The Art of Life in South Africa 0821422510, 9780821422519

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Advance praise for The Art of Life in South Africa “The Art of Life in South Africa is a richly suggestive and moving contribution to South African intellectual history. Weaving in a highly imaginative way the two concepts of life and art, Magaziner opens unique pathways for research in the historical sociology of the object-worlds South Africans invented, created, and inhabited during the long twentieth century. Written with extraordinary clarity and precision, this book will appeal to anyone curious about new trends in the historiography of culture.” —Achille Mbembe, author of Critique of Black Reason “The Art of Life in South Africa contributes to a global conversation about ‘art’ and ‘craft’at the same time as it challenges neat distinctions between center and periphery, metropole and margins. Art education provides rich terrain through which the entangled relations of modernity, subjectivity, and materiality can be explored. This book is as important for students of global modernism as it is for scholars of South African art, history, and politics.” —Tamar Garb, author of Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography “Magaziner tells a profoundly human story of the institutional and social constraints under which African artists operated and the different ways in which they sought to find a way to produce beauty in the midst of oppression.” —Frederick Cooper, author of Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State “The Art of Life in South Africa is beautifully rendered, well researched, and tells an important, scarcely told story. Combining in exciting ways intellectual, cultural, and social historical approaches, Magaziner offers a meditation on what happens if we examine a past that is shaped by broader historical forces (in this case apartheid) but that cannot be reduced to them.” —Clifton Crais, coeditor of The South Africa Reader: History, Culture, Politics

“In this beautifully written book, Magaziner opens a small story to reveal expansive, deep questions. The Art of Life in South Africa offers an unexpected and transcendent intellectual history of African self-making and art practice.” —Julie Livingston, author of Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic

“The Art of Life in South Africa is an astonishing book, powerfully constructed, intricately researched, and gorgeously written. From the focused study of individual lives and practices that flourished in and around the Ndaleni art school, Magaziner extends the possibilities of a more democratic form of art history.” —David Doris, author of Vigilant Things: On Thieves, Yoruba Anti-Aesthetics, and the Strange Fates of Ordinary Objects in Nigeria

The Art of Life in South Africa

n ew a f r i c a n h i sto r i e s S e r i e s e d i t o r s : J e a n A l l m a n , A l l e n Is a a c m a n , and Derek R. Peterson

Books in this series are published with support from the Ohio University Center for International Studies.

David William Cohen and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, The Risks of Knowledge Belinda Bozzoli, Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid Gary Kynoch, We Are Fighting the World

Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara S. Isaacman, Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development Stephanie Newell, The Power to Name Gibril R. Cole, The Krio of West Africa

Stephanie Newell, The Forger’s Tale

Matthew M. Heaton, Black Skin, White Coats

Jacob A. Tropp, Natures of Colonial Change

Meredith Terretta, Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence

Jan Bender Shetler, Imagining Serengeti

Paolo Israel, In Step with the Times

Cheikh Anta Babou, Fighting the Greater Jihad

Michelle R. Moyd, Violent Intermediaries

Marc Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa? Marissa J. Moorman, Intonations Karen E. Flint, Healing Traditions Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola, editors, Recasting the Past Moses E. Ochonu, Colonial Meltdown Emily S. Burrill, Richard L. Roberts, and Elizabeth Thornberry, editors, Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa

Abosede A. George, Making Modern Girls Alicia C. Decker, In Idi Amin’s Shadow Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Conjugal Rights Shobana Shankar, Who Shall Enter Paradise? Emily S. Burrill, States of Marriage Todd Cleveland, Diamonds in the Rough Carina E. Ray, Crossing the Color Line

Daniel R. Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets

Sarah Van Beurden, Authentically African

Emily Lynn Osborn, Our New Husbands Are Here

Giacomo Macola, The Gun in Central Africa

Robert Trent Vinson, The Americans Are Coming!

Lynn Schler, Nation on Board

James R. Brennan, Taifa Benjamin N. Lawrance and Richard L. Roberts, editors, Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake David M. Gordon, Invisible Agents

Julie MacArthur, Cartography and the Political Imagination Abou B. Bamba, African Miracle, African Mirage Daniel Magaziner, The Art of Life in South Africa

The Art of Life in South Africa Daniel Magaziner

Ohio University Press Athens, Ohio

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701 ohioswallow.com © 2016 by Ohio University Press All rights reserved To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at (740) 593-1154 or (740) 593-4536 (fax). Printed in the United States of America Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ƒ ™ 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Magaziner, Daniel R., author. Title: The art of life in South Africa / Daniel Magaziner. Other titles: New African histories series. Description: Athens, Ohio : Ohio University Press, 2016. | Series: New   African histories | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016036236| ISBN 9780821422519 (hc : alk. paper) | ISBN   9780821422526 (pb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780821445907 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Ndaleni Art School. | Art teachers—Training of—South   Africa. | Art—Study and teaching—South Africa. | Blacks—South   Africa—Social conditions—20th century. Classification: LCC N88.5.S6 M34 2016 | DDC 707.1068—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036236

In a secluded corner of the yard he stumbled upon a gigantic operation. It was the work of the little girl. She was in the process of building a model village, all carved out of mud. There were mud goats, mud cattle, mud huts and mud people, and grooved little footpaths for them to walk on. He stood staring at it for some time, a look of pure delight on his face. Then he turned and chose a site as far removed as possible from this sanctuary of genius, and with lengths of string marked out the shallow foundation for the tobacco curing and drying shed. —Bessie Head

Genius is never a case apart. —Jon Berger

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xv



Prologue Handwork

xxi



Chapter 1

A Hillside in South Africa



Chapter 2

Craftwork

25



Chapter 3

Art

53



Chapter 4

Journeys

82



Chapter 5

Learning

122

Chapter 6

Apartheid

204



Chapter 7

Artists

241



Epilogue

The Art of the Past

269

1

Notes

291

Bibliography

337

Index

361

Illustrations

Figures

A.1 Detail of a mural by Hamlet Hobe, 1960 Pro.1 Basketry class at Indaleni Mission, date unknown Pro.2 Carving tools and objects at Grace Dieu Mission, late 1920s 1.1 A man in black and brown shoe polish, by Winston Radebe, 1965 1.2 Carving outdoors at the Ndaleni art school, late 1960s 1.3 The Hand of Destruction, by Fish Molepo, 1979 1.4 Stoking the kiln, Ndaleni art school, 1975 1.5 The kiln, Ndaleni art school, 1975 1.6 “I Am Longing to Be One of Your Art Students,” by Dominus Thembe, 1975 1.7 Daphne Biyela and classmates preparing wood for sculpture, 1978 1.8 Mercy Ghu at Ndaleni art school, 1969 2.1 USiko, by George Pemba, mid-1930s(?) 2.2 Ernest Mancoba with a bust of himself, Grace Dieu Mission, late 1920s 2.3 Grass brooms and baskets, unknown artists, drawn by Jack Grossert, 1950s 3.1 Jack Grossert, Durban, 1978

xv xxii xxvi 2 4 6 8 9 12 15 17 31 37 42 52

ILLUSTRATIONS x



3.2

A Basotho Village, drawn by Jack Grossert, 1958



3.3 Children’s



3.4 Mask



3.5



3.6 Design



3.7



3.8 Cover,



4.1 Aerial



4.2 The



4.3 Cleaning



4.4 Detail

art class, the Art Gallery of Toronto, 1937

57 59

(Senegalese), artist unknown, drawn by Jack Grossert, 1956

66

Broom handles by Natal schoolchildren, drawn by Jack Grossert, 1950s

68

by Gcinisiwe Gumede, displayed at the Eshowe Craft Show, drawn by Jack Grossert, 1950s

70

Beaded objects, unknown artists, drawn by Jack Grossert, 1950s

73

Native Teachers’ Journal, by Selbourne (Selby) Mvusi, 1953

79

view of the Indaleni Mission, 1957

83

girls’ hostel at Indaleni Mission, 1950s

84

the kiln, from a mural painted by Abednego Dlamini, 1960 of a mosaic by Powell Xaba, 1962

85 86

4.5 Covers

by Alois Mokoena and E. E. E. Mkize, submitted to Native Teachers’ Journal, 1950 91



4.6 Covers

by Kenneth Masuku and Simon Gama, submitted to Native Teachers’ Journal, 1950 91



4.7 Teaching

staff at the Indaleni Training College, including Peter Atkins and Peter Bell, late 1950s

4.8 Abednego

97

Dlamini discussing a sculpture with a fellow student, 1960

100

Peter Bell and students, early 1960s

102



4.9



4.10 Lorna



4.11

Peirson and Enid Motjale, 1967

105

Leave Taking, by unknown Ndaleni student, 1950s(?) 107

4.12 Detail



4.13



4.14 Thabo

of a mural painted by Sophie Nsuza, 1963

Solomon Baloyi at Ndaleni art school, 1976 Morathane, Credo Kubywana, and Christina Jikelo prepare for the year-end exhibition, Ndaleni art school, 1976

109 113

119



4.15

Practicing school students pose with Monster, by Silverman Jara, 1960s



5.1 Detail



120

of a mural by Samson Mahlobo, 1962

123

5.2

Foot Prints, drawing and poem by Solomon Mabusela, 1966

125



5.3

Queen of Beauty, by Ernest Majova, 1964

127



5.4

Students building the entrance to the girls’ hostel, early 1960s

129



5.5 Completed



5.6 Detail



5.7



5.8 Detail



entrance to the girls’ hostel, late 1960s

of a mural by Hamlet Hobe, 1960

Seesaw, by Elliot Nyawo, 1964

130 140 143

of a mural by an unknown artist (girls’ dining hall), late 1950s

146

5.9

Man with Stone, by Leonard Mbuli, 1980

148



5.10

Students hiking in Giant’s Castle, 1964(?)

150



5.11

Students sketching in Giant’s Castle, 1964(?)

151



5.12

Crab, by Fish Molepo, 1979

154



5.13

Wood Working Room, by Wiseman Mbambo, 1965

158



5.14 Carving,



5.15

Fikile Langa blocking out a sculpture with an ax, 1975 160



5.16

Untitled sculpture, by unknown Ndaleni art student, year unknown

163



5.17

Student with a railway sleeper, cover by Hilda Mohlopi, 1966

165



5.18 Angel



5.19

5.20

late 1960s

Mavuso digging clay, 1980

159

169

Susan Leboso digging clay, 1981

170

Railway Workers, by Michael Likhi, from the collection of Brenda Eckstein, 1967

181



5.21

Jacob Ndlazi and Dimbaza Family, 1972 182



5.22

Why? by Alphey Motsomane, 1976

185



5.23

George Kulati with birdbath, 1964

188



5.24 Ntombi

Mdunge (formerly known as Daphne Biyela) at Ndaleni art school, 1978

191

xi ILLUSTRATIONS

ILLUSTRATIONS xii



5.25 Nathaniel

Ntombela and Rightwell Temba examine student works, 1966



5.26 Exhibition



5.27 Exhibition



5.28 Alex



6.1 Ndaleni residents and Monster, by Silverman Jara, 2013

205



6.2

Practice teaching, Indaleni Practising School, 1968

208



6.3

Solomon Sedibane at Ndaleni art school “refresher course,” 1968

209



6.4

Students of Amelia Shishuba with grasswork, 1970s

214

Students of Godfrey Mpulu, with masks, 1970s

219

in the main hall, Indaleni Training College, 1971 at the Metropolitan Methodist Hall, Pietermaritzburg, 1975

6.5

Mauwane at the exhibition, 1978

193 197 198 203



6.6 Lorna

Peirson at home in Howick, KwaZulu-Natal, 2013 231



6.7

Students of Elijah Zwane building a hut, Transvaal, 1971

234



7.1

Mother and Child, by Dumile Feni, 1966

242



7.2

Selby Mvusi, with his Adam and Eve (1955), 1958

246



7.3

Introspection I, by Paul Sibisi, 1972

257



7.4

Group shot, Ndaleni art school, late 1970s

264



7.5 Leslie

Cindi at Ndaleni art school, 1973

Ep.1 Atomic Sausages, by Cyprian Ramosime, early 1960s Ep.2 Mural

at P. J. Simelane School, Dobsonville, Soweto, 2013

Ep.3 Entranceway to girls’ hostel, photograph by Cedric Nunn, 2009

268 271 279 283

Ep.4

Statue by unknown Ndaleni art school student, photograph by Cedric Nunn, 2009

285

Ep.5

Students of the Indaleni School for the Deaf meeting in the main hall, photograph by Cedric Nunn, 2014

286

Ep.6 Artwork by the students of Busi Mkhize, masonite and plastic, Indaleni School for the Deaf, 2014 288 Ep.7 Birdbath, by Phanuel Pooe, photograph by Cedric Nunn, 2009

289

Gallery Following page 130

Christ, by Phillip Ndwandwe, 1964, photograph by Cedric Nunn, 1993 Sower, by Abiah Ramadi, 1966, photograph by Cedric Nunn, 1993 Garden Water Tap, by Wiseman Mbambo, 1965, photograph by Cedric Nunn, 1993 Birdbath, by Phanuel Pooe, 1965, photograph by Cedric Nunn, 1993 Mural by Sophie Nsuza, 1963, photograph by Cedric Nunn Solomon Sedibane leads a woodworking group at Ndaleni art school, 1968, unknown photographer Detail of a Bible scene by Francis Halala and Jacob Masike, 1962, photograph by Cedric Nunn, 2009 Giraffe mosaic by Gabriel Vilakazi, 1961, photograph by the author, 2011 Map

1.1 Southern Africa. Map by Jennie Miller

xxviii

xiii ILLUSTRATIONS

Acknowledgments

This book is a study of art education in South Africa, under segregation and apartheid. It considers the community of artists and educators who came together to create at numerous places—in Bulwer near the Drakensberg, in Pietersburg in the far northern Transvaal, in Johannesburg, and especially at Indaleni, outside Richmond in what is today KwaZulu-Natal—under the considerable cloud of white supremacy and structural poverty. It is the story of a community that nurtured its own ideals and practices and promoted nothing less than a new way of being in the world. The art teachers

Figure A.1 Easel painting at the Ndaleni Art School, from a mural painted by

Hamlet Hobe, 1960, photograph by the author

Acknowledgments xvi

whose stories follow have taught me a tremendous amount about creativity, consciousness, and aesthetics; I hope that I have learned some of their lessons about being as well. At the very least, I share with them the experience of being nurtured and enriched by a beloved community. This project began in the basement of the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), with the discovery of a book about the artist Dan Rakgoathe and the promise of another archive—of his alma mater, the Ndaleni art school, a few hundred kilometers away in Durban. I am forever indebted to the incredible team of archivists who helped me find my way: Jo Berger at the JAG; Michelle Pickover and team at Historical Papers, University of the Witwatersrand; and especially Mwelela Cele, Senzo Mkhize, and Nellie Somers at the Killie Campbell Collection at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Nellie was especially generous with her time, given my limited stay in Durban and the sheer volume of the Ndaleni material. I am also grateful to archivists at the Mayibuye Center at the University of the Western Cape, the South African National Gallery, the South African National Archives in Pretoria, the University of Fort Hare archives in Alice, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University. Michael Gardiner provided me with critical documentation, as did Brendan Bell of the Tatham Art Gallery, Lorna Peirson, and her former colleague Craig Lancaster. Lorna Peirson was also incredibly generous with her time, humoring me through numerous visits and an unceasing barrage of questions. I am grateful. She passed away in mid-2015 and although it saddens me that she will never see this book, I will always remember the look on her face while I read a draft of the first chapter to her when last we met. I am grateful as well to the numerous former Ndaleni students and other South African artists who took the time to speak with me. Not all of their stories made it into this book, but each of them is responsible for whatever sense I have been able to make of the terrain of creativity in twentieth-century South Africa. All errors are, of course, my own. Special thanks to Bongi Dhlomo, for her friendship and her many lessons about what it means to create. I was fortunate that my long-standing relationship with the Steve Biko Foundation granted me the opportunity to meet and spend time with Bongi, as well as to present a version of this work at the foundation’s wonderful new center in King Williams Town, which was an amazing experience.

I benefited from presenting parts of this book to engaged and critical audiences and colleagues at Emory University’s Seminar on African History, the African History and Anthropology Workshop at the University of Michigan, the University Seminar on Africa at Columbia University, Yale University’s Council on African Studies Seminar, the Witwatersrand Institute of Social and Economic Research WISH seminar, the University of Johannesburg Historical Studies Seminar, the African Studies Working Group at the University of Notre Dame, the African Studies lecture at Colgate University, the Red Lion Lecture at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago, the Northeast Workshop on African Studies, and the African Studies Association. Karen Ijumba, Jennie Miller, Sam Appel, and Mariana Arjona Soberon all played critical roles in helping me manage this material and shape it into presentable form. I am fortunate that colleagues and friends across continents and campuses have contributed to this work and the living that produced it. In South Africa, Cedric Nunn, Elza Miles, Joey Kok (who helped so much with translations!), Berno Schneider, Anitra Nettleton, Laura Phillips, Jacob Dlamini, Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi, Achille Mbembe, Nafisa Essop Sheik, Stephen Sparks, Natasha Erlank, Juliette Leeb-du Toit, Andries Bezuidenhout, Irma DuPlessis, Brown Maaba, Mwelela Cele, Sarah Emily Duff, Shireen Ally, Thembisa Waetjen, Goolam Vahed, Simphiwe Ngwane, Omar Badsha, Clive Glaser, Keith Breckenridge, Catherine Burns, Khosi Xaba, Obenewa Amponsah, Nkosinathi Biko, Julie Parle,Vanessa Noble, Councilor Thulani Shabalala, and so many others were critical interlocutors and friends. While writing this book, I lost my friend and mentor Mbulelo Mzamane; I treasure the memory of describing this project to him when last we met. This book was conceived and written during a period of personal and professional transitions. The project developed first at Cornell University, and I am grateful to colleagues there who offered advice and encouragement. I need especially to note Salah Hassan, who took the time to tutor me on the history of twentieth-century African art. Support for my initial research was provided by the Society for the Humanities and the Institute for the Social Sciences, both at Cornell. Since 2011, I have been fortunate to call both Brooklyn and Yale home (with plenty of Metro North in between). I’m grateful to the Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies and the Whitney Humanities

xvii

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments xviii

Center for supporting my research, as well as to the latter’s Hilles Publication Fund for helping defray the costs of producing this book. A hearty thank you to Ian Shapiro for his support, again and again. Colleagues at Yale have been generous with their time and suggestions; I am grateful to Anne Eller, David Blight, Paul Sabin, Kate Ezra, George Chauncey, Paul Freedman, Francesca Trivellato, Alejandra Dubcovsky, Rohit De, Julie Stephens, Jenifer Klein, Jennifer Van Vleck, Jenni Allen, Albert Laguna, Ned Blackhawk, Rosie Bsheer, Laura Engelstein, Greta LaFleur, Mike McGovern, Katie Lofton, Naomi Lamoureaux, Steph Newell, Louisa Lombard, Kate Baldwin, Jonathan Wyrtzen, Joanna Radin, Michael Cappello, Chris Udry, Richard Anderson, Joshua Rubin, Matthew Keaney, Samuel Severson, Efe Igor, Thuto Thipe, Keri Lambert, Nikita Bernardi, Py Killen, and many others. I offer special thanks to Bob Harms, Alan Mikhail, and Ben Kiernan, each of whom read the manuscript carefully and offered vital interventions. Thanks also to the amazing staff in both the History Department and the Macmillan Center. I am grateful to Dana Lee, Denise Scott, Caryn Carson, Liza Joyner, and especially Lina Chan for her patience with my inept bookkeeping. Beyond New Haven, I have been lucky to be able to stay connected with old colleagues and mentors and to develop new networks. For advice, critiques, assistance, and camaraderie, my thanks to (in no particular order) Tom Spear, Clifton Crais, Jim Sweet, Neil Kodesh, Mark Hunter, Johanna Crane, Priya Lal, Meghan Healy-Clancy, Jill Kelly, Liz Thornberry, Khwezi Mkhize, Anatoly Pinsky, Paul Landau, Laura Murphy, Rian Thum, Jon Soske, Andy Ivaska, Brian Rutledge, Leslie Hadfield, Emily Callaci, Tyler Fleming, Carina Ray, Lauren Jarvis, Robert Vinson, Minkah Makalani, John Mason, Kim Miller, Naaborko Sackeyfio-Lenoch, Elizabeth Perrill, Shannen Hill, Kathryn De Luna, Kristin Phillips, Pier Larson, Butch Ware, Michael Panzer, T. J. Tallie, Marissa Moorman, Joshua Cohen, Chris Lee, Dennis Laumann, Mamadou Diouf, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Sean Hanretta, Noah Tamarkin, Jon Glassman, Jeremy Foster, Michelle Moyd, Jeremy Braddock, Mukoma wa Ngugi, Suman Seth, Mindy Smith, Guy Ortolano, Jenny Mann, and many others. Working with Ohio University Press has been a comfortable homecoming in itself; my thanks to the entire team, including Rick Huard, Beth Pratt, Gill Berchowitz, Nancy Basmajian, Joan Sherman, Samara Rafaert, two anonymous readers, and, of course, Jean Allman, Allen Isaacman, and Derek Peterson. Portions of this book were previously published as “Two

Stories about Art, Education, and Beauty in Twentieth-Century South Africa,” American Historical Review 118, no. 5 (2013). Book one was bylined Ithaca, book two Brooklyn, and it is better for it. This commuter’s gratitude to the New York City Africanist community overflows. I am grateful for the time, ideas, inspiration, and support of Julie Livingston, Fred Cooper, Hlonipha Mokoena (whom NYC misses terribly), Shobana Shankar, Ben Talton, and Greg Mann. Frequent lunches with Sean Jacobs have sharpened my conception of this book and the politics it articulates. Through him, I have been able to learn so much from the wider Africa Is a Country community, of which I am proud to be a part. Friends and family in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, California, and beyond have stepped in to help Katy and me walk the razor’s edge of two jobs, unforgiving schedules, little kids, and a dog. I’m so thankful to the grandparents, neighbors, nannies, babysitters, and teachers who made this possible. I was fortunate to write most of this book in the home I share with Katy and Liya, while listening to new addition Micah learn first to crawl, then walk, then run (and fall) upstairs. As a historian, I cannot help but be keenly aware of the passage of time; I lost my last grandparent while writing this book; I welcomed my nephew Rafa Henry; and I watched my baby girl become a prototeenager who dances, swims, and loves to build and draw. She will be able to read these words, which freaks me out. Time passes and things change, but Liya Reba and Micah Leon always bring me joy beyond words. And to Katy . . . again, words just will not do. This book began with us together in Johannesburg and Durban and continued with us together in Ithaca and Brooklyn. It began in school and ended with you at work, so able, so passionate and skilled and smart. It has not always—or often?— been easy, but I believe with all my heart that this process has been and will be worth it. Together, we keep the balls in the air, across cities, train lines, and continents. Our family is a refuge of love and joy. Everything I have ever written has been for you, but this book is truly yours. I dedicate it to our lives together, to our future, and to you, my love.

