A single line of West African wisdom — the head and the load are the troubles of the neck — holds an entire history of labour, empire, and survival inside it. On its surface, the proverb simply describes something physical: whoever carries a burden knows the weight does not sit in the head alone. It travels down through the neck, the spine, and the whole body. But the phrase has also become the title of one of the most ambitious pieces of contemporary performance art about the First World War, a work devoted to the hundreds of thousands of Africans who carried a European war across their own continent on their backs and heads.
Understanding "the head and the load" means moving between two very different registers: a compact folk saying that has circulated in Ghanaian and wider West African speech for generations, and a large-scale theatrical project by the South African artist William Kentridge, first staged in 2018. Both point at the same uncomfortable truth — that the people who carry things are rarely the people who are remembered for carrying them.
What the Proverb "The Head and the Load" Actually Means
The proverb is usually translated as "the head and the load are the troubles of the neck," and its logic is deliberately unsentimental. The head decides where to go. The head accepts the work. But the neck is what absorbs the strain of getting there. In a few syllables, the saying separates the part of a person that chooses from the part that endures the consequences of that choice.
That distinction gives the phrase its staying power. It can describe a farmer carrying produce to market, a porter hauling timber, a mother balancing water, or an entire colony pressed into service for a war it did not start. Across those contexts, the proverb keeps making the same accusation: burdens are distributed unevenly, and the pain of carrying them is usually invisible to whoever commissioned the journey.
The Akan Roots of a Widely Quoted Saying
The saying is most often attributed to Akan-speaking communities in Ghana, where proverbs function as condensed legal, ethical, and social commentary. In Akan oral tradition, proverbs are not decorative; they are used to settle arguments, teach children, and encode historical experience. A speaker who deploys the right proverb at the right moment demonstrates both wisdom and authority, and the image of a loaded head is a classic example of that rhetorical economy.
Versions of the idea appear across West and Central Africa, which suggests the metaphor emerged independently wherever people carried heavy goods over long distances. Colonial-era anthologies, missionary grammars, and later African literature helped carry the Ghanaian wording into English-language circulation. By the time artists and historians began quoting it internationally, the proverb had already travelled further than most of the people it describes ever could.
Why the Neck Suffers: Labour, Hierarchy, and Hidden Cost
Read politically, the proverb is a statement about who bears risk. The head represents decision-making power — the colonial administrator, the officer, the merchant, the planner. The neck represents the labouring body that turns those decisions into movement. The load, of course, is the actual weight: the crate, the ammunition box, the railway sleeper, the wounded soldier, the machine gun.
That structure repeats itself in modern economies. Global supply chains are built on the assumption that the person who orders a product is far removed from the person who carries it. Care work, agricultural labour, and long-distance migration all follow the same pattern, where the neck absorbs the strain so the head can remain comfortable. The proverb's endurance comes from its refusal to pretend otherwise.
William Kentridge and the Making of a Monumental Performance
William Kentridge, born in Johannesburg in 1955, is one of the most widely recognised artists to emerge from South Africa. His drawings, films, operas, and installations have consistently circled questions of memory, colonialism, and the uneasy relationship between beauty and violence. When he turned his attention to the First World War in Africa, the result was not a conventional history lesson but a devised theatrical work built from music, movement, projection, and paper.
The Head & The Load premiered in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in London in July 2018, commissioned as part of the 14-18 NOW programme marking the centenary of the First World War. The choice of venue mattered: a vast industrial space once used to generate power for the city became a stage for a story about the labour that powered an empire.
From the Tate Turbine Hall to the World Stage
The London premiere set the template for everything that followed. Audiences entered a cavernous hall to find a long procession route rather than a traditional stage, with performers moving through the space and around the crowd. The piece ran roughly an hour and a quarter without an interval, deliberately refusing the comfort of a conventional theatrical evening.
After London, the work travelled to the Park Avenue Armory in New York in December 2018, where the drill hall's drill-shed architecture echoed the Turbine Hall's scale. Further presentations followed at festivals and venues in Europe, allowing the production to reach audiences who might never encounter the underlying history in a museum or a textbook.
Music, Machinery, and Paper Shadows
The score, composed by Philip Miller with Thuthuka Sibisi as musical director and co-creator, drew on South African vocal traditions alongside European marches, hymns, and fragments of period music. A chorus of singers, soloists, and instrumentalists performed live, with voices often used as a kind of historical witness rather than straightforward narration. The music moved between lament, satire, and something closer to a work song.
Visually, the production relied on Kentridge's signature techniques: animated charcoal drawings projected onto hanging screens, huge paper cut-outs manipulated by performers, and skeletal mechanical structures that suggested machinery without ever fully becoming it. Performers carried crates, poles, and bundles across the space while projections of colonial maps, archival photographs, and hand-drawn figures flickered behind them. The effect was less a reconstruction of history than an argument about how history is carried forward.
