a large advocacy

group for Afrikaners, the descend-

ants of the white Dutch and Hu-

guenot settlers of South Africa,

has led international efforts to

draw attention to their discredited

claims that white farmers are be-

ing systematically forced off their

land and killed in large numbers.

In 2018, after Ernst Roets, depu-

ty chief executive of AfriForum,

appeared on a segment on Fox

News in the United States with the

host Tucker Carlson, President

Trump said on Twitter that he was

directing his secretary of state to

investigate what he called “large-

scale killing” of white farmers.

In a telephone interview, Mr.

Roets said that the government

does not protect white farmers:

“It’s very clear this is not a pri-

ority for them to do anything,” he

said.

In the courtroom on Friday, the

judge was flanked by four armed

police officers, government min-

isters occupied the benches near

the front and journalists packed

the room.

The country’s minister of po-

lice, Bheki Cele, who had visited

the town earlier in the week in a

bid to de-escalate the tensions,

noted in an interview afterward

that four people — three of them

Black — had been killed in the

area since April.

“One of them is this young

white man,” he said.

Strangling of White Farmer

Sets Off Protests on 2 Sides

In a Divided South Africa

By LYNSEY CHUTEL

and MONICA MARK

Farmers in Senekal, South Africa, where two Black men are accused of killing a white farm manager.

JOAO SILVA/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Lynsey Chutel reported from
Senekal, and Monica Mark from
Johannesburg.

Tensions over race

and land ownership,

long after apartheid.