Brooklyn, NY May 2016 xix Acknowledgments

Prologue Handwork

Fred Sithole was a teacher at the Lurani Government School, outside Bulwer in the Union of South Africa’s Natal Province. Lurani was one of a few dozen schools that the Natal provincial government ran without the aid of the country’s ubiquitous Christian missions. In the years since World War I, Natal’s education department had embarked on an ambitious program of school building and curriculum overhaul. The percentage of African students who attended schools was small—only between 7 and 15 percent during the 1920s—but those who were in schools experienced new pedagogical imperatives that spoke of education for the sake of “life,” not just for learning. Such new ideas grew out of decades of debate about the role Africans were to play in South Africa’s schools and the colonial economy. These debates would likely have seemed quite abstract from both the teachers’ and the students’ perspectives. For Sithole and his students, new educational theories boiled down to the real, material fact that children devoted at least an hour of their school day to manual work.1 In his presentation to his fellow teachers in Bulwer, Sithole noted that some schools did a good deal more, citing one in which “two-thirds of the time is devoted to Manual Work.” He was not suggesting such a dramatic overhaul for Lurani, even if his research indicated that their students would have supported such measures. Like many of his colleagues, Sithole had been educated under the old dispensation, when missionary education had focused on classical instruction—primarily the three Rs, which he referred In 1926,

Figure Pro.1 Basketry class at Indaleni, date unknown, photographer unknown, with the permission of the Richmond/Byrne District Museum (hereafter cited as Richmond Museum)

to as “school subjects.” But that was then; now, in the mid-1920s, he surveyed his students about whether they preferred to spend their time on school subjects or on manual work. Their response was unequivocal: “I think Manual Work must be given more time,” wrote one. “Between these two, myself I choose Manual Work,” added another, reasoning that school subjects “will not help us much when we are old. Manual Work makes us better people.” Manual work took some of the mystery out of school. Its purposes and outcomes were apparent and translatable to life outside the classroom. “We make the baskets even at home when the teacher is not present,” a student explained. Unlike the alchemy of mathematics, which frequently saw students “fail to make a hard sum,” manual work was accessible to all: to make a basket or a spoon or a piece of furniture, “we only use hands and look with the eyes.” As Sithole saw it, through manual work schools would, in time, pay real, tangible dividends for both students and their community. Why bother with school subjects when “we have no school-fees and money for

books,” a student asked; rather, “we can make baskets and sell them.” The “subjects cannot give us money,” another added, and Sithole drew the collective conclusion: “All students see that Manual Work will help them to earn their living.” This was a selective survey, to be sure; Sithole was a teacher in favor of manual work over and against schooling’s traditional emphasis on the subjects. Moreover, he published the results of his survey in the Native Teachers’ Journal, a publication founded by the recently invigorated provincial department of education, which had emphasized manual work (also known as industrial education or handwork) as part of its post–World War I reforms. Yet even if biased and edited, Sithole’s conclusions spoke eloquently to the unfolding ideology of African education in 1920s South Africa. Education “for life” was for the real world beyond the school. Students were poor, and manual work offered them the chance to make some money. Contemporary evidence suggests that even the small percentage of African youth who went to school spent fewer than five years there. Sithole and others contended that those few years were best spent giving students practical skills for the rest of their lives— which meant reading and writing, to be sure, but also basketry, sewing, and woodworking.2 Sithole’s claims were parochial, limited to his school near Bulwer. Yet consciously or not, he invoked decades of global debate about the position of the black student. From the turn of the twentieth century until the eve of World War II, educational theorists across Africa and elsewhere reevaluated whether the European-derived colonial education system was appropriate to the needs of the African child, as increasing numbers of the latter began to enter schools.3 This continental debate was part of a larger discussion about mass education globally, driven by industrialization and urbanization, among the other epochal shifts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In British colonial Africa, these issues took on a new urgency after World War I, following the evolving needs of the colonial political economy and the growing authority especially of American social scientists and philanthropists who were eager to extend their country’s ideological influence.4 Reflecting on the precedent of the postslavery US South, American theorists taught that education worked best when it promoted social cohesion, not the splintering of the community into “educated” and “not educated” segments. Prevailing social and cultural conditions being what they were across Africa, it was presumptuous

xxiii

Handwork

Prologue xxiv

and foolhardy to apply metropolitan educational practices willy-nilly across the empire. Rather, education needed to proceed slowly and practically, just as Booker T. Washington had demonstrated in the United States after emancipation and as Washington’s acolytes, both black and white, were attempting to replicate across colonial Africa. Paul Monroe of Columbia University’s Teachers’ College called this Washington-derived scheme “adapted education.” Monroe had no particular expertise in colonial pedagogy, but he was nevertheless assigned by the US State Department to issue a report on education in colonial Africa in 1919. Monroe’s conclusion was simple: African society was at a different stage of development than European society. Monroe believed that although education for Africans should contain “the essential elements of modern civilization and Christian culture,” there was nothing more essential than equipping students with “modern methods in industry and agriculture.”5 Until the 1910s, dominant imperial practice was to import metropolitan teaching to the colonies, “with little or no adaptation or curriculum reform to accommodate local circumstances.”6 With faith in the potency of European culture, metropolitan educationists and their far-flung missionary networks were cultural imperialists, trampling on African traditions in the name of progress and neglecting what Monroe called the “unique genius” of African societies.7 Monroe condemned this. South Africa had been exemplary here, at schools such as Adams College and Lovedale, where those who devised the curriculum learned from the best practices of metropolitan society and foreswore any adaptation to African economic and social circumstances. The situation changed dramatically during the years bracketing World War I, under the influence of one of adapted education’s most strident proponents, the South African and Natal-born Charles Loram. Loram was a graduate of Teachers College, where he had studied with Paul Monroe and completed a PhD on the “education of the South African Native.” Upon returning to Natal to serve as the chief inspector of native education in 1918, he quickly ascended to the highest echelons of the native administration. In 1920, he left the Natal Education Department to serve on the Union’s Commission of Native Affairs; in 1921, he joined the Phelps-Stokes Commission on its educational survey of the region.8 Loram’s reputation was built on his efforts in Natal, where he worked assiduously to reshape the province’s approach to African education. As

historian of South African education Peter Kallaway explained, Loram had left the United States “deeply wedded” to the adapted education model. The desire of Natal’s African population for schooling and the provincial government’s interest in a more scientific approach gave him a suitable laboratory for his experiments.9 It was Loram who organized the Lurani Government School and Loram whose insights and authority provided the context for Fred Sithole’s confident assertion that the best education began with the hands. Loram had reviewed the education systems of the US South while studying at Teachers College; he had traveled both to Tuskegee and to Hampton, and not surprisingly, he found a worthy model in Washington’s adaptation of the white school form. Washington had done more to advance the Negro than any white American, he claimed, “and so will it be with the Native peoples of South Africa.”10 Washington had valorized the image of the African American farmer and craftsman, tilling the land and producing useful goods. Loram’s syllabus similarly demanded that manual training take up an increasingly significant proportion of the learning week. “The course in industrial training should have taught him the simpler Native crafts, the useful European art of sewing and the elements of practical agriculture,” Loram contended, “while proving that there is nothing lowering in manual work.”11 Loram’s tenure as chief inspector of native education in Natal was short but evidently long enough to enact much of his program. Within a year, 73 percent of the African schools were doing manual work; by the mid-1920s, that number had risen to 86 percent.12 Historians have noted his success; more and more, Loram’s tenure in Natal is seen as a rehearsal for the apartheid government’s efforts in favor of “own lines,” or adapted education. Such teleologies aside, the fundamental fact is that over the 1920s, more and more African students entered schools like Sithole’s, there to work with their hands.13 Carpentry and woodworking; basketry and sewing by children in schools—this was to be the foundation of a future African society’s economy in their villages and native reserves. This separate future was, of course, an illusion. White artisans looked jealously at African vocational training. Indeed, previous efforts to promote African industry had foundered because of outspoken white opposition, and it was far from certain that handwork would save Africans “from going up and down the streets looking for jobs.”14 Even more fundamentally,

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Handwork

Figure Pro.2 Carving tools and carved objects at Grace Dieu Mission, late 1920s, photographer unknown, Historical Papers Research Library, University of the Witwatersrand, File AB750Ga8.36, with the permission of the Anglican Church of South Africa

“adapted education assumed that Africa would continue to consist of exclusively rural societies”—small in scale, cheaply supported by domestic agricultural production—but the 1920s instead saw the dramatic decline of independent African farming and the beginning of a still-ongoing tide of urbanization. Industrial education was premised on the faith that African students could sell the things they made in school, yet by the end of the 1920s—and especially with the onset of the Depression in the 1930s—the market for African industrial work seemed to have dried up.15 Loram and Sithole’s own department took note of this. In 1929, a regional inspector named Dent surveyed his schools and concluded that the market value of their crafts was uncertain. In fact, “in most cases there is no visible market, and the articles accumulate to become mere lumber,” he informed the provincial authorities. But he did not call for students to stop working with their hands; rather, he suggested that the department cease to emphasize the “market value” of student work “to the exclusion of other aspects of Native crafts.” Dent proposed a shift “in the purpose” of handwork,

away from “inculcating industry to aesthetic appreciation.”16 If not industry, then why not art? The last was an intriguing idea, and other educationists developed it over the course of the next decades. All the while, African students in South African schools continued to work with their hands—to build, weave, model, and carve—sometimes for an hour per day and sometimes more.

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Handwork

Map 1.1 Southern Africa. Map by Jennie Miller, www.jennie-miller.com

Chapter 1

a Hillside in South Africa

the greatest challenge was the lack of materials. The syllabus called for students to weave with grass, but in many areas, no suitable grass existed; teachers reported using wool instead. When the lack of paint demanded similar improvisation, “we are using wet chalk and crayons.”1 The syllabus was unrelenting, no matter whether teachers taught in rural schools with ample stone and wood or in denuded urban areas where “there is no wood because the school is right in the Location.”2 Teachers were forced to find creative solutions to their particular experiences of material want, and they eagerly exchanged advice and suggestions. “Wood for sculpture can often be obtained free of charge from municipalities when trees such as Jacaranda, Silver Oak or Syringa have to be pruned or cut down,” one teacher reported, “John Ngcobo succeeded in getting some wood in this way in Pietermaritzburg.”3 Vivian Bopape frequented waste yards outside factories and in industrial areas; her quests were often rewarded with spoiled newsprint, broken glass, and torn sponges—all of which proved useful in her lessons.4 Material want affected teachers’ own art practices as well. Winston Radebe was a talented draftsman, but he lacked the money to buy conté crayons or charcoals. So he drew with shoe For most,

Figure 1.1 A man in black

and brown shoe polish, drawing by Winston Radebe, 1965, photograph by the author

polish—Nugget brand, black and brown—and proudly enclosed a sample for his art teacher.5 Correspondence about materials dominated the pages of the art teachers’ newsletter from its initial publication in 1961. Lack was the “major enemy” of Ndaleni graduates, and its defeat drew the community of teachers, students, and artists together.6 Between the early 1950s and the early 1980s, South Africa’s Department of Bantu Education ran a school for the training of specialist arts and crafts teachers at Indaleni, outside Richmond in the Natal Midlands. Over those decades, nearly a thousand students attended the course, which qualified them to teach the department’s arts and crafts syllabus in apartheid South Africa’s schools. As we have seen, long before the advent of the policy of Bantu Education, syllabi for Africans had mandated that black students engage in what was variously called art, handwork, industrial education, craftwork, or arts and crafts while enrolled in government-funded schools. This took on a new urgency in the 1950s, when arts and crafts featured in the apartheid government’s efforts to preserve the absolute distinction between African (or “Bantu”) and European education. In the years leading up to the adoption of the Bantu Education Act in 1953, apartheid bureaucrats and theorists considered how best to ensure that the syllabus promoted difference—and in the years that followed, qualified teachers went to Ndaleni to study the activities called for in the Bantu Education syllabus. At Ndaleni, they studied grasswork, beadwork, bonework, painting, drawing, wood carving, and claywork, among other subjects; they also developed their own art practice and gained a working knowledge of art history. Paid for with government bursaries, the art program was a two-year course through the 1950s and was then reduced to a one-year program from the 1960s until the course’s end in 1981. In return for the government bursary and a pay increase upon completing the course, Ndaleni students agreed to teach art in the apartheid government’s African schools. Close to a thousand graduated, about one hundred failed to complete the course, and nearly two thousand more were turned away because of a lack of space.7 That only one-third of applicants were admitted to the Ndaleni program indicates its appeal. A year at Indaleni (the former mission station as opposed to the art school, which did not use the locative prefix) was a year nestled in the Midlands, painting, sculpting, drawing, learning. The vast majority of Ndaleni students were already working teachers, so a year at Ndaleni also meant time away from their typically underfunded and

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A Hillside in South Africa

The Art of Life in South Africa 4

Figure 1.2 Students carving, late 1960s, photographer unknown, Ndaleni Scrap-

book 4, with the permission of the Campbell Collections of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (hereafter cited as CC)

overcrowded schools; it also meant a year without pay, being confined to shabby mission accommodations, and for older students being away from their families. Many considered themselves artists, even if society did not recognize them as such, and although it was not an art school in the strictest sense, Ndaleni was one of a very few places where black South Africans could study and develop their art.8 Yet attaining an Ndaleni certificate did not promise a much easier life. The same problems awaited graduates— more and more students, dilapidated working conditions, a pervasive lack of materials, and an even more pervasive lack of appreciation. For many, it was worth it. Teaching art in Bantu Education schools could be rewarding, as Elijah Zwane wrote in the early 1960s. “Wishing to see what I had in my class, I introduced modeling in clay and picture painting, and the work of the pupils struck me with wonder,” he gushed. It was marvelous to “see what talents remain buried in the nerves of an African child.”9 A decade later, Mercy Ghu was similarly enthusiastic: “[The students’] imagination is fairly wide when it comes to clay or paper mâché,” she reported, “they are not at all inhibited!”10 Listening to them chatter while they worked, she was transported back to her time at art school, to

the joy that resounded in the “sound of the hammer and chisel in the free, open air.”11 “Their world was different from ours. We must start there.”12 So wrote Nathan Huggins about the Harlem Renaissance, to free himself and his readers from decades’ worth of knowledge of what that era and its personalities meant. Let us start there: is it possible to tell the story of Elijah Zwane’s “wonder” or to exult in the “free, open air” of such a place as twentieth-century South Africa? Between the 1950s and the 1980s, hundreds of black South Africans journeyed across their benighted land to a hillside school to paint, to carve, to model, to think. The evidence they left behind suggests that, for the most part, they enjoyed the experience. They held fast to it, treasuring the school, their talent, their vision, their changed selves, and the community they made there amid society’s storms. We know a good deal about those storms. As a way of life, the “apartheid” for which these teachers worked is still little understood. As a concept, it is a term immediately grasped and then shelved with colonialism, racism, segregation, and the Holocaust—the litany of a century’s wrongs.13 Generations of activists, artists, scholars, and others have condemned apartheid’s violence and urged resistance. Yet the term apartheid itself continues to do tremendous violence to those who lived under that system: when we invoke the word—and especially when we append the categories black and South African to it—it becomes too easy to sit back, satisfied that we know the whole story.14 But even those who lived it and fought righteous struggles against the apartheid system can claim only an imperfect knowledge of what it meant to live in that time and place.15 Broad sociological claims produce similarly partial truths—about poverty, about oppression, about inferior education and corrupt and unresponsive bureaucracies. All are true—and all obscure other truths, about the decisions with which people were presented, about the opportunities they seized, and about their exertions for better and more meaningful lives. Life is multiple and contradictory, the political philosopher Richard Iton writes, and when seeking to grasp its various incarnations, “we cannot overlook those spaces that generate difficult data.”16 The Ndaleni art school was such a difficult place. At a basic level of political and historical identification, the art teachers who passed through Ndaleni were cogs in the machinery of white supremacy. They taught a syllabus written by C. T. Loram’s children—bureaucrats

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A Hillside in South Africa

Figure 1.3 The Hand of Destruction, by Fish Molepo, ARTTRA, no. 38, October 1979, 22

charged with the maintenance of racial separation—and even when teachers could not teach that syllabus to the letter, their quest for materials reveals that they aspired to do so.17 They were also people open to the possibility of beauty, imbued with a confidence that if they could imagine something, they could materialize it; if they needed to say something, they could say it.18 They were thinking people in a time and place that did not necessarily reward their sorts of thoughts. They were relics of a bygone ideology, justly relegated to history’s scrap heap. Ndaleni generates difficult data precisely because it opens a window into the closed room of the past—through its archive, we can see the faces looking out at us, blind to the world of knowledge and hindsight that we inhabit. Twentieth-century South Africa was only one among many such rooms. Indeed, we live in another room today, a room whose boundaries we perceive dimly, if at all. What did it mean to dwell in that realm of perception?19 What comes of our “attempt to see through the looking glass of epistemological history”?20 The Art of Life in South Africa is the story of a community, a school, and the idea that people everywhere are creative beings, capable of making manifest their unique visions of the world. Twentieth-Century South Africa

Imagine a kiln. By the early 1960s, it was evident that the art school’s infrastructure was not up to its task. The syllabus called for students to be trained in clay, which was one of the few raw materials abundant in African schools because in many places—although not everywhere—it could be freely gathered from streambeds and other watercourses. In other words, the material was free only in the sense that it was paid for with students’ labor, not cash. The production of clay at Ndaleni art school was a bone-wearying process, involving trips to nearby streams to dig raw clay; hauling buckets up and down steep hills; and spending hours grinding, sieving, and curing raw clay for use in their art classes. All of this was arduous enough without the additional task of gathering wood to fire the students’ creations. The students had no potter’s wheel, and they had no modern kiln.21 The first iteration of the Ndaleni art school newsletter begged supporters for £150 to buy an electric kiln to ease that last, excessive labor. Funds were not forthcoming, however, and it was not until the early 1970s that the Department of Bantu Education relented and delivered a brand-new,

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A Hillside in South Africa

The Art of Life in South Africa 8

Figure 1.4 Stoking the kiln at Ndaleni, 1975, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4, with the

permission of the CC

state-of-the-art, electric kiln to Ndaleni’s hillside campus.22 There it sat, untouched and unused, for a decade, until the school closed. Ndaleni had electricity; the art school’s instructors might have plugged the thing in and made their students’ lives easier. Yet they understood too well the realities that would be faced by art teachers in the country beyond the campus. Bantu Education schools did not have electric kilns—many did not have electricity at all. It was better to continue to dig a hole in the ground, scrounge for bricks, and gather wood than to humor the department’s illusory modernity.23 The story of this cold electric kiln captures the reality of twentieth-century South Africa differently than do most history books. Both scholarship and popular memory typically capture the vastness of that time by focusing on a handful of well-told stories: the interwoven rise of the industrial state and political segregation, the maintenance of white supremacy and apartheid, and the “people’s” struggle for some sort of new political dispensation.24 Yet the tension between the possibility of the wood-fired kiln and the unreality of the electric kiln reveals an entirely different set of experiences. Recently, scholars have begun to push against historiographical convention. Some have called for “post-anti-apartheid” historiography, a

Figure 1.5 The kiln at Ndaleni, 1975, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4, with the permission

of the CC

“history in chords” that can account for the past in ways less beholden to the politics of bygone times, more sensitive to the “complexity” of the past beyond the limits of the “struggle.”25 The metaphor is suggestive. People live their lives multiply, at times striking one note—that of protest, perhaps—and at times striking others—laughter, sorrow, satisfaction.26 Historians typically only register certain sounds as worthy of reproduction, especially those that continue to resonate into our present, even as we claim that our discipline celebrates the contingent, the alternative pasts that were lost along the way to today. As we all know from our own lives, there were always other notes, other ways of experiencing—and therefore capturing—time. What else was life in twentieth-century South Africa, beyond the well-worn keys? The kiln sounds an important note. All of the technologies that marked modern life in the twentieth century were part of art students’ experiences, if differently than in more equitable spaces. Their experience of the kiln— the consciousness that its unplugged, unused instrumentality proposed—revealed a critical contour of their existence.27 Art students experienced South African modernity not only in poverty and wealth or exclusively in the denial of or vehement insistence on rights but also in muscles tired from digging clay and chopping wood for fire, all as a precondition for creating. They

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A Hillside in South Africa

The Art of Life in South Africa 10

knew twentieth-century South Africa in their knowledge that they would never encounter amenities such as electric kilns in African schools. But that was only one note the cold kiln played. Art teachers also knew twentieth-century South Africa in their own eagerness to embrace such challenges, to dig clay, to chop wood, and otherwise to work to create beauty under apartheid.28 It is incongruous to think of beauty under apartheid, given the common tendency to see that period of the South African past carried by the momentous tension between oppression and liberation, with scant moments to pause and consider the sensory experience of a single moment spent digging or chopping or waiting for the clay to fire. Yet such moments peppered and demarcated art students’ time, and they turned time’s passage into the stuff of historical experience. To live in twentieth-century South Africa was to know, as Arjun Appadurai counseled, that which we identify as “modernity” has always been “unevenly experienced.”29 Twentiethcentury South Africa was as uneven and profoundly iniquitous a space as existed for much of the century; yet it was also, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, a “space of possibilities,” a place with limits defined by the “position taking” of those who lived there. Bourdieu assigned special authority to those who work within the possibility of time and space. History “presents itself to each agent as a space of possibilities, which is defined in the relationship between the structure of average chances of access to different positions . . . and the dispositions of each agent, the subjective basis of the perception and appreciation of objective chances.” Artists are Bourdieu’s exemplary agents. Through their “dispositions” and their choices, they work within, against, and through the possibility of their moment; creators create history, and in turn, they, as historical beings, are created by it.30 Bourdieu thus imagined the artist as someone who sifts through the possible, as time unfolds. This is reminiscent of Achille Mbembe’s clarification of African subjectivity “as time,” as unfolding and not complete.31 This is an interesting challenge to the intellectual historian. Most scholars of black South African intellectual history have tended to tell the stories of those great anticolonialists whose thoughts were always on the future. In this way, early nineteenth-century radical resistance is read as a rehearsal for the more rational, reasoned appeals that marked the early twentieth century, as well as the move toward revolution at the century’s midpoint.32 Put differently, if intellectual history is the history of “thinkers and concepts,” African intellectual history has long dwelled in histories

of the future, not explications of a series of presents.33 My own work is notably guilty of this: in my first book, I studied dreams and strategies to promote changes yet to come, at the expense of a more finely tuned examination of creative responses for living then.34 The narrative of becoming predicted by the logic of colonial modernity is seductive, yet art students without supplies knew better. They knew that absent tempting narratives, they were living the uneven experience of contemporary life in an unequal world. By watching as they positioned themselves according to their dispositions, we might avoid the trap of “privileging the analytical over the lived.”35 This brings me back to Mbembe and the idea that subjectivities are fashioned from “everyday practices” in time, and thus that the strategies and conditions of a succession of presents are revealed through life histories. “African identity does not exist as a substance. It is constituted, in varying forms, through a series of practices,” Mbembe argues.36 Rarely were the quality and conditions of African identity more overdetermined than during juridical apartheid and the struggle against that system. Few places, therefore, might be as meaningfully explored for the practices that belied both a categorization of this sort and the conviction that art students’ lives were empty, mentally denuded existences. As with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Bengali bureaucrats, the circumstances of Ndaleni teachers’ lives were not of their own choosing, but these individuals still had “to find their livelihood” therein.37 In this way, the strategies of art students and teachers to maintain the integrity of their creative practice tell a story bigger than their relatively small community. Their kiln offers a story of existence-in-time that the art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu describes “not as a closed, historically and geographically situated phenomenon, but as a constellation of . . . strategies”—the potential multiplicity of life lived in moments.38 Time is not an inert medium through which trends and ideologies pass and are transmitted. Rather, time must be understood to be soil, always and everywhere awaiting an artist’s particular, unique seed.39 Art

It is necessary to extend the metaphor. No seed falls on neutral soil; atmospheric conditions always prevail. Artists always labor in dialogue—or

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The Art of Life in South Africa 12