The Forgotten History of Africa's Wartime Porters
The First World War is usually remembered through the trenches of France and Belgium, yet significant campaigns were fought across Africa between 1914 and 1918. Togo, the Cameroons, German South-West Africa, and above all German East Africa became battlegrounds where European powers fought for colonial territory while African soldiers, carriers, and civilians paid the price.
Terrain made the East African campaign especially dependent on human muscle. Tsetse flies killed horses, mules, and oxen, and roads were often little more than tracks. With motor vehicles useless across much of the interior, armies turned to porters. The result was an enormous, largely conscripted labour force whose job was to move food, ammunition, equipment, and wounded men across distances that could stretch for hundreds of kilometres.
The Carrier Corps in the East African Campaign
British authorities formalised recruitment through the Carrier Corps, later organised under a Military Labour Bureau. Men were drawn from Kenya, Uganda, Nyasaland, and other territories, sometimes through chiefs instructed to supply quotas, sometimes through outright coercion. The name survives in Nairobi's Kariakor district, a neighbourhood named after the Carrier Corps and still widely known by that spelling.
Conditions were brutal. Rations were frequently inadequate, medical care was minimal, and the work continued through the rainy season and the dry. Carriers died from dysentery, malaria, exhaustion, and untreated wounds at rates that dwarfed combat casualties in some units. Comparable systems operated on the German side, in the Belgian Congo, and in French West Africa, meaning the burden fell on Africans regardless of which flag they were forced to serve.
Death Tolls, Memorials, and the Politics of Remembrance
Estimates vary widely, but historians generally agree that hundreds of thousands of Africans served as carriers during the war, with some figures exceeding a million when all belligerents and all theatres are counted. Deaths among carriers in East Africa alone are commonly estimated in the tens of thousands, with some studies suggesting figures approaching one hundred thousand once disease and post-war mortality are included.
- Roughly 400,000 Africans served in British carrier units in East Africa, according to widely cited figures.
- Total African labour recruitment across all European empires during the war is often estimated at over one million people.
- Carrier deaths from disease and exhaustion frequently exceeded combat deaths among African troops.
Commemoration lagged far behind the scale of the loss. Cemeteries and monuments across East Africa recorded the names of European officers while listing African carriers in aggregate, if at all. A 2021 Commonwealth War Graves Commission report formally acknowledged that many African and Indian casualties had been commemorated unequally, confirming what communities had argued for decades.
That delayed recognition is precisely the gap Kentridge's work occupies. Rather than waiting for institutions to correct the record, the performance insists that memory can be made through voice, movement, and the physical act of carrying something across a room while an audience watches.
Themes, Criticism, and the Work's Afterlife
The Head & The Load was widely praised for its ambition, its music, and its refusal to simplify. Critics described it as overwhelming in the best sense, a production that used scale to make a point about scale — the sheer volume of human labour required to sustain a war fought for reasons that had nothing to do with the people doing the carrying.
At the same time, the work raised difficult questions about representation. A European commission, a globally celebrated artist, and an international touring circuit framed a story about African suffering for audiences largely unfamiliar with the history. Some commentators asked whether the piece risked turning African labour into an aesthetic experience for the very institutions that benefited from colonial extraction.
What Reviewers Saw and What They Debated
Most reviews focused on the sensory force of the production. Writers highlighted the chorus, the procession, and the unsettling beauty of Kentridge's projected drawings, arguing that the work succeeded precisely because it refused to illustrate a historical narrative in a straightforward way. The absence of a conventional plot was treated as a strength rather than a flaw.
Other responses were more sceptical. Questions about authorship, funding, and audience circulated alongside the praise, and some critics noted that the production's emotional power depended on distance — the audience could watch the carrying without ever having to do it. Kentridge himself has generally resisted the role of spokesperson, describing his approach as an exploration of complicity rather than a claim to speak for the dead.
Why the Phrase Still Resonates Today
The proverb has outgrown its original context. In academic writing, journalism, and activism, "the head and the load" now functions as shorthand for the unequal distribution of labour under empire and its successors. It appears in discussions of supply chains, migration, and the ongoing debate about reparations and archival restitution.
The production's partnership with the Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg extended its life beyond the stage, connecting the work to South African artists and musicians who continue to develop related projects. Recordings, documentation, and derivative performances have kept the material circulating long after the original tour ended.
What remains most useful about both the proverb and the artwork is their insistence on the body. History is often written as a sequence of decisions made by leaders, but the neck remembers what the head prefers to forget. Anyone researching this history now has an unusual advantage: a phrase short enough to remember, and a performance rich enough to return to, that keep asking who actually carried the weight of the twentieth century — and who is still carrying it.