In Bester’s consistent but unique iconography, images and concepts cohere in the interests of communicating a complex, often contradictory reality. Thus, for example, Bester often uses still life motifs to suggest the idea of calm dignity: the continuity of ordinary peoples’ lives against a daily reality of violent aggression. This experience of violence, symbolized most obviously through the inclusion of snarling dogs and skulls that allude to the death during the apartheid era of countless innocent victims, is also reflected in the inclusion of white dolls that point to the imposition on African communities of ‘western’ values and ideas. But here, as elsewhere, Bester’s troubling image of the social engineering effected by racist state ideologues, is compounded by the suggestion of the impact so-called ‘third force’ agents had on the lives of these communities. Although in many cases they were social misfits, they were used by the system to realize its increasingly sinister aims and objectives.