Figure 1.6 “I Am Longing to

Be One of Your Art Students,” Dominus Thembe, ARTTRA, no. 30, May 1975, 6

contestation—with their surroundings, both material and intangible. South African art historians have long explored the ways in which black South African artists in particular practiced in conversation with their unfolding political realities. Art and politics were often one and were considered as such. Indeed, art history as a discipline has tended to wed black creativity to the story of protest and oppositional action. This was how some artists lived their lives and practiced their art, to be sure, yet it plays only that single, popular note.40 Art historians have tended to focus on art as necessarily oppositional even when it was not articulated as such. Under the art historical gaze, every meeting of white and black artists is recast as a “non-racial aesthetic practice,” each work displayed to a primarily white audience, “a firm line of communication across the iniquitously effective racial divide which kept South Africans apart.”41 Works of art are subject to interpretation; and artists’ lives have been hitched to narratives many artists would not have recognized. Although most art historians would regret the comparison, their discipline has tended to share with the apartheid state the conviction that

as black artists, individual creators approached their canvas, wood, or stone with a set of predictable concerns born of their supposed racial identity—to be political or not, to be ‘modern’ or ‘traditional.’ Who they were thought to be determines how we understand their work.42 In other words, artists do not live in these studies; instead, they inhabit social categories. Thus, scholarly examinations tend to “naturalize” rather than effectively “analyze” what happened when the artists found the time to create.43 The art historian Anitra Nettleton’s study of the famed midcentury artist Dumile Feni pushes back against this convention. She argues that art history needs a good dose of historical method—an insistence on context and chronology, a healthy skepticism toward received categories, including even the most basic assumption that Dumile is best understood, first and foremost, as an “African” artist. Rather, one should start with the latter category— artist—and see what comes from that.44 Joshua Cohen has recently echoed this historicism in a new study of the work and life of Ernest Mancoba, who features prominently in all accounts of the pioneering generation of black South African artists. Whereas previous studies—including very recent work, such as the multivolume Visual Century—tended to presume Mancoba and others’ iconic status, Cohen noted the “need to examine African modern artists more as creative practitioners than as cultural icons.”45 Attention to the practice of creativity demands that those interested in artists look intently at context. “I cannot, as an artist, work by the light of an historical principle,” John Berger’s Janos Lavin insisted, “I must work by the light of my senses— here and now.”46 Berger penned this admonition in 1958, yet as a discipline, art history has tended to focus instead on historical principles—whether nonracialism or the struggle—against the actual practice of art. And practice is quite revealing. Ndaleni artists modeled clay; with their own students, they produced pots, bowls, and animals, wood-fired in a hole in the ground, in the twentieth century. Theirs was a multiracial environment, like so many art-producing spaces, as John Peffer has suggested. Surely, however, it is more meaningful to note the labor that went into each modeled object and from that to draw conclusions about the historical circumstances in which these artists lived and that structured their creative practice.47 Artworks, produced in time, are “embodied meanings” that “have the style that belongs to that culture,” Arthur Danto explains.48 So, too, did apartheid have a style beyond the relatively well-known aesthetics of its architecture and its opposition.49 Against theories that opposed art

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The Art of Life in South Africa 14

to the rest of life, John Dewey compared works of art to mountain peaks, which “do not float unsupported; they do not even just rest upon the earth. They are the earth in one of its manifest operations.”50 Art is made by people; it is therefore historical—the then-current world “in one of its manifest operations.” Rather than cast twentieth-century South African art practices as always oppositional, we might understand art as apartheid in one of its manifest operations. This is not to say that we understand art according to our received knowledge of what apartheid was—a set of laws and economic relationships, an oppressive system—but instead, that we focus on art as creative practice conditioned by what was possible then and there. This is the perspective assumed in The Art of Life in South Africa— that we need to move forward in time with historical subjects, to survey the terrain of the possible and watch the work that went into creating. What Berger wrote of painters is true of all artists: “When a painter is working he is aware of the means which are available to him—these include his materials, the style he inherits, the conventions he must obey, his prescribed or freely chosen subject manner.”51 By concentrating intently on one school and one set of practitioners, I am able to access that fleeting awareness and watch as creative beings pick and choose from the possible.52 Even under apartheid, education was not simple indoctrination: to learn was to develop, to change. This was especially so if the subject was art. Ndaleni’s teachers worked for the apartheid state, but their frame of reference was global, stretching back to early twentieth-century debates about the nature of the creative human subject. Art objects are the outcomes of processes of analysis, selection, and embodiment, in material form. Art is the work of consciousness made manifest; creation is an act that crosses the threshold between the mind and the world. The artist creates by not merely inhabiting convention and context but also moving within it. Context is both “opportunity and restraint,” Berger writes, “by working and using the opportunity [the artist] becomes conscious of some of its limits [and] pushes against one or several of them. According to [the artist’s] character and historical situation, the result of his pushing varies from a barely discernible variation of a convention . . . to a more fully original discovery, a breakthrough.”53 To see artists working through and with time is to open up new vistas about both art and thought in African history. Much self-conscious Africanist intellectual history has long centered on the concerns of the anticolonial imagination and the nation. But a

Figure 1.7 Daphne Biyela (center) and classmates preparing wood for sculp-

ture, 1978, photographer unknown, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4, with the permission of the CC

significant substratum has considered the same issues that Berger assigned to the artist: what it means to inhabit and move in a particular time and place and how thinking beings manifest their thoughts in the physical, social world.54 Recent Africanist scholarship from southern Africa to the Great Lakes and West Africa depicts thinkers as those charged with imagining and making real the community. This sort of thought is often about the fundamental task of getting by, whether in the maintenance and unfolding of political communities in precolonial Buganda; the bringing of rain to parched fields in Tanzania or highveld South Africa; or the maintenance of expansive, beloved families under a sheikh’s authority in colonial French West Africa.55 Beyond the box of the nation, African intellectual history abounds with thinkers’ efforts to make life better by making the imagined real. To make the imagined real, through discipline and practice, is the regular work of art.56 Asked to define the nature of art, Berger reflects on

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The Art of Life in South Africa 16

“the moment at which a piece of music begins.” Art emerges in the “incongruity of that moment, compared to the uncounted, unperceived silence which preceded it.”57 Before the music starts, there was only time, undifferentiated and indistinguishable; then, suddenly, human invention crossed the threshold from the mind into history. The eruption of music lays bare the “distinction between the actual and the desirable.” It makes apparent the constant, invisible thinking that is always in the world. Art is thus not an isolated, esoteric concern but social practice, just as Africanist scholars have suggested that intellectual history is concerned not with esoterica but with the real historical demands of life. But art is not merely a part of history. To capture in form the style of an era is no superficial task; rather, artists tend a delicate crop, that of beauty and its cognates—related terms such as happiness, contentedness, reflection, and satisfaction. “Aesthetics prime the pump of life,” Michael Taussig argues. Ndaleni artists worked hard without adequate materials because they were convinced, as were many others both in South Africa and elsewhere, that “beauty is as much infrastructure as are highways and bridges.”58 They understood that to create was to argue for beauty in the everyday, even under apartheid, even with cast-off paper or shoe polish. For them, to be an artist was not to revel in the distinction between thought and the rest of life; it was to attempt again and again “to define and make unnatural this distinction.”59 We venerate works of art to the degree that we raise temples to their glory and charge admission merely to stand in their presence. But the social purpose of the work that comes before the works reveals that we have it backward. Art is not beauty shut off from the world— it is the faithful conviction that the world is worth beautifying. Or at least, that was how Mercy Ghu saw it in the late 1970s when she taught her Soweto students to work with what was at hand and celebrated their happy chatter from deep within apartheid. Hers is an instructive case. Ghu was talented and interested in creating, which is what took her to Ndaleni. She never made it as an artist in the conventional sense: she did not sell her works and instead made her living teaching in government schools. In this, she was like the vast majority of Ndaleni graduates who came to art school for a year, studied and practiced, then returned to their lives as teachers or bureaucrats. Yet for Mercy Ghu, there was beauty in her classroom and her students; she yearned for them to live through art as she did, to create in their own lives as she did in hers through her teaching in a

Figure 1.8 Mercy Ghu, 1969, photographer unknown, Ndaleni Scrapbook 3,

with the permission of the CC

The Art of Life in South Africa 18

Bantu Education school. Experiences like Ghu’s are what make the Ndaleni story something other than “art history.” The history of their art school was inscribed in the intellectual life of its students rather than through the sum total of their works. Together they wrote the story of a place that generated a shared vision of human possibility and that then came up against the limits of context. In their intense attention to their time, Ndaleni students reach into ours to speak of the ongoing challenge and potential of life.60 Life

And what of life? If creating is a constant, necessary human task, how does each artist—each person—pursue it? As art historians have shown, some South African artists did this directly by engaging the state and the system, whereas others did so through relationships that belied the country’s social segregation. But what did it mean that these Ndaleni artists did so as teachers, in apartheid government schools, and that most eagerly embraced the opportunity? As a historian, I am able to put their social position—teacher— into conversation with other aspects of what I think was important about their identities—male, female, black, South African, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s— and to draw conclusions about the politics of the choice each made to go to work for Bantu Education. Yet art’s insights give me pause, as does the impossibility of knowing a person’s mind other than through their speech, creations, and ability to cross that threshold of consciousness in the world. We need a new politics to grasp the implications of their historically conditioned maneuvers.61 The work of self-making was ongoing under apartheid, in ways that were beholden neither to the state nor to its opposition yet were nevertheless deeply implicated in the structures of their time and place. That is precisely the point. In her study of the self-making correspondence of the early twentieth-century healer Louise Mvemve, Catherine Burns discussed Mvemve’s letters as a sort of microinfrastructure, as “girders” laid between a self and others. Previously, scholars had shown the hegemonic effects of writing, especially in English, but Burns suggested that Mvemve’s life shows instead how individuals embraced the opportunities history presented to them, in the service of their “complex, situational and unfolding sense of self.”62 Similarly, later generations of black South Africans embraced the opportunities presented to them under apartheid, such as enrolling at

Ndaleni, where they sought to build a community of like-minded selves— artists, capable of expressing something unique to their being-in-the-world. In what follows, I offer few arguments about their art. Still, Ndaleni was an art school, and its archive reveals that students were convinced that art—or often Art, capitalized—was vital to the construction of their durable selves. “Agency,” observes Joan Scott, “is not the innate property of an abstract individual” but a historical quality, “the attribute of subjects who are defined by—subjected to—discourses that bring them into being as both subordinate and capable of action.”63 So it is with art. For Godfrey Lienhardt, art is the voice of a soloist within the choir; for Ingrid Monson, it is a John Coltrane riff against the backdrop of the rhythm section.64 For Ndaleni graduates, art was the cultivation of self-expression with, within, through, and against the manifold limitations of Bantu Education and apartheid. Like Mvemve’s letters, art, education, and beauty were art teachers’ girders, the infrastructure that connected their selves to the rest of the community and, through that connection, made both more secure. Their lives were profoundly limited by apartheid, but through the social experience of art, they found a way to live. John Dewey thought art tremendously important because the act of creating is a discrete experience—it has a beginning and an end, it involves individuals’ creative faculties and their material realities, and it engages the perceptive powers of the audience. Art is an experience, set apart from the ongoing, undifferentiated experience of regular life, and as an experience, art provokes an aesthetic response—an appraisal, a quest for meaning, an assessment.65 We are all historical subjects who are subject to various regimes beyond our control, and we each lay girders to help us navigate the terrain of our experiences. Apartheid was such an experience. The system existed in abstract political fact, but it was also known aesthetically, intuited in the senses through sound, image, and language. The aesthetics of state power and popular resistance are well known.66 The aesthetics of interpersonal infrastructure, by contrast, are elusive, hidden, and often strange to see. Take, for example, the infrastructure of suspicion that prompted fears of witchcraft and the sense of danger, which thrived in Bantustan communities, as Isak Niehaus has shown. Niehaus demonstrates the ways in which witchcraft beliefs were wholly logical within the Bantustan experience—with the blight, poverty, co-opted authority, and overdetermined cultural distinctiveness that the system implied. These conditions prompted what Niehaus calls an

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“encapsulating effect,” which helped to shape the sense rural South Africans could make of their lives.67 Other scholars have advanced similar arguments that draw our attention not to apartheid as struggled against but to apartheid as a distinct, limited historical experience with which people lived, the terrain on which they struggled to build their selves.68 In this, they were co-opted, not in the sense of selling out but rather opting in, to exploit what advantages they perceived. Scholars such as Jonathon Glassman and Sean Hanretta have effectively demonstrated the historical contingency of community through the sometimes head-scratching moves of slaves and others to find comfort in being more tightly held.69 Channeling Michel Foucault, Ruth Marshall describes as “subjectivation” the process through which Pentecostal Christians gain a sort of freedom by completely subjecting themselves to the stringent demands of their faith.70 We know that South Africans “freed” themselves in protest marches, uprisings, and votes. Yet new studies have begun to undermine the rosy picture of “the long walk to freedom,” just as older accounts predicted.71 If we take a step back from the nation, we see that whether called self-satisfaction, fulfillment, comfort, or even happiness, “freedom” has often been the by-product of subjecting the self to regimes of control, as scholars on subjects ranging from sexuality to religion, ethnicity, scouting, the military, consumerism, and, indeed, nationalism have argued. By conditioning themselves to the rules and regulations of the art school community, Ndaleni art students insulated themselves from the tremors afflicting their society. Theirs was a small school with few students, yet the social satisfaction developed there speaks to a story bigger than that of art under Bantu Education.72 In his brilliant ethnography of the American military, Kenneth Macleish reveals how “free” human lives frequently depend on society’s intense and corrosive coercions.73 In what follows, I suggest that by subjecting themselves more completely to coercive ideological regimes—both apartheid and art education—some South Africans were able to transcend what we know of their history to find beauty, solace, and community within the ugliness of their times. The scholarship on sociability in South African history has been enriched by the work of Paul Landau and others, who have demonstrated how a widespread insistence on strategic and mutable relationships allowed polities, ethnicities, families, and political philosophies the flexibility to weather momentous social change.74 Yet scholars who consider the later

twentieth century have too commonly relegated satisfaction, happiness, and intimacy to the zone of the overtly and explicitly political, as if the only kind of love possible was revolutionary love, the only sort of friendship that of comrades in the struggle, and the only betrayals were those of confederate by confederate.75 But what of different sorts of confederacies, fashioned not in the racial enclave but by transgressing the boundaries between race and location?76 What of community born not in the choice of whether to conform, collaborate, or rebel but instead in the choice to subject oneself to the regime of the wholly different authority—in this case, art?77 Dan Rakgoathe was a black South African artist and teacher who studied at Ndaleni at the turn of the 1960s. His was a crowded world, but it was only hearing from his fellow Ndaleni students that convinced him he was “not utterly alone.”78 In the community gathered around art at Ndaleni, he found his self and mustered the courage to tease beauty from time and place. This is not to deny that his was an ugly time and an ugly place, where human creativity and possibility were stifled by repression, violence, and pervasive lack. In many senses, South Africa still is such a place. But I do deny the prevailing conviction that in its ugliness it was somehow exempt from the possibilities of community, of transcendence, of earnest and faithful effort to see one’s vision embodied and tangible. I found this book’s title in a letter from an Ndaleni student to his teacher, written more than a decade after he left the school. He was not a particularly talented artist and was continuously frustrated in his efforts both to teach and to make art. But even as his frustrations with some aspects of his life mounted, he recognized that his labors were rewarded otherwise: with children, a marriage, a career, and above all the ability occasionally to stand at a distance from reality, to stop the flow of time and take in the vista. He winked in the letter to his teacher—surely, he wrote, this was the art of life. I do not name nor quote him here, so as not to risk imposing hindsight’s teleology over his life as he, an artist, worked. Better first to grasp his context, test its restraints, envision its opportunities, and watch as he and his classmates tend their kiln. A Work

What follows is an attempt to grasp the lives of the Ndaleni school and its artists. As Okeke-Agulu, Berger, and Bourdieu have suggested, every artist moves within and against the terrain of the possible in their own time and

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place. In twentieth-century South Africa, that meant issues both abstract and visceral, which by the early 1950s saw the apartheid South African government establish an art school for African art teachers. The specific story of the Ndaleni art school begins towards the end of chapter 3. But since my story privileges the concepts and experiences met there, we first must answer the obvious question: why did the government desire such a school? The next chapter sets the stage for Ndaleni’s emergence by exploring its roots in local and global debates about African schooling, culture, and art in South African society, picking up where the prologue left off. “Craftwork” begins with the move from industrial to cultural concerns in African art education during the interwar period. It widens the scope and the chronology to consider the ongoing discussions about the nature of African creativity in the wake of urbanization, the supposed hegemony of European culture, and other epochal shifts. Other scholars have showed how white artists in particular responded to these changes by embracing a variant of the primitivism that had marked the advent of modernism in early twentieth-century Europe. I consider how, on the policy side, educationists and others shifted the justification for manual work in schools from industrial training to the preservation of “Africanness.” This conversation predated the election of the apartheid government and quickened in its wake, as the state attempted to resuscitate its version of African culture as part of separate development.79 I further consider the reasoning behind this in chapter 3, “Art.” Interwar and post–World War II South African educationists were not the only ones articulating an ideology of art in education. From the early twentieth century through the 1920s, theorists turned to African art to critique the mechanical excess of modernity.80 In the interwar years, thinkers animated this concept, to suggest that from African art might be drawn methods for projecting a new, more humane form of modernity than that which bedeviled industrialized societies.81 That “the modern” was both multiple and accessible through culture was a touchstone of ideological separate development in South Africa. The problem, however, was that South Africa’s African populations generally lacked the visual culture traditions that had so animated the primitivist imagination. The chapter explores how artists and educationists addressed this supposed shortcoming by concentrating on African craft practices—from basketry to indigenous architecture—to advocate for multiple ways to be artists. One of the driving forces behind what we might call “craft modernity” was Jack Grossert, who by the mid-1950s

was the national organizer of arts and crafts under Bantu Education. As Natal regional inspector a decade earlier, Grossert had begun to advocate for a specialist arts and crafts teacher-training program to support the African schools. By the early 1950s, this program was open at the Indaleni Mission. Chapter 4, “Journeys,” considers the initial decade of the program, under its first three teachers, and it begins to explore the lives and paths of the first students who enrolled in the art school. The archive deepens after 1963, when the program’s fourth teacher, Lorna Peirson, took over and established a new regime of both pedagogy and record keeping. The chapter thus moves forward to encompass the 1960s and 1970s as well, to ask who came to Ndaleni art school and why. Peirson brought remarkable stability during the nearly two decades that she taught at Ndaleni. There were important variations, but in general, her version of the Ndaleni education was consistent enough that I am able to draw broad conclusions across those years. Four factors were vital to this consistency: students’ common experiences of both journeying to and living at the art school, the physical experience of the campus, the unrelenting struggle for materials with which to work, and the theories and concepts to which the students were exposed. I consider the confluence of these four experiences most explicitly in the book’s longest section, chapter 5, “Learning.” This chapter looks closely at both the learning and the labor that went into being trained as an art teacher. Here, we see most clearly the compromises that inhered in students’ experiences—from the grand ideological level of working for Bantu Education, especially in the wake of school and other protests, to the quotidian, gendered ground of exertion, accommodation, food, and community. If students’ lives were their art, during their year on campus they did the work necessary to embody thought in frequently beautiful material form. And yet, each year ended by releasing students’ creative efforts into the wider, differently certain world—first through an annual sale of objects and then through students’ (re)encounters with South African reality beyond Richmond. Chapter 6, “Apartheid,” explores Ndaleni art students’ roles within the more celebrated political narratives of mid-twentiethcentury South Africa, in three forms: protest and political violence, the apartheid education system, and the personal and bureaucratic politics of the Bantustans. In each case, Ndaleni art students-cum-teachers were forced to accommodate their ideas about art and education to prevailing conditions, just as artists’ unique visions always bend to the possibilities of

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context. Chaper 6 locates the Ndaleni art school itself within the unfolding—and eventual unraveling—of apartheid, and it closes with the school’s own demise in the early 1980s. The work of art continued, however, even as conditions shifted. The book’s final chapter, “Artists,” considers the possibility of beauty as an organizing principle under apartheid, first by focusing on the trajectories of the small minority of Ndaleni student who actually found a living as visual artists after leaving the school. I supplement these few case studies with stories about others—teachers, parents, friends—who were not “artists” but nevertheless found beauty in their efforts to maintain their integrity and vision across the sweep of their lives. An epilogue, “The Art of the Past,” considers the legacy of Ndaleni in South African art history, in art education, and at the site of the school itself.

 In 2012, I had the great fortune to learn of Cedric Nunn’s passion for the Ndaleni site. As the epilogue relates, the decades since the art school’s closure have not been kind to the campus or to Richmond. Some of the school’s buildings now house a provincial school for the deaf; others have been ruined and looted for different sorts of raw materials than those that artists sought—bricks and metal to build homes or to sell for scrap. But the art students’ works are still there—murals, cement reliefs, mosaics, statues—all the more incongruous for the disrepair of the landscape. Nunn lives nearby and has been visiting the Indaleni Mission for more than two decades, documenting the place and its art. It is a tremendous privilege to feature his photographs in this study. His elegiac work captures the sense of loss, absence, ruin and the stunning beauty that pervades a place where teachers and students once met and created. Although the mission still stands—and there have been moves to restore its former prominence as an educational center—the Ndaleni art school is gone and not coming back. It is a relic of apartheid, in its own way like the street and city names, monuments, and numerous social ills through which the past continues to haunt South Africa.82 Yet we must acknowledge that ghosts are often ancestors as well, with the fertility that the past’s continuing relationship with the present can yield. There was once a community that came together to create, at an old mission station, on a hillside in South Africa.

