and another seated in a canoe, have a somewhat comic look but are rendered with the same attention to characteristic costumes and facial expressions as the many Africans surrounding them (18.36a, 18.36b) In the period after World War II, which has seen African states gaining political independence from their former colonial rulers, the colonial era has left a complex, frequently trouble legacy. African artists have adapted both indigenous traditions and Western art styles to engage with contemporary political and social reality. The South African artist Willie Bester (b. 1956), for example, used the technique of assemblage common to both avant-garde Western art and African art forms to create Semekazi (Migrant Miseries) (18.53), which records the hardships suffered by the black worker Semekazi under the apartheid system imposed by the white minority government of South Africa before democratic majority rule was finally achieved in 1994.