Made in 1979 and 1981, Ezrom Legae’s anatomical studies emerge from one of the most volatile periods of late apartheid, when detentions, deaths in custody, and the aftermath of the 1976 Soweto Uprising were searing themselves into public consciousness. Legae was uniquely positioned to respond: trained at Polly Street and later a core member of Egon Guenther’s Amadlozi group alongside Sydney Kumalo, Cecil Skotnes, and Edoardo Villa, he absorbed that circle’s insistence that African sculptural and spiritual traditions could be the engine – not the footnote – of a modernist language. By the late 1970s, however, Legae was pushing beyond their earlier optimism into a darker register, inflecting that Amadlozi inheritance with the forensic sensibility of someone living through a regime that catalogued, violated, and tried to erase Black bodies. The fragmented torso and isolated hand can be read against the political murders and autopsy photographs of the time, yet they refuse to become mere documents of atrocity: they remain charged, hovering between martyrdom, witness, and accusation. In this way, Legae crystallises a central strand of South African Black Modernism – a practice in which the body is both site and symbol of resistance – and remains one of its most incisive, gifted, and conceptually rigorous exponents.