Chapter 2

Craftwork

late 1920s, black South Africa discovered that it had artists. In 1928, a Parktown gardener named Moses Tladi began to show his landscape paintings to aficionados around Johannesburg. The black press took note and hailed Tladi as “a Native genius.” Promoted by some of interwar Johannesburg’s leading liberals, Tladi exhibited across the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, and the Cape. He earned a special dispensation to show a “special exhibit by a Native artist” with the South African Academy of Art in 1929—the first African to do so—as well as to show at the South African National Gallery, where he was the only African included in the 1931 show that organizers intended to demonstrate South Africa’s emergence as a center of art production in its own right. Tladi was black South Africa’s first celebrated artist. By the end of the 1930s, names such as Gerard Bhengu, George Pemba, Ernest Mancoba, John Mohl, and Gerard Sekoto were being discussed by art lovers from Durban to Cape Town and Johannesburg.1 By the 1940s, Tladi had faded into obscurity, even as a South Africa primed to consider the implications of black artistic success brought the handful of his peers to greater renown. But Tladi was the first, a “Native genius” with pencil, color, and brush. Tladi’s success was part of a wider conversation about the position of African artists, musicians, writers, and intellectuals in interwar South In the

The Art of Life in South Africa 26

Africa. The 1930s saw the consolidation of white supremacy in the country, as Prime Minister Barry Hertzog and the National Party government further restricted African political and land rights, culminating in the various bills passed in 1936. But even as those bills were being debated, black South Africans and others passed through the wondrous exhibits of Johannesburg’s Empire Exhibition and penned paeans to the “Bantu’s” contribution to the city’s cultural life. Writers attended lectures at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre and spent their evenings at the theater. They entertained one another and visitors from abroad at “delightfully” set tea tables.2 Eager urbanites dressed up and gathered at the recently opened Johannesburg Train Station, “to look about, meet friends, show off dresses, admire and be admired,” passing beneath Jacobus Pierneef’s magnificent “station panels” that announced a distinctly South Africa modernity.3 Pierneef’s celebrity transcended the art world; so, too, in a much diminished way, would the celebrity of those few black artists who came to be known simply as such. “Moses Tladi is a well-known African artist,” the Bantu World noted on the occasion of the Tladi family’s “flying visit to Germiston” in April 1938.4 The black press eagerly covered his exploits, as it did those of his peers.5 Each exhibition by a black artist was an event to be celebrated. Collectively, however, artists posed a problem, both to the black community and to those whites who thought themselves patrons of the arts and the legitimate rulers of the country. What was the nature of so-called native genius? Did Tladi’s success prove that “artistic ability is not affected by the colour of the colourer” as the editors at Umteteli wa Bantu hoped?6 Was he a genius who happened to be native? Or did his being black determine the extent and end of his genius, as racial and cultural theorists insisted? And as South African politicians of all stripes imagined the South African nation, what role would “native” artists play? To some, artists like Tladi demonstrated that the black community had its few and select geniuses, no different than any other community. Partisans of this point of view argued for the existence of talent and individual merit, in keeping with the animating spirit of Anglo-colonial modernity. For others, the community’s collective genius was what mattered—native genius, which became the genius of Bantus and eventually the genius of Africans. The latter point of view was, in many senses, a progressive claim against the homogenizing forces of empire, and as the 1930s became the 1940s, in South Africa and elsewhere the idea that natives or Bantu or

Africans had their own unique, unrepeatable genius was often a truly radical concept, portending a new politics.7 But in South Africa, the idea of separate, distinct, collective Bantu genius—not a Bantu genius—evolved to become one of the ideological foundations of separate development.8 Native Genius

Moses Tladi worked as a gardener in the years after World War 1. Among his employers was Herbert Read, whose property high on the Parktown Ridge faced north toward the open veld and the Magaliesberg beyond.9 Read family legend has it that Tladi started to experiment with making pictures by using the pencils and crayons that the children discarded; true or not, by the mid-1920s Read thought Tladi had accomplished enough to share his works with Howard Pim, a leading liberal who went on to become the president of the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) in the early 1930s (a position previously held by C. T. Loram) and who was credited with “discovering” and supporting Tladi’s talent.10 The nature of Pim’s support indicated the terrain of genius in which Tladi emerged. In correspondence with colleagues and fellow art lovers, Pim noted that although he was careful “not to interfere with the current of Tladi’s talent,” he did “assist” him wherever possible. For instance, Pim arranged for Tladi to visit the Johannesburg Art Gallery, “where he was allowed to inspect the masterpieces that have sent him away tingling with joy of his art.”11 Pim facilitated Tladi’s exhibition with the South African Academy and corresponded with specialists such as the professor Austin Winter-Moore at Rhodes University College–Grahamstown on Tladi’s behalf.12 To be sure, part of Tladi’s appeal was that he was “quite untaught,” as one reviewer put it, but also that his work was recognizable as art, in the European tradition. Tladi “tells the . . . truth in a poetic way. The atmosphere of the Witwatersrand is in [his] pictures unmistakable to all who know the Transvaal.”13 His were well-executed pictures, not evidence of his native disposition. The emergence during the early 1930s of black visual artists such as Moses Tladi was thus about individual talent and genius. At the same time that Tladi was showing in Johannesburg, another gardener emerged on the Natal art scene. Hezekiel Ntuli modeled clay figures during his free time as an employee of Maritzburger Stanley Williams. As with Tladi, reviewers

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remarked on his lack of training and instinctive artistic skills. “Leading citizens of South Africa have inspected his work and without exception they proclaim him a natural genius,” the Natal Mercury reported in 1930. His models were strikingly realistic, so much so that a local European’s dog was reported to have reacted violently to one of Ntuli’s clay lionesses. He worked in a medium—clay—that was thought to be traditionally African, but the evident genius of his work transcended racial categorization and allowed him to be hailed as an artist, period. He was only seventeen in 1930 but “wonderfully well developed. His hands are those of an artist, with fingers of exceptional length.”14 The individuated unit that was he—manifest in his body—made him the artist that his talent revealed him to be. Still, as with Tladi, part of Ntuli’s appeal was that he was untutored, “natural” in the language of the time. There was nothing uniquely South African about this in a postwar era when individual genius, absent sociology, was a cliché of artistic success.15 Yet South Africa did pose specific challenges to the emergent group of black artists in that it lacked the infrastructure to provide them with the education to cultivate this natural genius. Some artists benefited from their proximity to Johannesburg and its galleries; others, among them Ernest Mancoba and Gerard Sekoto, benefited from their training at missionary institutions such as Grace Dieu, an Anglican training college near Pietersburg that boasted an established program in handwork and artisanal industry by the turn of the 1930s.16 (See map 1.1.) Hailing from near Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape, George Pemba lacked these advantages. In the early 1930s, he was training to be a schoolteacher when he began to sketch images from newspapers and to paint location scenes, such as funerals and soccer matches. He was twenty when he showed his first works in Port Elizabeth in 1932. Reviewers saluted him as a genius. “The art exhibited in Port Elizabeth . . . could, in terms of approach to form and vision, not be distinguished from the work of white men,” one wrote. This reviewer knew that some wanted a “pure” African art,but he ridiculed such calls as “pathetic.” Pemba’s work showed that in the clash of cultures, “there are but two alternatives, affiliation or seclusion, and the latter is seldom thought about.” Art lovers were urged to celebrate Pemba for his “obvious” gifts. “It will not come as a surprise if he one day assumes a prominent place in our artist ranks.”17 It is worth pausing on this language for a moment. Like Ntuli and Tladi, Pemba was an acknowledged genius. His race was notable—there

were not many Africans like him—but his work announced especially that a new artist had come to join, in the words of this white reviewer, “our artist ranks.” Geniuses were there; the greatest challenge was to figure out how to train and cultivate their talents. Education was thus the terrain on which the politics of race and art were to be contested. Like many other aspirant Africans, Pemba appealed to the South African Institute of Race Relations and the Bantu Welfare Trust to support his endeavors. By the mid-1930s, his work had found its way into the hands of O. J. P. Oxley, an art professor at the University of Natal. “I have shown the drawings to all the members of the staff of the school and they are very impressed,” Oxley told an SAIRR representative. He regretted that there were not more Pembas out there. “If there were likely to be many such boys, a class might be started for them, but I think, at present, we shall only find isolated cases.”18 From his base in Pietermaritzburg, Oxley was a leading figure in South African art education in the 1920s and 1930s. He was open to the idea that African artistic geniuses might emerge, but also somewhat wary of the prospect. The Carnegie Corporation took him to the United States for a two-month tour of the Northeast in 1929, giving him an opportunity to survey the terrain of art education in that country. Like previous South African educationist visitors to America, Oxley was particularly interested in African American education and its possible inspiration for native education in South Africa. Oxley’s studies in the United States led him to propose a course of art appreciation for Africans, which would in turn “give way to craft work, which should form a great part of the instruction given.” He used the terms craftwork and handwork interchangeably, indicating that “the work would tend to be more vocational than that of the European schools.” If black artists did emerge from such a program, Oxley cautioned, “every care must be taken not to force European ideas upon the natives too early in their development, for by so doing we may be preventing means of selfexpression from asserting themselves.”19 In thinking about pedagogy, in other words, care ought to be taken not to ruin native talent. Rather than “force European ideas upon the natives,” interested parties needed to cultivate the field and allow genius slowly to take root in its own, racially determined way. Oxley’s views thus contrasted with Pemba’s reviewer. As the logic of race entrenched across South African society, so to by the mid-1930s did race begin to insinuate itself into discussions about the best way to teach art.

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Seeking tuition, George Pemba initially tried to find a way around the realities of race. He could not register as a regular student at Rhodes, the closest art school to his home, but Oxley and the SAIRR provided him with the means to relocate to Grahamstown to receive training as an external student with the aforementioned Professor Winter-Moore.20 They introduced Pemba to R. H. W. Shepherd, the director of the Lovedale Press in nearby Alice, who commissioned him to illustrate an isiXhosa children’s book. Pemba continued to draw and to paint in a naturalist, recognizably “European” style, and he thought himself improved immeasurably by his training. Oxley’s concerns were heard—“I have tried my best to be typically African,” Pemba wrote to Shepherd early in 1937, yet in the quality and style of his drawings, he felt that “some of my best work . . . is influenced by European Art.”21 European influence or not, while training at Rhodes Pemba proudly noted that he was “in the prime of my artistic career.”22 Pemba’s sense of his own unique talent accorded with the classic ideals of South African liberalism, which were always more vital in theory than in actual political fact. Whites extolled its virtues (even as they continued, like Pim, to support segregation), and black intellectuals commonly rallied around the thoroughly liberal idea of individual genius and accomplishment. “Be what nature made you,” advised a correspondent known as “Philosopher” in 1937, “whatever you are from nature, keep to it, never desert . . . your own line of inclination and talent.” Writers such as Philosopher took to the Bantu World and other media to argue that only by being “what nature intended you to be” would personal and social success follow. “Everyone is a genius at something,” Philosopher reassured the wary.23 “New African” thinkers like Philosopher returned again and again to the idea of race-blind education, which would allow true talent to emerge from the African community. Philosopher urged the black community to “understand that, although men are born equal, they are not mentally, morally and physically equal. There are men and women whose ability places them above their fellow-men.” Excellence was the way forward. “If we, as a race, can appreciate that fact, we would make rapid progress along the path of civilization.” To hear this writer tell it, jealousy impeded appreciation for the few individuals whose genius bloomed amid the weeds. “Why should we be jealous of a musician or poet who interprets our spiritual yearnings?” he asked, and why be jealous “of a sculptor or an artist who reveals the soul of our race?” By the mid-1930s, African intellectuals knew that white

Figure 2.1 USiko, by George Pemba, date unknown, mid-1930s(?), with the permis-

sion of the Historical Papers, Mayibuye Archive, University of the Western Cape

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nationalists wanted to view African society as an undifferentiated collective and to deny whatever individual rights had managed to survive conquest and decades of white supremacy. Over and against generalization, they invested in accounts of individual attainment and talent. “[Our] talents are the weapons through which our race shall win the war of freedom,” by compelling the “‘trustees’ of the race”—for example, South Africa’s white masters—“to recognize our work,” the editors of the Bantu World insisted.24 To page through Bantu World and other media during this era is to watch a community pool its collective intellectual resources in the name of individual attainment and, so they believed, the political recognition that would result. Coverage ranged from the light and airy—“Selmina Rampa, artiste . . . is one of our best dressed young women and is an able cook and all around hand-work expert”—to the dry and earnest: No matter what your colour is nor even your creed, but if true merit in you is then you are of the seed the seed that every man respects he may be white, he may be black it makes no difference to this fact that you are one of life’s elect for merit is the greatest thing the world has ever known. Peter Abrahams, poet and graduate of Grace Dieu, cast his vote for merit in 1936. “That Peter is a genius is evident to whoever has read his poems,” the Bantu World editorial page gushed.25 Broadsheets did more than convey the news of the day to an eager readership. They also served as stages for acts of self-definition and attainment.26 The historian Lynn Thomas has written about how newspapers sponsored beauty contests to define the parameters of modern race-womenhood in interwar South Africa. Competitions—over beauty, over talent, over art— were hallmarks of black urban life.27 “Competitions reveal talent,” wrote A. Ramailane in June 1935. Africans needed to be confident enough to play their God-granted hand. “Competitions are a means whereby competent leaders in all African life are revealed. [They] produce and exult Bantu arts.”28 The point was to compete and to win to demonstrate one’s

merit. Over the course of the 1930s and the 1940s, Bantu World sponsored competitions for gardeners, photographers, writers, musicians, and Christmas card decorators. It and other newspapers were careful to cover Africans’ triumphs wherever they took place, as far afield as Berlin and Jesse Owens’s victories in the Olympic Games and as close as the Transvaal, as when frequent contributor Walter Nhlapo won a short-story prize in the 1938 Eisteddfod.29 There were fewer visual art competitions than there were Eisteddfods and music competitions during the 1930s, but interested observers could read regular coverage of events such as the annual May Esther Bedford art competition at the Grahamstown city hall (where Professor Winter-Moore frequently judged the results). If they read closely enough, they would have caught the names Tladi, Sekoto, Mancoba, and Pemba among the winners.30 Competitions were about raising the quality of communal life, and critics thus had an important role to play. The prize-winning author Walter Nhlapo frequently appraised black theater and music across the 1930s and 1940s. Nhlapo was, above all, a proponent of good, socially productive taste.31 When a play was good, he praised it; when disappointing, his ire overflowed. “It had no story in it,” Nhlapo critiqued a short sketch performed in sePedi. Nhlapo typically preferred opera and classical music to such “native” fare, but his greatest frustration was with any work not done well. Indeed, although he rarely critiqued modern European-derived culture—the mastery of which he and many other Africans believed to be the lodestar of individual success—Nhlapo was also careful to remind his readers that Africans had a culture of their own. In the modern world, he said, “[our] customs—beautiful customs—are now despised . . . we must maintain a continuity of whatever creed we believe in, as well as grasp fast our racial traditions.”32 But what truly mattered to him was that when doing something, African performers needed to do it well. (Thus, his issue was not with the sePedi sketch itself but rather with the “ragged dressing of the cast.”) African actors and artists would not excel unless they creatively exploited the raw material of their African cultural background to the utmost.33 Some critics wondered whether African merits would best be expressed through works of unquestioned African origin and culture. Many shared concerns about cultural purity with their white counterparts. Recall that when Moses Tladi exhibited his highveld landscapes in the late 1920s,

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reviewers praised the native genius for having capturing the “truth” of the landscape. Yet when George Pemba emerged in the mid-1930s, his supporters imagined his role differently. Oxley’s reasons for introducing Pemba to Shepherd were not just financial—they were ideological as well. “I would like to see a boy, such as this, used to illustrate the Bantu readers and history books,” he wrote to the SAIRR. “I think that they should be encouraged, not only to illustrate, but [to] write their own text books. They would then be of much more interest to the Natives and would just give that necessary local interest in their own customs and folklore, which Europeans cannot possibly get.”34 Pemba’s training during the mid-1930s coincided with the Natal-based artist Gerard Bhengu’s own training, under the supervision of a German missionary and ethnographer named Max Kohler. Like Pemba, Bhengu worked in a European artistic idiom and, again like Pemba, his earliest works had depicted typical urban scenes (including at least one football match with white players). Kohler trained Bhengu and provided him with materials; he also urged Bhengu to start “drawing works with more of an African interest.”35 Bhengu did so, and he soon earned praise for illustrating “certain conceptions familiar to all of his people. . . . The best European artist could not have given anything half as good, for no European can draw what is in a native’s mind.”36 In these attempts to shape Pemba’s and Bhengu’s artistic education, we can see qualifiers creeping into the story of African art. The men were evident geniuses, but powerful gatekeepers wanted to make sure that their genius flowed from and to their racially delimited community. Bhengu’s and Pemba’s white patrons were not alone in thinking that African artistic creativity needed to apply Western techniques to the exposition of African society. One could be an artist without uncritically accepting the superiority of Western culture, argued Hampson Jack, a student at Adams College in the early 1930s. Rather, social and cultural progress meant that Africans “should first all study the history and traditions of their race and all that was good in them.” Africa was where the artist began, regardless of technological modernity, education, or exposure to European civilization; “it does not matter what changes in life, [Africans need] to be themselves and to retain their racial characteristics.”37 Jack was a student at a mission school outside Durban, but his ideas accorded with those of the greatest celebrity of the interwar African diaspora, Paul Robeson. Robeson harshly judged diasporic black culture’s overreliance on white artistic

norms. He reported that in the United States, “[black] artists attempt pale copies of Western Art,” yet “no Negro will leave a permanent mark on the world till he learns to be true to himself.”38 This was the case especially since even white artists were beginning to derive inspiration from African sculpture. Black artists needed to recognize that “it is not as imitation Europeans but as Africans . . . that we have a value.”39 Union Primitive

Black intellectuals were caught in a bind. If they insisted that the race progressed best through the extraordinary striving and success of individual geniuses, they risked dissolving their Africanness in the stew of colonial modernity. But if they argued that Africans’ genius emerged from the traditions, trials, and tribulations of their race, they risked allowing race to determine not only the content but also the form and limits of African artistic success. Robeson noted with disgust that black artists were aping the white man at a time when white artists were using African sculptural inspiration to great critical success. This was not lost on many South African art lovers, who rejected the idea that cross-cultural artistic invention was a positive force and instead worried that South Africa was losing the “pure” artistic potential of the Union’s very own “primitives.” Whereas editorialists urged artists to fill their canvases and stage their dramas with accounts of the community’s progress through the modern world, local primitivists contended that black artists’ first obligation was to preserve African aesthetic traditions—the authentic genius of natives, which was widely imagined to be under threat. Hampson Jack was a student at Adams College when he called for Africans to retain their racial characteristics. This was an important intervention at Adams, a venerable mission institution whose principal, Edgar Brookes, was both a prominent liberal on native affairs and an ardent critic of adapted education. An Adams education was based on the classics, down to art classes that focused on aesthetic appreciation, drawing, and painting, especially of the landscape around the campus.40 Still, prevailing primitivism in Europe and elsewhere gave teachers pause. “After the Great War some people in Europe were so disgusted with European culture that they suddenly discovered ‘primitive Negro art,’” taught K. H. Wilker, an art instructor at Adams. With that in mind, he cautioned his students not to

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overvalue Western inspiration. Much Western art practice was, in his opinion, “rubbish,” whereas “there is in your genuine art real beauty . . . you should not make the mistake of throwing it away, or of forgetting or of overlooking it and not seeing it all.”41 Wilker flattened geographic and cultural difference—“primitive Negro art” of the type celebrated by Europeans was hardly abundant in South Africa—to make an ideological claim: his African students, literate in English at their mission school, were vessels, conveying “genuine” beauty from the past, and they needed to be careful not to spill it. Others shared similar sentiments. Wilker wrote in 1940. By then, it was a common for white aficionados to agree with some of their African counterparts that there were African traditions worth preserving. Unlike African commentators, however, white voices carried to the arenas of state policy and curriculum.42 The local variant of primitivism soon made unthinkable both the unquestioned genius of Tladi’s highveld landscapes and Pemba’s welcome in the company of South African artists. Recall that Pim had felt the need to assure the Johannesburg art community that he had merely facilitated Tladi’s art education, not structured it. The genius of natives was natural, and it was best to keep out of its way. The art historian Lize Van Robbroeck notes the remarkable frequency with which critics and others assured themselves that African artists were pure and untainted by formal training.43 She focuses on white reviewers, but black reviewers were not immune to the allure of the untutored primitive. “Ernest Mancoba, the 27 year old African sculptor whose amazing wood carvings have excited the artistic populations of Capetown, has been given a chance by the Department of Native Affairs to fulfill his ambition,” Bantu World breathlessly reported in 1936. “He is entirely self taught.”44 This was far from the truth—Mancoba had studied woodworking while training to be a teacher in the 1920s at the Grace Dieu mission. He was well known for his naturalist carvings on Christian themes, which by the mid-1930s had earned him a reputation beyond South Africa. Moreover, he had grown up on a mine compound in Benoni; he was a graduate of Fort Hare; and by 1936, his social circle in Cape Town included Trotskyists and refugees from Europe—among them the sculptor Lippy Lipschitz, who shared ideas, books, and techniques with Mancoba.45 But unlike his contemporaries Pemba and Bhengu, Mancoba worked wood, which meant that it was easier to pigeonhole him as an “African artist.” The

Figure 2.2 Ernest Mancoba with a bust of himself, Grace Dieu Mission, late 1920s,

photographer unknown, HP AB750 Gbc2.5, with the permission of the Anglican Church of South Africa

The Art of Life in South Africa 38

nonmission press first noted him when he won a May Esther Bedford award in 1935. The award was endowed by a University of London academic “to encourage original works of distinctly African culture and to make these known as widely as possible.”46 As a carver, Mancoba created works that stood out. Works of “distinctly” African culture were not in abundance, and painters such as Pemba and Sekoto regularly won after the initial iteration of the competition. Yet Mancoba’s victory meant more. The Department of Native Affairs took note and commissioned him to “present the soul of his people to the world through his little wooden statues” at the 1936 Empire Exhibition.47 (Other than an exhibition of school handicrafts and two landscapes by John Mohl, Mancoba’s work was to have been the only African art included in the exhibition.) Mancoba was perhaps the foremost modernist among the 1930s black South African artists, but his choice of medium made it easy for interested parties to see him as an African who was an artist, not an artist who was a genius. Mancoba never exhibited at the Empire Exhibition; he was apparently uninterested in creating the “tribal curios” that the Department of Native Affairs hoped to display. Instead, he made plans to leave South Africa to seek further training in France. He was the “first Bantu from the Union to be given such an opportunity,” an education journal from Fort Hare noted. But it was not really about him: rather, his example demonstrated that “the Bantu . . . possess special talent in art.”48 The unnamed writer hailed Mancoba’s genius and called for the government to promote a curriculum that encouraged African artistic practice.49 The pivot from celebrating artistic success to calling for a certain sort of curriculum was a familiar one; as noted earlier, reviewers had responded to Bhengu’s evident genius with a call for more training to be made available to Africans. Yet in a context in which so-called self-taught and natural genius was seductive enough to deny that training had actually taken place, the question of the content and form of art education was a fraught one. Mancoba’s Cape Town mentor Lippy Lipschitz, remained convinced that “African artists should be left to themselves to develop their own forms and not be influenced by European trends.”50 Like Pemba, Mancoba soon learned that many of the art world’s gatekeepers in mid-1930s South Africa worried whether it was even appropriate for a non-European to be trained as an artist.51 By World War II, primitivist discourse was an established element of art education. Europeans continued to “discover” African talent, as Pim

had with Tladi and Oxley with Pemba, but they were anxious not to spoil their finds. In 1944, for example, a Pretoria art aficionado discovered a native draftsman. He showed the man’s work to an acquaintance at the Department of Native Affairs, who in turn shared it with Walter Battiss, the art master at Pretoria Boys High. Battiss was “impressed by the native’s work and considers that he has undoubted talent.” The bureaucrat reported that Battiss was going to give the African man some paints—but no more than that: “Battiss thinks that it would be a pity to give him too much tuition . . . as it would tend to destroy originality, as has happened in many cases of Bantu artists, who try to imitate European art. It would also lose its appeal to his own people, who have an entirely different conception [of art] from ours.”52 Art bounded and defined a community. It was okay to give an African artist material with which to express his or her vision; it was not okay to grant the sort of training that would risk diluting the artist’s African qualities. Thus, as the 1940s progressed, an apologetic tone leached into discussions of African art education. Genius was still there to be discovered and cultivated through conventional art education, but Europeans—and some Africans—apparently wished it was not so. At the end of the 1940s, for instance, the city of Johannesburg’s Non-European Adult Education Committee organized art classes for Africans as part of its efforts to guide African leisure time in “productive” directions. Classes began at Polly Street in central Johannesburg in July 1949. A small group of white artists taught the weekly classes; all betrayed some discomfort with their task. One “wanted to leave [the Africans] uninfluenced as far as possible”—an odd position for a teacher to take, to be sure, and one that left her open to accusations that “the European was adverse to giving away knowledge.” Undeterred, she “started . . . with crafts, because the Bantu has a traditional aptitude for crafts and very little tradition, if any, of painting and drawing.”53 That did not go over well; within a few weeks, teachers at Polly Street reported that their students’ obvious enthusiasm for painting necessitated that they concentrate their instruction on that medium. Still, teachers approached the “task of teaching very tentatively . . . aware of all the criticisms on the subject of teaching Natives to paint ‘in the European style,’ instead of encouraging their own approach to art.” Another paper reassured the reading public that it was appropriate to teach painting because “these are all town natives.” Their purity was already spoiled by their residence in the great metropolis; it was too late for them to remain—or be made—truly African.54

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Such sentiments were not exclusive to the gathering apartheid state, to fetishists of the exotic, or to race nationalists. Concerns over the decline of African artistic traditions and concomitant efforts to limit and constrain African artistic practices were increasingly liberal concerns, shared by black critics such as Nhlapo and white observers alike. In 1948, Edna Hagley, the secretary of the South African Association of Arts, appealed to the SAIIR for assistance in identifying facilities for African artistic development in the Transvaal. She could not help but pose a related question: “Should Non-Europeans be encouraged in the promotion of European techniques, or should a more indigenous application be followed, and if so what would be the best approach?”55 Quintin Whyte of the SAIRR agonized over his response. “This is very difficult to answer,” he admitted. “My own feeling is that African inspiration will take from European techniques what it requires and will produce something which may not be what one might call indigenous, but be the adaptation by African genius.” That said, Whyte cautioned that those were his feelings alone. He conceded that there was tremendous resistance to the idea of African artists working along what were assumed to be European lines.56 Some African artists were already sensitive to this. At the dawn of apartheid, Godfrey Thabang was a teacher and wood-carver who had exhibited at the by-then-defunct Gainsborough Gallery during the 1930s, when Tladi and Sekoto had done the same. The latter had subsequently left South Africa, to join Mancoba in European exile. At the turn of the 1950s, Thabang rejected that route, claiming that “he has no desire to study there . . . because the influences in Europe are so great and so completely in opposition to trends in African art that a young artist could quite easily lose his individuality and emerge as a poor European artist rather than an excellent African one.”57 It was hard enough to make a living as an African artist without resisting the tide. No one demonstrated this more than the SAIRR’s old correspondent and grantee George Pemba. Pemba had continued to work and paint throughout the late 1930s and 1940s. In 1944, he applied for a grant from the Bantu Welfare Trust to travel across South Africa to improve his art. Granted £25, he went from the Eastern Cape to the Rand, Natal, and Lesotho before returning home. A few years later, a local dentist and art collector named Hans Cohn wrote a thinly fictionalized account of Pemba’s life, entitled The Magic Brush, which included Pemba’s first-person narrative

of his 1944 journey.58 This “diary” is a remarkable document not so much for the story it tells, which is a rather conventional account of a boy who likes to draw in dirt and eventually discovers his ability to voice the genius of his people, but for the story that lurks behind the pages. Here was a Lovedale-educated schoolteacher, a town dweller born and bred, a trained painter, a burgeoning master of the quintessential modern medium. Yet in his diary, Pemba expressed nothing but contempt and disgust for urbanization and technological modernity; he described cities as places where “native originality did not exist . . . at all.”59 Real Africa, he explained, was rural Africa. Real African art was primitive tribal music, handicrafts, dances, and fetishes. To be “a Bantu artist” meant offering those “scenes to the world, . . . which only can be offered by a Native.”60 Lize Van Robbroeck and other art historians have typically explained sentiments like Pemba’s as modern Africans’ “nostalgic longing for a lost, originary community.”61 I see it differently: this was marketing. Pemba was a modern, an African, and an artist, but more fundamentally, he was a keen observer of South African society. Theorists from Dewey to Bourdieu argued that the “social alchemy” of artistic success depends on artists’ ability effectively to analyze their context.62 Pemba was shrewd: he saw how South Africa was changing, quickly, as the alleged liberalism of the Union slid toward the cultural nationalism of apartheid. He adapted to his times. It is hard to pinpoint exactly from where Pemba developed his insights into the intellectual and artistic currents of the era. He corresponded frequently with editors at Bantu World and other media, keeping them apprised of his travels and informing them about his exhibitions.63 He visited with other African artists; perhaps their conversations considered the country’s primitivist mood.64 What we do know for certain is that Pemba had begun to develop his art while training as a teacher and working in the Cape’s schools for African students—and there, the conversation about the contingent relationship between African genius and African art was well established and increasingly institutionalized. Crafts and the Curriculum

Africans were engaged in the organized production of aesthetic objects well before Howard Pim negotiated Moses Tladi’s entrance to the Johannesburg Art Gallery. As we saw in the prologue, children in government

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Figure 2.3 Grass brooms and baskets, artists unknown, drawn by Jack Grossert, 1950s, File KCM

25598, with the permission of the CC

and mission schools were doing things such as modeling clay animals and weaving baskets and brooms, and with the approach of the 1930s, politicians and pedagogues were beginning to develop new justifications for their doing so. Over time, these justifications gathered around a simple conviction: crafts, like music, were what Africans did. Clay modeling was included, for example, because it was imagined to come naturally to African children. In 1928, A. S. T. Zwana, a teacher in Nqutu, reflected this, noting that clay work “has been one of the good trades” for Bantu since “earliest times.”65 Another teacher saw the continuity as well: “We have all been either herd boys or young girls,” he reminded his fellow teachers, “we can remember how in our free hours we were sometimes absorbed in making clay oxen and horses and, the girls, in mat making or something of this sort. This . . . education must protect and even guide.”66 Theorists agreed that it benefited the African race to see its creative spirit preserved through the schools. “It is important . . . for the teacher of art to realize that . . . the Native craftsmen has his own conventions,” a teacher from Edendale, near Pietermaritzburg, explained in 1934. “His oxen, for example, have enormous, disproportionate heads. This is nothing but native convention.” Such heads might be grotesque and repugnant to white tastes, but “let the teacher of art in the Native schools realize at the beginning of his career that it is by no means his business to interfere with natural expression.” The schools rehearsed the victory of primitivism years before critics and others began to advocate for separate development in art training. The teacher quoted here taught at a teacher-training college, preparing African educators to teach in primary schools. He wrote about the teaching of art, but that was just the tip of his more fundamental concern with the effectiveness—or lack thereof—of the system of native education. It was wrong, O. J. Horrax wrote, for schools to be as missionaries had once imagined them: that is, as places where teachers imposed European ideas on African children. Rather, schools were about the cultivation of talent, differentiated by race and culture. From the schools to society to the future of South African art, “if the pupil is allowed to develop his talents in his own way it is not out of the question that there might grow up in time a school of African art of which the Native need not be ashamed.” This was possible only if teachers accepted African children’s disproportionately modeled oxen.67 Artistic convention, Horrax argued, was relative. The days

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of the imperial universal, with its homogenizing tendencies and standards of beauty, were over. Horrax published his piece in early 1934. A few months later, hundreds of international educationists traveled to Cape Town and Johannesburg to attend eight weeks of meetings organized by the New Education Fellowship (NEF). In general, they confirmed Horrax’s ideas. The NEF was a progressive educational organization, founded in the United Kingdom before World War I “to advocate [for] ‘a new type of education more responsive to the requirements of a changing world.’”68 The NEF expanded especially in the 1920s, when many argued that the breakdown of old European empires necessitated a broader rethinking of education to accommodate cultural diversity, especially in the so-called new countries of the world, such as South Africa.69 In the winter of 1934, the NEF descended on South Africa, bringing internationally renowned educational and cultural experts including John Dewey and Bronislav Malinowski to opine on South Africa’s education system and other topics. The question of how best to promote cultural stability through the schools was a frequent subject for debate, and here, art featured prominently. G. H. Welch reported on the progress of the Cape’s schools in using arts and crafts among African primary school students, “for the training of hand and eye and for use in the future lives of the pupils . . . along his [sic] own lines.”70 Welch explained that this was in keeping with Loram’s calls for an education sensitive to the “peculiar characteristics” of the black South African, and the audience agreed that art was the most characteristic of all. “The spiritual life of a people consists of their Art,” Malinowski concurred, and “from the racial point of view Art is the most characteristic and the least easily interchangeable” of traits. “Every race has its own artistic gifts [and] there is always native genius to be found,” he explained to a South African audience primed to agree. “It is high time that the ways and means should be found to create conditions under which Bantu Art could blossom forth again.”71 This is where the schools came in. Malinowski’s “genius” was that of the collective, not the individual. Schools for Africans ought to ensure the stability of African genius, not that of an African. The key was to acknowledge cultural difference, another audience member explained, and to turn schools into sites of resistance to cultural erasure: “It is horrible when German students try to turn out Bantu work, or English try to be Japanese, or Japanese adopt English, or when Bantu becomes European. It is false

and artificial copying, not a real growth and development.”72 Trust in native genius—trust in the particular characteristics of African pupils and the future—was wide open. “I believe that, apart from all the other efforts to raise the status of the Native population of Africa, the one which would come more naturally than any others would be the attempt to organise Native village crafts on a technically and commercially sound basis,” another audience member declared. Aesthetically, he said, he had “no fears. The Native will never conceive a utilitarian or other article of bad taste unless prompted to do so by some ‘enterprising’ ignoramus.” Along their own lines, conserved in adapted schools, native crafts would cohere African culture and protect African societies from the rude advances of European modernity.73 There was some dissent. Welch noted that the Cape Province’s Education Departmen had occasionally encountered fierce resistance to its handwork program. “There is no doubt that Native teachers as a body and the Native people generally view this branch of training with unconcealed aversion,” he admitted. In particular, he cited a statement released by the Transkei General Council mere months before the NEF conference. It is worth quoting in full: Your committee wishes emphatically to express the opinion that the time spent on teaching handicrafts, i.e., clay modeling, basketwork, etc., is time wasted. This is our unanimous view. When this subject was introduced it was in the hope that, in addition to the training of hand and eye it would mean the resuscitation of the old Native industries and might open avenues for a Native industry. But if such handicrafts ever existed on any large scale among the Natives, which your Committee doubts, we are convinced that their day has long gone by. Natives are now using articles of European manufacture with which the hand-made article will never again be able to compete. And so far as the training of hand and eye is concerned, the slight benefit the Native pupil might derive is no way commensurate with the waste of valuable time, which could more usefully be given to other subjects.74 In a few phrases, the Transkei General Council (actually, a multiracial group made up of four white magistrates and eight chiefs) punctured the

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logic of handwork in the native schools. There was no material gain, given the arrival of manufactures with which “the hand-made article” could not compete. Training the eye was a vague, ill-defined justification, given how much else there was to learn. Yet neither of these critiques threatened the conference’s enthusiastic discussion of arts and crafts like the committee’s “doubts” that handicrafts “ever existed . . . among the Natives.” According to the committee, there was nothing traditional about arts and crafts, and therefore, there was no justification for preserving their practice in the African schools. Calls for African students to work with their hands in school were thus nothing more than the cultural invention of empire and of white supremacy.75 Many teachers knew this, and Welch’s report of their “unconcealed aversion” was an apt description. A few years after the NEF conference, a Cape teacher published a withering critique of the administration’s enthusiasm for handwork. Handwork was “the most useless subject in the curriculum,” the anonymous teacher grumbled: “It has nothing or next to nothing to do with . . . teaching.” He conceded that the authorities thought handwork was quite important, but he insisted that whatever importance it had “is more than counterbalanced by its unpopularity amongst the teachers.” The time had come for teachers to speak out, to “declaim against the teaching of this subject [so that] the better their time will be employed. Money and time, if they must be spent, should be spent on more useful and interesting subjects than this handwork.”76 This was powerful stuff. But there was a reason why the author of these lines chose to remain anonymous; over and against these few dissenters, the South African educational authorities’ enthusiasm for industrial education—alternatively known as manual education, handwork, or, increasingly, arts and crafts—was undimmed. Handwork’s enthusiasts could count on the imprimatur of the learned. Malinowski’s support for arts and crafts in education emerged from a well of deep concern about the decline of African societies and the forced collapse of cultural distinctions in the wake of empire. He proposed that education was where the reconstitution of African society could begin, in schools where the African child should “be developed along lines which will not estrange him from things African or make it less easy for him to maintain his place in African society.”77 This was cultural relativism as a critique of the imperial universal, a call to revitalize African societies by educating them along their own lines, trusting that through “native” capacity alone,

as Stellenbosch anthropologist W. G. Eiselen urged, “can the Natives advance.”78 To be sure, critics presented papers that advanced their own ideas, but the experts gathered at the NEF conference were clearly on the side of adapted education, as a response to and critique of the African community’s experience of historical change.79 Still, some did worry that the Transkei General Council might be correct in asserting that handicrafts no longer existed as they once had. During the 1930s, it was common for interested observers to bemoan the decline of Africans arts and crafts practices. “Much of the craftwork of [the] natives is dying out [in] the country,” an architect complained to the SAIRR in 1931.80 Others took their concerns to the Department of Native Affairs and urged the government to get more interested in cultural preservation. Someone had to take charge of “preserving native art and works,” “Ethnologist” wrote to the secretary of Native Affairs in 1937.81 A visiting British poet, Barbara Penrose Marks, agreed. She had “many nice things to say about the art among the Bantu,” reported the Bantu World, and she urged that Bantu potters be given more systematic training to perfect and preserve their craft, since “pottery . . . is dying out in South Africa.” With adequate supervision and initiative, African art need not die a tragic death, she declared. Instead, she insisted that there was great potential for a Bantu school of art to emerge, given that “the Native-made clay pottery of South Africa bears considerable resemblance to the work of the primitive people who inhabited Britain more than twenty centuries ago.”82 Primitivism became more urgent over the next decades. Between the 1930s and the 1950s, a steady drumbeat of alarm warned that African artistry was in immediate danger, and white authorities worked behind the scenes to promote its resurgence.83 Given the National Party government’s wellknown affection for bureaucracy, institution building, and differentiated cultural development, it is not surprising that after 1948 the state took a particular interest in retrofitting African artistic practices to fit the ideological needs of separate development. Native Affairs commissioners employed a variety of strategies to accomplish this. In Payneville, on the East Rand, for example, Native Affairs officers organized an exhibition of “beadwork, grass, clay, wood, leather work, [as well as] fruit and vegetables from Native Trust farms,” and they invited both the media and the director of the Johannesburg Art Gallery to attend. The latter hailed the department for cultivating “art in its truest sense.” Speaking from the dais to the assembled crowd,

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the director called “Bantu [to] revert to the arts and crafts of his forefathers which were examples of true art and were in danger of extinction,” rather than copying European ideas.84 Other commissioners followed Payneville’s lead, ensuring that agricultural and industrial shows around the country frequently featured a Native Affairs Department stall stocked with whatever local handicrafts they could find.85 The government’s assiduous work to promote African crafts masked anxiety that there was in fact little to promote. At least twice during the 1950s, officials conducting government surveys turned to schools and district commissioners to report on the presence of crafts—or the lack thereof—in their surrounding areas. “For various reasons,” the government was “interested in the development of the traditional and other arts and crafts practised by Natives in the past and at present,” members of a commission wrote in July 1952. “In which areas do Natives show particular aptitude for certain arts and crafts?” Were arts and crafts vital or dying, and if the latter, “[do] you regard this as a healthy development?” The commissioners addressed themselves especially to educational authorities, which were more numerous than other government bureaucracies, but many schools reported that beyond their doors, they saw few signs of hope. “I regret . . . that in this area we have very little either of the home-craft [or] handicraft,” responded the principal of Lovedale two months after receiving the survey—although he did remember once seeing a woman selling brooms and “a rough type of cloth bag,” as well as a man selling chairs.86 Later in the 1950s, another commission asked whether district commissioners might be able to gather enough crafts to exploit the tourist market. The Pietermaritzburg office was not optimistic: “It must be fully appreciated that at present the natives do not produce substantial qualities of arts and crafts,” the chief native commissioner wrote.87 A counterpart in the Eastern Cape agreed. At the central government’s urging, he had conducted a thorough review of craft production in the Ciskei, with “entirely negative” results. He listed only five centers of production in the entire region: in East London, where “beadwork and basket-making may possibly be encouraged”; in Peddie, where “beadwork in small quantities can be purchased from nearly every kraal”; in Keiskammahoek, where “basket work and the making of reed mats, beer strainers and brooms is done but the output is restricted because of the scarcity of suitable reeds and grasses”; in King Williams Town, where “a list of names of persons who constitute

a likely source of supply of native curios was supplied”; and, finally, in Salt River, where “the names of certain banglemakers and leather-workers were supplied.” Clearly, these were not the initial stirrings of a cultural revolution.88 So government surveyors turned back to the schools.89 In preparation for the Rand Easter Show in 1954, government agents reached out to schools across the Transvaal and elsewhere to ask them to submit student work for the arts and crafts exhibition. The responses were almost universally negative—the letters went out in January, soon after the schools had reopened and long after most had trashed the work that their students had produced during the previous school year—but the motive behind the correspondence was telling.90 When searching for evidence of the continued vitality of African cultural traditions in midcentury South Africa, the logics of the curriculum necessitated that one start with the schools. National educational investigations through the late 1930s and into the 1940s confirmed the conviction that education was about cultural reproduction, first and foremost. The perceived need to preserve the genius of natives had displaced the potential to discover native geniuses. The logic of cultural preservation and transmission having been set in place, students continued to work with their hands in schools, weaving grass, modeling clay, and stringing beads. The 1949 Commission on Native Education, under the leadership of W. G. Eiselen, was the farthest-reaching of these national education commissions. W. G. Eiselen had attended the NEF conference while teaching at Stellenbosch in the early 1930s. Then, he had been a loud proponent of the declensionist narrative, blaming “the rapid and uncontrolled influx of European civilization” for the sad state of African cultural practices. Social change had been too abrupt and too jarring, he argued, with the advent of migrant labor and the move to cities having resulted in the “absence of the men and reliance upon cash wages lead[ing] to neglect of the gardens and the homes and to made goods supplanting the work of the artisan.”91 Nearly two decades later, with the advent of apartheid, he saw reason for optimism: over and against European hegemony, Eiselen’s commission took as a given “the virility, adaptiveness and pervasiveness of Bantu traditional culture.” True, African societies had been buffeted by change, but “even where complete substitution of the indigenous culture by Western culture has been striven after the indigenous culture has in no case disappeared completely.” His commission asserted that “the general function

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of education is to transmit the culture of a society from its more mature to its immature members and in so doing to develop their powers.” African society was unique, was it not? Who could critique its advancement as such? That Eiselen was an Afrikaner, trained in the tradition of German Volkekunde anthropology, and a member of the National Party was essential to this renewed call for an adapted education; still, those labels were also incidental, accidents of language and electoral politics. More apposite was that Eiselen and his commission worked within a South African intellectual tradition that believed African students and African society benefited from handling grass and clay.92 Eiselen’s progression from warning of decay to promoting “adaptiveness” and “virility” was telling. Ideas about African creativity had shifted dramatically in the preceding decades. Where once African geniuses were notably few and far between, now the genius of the collective was well established, if threatened. Where once artistic attainment was measured by the mastery of European artistic forms, now the critique of the imperial universal validated the perfection of indigenous technique in indigenous mediums. Recall how, in 1937, “Ethnologist” called for the government to take an active role in preserving African-made objects as remnants of a lost society. As the apartheid government consolidated its hold over South Africa, its bureaucracies promised to do better than that. The time was ripe to reanimate tradition as the basis of what the Eiselen’s commission referred to as“a modern progressive culture, with social institutions which will be in harmony with one another and with the evolving conditions of life to be met in South Africa.”93 Not stasis, not regress: progress. Native genius, cradled in the apartheid schools, would grow into an African modernity in South Africa, coherent, consistent, and stronger for having survived its tangle with imperial hegemony—or so the state’s theory went. Members of the Eiselen Commission had few kind words for their predecessors in the Union’s provincial education ministries, but they did laud the previous government for laying the foundation for such progress. “It is true that they have, in the face of the most open opposition of Bantu parents, insisted on the retention of Bantu handicrafts in the school syllabi,” the report noted.94 Now, under the National Party, passive, contested retention would become energetic, enthusiastic development. As we have seen, the apartheid government’s initial surveys about craftwork yielded few results. But Natal, ever a leader in matters of African

education, promised that it could deliver. “We understand that Organizer Mr. Grossert who deals with Arts and Crafts in the Natal Native Schools, is putting up a comprehensive memorandum on the subject and feel that this will be far more precise and useful than any information we could give on the subject.”95 Natal’s inspector of native education begged Pretoria for patience. Grossert was a busy man, traveling the province, collecting and critiquing student craft. He was also increasingly spending time in the Midlands, near Richmond, supervising the teacher-training course in art that he had started at Indaleni.

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Figure 3.1 Jack Grossert in Durban, 1978, with the permission of the CC

Chapter 3

Art

John Watt Grossert —Jack,

to those who knew him—was born in Tweedie, Natal, in 1913. He trained in fine arts at the University of Natal, studying with O. J. P. Oxley. After graduation, he qualified as an art teacher, one of only two in African schools in the mid-1930s. He moved quickly into native education administration, serving first as a regional inspector and eventually, after the advent of apartheid, as the organizer of arts and crafts for the entire Natal Province. (He assumed the same position on a national level after 1955.) The organizer was a relatively recently defined position; Grossert traveled the length and the breadth of the province—he spoke of traversing tens of thousands of kilometers per year—visiting with principals and instructors, attending school shows, and overseeing the implementation of the arts and crafts program in government-supported schools.1 He was also an impassioned public intellectual. He published frequently on matters ranging from the development of the Bantu Education syllabus to the need to establish a collection of African craft in his home province. He lectured both at home and abroad; he gave talks on African art on Radio Bantu; and beginning in the early 1950s, he spoke frequently about the specialist art teachers’ training course that he opened at the Indaleni Mission, outside Richmond in the Midlands.

The Art of Life in South Africa 54

The specialist art teachers’ course was Grossert’s brainchild. The program embodied the aspirations and promise of his wide-ranging reading about the role of art and education to promote what he repeatedly described as “harmonious relationships” among people. For Grossert, art education was not only about economic stability and the need to preserve cultural traditions from the overwhelming power of industrial modernity— although those were issues about which he cared deeply. Art was also “educative in the profoundest sense of the word”—it trained people to think, to create, to be, and to be better members of a community.2 Art was foundational and essential, and after 1955, the apartheid government’s support for his program ensured that South Africa would remain on the cutting edge of progressive pedagogical practice. Grossert was undoubtedly a primitivist; he was among the many white South Africans who worried about the loss of black South Africa’s cultural traditions and who fretted about whether the institutional training of African artists risked seeding a dangerous cultural schizophrenia. Yet Grossert’s faith in art education emerged simultaneously from a deeply held critique of white, Western, industrial modernity. He was not concerned that some vague “Africanness” was being lost to urbanization and social change; rather, like John Ruskin and others associated with the nineteenth-century arts and crafts movement, he was concerned that essential human values such as harmony and balance were at stake in the struggle to retain crafts on the curriculum.3 In addition to his duties as organizer and founder of the art-training course, Grossert published two books during the 1950s, which collected his ideas about art education’s role in society. The first, Art and Crafts for Africans (1953), was intended to serve as a handbook for teachers in African schools. Generously detailed and illustrated with Grossert’s remarkable reproductions of student work, Art and Crafts for Africans was largely instructional, with chapters on weaving, basketry, and so on. He coedited the second book, The Art of Africa, with Walter Battiss and two anthropologists, G. H. Franz and H. P. Junod. Ostensibly a study of the artistic traditions of the entire continent, from Egypt through West Africa and points south, The Art of Africa was a profound political, discursive, and ideological statement about the role of art in world society in general and in South Africa in particular. It set out a bold agenda for black South African art, which, as Grossert repeatedly assured audiences in the

1950s and 1960s, would make the entire country a more accomplished and more harmonious place. As with Art and Crafts for Africans before it, The Art of Africa was intended for African school students as part of the expanded Bantu Education syllabus. Its goal was to guide Africans to the useful precedents of African attainment, to “re-awaken” the “joyful attitude” that Grossert claimed had prompted artistic invention in the past. To accomplish this, Grossert played two discursive tricks on his readers. First, he embraced the idea of a racialized Africa to smooth over the dramatically different material cultures of the continent. Although he acknowledged the obvious differences between southern Africa and West Africa, he nonetheless claimed that a “common cultural heritage” linked black people across the continent. This heritage, he continued, was apparent especially in material culture, where “simplicity” and directness of “universal forms” predominated. His second trick was to collapse the category of craft into that of art, thereby eliding the frequent assertion that black South Africans had no visual arts traditions to preserve and promote.4 Each chapter in the book was lavishly illustrated with Grossert’s careful reproductions of masks, headrests, statues, drums, pots, baskets, and so forth (save Battiss’s chapter on “bushmen” art, which included the author’s own drawings). Grossert’s illustrations served to link the different material cultures of West Africa and southern Africa. The book opened with a chapter on “The Arts and Crafts of Negro Africa.” There, Grossert drew from examples held in the Natal Museum and other collections to demonstrate the extent to which West Africa statuary, masks, and other material objects had become an accepted part of the global art world by the 1950s. But in a book called The Art of Africa, it was notable that the next five chapters focused exclusively on southern Africa, an area much less celebrated for its artistic achievements. Indeed, although in the 1930s and 1940s numerous observers called for the preservation of African craft, as we have seen, they did so largely in terms of preserving culture, not “art” per se. In their text, Grossert and his coeditors were granting craft—the making of useful objects—the same degree of aesthetic accomplishment as that usually reserved for the so-called fine arts. Grossert devoted as much loving care and seriousness to sketching a seemingly simple Zulu imbenge—a pot cover woven from ilala, a long, pliable palm frond—as he did to sketching a life-sized bronze head from Ife.5 Between the same covers, rendered by the

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same hand, the argument was apparent: both the celebrated bronze and the quotidian imbenge were esteemed markers of aesthetic attainment. Both were formally accomplished works of art. Grossert and his coeditors defined art expansively to embrace the variety of objects reproduced in the text. “Art is most simply and most usually defined as an attempt to create pleasing forms,” they explained.6 The urge to create a pleasing form was a fundamental trait shared by all: “[Man] must create beauty for himself. That is how the art of man is born. True man is not really happy until he has ever with him that which pleases his eye, his ear, his taste, his touch, his emotions.” This was a compelling definition of art, which collated decades’ worth of aesthetic theory that thinkers across the globe had developed in response to what they perceived as a crisis in the arts in an era of capitalist expansion and technological change. The collapsing of high and low art into the all-encompassing category of art did important ideological work within the museum—but not only there. To assert that for man truly to be man, he had to work in pursuit of beauty was a profound political statement about the role of art and creativity in modern society. And here, both Grossert’s colleagues and his forerunners claimed that African art had a particularly vital role to play. In The Art of Africa, drawings of kraals and huts brought the architecture of everyday African life (or at least “traditional life”) into the category of art. Grossert contributed a meticulous rendering of a village to Franz’s chapter on Basotho artistic practices. His drawing is a remarkable piece of art in its own right—the village detail shows a half dozen perfectly round huts set within a series of interlocking straight and rounded walls. Take away the detail (thatched roofs, a fence of vertical branches) and you have simple, geometric shapes—circles, squares, rectangles, ovals—that are well balanced and logically related to each other. “Now let us look at the Mosotho village,” Franz wrote in the accompanying text, “the first thing that strikes us is that it fits so beautifully into the landscape.”7 The village was obviously an artifact, or something made, but as drawn by Grossert and explicated by Franz, it was so natural as to fit perfectly into the landscape. In their huts and walls, Basotho villagers had perfected the work that the land’s creator had begun. Franz had a word for this: harmony. “In all things [people] seek for harmony . . . the sense of beauty is satisfied when man is able to appreciate a unity or harmony of formal relations among his sense-perceptions. His own creation must be in harmony with himself and with the life around him.”8

Figure 3.2 A Basotho Village, drawn by Jack Grossert, from Walter Battiss, G. H. Franz,

Jack Grossert, and H. P. Junod, The Art of Africa (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Shuter and Shooter, 1958)

Here, Franz was writing about an imagined Mosotho, in language reminiscent of the earliest twentieth-century reception of African and other so-called primitive art in the salons of Europe and America. Artists, theorists, and critics had hailed African art not only for the simplicity of its form and the essential accomplishment of its design but also for the social values they read into the objects—harmony, unity, beauty—in other words, traits that many moderns found lacking in their own day-to-day lives. Since the 1910s and especially in the 1920s, African art had been levied as a critique

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against the excesses of industrial society. So conscripted, African art was profoundly political. By describing the art of everyday life in southern Africa in a similar way, Jack Grossert asserted that black South African art would change society, if only it could be cultivated in the next generation of Africans. Grossert published this text in the late 1950s, just as this generation was being drawn into the confines of Bantu Education schools, where African students encountered the arts and crafts requirements that the previous decades had bequeathed to them. Grossert did his best to reassure them that art deserved to be on the syllabus, for art and only art could guarantee unity, perfection, balance, and harmony under apartheid. Art against Modernity

When the NEF set up shop in South Africa in the winter of 1934, it brought a wealth of knowledge about new pedagogical movements, psychological innovation, and ethnography’s confidence about the way societies functioned. As we have seen, it also brought speakers who bemoaned the passage of the world’s once-varied visual cultures in the face of industrial manufacture. Grossert echoed these concerns, writing that however accomplished it might be, local artistic production could not compete with “the mass produced utensils and furniture from modern European controlled factories.”9 Factories made useful goods but not art. As Walter Benjamin famously argued, mechanical reproduction threatened fundamentally to alter the production and experience of art. Benjamin was particularly concerned about photography’s capacity to displace painting; if anything, the threat that manufacturing posed to African craft–cum-art was even more profound.10 The year 1934 stood on the precipice of a global crisis in the arts, a Dutch educationist, J. J. Van Der Leeuw, had told the delegates gathered in Cape Town. Machines were displacing traditional human activities, and it fell to the pedagogues to figure out how best to preserve that innate creative spark—what he called “spontaneous self-activity”—that made humans unique.11 Given the prevailing undercurrent of concern, it was perhaps not surprising that the best-attended talks of the two-month NEF conference were given by Arthur Lismer, a Canadian art education expert who was working as the education director of the Toronto Art Gallery. In Toronto, Lismer’s primary job was to use the Gallery to motivate the masses of Torontonians

Figure 3.3 Children’s Art Centre Class at the Art Gallery of Toronto, July 1937,

unknown photographer, with the permission of the Art Gallery of Ontario

to create. “Art has been placed in a water-tight compartment, separate and sacred to the initiated few,” he claimed. Art did not necessarily rot within museums, but neither did it live. As he wrote elsewhere, “dead and stately halls hung with . . . priceless masterpieces of other days feel the need of something more than sightseers and occasional visitors.” Sequestered and set apart from everyday life, art lacked oxygen. The problem was not with the objects, Lismer explained, but with people’s failure to appreciate the vital role that objects played. “The Art Gallery is more . . . than sticks, metal girders and concrete,” he asserted, “it is a living manifestation of the expression that life is not all depression and material possessions, that there are still things in life that we need to see more and more, still new experiences in adventuring into new lands and into the heart of people everyone, through an understanding of their arts.” Art was under threat, but Lismer insisted it remained “the most universal voice to-day,” something in which all communities needed to share.12 Lismer was especially keen that children be exposed to art and encouraged to produce it. He brought an exhibition of children’s art to South Africa. “We are slowly emerging into a wider consciousness of the true function of Art,” he counseled his audience. “We are beginning to claim

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the privileges and opportunities that the participation in the experience of Art offers to all.” Art was not a matter of specialized training or wealth or privilege. Rather, art was about the “growth and sustenance of people”— adults and children alike—“in daily life.”13 The social work of art worked best when begun early. Thus, Lismer insisted, the role of art and art education in industrial society ought to be a matter of widespread concern. The American educationist and philosopher John Dewey was in the audience in Johannesburg in 1934. Dewey had recently begun to write on these very same issues, reflecting on his time as education director at suburban Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation. Like Lismer, Dewey’s patron, Albert Barnes, was well known for critiquing staid, tired galleries for treating works of art like religious icons. Barnes insisted that art’s value was its insight into the human condition, which meant that works of art needed to be shared, considered, and experienced, not cut off from view. What was needed was “necessary insight,” to understand the work of art, as he put it, and it was that insight that the foundation sought to generate.14 As Barnes’s educational director, John Dewey had begun to reflect on and develop this “necessary insight” about art and society. His studies brought art, insight, and society together. Art, he explained, reflected human insight and initiative, and it produced human insight and initiative, without which the progress of human societies was impossible. The problem, Dewey wrote in Art as Experience (1934), was not that mechanization undermined the unique value of the work of art but that it made artificial the natural relationship between human minds and the objects of their imagination. “Objects that were in the past valued and significant because of their place in the life of the community now function in isolation from the conditions of their origin,” Dewey explained. Museums exacerbated this by telling tales of individual genius and extolling the mystic values of fine art, with the result that works of art were too frequently “set apart from common experience [to] serve as insignia of taste and certificates of special culture,” not as sources of insight, available and inspirational to all.15 Dewey’s analysis suggested that concepts such as “art for art’s sake” obscured the fact that all aesthetic objects were historical practices, hardwired into the functioning of the human organism within its environment. Art was how people worked within and through their physical world, and works of art revealed and reflected humans’ understanding of their context. To be educated in art was thus to learn how better to be within both nature

and society.16 Here in particular, the American’s ideas dovetailed neatly with the gathering South African consensus that crafts ought to be treated as valued and valuable works of art. Like Jack Grossert, Dewey critiqued the art industry for failing to recognize how, in the artisanal past, “domestic utensils, furnishings of tent and house, rugs, mats, jars, pots, bows, spears, were wrought with such delighted care.” The work of art was everywhere where people made things and lived among them, and “such things were enhancements of the processes of everyday life.”17 What made objects aesthetic was not their inherent beauty or technical accomplishment but the ways in which their creators had lived in and through them.18 Life, Dewey explained, is ongoing, flowing like a river toward death, but that is not how we experience it; rather, we narrate our lives, carve discernable experiences out of the medium of experience, and tell stories “so rounded out that [their] close is a consummation and not a cessation,” even as our bodies continue downstream.19 To create an object is to narrate time: creation has a beginning and an end; it is a discrete and therefore knowable, discernable experience. This matters, Dewey argued in the early 1930s, because without such experiences, people cannot come to grasp their selves amid the onrushing of time. Art objects are concrete manifestations of the human reflection on (and therefore knowledge of ) experience; objects are consciousness, embodied. The work of art is thus work of the self. But why did this embodied, objective humanity matter in Dewey’s own context? To what would such selves amount? Dewey’s ideas about art and education were not uncontested. Indeed, in his writing he invoked other theorists, among them Franz Cižek, an Austrian educationist who was well known for proposing that schools ought to cultivate their pupils’ “free expression.” Cižek saw art differently than did Dewey. As the Austrian understood it, art was a means by which individuals developed their own selves, period. To interfere in students’ expression was to risk damaging their psyches and their best selves. According to Cižek, individual attainment and expression were the sine qua non of art education. Dewey disagreed, suggesting instead that art education served society’s ultimate purpose: integration of the individual within his or her environment, as a better functioning member of the community.20 In the context of the Great Depression in particular, partisans of the Deweyesque perspective felt that, as the education historian Arthur Efland put it, “[though] the

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psychological adjustment of the child was . . . important, the survival of society itself was also a priority.”21 Art education did not need to stop with expressive selves; it needed to go further to promote an expressive society. To borrow from Grossert and Junod, art education was about the harmony in social relations that would result. There were many reasons why life in industrial society lacked harmony. Not surprisingly, scholars interested in art and education posited that the fact that moderns lacked the opportunity to resolve conflicts through self-expression was paramount among these. Both Grossert and Dewey agreed that harmony’s opposite—discord or dissonance—was also an experience, a potential narrative within the flow of life.Expression was how people responded to discord’s recurring presence. Words, paint, and wood (to cite but a sample) were the means by which harmony and unity were reestablished in the individual, and thus, through individual efforts, harmony restored to the social body. Everyone needed this; what made artists exceptional was the intensity with which they embraced discord as a necessary antecedent to harmony. As Dewey understood it, artists were people who sought out life’s rough, irregular moments, rather than striving for smooth tranquility: “Demand for variety is the manifestation of that fact that being alive we seek to live, until we are cowed by fear or dulled by routine. The need of life pushes out into the unknown.”22 A person became a self by grasping the experiences that made up the drama of life; selves became a society when they were able to share in the tension and release that marked the work of art. This same concern about social cohesion was what motivated the ethnographers to call for the preservation of so-called Bantu culture. But for Dewey, Lismer, and Grossert, this was bigger than Bantu society. It was a modern problem, demanding an institutionalized, societal response. Writing a few years later, the Dewey disciple and English art theorist Herbert Edward Read (not to be confused with Tladi’s South African patron) expanded on this in a particularly eloquent and damning way. Like Dewey, Read argued that art was a fundamental human practice, once available to all, that had been obscured by industrial modernity and the isolation of “artist” as a social category. Lacking an awareness of the true work of art, contemporary society fetishized only the individual artist, the genius, at the cost of the mass repression of “instinctive life . . . [a] repression [which was] responsible for [man’s] mental illness—his psychoses

and neuroses.”23 Writing in the early 1930s, Dewey had envisioned a world that would grant expanded opportunities for self-expression. Read wrote as World War II raged, and he was more pessimistic. Like Dewey, he bemoaned the separation between the “high” arts of the museum and the “low” arts of the struggling artisan, suggesting that the division rendered creativity the property of an exclusive few, not a widely dispersed practice. The suppression of “spontaneous creative ability” had led to the “disintegration of the [human] personality” in the centuries since the Renaissance, resulting in the chaos and disintegration that were amply evident in his time.24 In a telling passage, he put it this way: It is the first day of June 1942. The laburnum trees cast their golden rain against a hedge of vivid beech trees. Everything is fresh and sweet in the cool early sunshine. I have just heard that during the weekend the biggest air-raid in history has taken place. Over the city of Cologne . . . our airforce on Sunday morning dropped [11,000] bombs. I listen half-consciously to the sounds that reach me here—the twittering of birds and the voices of children playing in the garden—and try to realize the meaning of these distant events.25 Read believed, as Dewey did, that human beings needed to to face, embrace, and resolve tensions by creating, and thus make life more expressive, more transparent, and more harmonious. Art was the necessary outlet, without which humans lived a denuded life, out of sync with the rhythms of the natural world and their own human community. Or so the horrors Read’s own time revealed. Read’s critique was the latest in a long series of writings expressing similar sentiments. As John Ruskin and the arts and crafts movement demonstrated, when industrialization took hold in the nineteenth century a variety of Western utopian thinkers had looked backward to the West’s eroding artisanal traditions for guidance. In the interwar twentieth century, many looked instead to the supposedly harmonious African societies—and these, too, now appeared to be in danger.26 Proponents of the work of art in society shared primitivists’ fascination with the supposedly simple forms and geometric shapes of African sculpture. But theirs were not only formal concerns; to Barnes, Lismer,

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Dewey, and others, so-called primitive society stood out as a model for what had been lost along with the true meaning of art. The objects stood in for the forgotten ways of experience and creativity. “There is much in the life of the savage that is sodden,” Dewey explained, but also much for the civilized man to learn: “When the savage is most alive, he is most observant of the world around him and most taut with energy. As he watches what stirs around him, he, too, is stirred.”27 Dewey imagined primitive man “taut” with tension, not the master of the world but in constant, ever-evolving dialogue with his environment. “Primitives’” lack of mastery meant that their society was constantly forced to adapt, to create, and thus to humanize the world. In Dewey’s day and in his community, this was no longer the case. Instead, the “environment is, . . . exhausted, worn out, esthetically speaking.”28 He called for “civilized” people to get back to the fundamental creative negotiation that was the quest for balance and harmony.29 Dewey’s work at the Barnes Foundation brought him into contact both with Barnes’s notable collection of African statuary and with his dealer, the Parisian Paul Guillaume. Along with Thomas Munro—a former student of Dewey’s at Teachers’ College—Guillaume selected exemplary pieces to be shipped to Philadelphia and displayed at the foundation. The two also collaborated on the publication of Primitive Negro Sculpture (1926), one of the books which Lippy Lipschitz would later introduce to Ernest Mancoba and which observers credited with inspiring the young sculptor’s turn to a more recognizably “African” style.30 Guillaume and Munro applied Barnes’s ideas about “plastic form” to the analysis and appreciation of African art, while frequently straying beyond art objects to rehearse the theory of the work of art in society. African art suggested that a “durable intellectual culture” had once existed in Africa, although it was no longer in evidence. They imagined an Africa prior to colonialism and slavery, home to “the art-producing negro [who] was a negro un-touched by foreign influences.”31 The art-producing African’s way of life was visible not in the Africans of Guillaume and Munro’s present but through the “plastic form” of the statue, “recapturing a part, and the central part, of the experience of all who have come to vital grips with the statue: that of the sculptor himself [and] the first observer” in that long-distant past.32 The statue embodied the experience of its creator, as Dewey would put it; it was a piece of historical evidence, which in turn

helped to produce the society that encountered and supported its production. Elsewhere, Guillaume described what he saw in the best of African art—“all-inclusive unity and harmony . . . every part is related to every other, and there are no loose ends, no discordant notes or irrelevant details . . . one exists for the moment in a single small harmonious world from which frustration and incompleteness have been removed.”33 To come into contact with an African sculpture and to consider its plastic form was to come into contact with an untouched, pure society, harmonious, unified, expressive. “Born along by the rhythm of the life about him, and by the momentum of the past, going a little farther by his individual power, the primitive artist creates a new form, the crystallized expression of his race and of his own personality.”34 The subtext was readily apparent: everything African society had been, which had resulted in their delightful objects, modern society was not. Modern society was discordant, off balance, and violent. Art was the privilege of the few, the fetish of the individual, whereas the African artist had “sought no individual fame.”35 The (imagined) work of art in the African past answered the critique that Dewey, Barnes, Lismer, and Read levied against their own time. This is not to say that theorists about the work of art wanted to replicate African societies; rather, from objects of African social creation they culled lessons about creativity and the position of the artist, to be applied to modern life. But where did that leave African societies—and African artists? Guillaume and Munro could not control how their ideas—and ideas like theirs—were received. Mancoba responded in his own way. In Grossert’s careful sketches of Asante fertility dolls, Sahelian masks, and Zulu rugs, in Franz’s assertions about Basotho society, and in Grossert’s lovingly wrought village scene, we might see another response—the radical conviction that Guillaume and Munro were wrong and that harmony was still possible in Africa.36 It is worth noting that there was a precedent here for using the text in this way. One of Africa’s paramount aesthetic theorists was the poet and politician Leopold Senghor, who, according to Souleymane Bachir Diagne, encountered Primitive Negro Sculpture while a student in Paris in the 1930s.37 Over the next three decades, Senghor adapted the text’s conviction about African artistic accomplishments to his own political program for the continent’s engagement with modernity. In the 1950s and 1960s, Senghor frequently returned to Primitive Negro Sculpture’s claim that African

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Figure 3.4 Mask (Senegalese), artist unknown, Mask, Senegal, District Leo, drawn by Jack Grossert,

1956, with the permission of the CC

creative objects represented an Africanity avant la lettre—something so African that they even predated the need to claim Africanness, whether as a deracinated captive or as an anticolonial revolutionary. Senghor closely followed existentialist and phenomenologist debates about the nature of African identity and rebutted them with the art object, “an Africanity as real as the material objects it has produced, which are, before all else, its works of art.”38 Like Grossert, Senghor believed that works of African invention rehearsed great African achievements still to come. It is unclear whether Senghor read Dewey, but it seems possible that both he and the American generated much of their philosophy in dialogue with Guillaume and Munro’s account of African artistry. Senghor and Dewey both cited rhythm as the element that united the traditional and the new. For Dewey, rhythm was seen in art’s accumulating narratives, each “having its particular rhythmic movement; each with its own unrepeated quality throughout.”39 Every statue was different, but each reflected a unique experience and effort to overcome discord with harmony. Guillaume and Munro’s anonymous artists worked like all “great original artists [who] take a tradition into themselves. They have not shunned it, but digested it.” Dewey was a theorist; Senghor was also a politician, and he drew a powerful political lesson from the art object. He rejected Guillaume and Munro’s contention that African art was dead and claimed instead that the rhythm of the individual statues revealed that African art by definition always moved, always progressed—as would African societies, grounded in tradition but open to the future. His négritude was a “principle of movement,” an experience of openness. He called for Africans, artists and otherwise, to claim this rhythmic approach to life as their African identity: “an open question to be ceaselessly explored.”40 Senghor developed his aesthetic theories while also pursuing national self-determination and Senegal’s intellectual and artistic development.41 Unlike Dewey, Barnes, Guillaume, and Munro, he had authority outside the narrow world of art (no matter how much the four of them might regret the art world’s narrowness). Jack Grossert also had a certain degree of political authority. Like Senghor, he believed in the aesthetic accomplishments of the African created object. As The Art of Africa so eloquently expressed, he, too, rejected the notion that African artistry was lost with the political and other practices that had been battered by European occupation. Grossert’s sketchbook revealed this. In pencil and crayon, he captured the Natal

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Figure 3.5 Broom handles by Natal schoolchildren, drawn by Jack Grossert, 1950s, with the permis-

sion of the CC

Museum’s collection of West African sculpture and, sometimes on consecutive pages, a learner’s pot, beaded bracelet, or grass broom.42 In African schools across the Union throughout the 1940s and 1950s, he witnessed what he described as an unbroken lineage of African creativity. Using what authority he had, Grossert worked to develop an education system based on the self-expressive work of art and the grounded openness that made art African. Education through Art

In his writings and speeches, Grossert frequently acknowledged his debt to the “revolution of art” and the aesthetic theory of the 1920s and 1930s.43 He returned again and again to concepts familiar from Dewey, Herbert Read,

Arthur Lismer, Guillaume, Munro, and others. But there were many concepts that were South Africa’s alone and represented his attempt to thread the various needles of his brief—as a proponent of the beautiful and an apartheid bureaucrat; as an African art aficionado, in a country without celebrated indigenous artistic traditions; as a modernist teacher who believed that self-expression led to social harmony and that Africans as Africans best expressed themselves in certain ways. He began to solve these issues by introducing the concept of taste. Grossert wanted to argue that black South Africans had inherited the continent’s artistic traditions, yet, as we have seen, his own bureaucracy could report only scattered findings of African artistry. Eiselen had argued that European manufactures were responsible for the decline of African artisanship, and Grossert agreed that the flood of industrial goods threatened to usurp the African society’s creative outlet.44 But he added a new element—the concept of inherent, racialized taste—that allowed him to suggest that something intangible had survived the African craftsperson’s encounter with industrial modernity. He bemoaned the “devastation which had been wrought in Bantu taste by the flooding of Native stores with shoddy European trash to take the place of traditional crafts of great beauty and sincerity.”45 In response to this discussion, he proposed a pedagogical solution. Writing of basketwork, Grossert despaired how “under white guidance these naturally formed objects arising out of the simple use of materials, have been distorted into pretty, useless objects that are completely subversive of character and traditional taste.”46 Note how easily Grossert slipped into Deweyesque language in describing this situation. African production had been “natural,” not artificial. It was what the people did and what, we might presume, rendered their society harmonious and tranquil. But Europeans had ruined that, and in Grossert’s own time both art and society were flirting with a tragic loss.47 By focusing on taste, Grossert criticized the ways in which Africans were taught, and he proposed a bureaucratic intervention.48 Yes, government surveys had revealed a lack of craftwork, but Grossert circumvented such findings by insisting that Africans’ inherent taste still survived. He drew his audience’s attention to how well Africans dressed. “In choosing clothes, one notices that most Africans . . . have an infallible taste for what is best,” he observed on one occasion. “Cannot this gift be extended to crafts in general?”49 Dress was a tempting subject; it was less overdetermined than

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Figure 3.6 Design in blue and purple, by Gcinisiwe Gumede, displayed at the Eshowe Craft Show, drawn by Jack Grossert, 1950s, with the permission of the CC

the production of aesthetic items, and yet it reflected artistry as Dewey would have understood it—conscious selection and awareness, the human need to organize material to tell a story. Dress was taste unsullied, an aesthetic practice that transcended time. He credited all Bantu and especially the Zulu, with whom he was most familiar, for “their taste in dress, both when they dress in a traditional manner and when [they] adopt European styles.”50 The last clause was critical: Grossert had no problem with Africans dressing in European styles. The clothes were not what made the African;

it was the Africans’ tasteful manner of dressing that defined Africanity. As Africans, taste came naturally from within, as they engaged their present. The question, then, was how to promote aesthetic progress without destroying African taste. Grossert’s goal was always to return the lost vitality to African craft, in which he saw shining examples of the work of art. For inspiration, he turned to education theorists such as Lismer and Read, whose own work in wildly different settings confirmed that the art teacher’s greatest challenge was not to teach too much and risk stifling students’ creativity. He looked closer to home as well, especially to Canon Edward Patterson’s Cyrene Mission in Southern Rhodesia.51 (See map 1.1, and note 22 in chap. 2, above.) Patterson, a graduate of the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London (and an instructor at Grace Dieu in the 1920s), founded a school for African children near Bulawayo in the 1940s, in which art played a central role. In 1949, Grossert journeyed to Cyrene,accompanied by Ann Harrison, another young British art school graduate (of the Slade School), who had recently arrived in South Africa seeking to teach art. Theirs was a pilgrimage to a great center of African creativity. Grossert’s companion recounted her impressions of Cyrene in her diary: “These walls glow with colour and are totally unexpected in this khaki coloured, sundried setting. Every foot of the walls outside and inside have been painted by the pupils with murals rich with African vegetation and Biblical happenings set in a Rhodesian countryside. The impact of these murals, their creative vision, design and colour, is breathtaking.”52 At Cyrene, Patterson’s pedagogy was simple. He trusted in his students’ innate taste and eschewed sharing other people’s work with them, both that of European and of their predecessors at the mission. Indeed, after the walls were completely covered in authentic expression, he had them whitewashed and then started over. For Patterson, art was most decidedly not a matter of the finished work but was instead about the regular work of self-expressive creating. Grossert and Harrison returned to Natal excited, for at Cyrene they had seen the progress they envisioned in African art. First, they would revitalize craftwork; then, trusting in taste and the unceasing stream of African creativity, their students and South African society would rediscover that rooted openness for which Senghor called. They left Southern Rhodesia “convinced that we were fully justified in introducing” art in Natal, 71

Art

The Art of Life in South Africa 72

Grossert remembered, “since many of the students there showed a . . . standard of aesthetic sensibility” comparable to what they had seen at Cyrene. In South Africa too, taste had survived conquest, and from students’ “beautiful grass mats and bowls and carved wooden artifacts” would come new harmonies.53 Patterson was a bit of an eccentric, isolated in the Matopos Hills far from the centers of aesthetic theory, but he had arrived at a critical point. He trusted in his students’ capability and good taste, and he practiced a gentle pedagogy designed to cultivate both. John Dewey had arrived at a similar place, writing in the late 1920s about the ideal relationship between teacher and student. “Nobody else can see for [the student],” Dewey suggested, “and he can’t see just by being told,” yet teachers were still essential, “for the right kind of telling may guide his seeing and thus help him see what he needs to see.”54 Teaching—and especially art teaching—was itself an art, requiring acute sensitivity and finesse. Returning from the Matopos Hills to the Natal Midlands, Grossert and Harrison talked about how they would begin to train Africans to teach with such skill. Looking back over the history of art education in the Bantu Education schools, Grossert credited two people for laying the program’s foundation. The first was Charles Loram, who was famous in South Africa and whose influence was obvious. The second was Arthur Lismer, the Canadian art educator who had first visited the country to attend the NEF in 1934.55 Grossert credited Lismer for laying the practical, institutional groundwork for the South African art program, while noting that he was also a critical theorist. In 1934 Lismer had explained to his audiences at the NEF that the work of art in the schools was twofold: the development of personality and, as children matured, the social dividend of empathy. Each child who was granted an opportunity to experience and produce beauty was an investment in a better, more humane community. “Art education is the encouragement of a whole people towards the appreciation of beauty,” Lismer reflected. To some extent, art education was about the identification and “encouragement of individual talent,” but it could only “prepare the soil” for genius “by developing the natural instincts of [all] human beings towards the lovelier things in life. [Art] provides room for self-expression and opportunities for the lighting by each of his own little lamp.” In referring to “the lighting by each of his own little lamp,” he was asserting that each person, regardless of creed or color, was capable of self-expression and aesthetic appreciation. This was Lismer’s credo. Truly artful teachers and

Figure 3.7 Beaded objects, unknown artists, drawn by Jack Grossert, 1950s, with the permission of

the CC

The Art of Life in South Africa 74

sensitive education systems were those that offered a light of inspiration equal to the task.56 Lismer’s talks generated an intense interest among the NEF delegates. E. G. Malherbe, the conference organizer, had met Lismer in Toronto in 1933 and raised funds for his trip to South Arica. Malherbe assumed that Lismer’s lectures on such an esoteric subject—child art?—would struggle to draw a crowd, however, so he assigned Lismer’s first lecture to a room that held less than one hundred. Lismer proved so popular that his second talk was moved to the University of Witwatersrand’s Great Hall, one of Johannesburg’s largest venues. After the conference’s end, Lismer was invited to stay on in South Africa and even to assume the directorship of the Johannesburg Art Gallery.57 He declined the latter offer but did return to the country in 1937 to embark on a grand tour to assess the potential for art education in the Union’s native schools. He visited elite schools such as Adams College, where students reported that “Mr. Lismer . . . spent several hours instructing training college students on the elements of Art. To Mr. Lismer, Art is not simply a subject, it is the expression of life itself.”58 He visited government primary schools as well. Everywhere he went, Lismer reflected on the teachers’ responsibility to help their students’ creative efforts in search of harmony. Given the prevailing primitivist mood, it was perhaps not surprising that Lismer claimed in 1937 that “traditional Bantu crafts” were the best means of achieving this.59 Schools were foreign impositions on African society, he explained, and without a link to Bantu culture, Lismer suggested that “serious damage will be done to the minds of the Bantu pupils.”60 Craftwork would be a bulwark against the African student’s rootless wandering through the modern world. At the NEF, the South African politician D. D. T. Jabavu had claimed African children “[came] to school armed with a strong bias for handwork.”61 Lismer agreed and suggested that Africans’ unconscious, innate, natural aptitude for craftwork would be the foundation of an artful society in South African. Lismer’s critical innovation was his insistence that crafts were only the beginning. On the surface, his call for crafts in schools was reminiscent of the insistence of anthropologists, artists, and others that crafts stay on the syllabus, but he sharply criticized those who failed to understand the real reason why this was so. In the face of derision, he proclaimed that all people were artists, whether they painted landscapes or made pots. “The

people slapped their thighs and laughed when he told them their pots were art,” his biography recounts.62 Lismer’s audience did not understand that he did not necessarily mean the pots deserved to be in a museum. Crafts were not valuable in themselves, however accomplished and visually pleasing they might be. Rather, they were tools. In schools, African pupils would be given a medium familiar from their regular, nonacademic life. Clay, grass, wood, beads--Lismer believed that such things were abundant and familiar in the communities from which students came to attend school. This was the raw material with which the “richness” of their African background— taste, aesthetic sensibility—could be cultivated in the schools, not to make prettier baskets but “to cultivate the uniqueness of their individuality.” This was where teachers came in. According to Lismer’s vision, teachers would circulate throughout the classroom, encouraging students to make their thinking explicit, to continue probing their material, and to reflect on why they molded the clay this way and not that or why they emphasized this color and not another. As Lismer explained, the goal of craftwork was to discover “the potentiality of the Bantu pupils and help them to discover themselves.” It was not necessarily about developing talent; it was about ensuring that South African students were able to contribute to art’s work in human society.63 Lismer submitted a report to the Natal provincial government before returning to Canada in the winter of 1937. His argument was threefold: craft was the tool that unlocked art, art was the expression and consciousness of the individual student, and the Natal Education Department ought to recognize this by training teachers to guide, rather than dictate to, students. He further recommended that the department name an art organizer to ensure that the program was able to walk the line between craft for culture’s sake and art for society’s sake.64 Over the next few years, Natal began to implement Lismer’s recommendations. South African art education moved forward, carried by the odd combination of primitivism and progressive ideas about the work of art. Jack Grossert absorbed these theories during his stint as a provincial art teacher. Over time, he had other “teachers,” among them Viktor Lowenfeld, a German Jewish refugee who had developed a theory of art education during years teaching at Virginia’s Hampton Institute and Pennsylvania State University after World War II. Like Lismer, Lowenfeld urged instructors to begin with society’s youngest members. He suggested that art was

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The Art of Life in South Africa 76

how children communicated; without art, they—and thus, society—were stifled and unhealthy. “Whenever we hear children say ‘I can’t draw that,’ we can be sure that some kind of interference has occurred in their lives,” Lowenfeld noted. It was the teacher’s task to cultivate children’s natural urge to communicate. To ensure that expression remains free and unencumbered, he wrote in 1947, “never prefer one child’s creative work over that of another! Never give the work of one child as an example to another! Never let a child copy anything!” Copying ruined originality; ranking and comparison undermined confidence; to insist on what the teacher thought was the correct representation of reality destroyed creativity. “How ridiculous to overpower these little children’s souls!” Lowenfeld exclaimed. Scribbles were a first stage of their mental growth and communication, which, if cultivated, would result in a more humane and successful society made up of confident, expressive people. Let the children scribble! he urged.65 Or work clay or grass. Lowenfeld’s scheme for art teaching reinforced Grossert’s conviction that Europeans had been the wrong kind of teachers. Convinced of their own righteousness, they had ridiculed and mocked the conventions of African artistry. They had even denied that the good, tasteful objects that Africans created were worthy of being called art. They had overwhelmed the souls of their charges—primarily the adults but also,through the alienating experiences of the schools, the children as well. To Grossert’s mind, it was a happy accident that the authorities had retained a space on the syllabus for creative work, and he intended to exploit it. He applauded the advent of Bantu Education. Even if the National Party and its ideologues did not necessarily grasp how essential art was to human development, their policies had kept the door open for the work of art in South Africa.66 The Invention of South African Art

Grossert trusted that the schools would provide the space to experiment and to build, at least as far as the visual arts were concerned. Aesthetic activity was already on the syllabus. Tradition called it craft, but like Dewey and like Grossert’s coeditors on The Art of Africa, he believed that crafts differed from art in name only. Grass and paint were nothing more than “different media for the expression of the same aesthetic activity.”67 The only difference was that African children were more familiar with the former than the

latter. The real work of art would follow. “Art and crafts as school subjects are taught because they provide basic educational experiences for the development of imagination and constructive thought processes,” Grossert explained. “For educational value it is of less concern . . . what materials are used, provided they are within the range which pupils can fashion and shape, than the ideas which can be developed from them.”68 Craftwork was focused, self-conscious labor. In effect, it tricked students, administrators, and parents into thinking that the children were just modeling clay animals or weaving mats, when in fact they were developing their own selves. By giving students a space to make things, teachers seeded “creativity and originality.” From those seeds would flower adults able to “face the world with a confident ability to use all its challenges as creative opportunities.” Bantu Education would create artists, not in the sense that art was listed in the school curriculum but in the fervent, hopeful faith that art was, in reality, “a way of life.”69 As Grossert began to plan and publicize the nascent Bantu Education art program and especially its teacher-training initiative, it was clear that he had learned from Lowenfeld and Lismer. “It is a bad method for the teacher to sit at the table while the children stand waiting heir turn to show her their work,” he counseled. “Hours of time are wasted this way.” Instead, he believed that teachers ought to circulate around the classroom, offering encouragement and support but not talking “too much during a lesson”: “After the pupils have been questioned, give them time to get started, before interrupting their train of thought. When about ten minutes have passed, go around the class noticing each pupil’s individuality.”70 He, too, recognized that only the right kind of teaching could produce the right kind of art; simple pedagogical decisions could promote expression. As art produced real, thoughtful life, life would produce better art. Crafts were seeds and not “tribal” curios, which Grossert ridiculed as the “sentimental repository of pseudo art [and the] sluggish backwater from which no refreshing drink can be obtained.” Bureaucrats and businesspeople who wanted to market and sell traditional crafts were charlatans and their business “anathema to all those who have a genuine interest in the education of the Bantu.”71 It was “facetious” to expect to sell student work, as so many had intended; African schools were schools, not industrial centers.72 And schools were about adapting tradition to the demands and possibilities of the future, in both senses of the “work” of art.

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Instead of feeding the curio market, Grossert imagined that the South African art education program would begin with crafts and eventually incubate what he hoped would become “a school of indigenous art” in the country.73 “African pupils could produce “high artistic” expression in painting . . . on a level equal to that of any other race,” he assured a group of African teachers after his experiments had gone on for a few years.74 Later, he reflected on several urban schools where “picture-making” had supplanted craftwork. He had not yet had an opportunity to staff those schools with trained art teachers; they were “staffed” only with materials and the conviction that students ought to be “left free to express themselves.”75 But he noted that these schools were enjoying tremendous success. This move into graphic arts confirmed his conviction that all children could carve, model, paint, and create.76 For this vision of art education to succeed, South Africa needed more specialist art teachers, trained with the insights of Dewey, Read, Lismer, and Lowenfeld in mind. Advertisements for a specialist art teachers’ program began to appear soon after Harrison and Grossert returned from Cyrene in 1949. “There is an Art class at . . . Indaleni,” the Native Teachers’ Journal informed its readers that year. Teachers who were “interested in Drawing, Painting, Modeling, Design, etc.” were encouraged to apply.77 By the early 1950s, Native Teachers’ Journal began to feature covers designed by Indaleni art students, in addition to Grossert’s ever-present drawings of school craft. A Richmond-born Indaleni student named Selbourne Mvusi drew one of the first covers; it showed an ancestor, wearing an inkatha (a coiled grass headdress) looking on approvingly as a schoolboy in short pants worked a lathe—tradition, updated, manifest in the creative exertions of the twentieth-century school student.78 By the mid-1950s, Mvusi had left the Indaleni Mission and was both teaching art in Durban and developing his own reputation as an artist. In Mvusi’s own progress, Grossert saw confirmation that art education in South Africa was going to work—that Bantu Education could cultivate humane expression in mid-twentieth-century modernity.79 When thinking about successful artists such as Mvusi, the father of national art education in apartheid South Africa fantasized about a future in which the regular work of art in South African society would result in a special class of artists, “prophets . . . creative geniuses” who “transcended the physical world and gained visions of an ideal order.”80 He acknowledged that South Africa

Figure 3.8 Cover by Selbourne Mvusi, Native Teachers’ Journal 33, no. 3 (April 1953): 212

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was far from ideal—the people were poor, and art was still poorly understood. But he was optimistic that from children’s scribbles and molding of clay would emerge masters who could help to harmonize society. Or so he hoped, as he put his faith in his art school.

 Of course, the reality was that in South Africa, art education existed only because its primitivist and racialist aspects were popular with the ideological pretensions of the white minority. Even if people were motivated with progressive ideas about the creative potential of the child, reality demanded that art education in apartheid South Africa began where South African society was—that is, with primary school students and the crafts black children were made to do there, simply because they were black. Grossert traveled tens of thousands of miles through apartheid South Africa, visiting craft shows and witnessing the development of Bantu Education. He knew that his was not the only vision and that there were others, more authoritative than he, with their own agendas for the schools. Still, he believed in human perfectibility, through the work of art. On occasion, he even went so far as to declare that the poverty and want that stalked Africans’ school were actually advantages, in that they would promote more of the initiative and critical thinking that was the raw material of art.81 Grossert left Bantu Education in the mid-1960s to found the Fine Arts Department at the University of Durban–Westville, the apartheid era tertiary institution for South Africans of Asian ancestry. It was a homecoming of sorts for him, as his Oxley-supervised master’s thesis had been on Hindu architecture in Natal—touching on another community’s story about the unfolding of tradition. At the end of the turbulent 1970s, Grossert left South Africa for Ireland. He returned to Natal in 1988 and gave an interview about the Bantu Education art program that he had once so enthusiastically promoted. In his account, he reflected especially on a visit he had had in 1982 from one of Mvusi’s classmates, Eric Ngcobo, an accomplished artist and theorist in his own right. Ngcobo had succeeded Mvusi as an art teacher at Loram High School in Durban; he eventually became the organizer of arts and crafts in the KwaZulu Bantustan. Like Grossert, Ngcobo had been a true believer in the work of art. The former had even sponsored Ngcobo’s overseas trip to attend an international conference of art educators during the mid-1970s, at which Ngcobo had extolled the virtues of

the South African art education system.82 And yet, Grossert told his interviewers, during Ngcobo’s visit to the United Kingdom in the early 1980s, he had toured a number of schools to assess what resources students had available there—and the discrepancy between British and Zulu schools had “overwhelmed” him. Ngcobo’s reaction forced Grossert to acknowledge that South Africa’s material limitations and politics had conspired to undermine even the best-intentioned theories. That confession was only part of Grossert’s burgeoning crisis of faith; he was more troubled still by the fact that when he returned to South Africa in the late 1980s, he heard many collectors and others extol his art program for sustaining the curio trade in South Africa. To someone whose younger self had so vilified that sordid business, those words must have stung with painful venom.83 It turned out that the needles Grossert had to thread were not those relating to concepts he had teased out in his writings and speeches— traditional versus modern, art versus craft, teaching versus indoctrination. He lived and worked in apartheid South Africa, which meant that there was a more fundamental game afoot, one played with power beyond that of the organizer of arts and crafts. South African students worked with their hands in schools for reasons born, like those sculptures Guillaume and Munro wrote about, by the momentum of various traditions—from Loram, Eiselen, and Grossert—that were carried forward by the initiative of others who followed. All had contributed to the establishment, by the 1950s, of a government art school at on old mission station outside Richmond. Like all created objects, once made and loosed from its creator’s hand the school shifted and changed according to prevailing conditions. For many, the school held out the promise of African tradition preserved; for more, it represented a still poorly defined period on the syllabus during which mid-twentieth-century African students were required to make baskets or work clay. For some, it was frustration born from poverty and a prevailing lack of opportunity. And yet for others, there was Grossert’s dream: an art school that offered a space to develop personality; to embrace discord; to find a harmony; and to experience the transcendence of a moment carved from time.

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Chapter 4

Journeys

The Indaleni Mission was one of Natal’s oldest. Founded in 1847, it predated the white settler town of Richmond by three years. It, too, was a settler community, albeit of a different sort. Its first residents were Methodist converts who, along with their minister, James Allison, had been forced from Swazi territory in the mid-1840s. Their banishment was due to King Mswati’s suspicion that their loyalties lay with the ascendant British Empire and not his nascent kingdom. Allison, his converts, and assorted hangers-on moved southwest into British territory and settled on a small hill in the Midlands, itself recently abandoned by people under the leadership of a chief who had been unlucky in the regional politics of war and allegiance.1 The mission developed quickly. By 1850, Allison reported holding classes on religion, artisanal crafts, and agriculture to twenty-three African children who had settled there.2 It endured some lean times in the last half of the nineteenth century, during which membership in the church waxed and waned. Although the local Methodist population was never particularly stable, the church’s various schools kept the mission functioning through Loram’s day and beyond. By World War II, Indaleni had evolved into a major center of African education in the Midlands, and it boasted a secondary school and a teacher-training college. By the late 1940s, there

Figure 4.1 Indaleni Mission, 1957, with the permission of the Richmond Museum

was a boys’ hostel and dining room near the training college (on the east side of the mud road that led up to the hill from the empty reserve land between the mission and Richmond town). Moreover, demand had led to the building of a massive girls’ hostel slightly downhill and across the street from the training college proper—a three-story, cement edifice with lavatories and dining facilities separate from those of the boys. Downhill from the training college and across the street from the girls’ hostel was the institution’s second infrastructural advantage, at least as far as teacher training was concerned—a primary school, where teachers in training could practice. It became known as the “practising school.” In the 1940s and 1950s, Richmond had a small permanently resident African population. Today, the valley between the Indaleni Mission and Richmond town is filled in with township dwellings, ranging from 1990s-era Reconstruction and Development Programme houses to backyard shacks, but back then, the area was thinly populated. If you were standing at the top of Indaleni hill and looking toward Richmond, there were a few Methodist families’ homes at your back and scattered African communities in the native reserve on the fringes of the white municipal area. Huge trees— foreign oaks and maples, primarily—obscured the view to town in places. Through their leaves were vegetable farms, cane fields, timber farms, and

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Figure 4.2 Girls’ hostel at Indaleni, 1950s, with the permission of the Richmond

Museum

the small grid of white Richmond. Yet each morning, Ndaleni art teacher Peter Bell remembered, “seemingly out of the ground, hundreds of children . . . converged there [at Indaleni] with their books and slates,” only to vanish “at the end of the day like puffs of smoke.”3 During school hours, the mission was filled with the sounds of children at play, matrons’ calls for calm, and the strained efforts of teacher trainees to apply their learning to unruly reality. It was a noisy educational oasis, set in the massive quiet of an agricultural landscape. Beginning in 1949, other sounds joined the cacophony. These were at first unobtrusive—a brush, dipped in paint, applied to canvas; lead’s scratch on paper; perhaps a clipped, muffled curse at a line gone astray. Gradually, these new sounds grew louder—cement mixed and poured, laughter cascading from scaffolding as paint cans clattered and art students transformed the campus into a gallery of mid-twentieth-century creative thought. Friezes went up, discarded crockery was shattered and reassembled into mosaics, walls exploded in color and whimsy, and figures arose to gaze toward Richmond or to welcome birds to bathe or to support a child’s seesaw or a school’s swing set. Fallen trees were hauled

Figure 4.3 Cleaning the kiln, detail of mural by Abednego Dlamini, 1960, photograph by the author

from local fields; soon, the sound of adze and ax and the beat of mallet on chisel sounded as regularly as the voices of the training college’s choir and the practicing school’s yelps. Art students trudged uphill beyond the mission house to the river and returned muddy, their hands and arms coated in drying, cracking ochre, their backs bent with the weight of the thick, wet clay in their buckets. New sounds followed: the hiss of steam escaping burning logs and the quiet conversations of students at work tending a fire to heat a kiln in which riparian soils were transformed into works of vivid imagination. There were other sounds, of course—wind in the fields and among the trees, as well as the insistent, thick Midlands rain hitting the roofs of the classrooms and the puddles in the rutted road. But the sounds that would bring Indaleni and its art school (known as Ndaleni, without isiZulu’s locational i- prefix) into history were human sounds—sonic evidence of consciousness, experimentation, and change. These artful sounds were constituted of conversations and relationships between teachers and students,

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Figure 4.4 Detail of a mosaic by Powell Xaba, 1962, photograph by the author

between veterans of the program’s early days and those to whom they talked about their art school, between the objects students created and the world in which those objects came to live. The story of Ndaleni began with Charles Loram and Walter Battiss, then proceeded through Dewey and Lismer to conversations such as that between Jack Grossert and Ann Harrison on the road from Cyrene Mission. It continued through Harrison’s successors’ efforts to create an art school on Indaleni hill during the 1950s and those African students from across the Union who alighted there and were converted. These in turn carried “the preaching of the Art Gospel among the gentiles” into the 1960s, the Republic and Grand Apartheid, the bureaucratic challenges of Bantustan “independence,” and the tensions and opportunities of the 1970s.4 Our focus now shifts away from the debates about race and creativity that led to the creation of a Bantu Education art school. By the time Ann Harrison began to teach art at Indaleni Mission, the National Party was in power; it would remain there for the next three decades and beyond,

conditioning the meaning and legacy of the Ndaleni art school in the world beyond the Hella Hella Road, Richmond, Pietermaritzburg, and the mountains. In subsequent chapters, we will see how the Ndaleni school and its students encountered apartheid’s varied challenges. But before doing so, we need to condition ourselves to recognize that even as apartheid reigned, Ndaleni’s own rhythms pulsed: the daily cycle of sawdust and dirtied brushes, the children appearing and disappearing like smoke; the annual cycle of interested people across South Africa realizing that there was an art school near Richmond, and the regular appearance of applications in the post. And each January, there were the journeys—first of a few, then a few dozen, and eventually hundreds—of teachers, students, and artists from across a vast land, converging among a few buildings on a hill above a valley. “This is Indaleni!” wrote Cliff Molokoane. Coming up the hill, there “was a big monster next to the gate.” It was concrete, grotesque, and startling. It was, he remembered, his “welcome . . . to the Art atmosphere of Indaleni” and to the possibilities and the work that art school portended.5 Origins, 1949–63

In the catalog that accompanied the 1999 Ndaleni retrospective exhibition in Pietermaritzburg, curators and art historians credited Ann Harrison for having been the art school’s first teacher. That is only partially accurate. Harrison was an art teacher at Indaleni Mission, but she predated the art school itself. Her role was both incidental and vital. It was incidental because she was only briefly in South Africa (she stayed for less than two years) and she taught art to only a handful of training college students during her tenure at Indaleni. Yet her experiences were vital because Harrison was the first to think systematically about how to teach art at Indaleni Mission. She was a conduit between European and North American thinking about the relationship between art and education and the practical principles and lessons that actually teaching demanded. Harrison was in her late twenties when she arrived in Cape Town from England in 1948. She held a degree in fine arts from London’s Slade School of Art, where she had specialized in sculpture. She was not an experienced art teacher; in the edited diary of her Indaleni experiences, she noted that she had only taught briefly in an army school during the war

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and afterward done some “experimental Art Teaching for the Institute of Adult Education in a mental hospital.” Yet she made up for her lack of experience with the clarity of convictions familiar to readers of Dewey, Lowenfeld, and Herbert Read. “I believe that in Schools, Art should be as important as learning to read and write,” she asserted; “I also believe that everyone can ‘do’ Art and can become visually literate, given direction and encouragement.”6 Like Grossert, she did not differentiate between art and crafts; she was convinced that the “initial training of artists and craftsmen should be identical—an introduction to form, colour and the nature of materials.”7 Her primary inspiration in teaching art came from the Bauhaus in Weimar Germany, where instructors such as Walter Gropius and Joseph Itten had similarly argued for collapsing the divisions between high and low art. Harrison had read about the Bauhaus Vorkurs (foundation course) while at the Slade; it informed her intention to teach art first through “line, shape, space, colour, tone and texture, and the part they play in composition.”8 She landed in Cape Town in 1948 and offered her services to the Cape Education Department. After officials declined her offer, Harrison trekked inland to the Transvaal, which similarly saw no need for a specialist art teacher in the province’s African schools. Finally, just before the start of the 1949 school year, she met an unnamed inspector in the Natal provincial schools who told her about an opening teaching “blackboard writing and visual aids” to trainees at the Indaleni Training College. It was at Indaleni that Harrison met Grossert, who was all too familiar with bureaucratic resistance to transforming handwork—a category that included teaching aids—into art in the training colleges. He encouraged her to develop a syllabus, and he soon received “a comprehensive scheme of lessons for her various classes on an imperial sheet of cartridge paper, which ranks as one of the most carefully planned and thought out of any schemes of work seen by the Organiser, in any school, before or since then.”9 At the time of her appointment, arts and crafts was a mandatory subject for all student teachers at the training colleges, so that they would better be able to teach the handwork required by the provincial syllabus. In spite of this, the province had only two specialist art teachers working to train teachers, and schools there continued to do little more than produce “wooden spoons or woven mats [with] too much emphasis on skill and too little on creative thinking.”10 Given the prevailing conditions, one might easily imagine how enthused Grossert was to meet

Harrison and to learn that the “overriding aim of [her] scheme was to involve all pupils and not only those who happened to be particularly skilled in drawing, in the belief that the encouragement and practice of creative art is a vital part of education.”11 Harrison’s diary is a choppy document. Some passages are clearly retrospective, as when she credited her later reading of a text—sometimes years later—for informing her understanding of a 1949 Indaleni experience. But others capture something of the nature of the place and her experiences there. “This morning on the way to breakfast, I stopped on the path to the Mission and turned to look around,” she wrote. Below, she saw “the dusty road and the dark stained wooden classrooms and the concrete façade of the girl’s [hostel] . . . on the warm air was a pungent smell of burning wattle.” Across the valley, “a dog barked, the sound carrying with surprising clarity” in the emptiness of a midweek Midlands morning. It was here that Harrison attempted to instill her enthusiasm for art and education in her students. This was a challenge, in part because her students had not come to Indaleni to study art, unlike those who would study with her successors. They were aspirant teachers, for whom her class period was only an odd novelty on the syllabus. She concentrated on creating the right “incentive” for creative work, as Patterson had done at Cyrene. Harrison had apparently spent some time apprenticed to a circus before going to South Africa. In her imagination, the art room was like the circus ring—“no matter what personal problems [circus performers] had, emotional or physical, these were forgotten as they entered the brightly lit circle.” Both the circus ring and the art room were spaces within and yet apart from the rest of the world; drawing on the Bauhaus instructor Itten, she sought to create an atmosphere of “dynamic-relaxation” in her classroom—a mellow, friendly mood conducive to creating and sharply contrasted to the strict discipline that marked the rest of the mission.12 Only within such a relaxed atmosphere, she contended, would students be confident enough to create and to experiment.13 Her diary reveals that Harrison was also a wide-eyed observer of African life. Notwithstanding the fact that her students were school graduates, which put them in the upper echelon of African academic attainment (since this was before the National Party government made its attenuated education system more widespread), she devoted many pages of her diary to playing ethnographer and speculating about her students’ marriage rites

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and haunting tokoloshes and other spirits. But she also observed extant decorative traditions and attempted to bend her Bauhaus-inspired syllabus in that direction. She studied the use of color in beadwork and principles of design in weaving and attempted to distill what she learned into her lessons. Harrison mentioned very few students by name in her diary, and none of her students reappear in the Ndaleni art school archive. Yet we can still find evidence of her time there. In 1949, for example, Grossert announced a contest to design covers for forthcoming issues of the Native Teachers’ Journal, which would both showcase the artistic achievements of the journal’s readers and present an opportunity to demonstrate how to analyze and critique creative work. Harrison won the first cover with an abstract array of strong, vertical, “tribal” patterns, executed in red ink. Grossert’s discussion of the losing designs is altogether more interesting. First, he noted the runner-up, which was a drawing by the other specialist art teacher in the province, A. P. Ewan at Mapumulo Training College. Harrison’s cover was entirely abstract; Ewan’s was a well-executed drawing of a man and child, with the man gesturing toward an open door flooded with, one presumes, the light of education. Grossert then proceeded to consider the losing submissions, all of which had come from African student teachers. He found them lacking in both design and originality. Whether from Vryheid or Edendale, these submissions looked more or less the same—they were pictorial and stereotypical, prominently featuring fairly crudely drawn figures and buildings, shields and assegais juxtaposed with books and blackboards. Yet the submissions that came from Indaleni looked subtly different. Although they, too, trafficked in recognizably Zulu insignia, they revealed familiarity with the principles of design that Harrison had incorporated into her course. One cover, by Kenneth Masuku, was divided into three panels; the central, largest section showed a shield crossed by a book and spear—but the side panels were given to a repeated abstract design of flowing vertical lines, crosshatched and dotted with subjective stylistic elements. The second Indaleni cover, by Simon Gama, repeated the shield-and-spear motif favored by the rest, but it did so differently by turning the motif into a design element, abstracted from context, with twenty shields and spears marching at 45-degree angles from left to right across the page. My archive reveals nothing about Masuku and Gama other than that they were training as teachers at Indaleni Training College and had Ann Harrison for art. But their cover submissions speak indirectly about the origins of the Ndaleni school.14

Figure 4.5 Sample covers by Alois Mokoena (left) and E. E. E. Mkize (right), Native Teachers’

Journal 29, no. 2 (January 1950): 40–45

Figure 4.6 Sample covers by Kenneth Masuku (left) and Simon Gama (right), Native Teachers’

Journal 29, no. 2 (January 1950): 40–45

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As previously discussed, on the way back from Cyrene in 1949 Grossert offered Harrison a job teaching the specialist art teachers’ training course that he proposed to start at Indaleni. She began to develop the syllabus, and Grossert placed advertisements calling for applicants to begin studies in 1950. The course was immediately postponed, however, due to a lack of applicants. The postponement was fortuitous, if only for Harrison. Her diary reveals that she was uneasy about taking on the proposed course; per her suggestions, the provincial authorities had approved a three-year course, like the Vorkurs, but she worried that she was ill equipped for the job: “How little I know about creativity,” let alone “how to teach it,” she fretted. Thankfully, while she was preparing the course, a former suitor wrote and invited her to explore the postwar Mediterranean with him. He gave her an out, and she took it, decamping from the Indaleni Mission midterm in 1950.15 Grossert brought the cover contest’s second-place finisher, Alfred Ewan, from Mapumulo to take over Harrison’s classes. Like Harrison, Ewan was British, with a fine arts degree from Dundee. He served as the Indaleni Training College’s art teacher through the end of 1951, after which, for the first time ever, specialist teachers journeyed to Indaleni to take a course dedicated solely to art.16 Under Ewan, the course’s animating tension was whether it was supposed to train teachers or artists. When it began in 1952, there were only two institutions that trained African visual artists: the recently organized night classes at Polly Street in Johannesburg and the even more informal classes offered by the Bantu Indian Coloured Artists (BICA) collective in Durban. Both appealed primarily to professional Africans who sought something constructive to do with their leisure time. Although this situation changed somewhat—especially in the case of Polly Street—the art historian Elizabeth Rankin was certainly correct in her contention that “in the context of the 1950s [Ndaleni] offered probably the most programmed art training available to black students.”17 Even as Grossert and others repeatedly insisted that the school’s primary purpose was to train art teachers, the reality was that it also attracted, in Grossert’s words, “those with special talents” who wanted to “develop their talents and earn their living by practicing their art.”18 Advertisements posted in late 1951 announced that Indaleni was going to begin two-year courses in the next year, focusing on teacher training but also on “design, pictorial composition, still life drawing, modeling and sculpture . . . etc.” Two years at Indaleni thus offered artistically inclined Africans the rare opportunity to explore media and train under

the exclusive tutelage of an established artist (rare indeed, given the era’s concerns about tipping the scales of African art with too much training, as we have seen). Moreover, the training afforded by weekly sessions at the practicing school held out the possibility of employment as a specialist art teacher in government schools at a time when it was likely that not a single African in South Africa was making a living by art alone. Interested applicants were instructed to send Grossert a testimonial of good character and three drawings: “an Original Drawing in colour of any scene from everyday life, in which human figures are prominent; an Original Design in colour for a square scarf; [and] an Original Drawing in pencil of any piece of household furniture.” People, clothing, and furniture—this was to be an art program of which Harrison and the Bauhaus would have approved.19 The specialist teachers’ course was supposed to service two main constituencies: student teachers at training colleges such as Indaleni itself and already employed teachers who wanted to focus on a particular area of instruction. The latter had to sacrifice to attend Ewan’s course—the small print revealed that it cost £20 per year, which was not an insignificant sum—and beyond that, teachers would not be paid for its duration. Schools were still relatively few and far between in the early 1950s; “teacher” was a position of great authority and prominence in African communities. It is impossible to know how many teachers chose not to apply rather than risk losing their hard-won positions. Still, twelve students began the course (and six finished it two years later), each of whom had passed “an ability test having submitted specimens of original work.” Ewan was a landscape painter, and for him, there was no question that the specialist art teachers’ training course was really an art school. Yes, he conceded, the school’s “first intention” was to produce “competent art and crafts teachers,” but he was especially gratified that “artists are produced in the process. . . . There is a great deal of latent talent in Africans which only requires the opportunity to develop and mature.” Indaleni provided that opportunity. In Ewan’s opinion, the school’s African artists almost immediately began to produce work “which stands on an equal footing with that done in European art schools by students at the same stage.” Note the slippage here—art schools, not comparable teacher-training institutions. As the initial class completed its first year in October 1952, Ewan called for a new round of applicants to submit drawings of a pair of shoes, a design for a tablecloth, and illustrations from the story of Noah and the Ark.20

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Ewan was an enthusiastic teacher, but neither he nor his next two successors were particularly good record keepers. Lorna Peirson remembered that upon assuming the post of instructor in 1963, she found the Ndaleni archive consisted of little more than a truncated list of addresses and one syllabus, all of two pages long. The lack of information about the art school’s early years has bedeviled art historians as well; the 1999 Tatham Gallery catalog lists only twelve students who attended during the school’s first decade—far fewer than a 1962 estimate indicating seventy specialist teachers had finished the program since its inception and fewer than the fifty-two graduates who were sent the first issue of the art school newsletter in 1961.21 And even though many 1950s alumni appear frequently in the more complete archive that began to come together after Peirson’s arrival, there is little information about the journeys that early students took to Indaleni Mission. There is only one extant application from the 1950s, for example—that of Emmanuel Ngcobo, who enclosed landscape drawings in colored pencils along with his character reference.22 We know that Ewan taught someone named Khuluse, whose carved teak head was featured in an issue of Native Teachers’ Journal. Khuluse was in the first class at the art school; we know a bit more about two of his classmates, the aforementioned Selbourne “Selby” Mvusi and Eric Ngcobo.23 Mvusi was a very accomplished man. He had actually been born in Richmond and reared partly at the Indaleni Mission, where his Methodist minister father had been posted. He was educated at Adams College and returned to Indaleni from Fort Hare, which he had attended during the tumultuous turn of the 1950s.24 Ngcobo—who decades later would precipitate Grossert’s crisis of faith—came from a more humble background. His father was a carpenter and his mother a domestic worker who sewed and embroidered. They cared about education more than anything else; Ngcobo started school at age five, and he had been in school for sixteen years, without interruption, when he arrived at Indaleni in 1952. He was a matriculant and a trained teacher, and he was at the mission to pursue his interest in the “painting and drawing that I did during my normal high school education, despite the fact that art was not offered as a subject in the curriculum.”25 Mvusi and Ngcobo made up only a fraction of the art school’s first class, yet we can draw certain conclusions from their examples. In its earliest iteration, the art school appealed especially to high-achieving

academics. Mvusi, for instance, had graduated from two of South Africa’s elite academic institutions for Africans, and his personal life reflected his comfort among the leading intellectuals of black South African society. For him, Indaleni was a postgraduate course of sorts, the opportunity to train what was subsequently revealed to be his enormous talent in painting, drawing, and sculpture. His skill was almost immediately apparent. Recall his submission for a Native Teachers’ Journal cover that I considered in the last chapter. It depicted a schoolboy working a lathe, watched approvingly by the disembodied heads of his Zulu ancestors. Mvusi was an obviously talented artist, especially when one compares his work to the other student submissions published in the journal. His figures are proportional, focused, and confident. His study of design principles and color is evident in the background, where the ancestors are carried on a sunbeam, shining a light that casts into relief a repeated circular motif that manages to convey both a sense of the sky and a cross section of a downed log. We have no similar evidence of Ngcobo’s early artistic inclinations, but we do have his recollection that he became interested in the arts during high school. He did not attend university. For him, the art school functioned as a degree-granting institution to cap his education after passing through primary school and high school. Thus, for both Mvusi and Ngcobo, the available evidence suggests that the specialist teachers’ training course was as much of a fine arts program as it was preparation for a career teaching the arts and crafts components of the syllabus. This accords with former Ndaleni teacher Peter Bell’s account of the art school under both Ewan and his successor, Peter Atkins. Bell was a South African–born graduate of Rhodes University and University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art; he replaced Ewan as the art teacher at Indaleni Training College after the former took charge of the art school. Bell was thus in a unique position to observe the school’s early years. The Ewan era was short lived. Ewan taught the specialist teachers in 1952, at the onset of the Defiance Campaign; Bell remembered that Ewan was “devoted to the ‘cause’ [of] the socio-political aspirations of the disenfranchised black majority in South Africa.”26 At least one of his students—Mvusi—had been a Youth League member, and Ewans’s politics most likely earned his students’ loyalty. Those politics did not, however, earn him the government’s affection: Bell reported that political pressure forced Ewan to resign from the art school toward the end of his first year

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teaching the specialist course. Again, Grossert scrambled to find a replacement, only now more urgently, given that the course was already under way. Fortunately, a number of talented artists and potential teachers were floating around Natal, and he was able to bring Peter Atkins to campus to begin the 1953 course.27 Like Ann Harrison, Atkins had studied at the Slade School of Art in London. A trained sculptor, after leaving school he had assisted the celebrated British modernist Henry Moore at his Hertfordshire studio before going to South Africa with his wife, a painter and fellow Slade student named Georgina Hunt.28 They lived at Indaleni Mission for the next seven years. “Our lecturer [Atkins] was happy and hardworking,” a mid-1950s student recalled, “he worked on wood and steel sculpture, while his wife worked on oil painting and mixed media techniques.”29 Whereas Ewan had encouraged students to draw and paint, Atkins focused especially on sculpture. Like many other European teachers, he apparently believed that Africans had a natural aptitude for carving, notwithstanding the fact that Natal lacked such a tradition. Gradually, the art school began to earn a reputation for sculptures influenced by Atkins’s training in “expressionististic modernism.”30 Students continued to arrive. Some came from artistic families, like the two older brothers of the Natal sculptor Michael Zondi.31 Most were trained teachers, yet in Grossert’s opinion, they would have wanted “to make sculpture or painting their career if commissions were forthcoming.”32 Many were graduates of teacher-training colleges who saw specializing in arts and crafts as the surest route to an artistic career. Solomon Sedibane arrived on campus in 1956, along with three classmates from the Lemana Training College, near Louis Trichardt in the northern Transvaal. Sedibane’s crew called themselves Die Boksombende, “the hit him gang,” after what was then a popular Afrikaans radio serial. The hit him gang made up a majority of the seven male students who began the course that year; they joined four male second-year students in the Allison Block, a simple brick structure named for the mission’s founder. At that point, the art school consisted of one small building, just behind the Allison Block. It was divided into two sections—one devoted to painting, the other to sculpture. Materials were scarce: cartridge paper, powder colors, and scattered pieces of mthombothi wood. Sedibane’s class built the art school’s first kiln, in which they fired modeled animals and pottery “tackled . . . without a wheel.” Despite the pronounced lack of

Figure 4.7 Teaching staff at Indaleni Mission, late 1950s, photographer unknown. Peter Atkins (top row, second from left) and Peter Bell (top row, second from right), late 1950s, with the permission of the Richmond Museum

resources, the art students slowly began to exert their influence over the campus. They painted the inside and outside walls of the studio in bright, rhythmic patterns, which Sedibane claimed were influenced by his Northern Sotho decorative principles.33 When suitable wood was available, they carved monumental pieces, decidedly modernist in orientation, that observers compared to the work of Pablo Picasso, Edvard Munch, and the Futurists. “To meet a life-sized ‘Henry Moore’ sculpture framed against the scenery of the Natal Midlands was in itself a surprise,” wrote a visitor to campus during Atkins’s last year, 1960. “But to go on to a school of art in this rural setting, where the work of Bantu student teachers shows more vitality than may be encountered in the well-endowed academic centres was a revelation.”34 This visitor suggested a name for one of Atkins’s own sculptures, which he had executed while teaching at the mission: “The Spirit of Free Enquiry.” It would have been appropriate. Atkins took a very hands-off approach to art education. It was his two-page 1958 syllabus that Peirson found upon arriving on campus a few years later. He was a devotee of Herbert Read and Viktor Lowenfeld; although he apparently did little in the

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area of preparing his students to teach, he applied cutting-edge art education theories to their art education. Bell recalled that Atkins used Lowenfeld’s ideas to encourage students to cultivate self-expression in their work.35 Atkins’s years on campus were vital because they provided continuity and thus the start of a critical mass of teachers trained at Ndaleni (as the art school became known over time) who began both to work and to publicize the school and its ideals. O’Brien Nkasha studied under Atkins in 1957 and 1958. A few years later, he reflected on the lessons he had learned there. “Art is the objective expression of human experiences,” he explained. “It has its origin when a person arranges any sensuous material in such a manner as to satisfy an inward surging feeling for balance and order.” By the time he published this article, Nkasha was teaching in a school run by the Bantu Education Department and Loram’s Native Teachers’ Journal had morphed into the national Bantu Education Journal. Yet the interwar origins of both the journal and the aesthetic theories of Dewey and others still resonated. Art was how people, especially children, reordered the world toward balance and harmony, Nkasha wrote: “The child’s mind is always disturbed by feelings and experiences. He is like a pot of water and God is the fire, heating the pot to keep the child’s feelings and experiences boiling.” Art was how children might “direct these vivid feelings, emotions and personal experiences,” each in their own way, since “subjects must fully and freely flow from the child’s experiences [and] stereotyped work must be discouraged.”36 Elsewhere, Nkasha referred to such ideas as the “Art Gospel”; by the turn of the 1960s, he and other disciples engaged more and more potential converts with the good news that there was an art school near Richmond. Another example comes from the pages of the Bantu Education Journal. Hamlet Hobe was a student in 1960. Two years later, his reflections on his Ndaleni education led him on a journey from blackboard teaching to the mysteries of the universe. He referenced a recent article on the role of the visual in education that had been published in ARTTRA, the Ndaleni newsletter begun by Atkins’s successor, Peter Bell. Art was everywhere and essential to normal life, Hobe reflected. “Can we not use art as a means of showing how true happiness lies in finding the joys of life that are close at hand—the joy of the beauty that all can possess for the effort to find and see it? And will not this love of the little joys of daily life lead to that higher mental state of contemplation which can give peace and true progress?”

From his own experiences at Ndaleni, he had learned how to contest discord through creating; art was about how “the individual [comes] to understand the transitory nature of this life, and [develops] an understanding of nature, not by dissection, but by contemplation.”37 Hobe had only just begun his teaching career; he was reflecting more on his own experiences as a student at Ndaleni than on his practical experience in the government’s schools. In the latter context, he was part of a dramatic demographic shift. As Bantu Education took hold, the government embarked on an ambitious school-building agenda, and more and more educated Africans were steered into teacher-training colleges. Many took art as a course there, and those who had talent were pointed toward Ndaleni. Abednego Dlamini was an accomplished Mapumulo Training College student in the late 1950s, at a time when the art school began to be promoted through an annual art competition among the various training colleges and other educational centers. He submitted a piece in 1959 and won the second prize; enthused, he drew his three pictures in coloured pencils and applied, like Hamlet Hobe, for 1960.38 A few months later, he was in Richmond. A contemporary image shows him at work on a nearly life-sized sculpture of a kneeling man, in front of the patterned walls of the studio.39 Dlamini studied first with Atkins and then with his successor, Peter Bell. Bell was promoted from his position teaching art at the Indaleni Training College after Atkins abruptly departed during the 1960 academic year. Like Ewan before him, Atkins was a foreign national who was frequently critical of the apartheid regime. His was a precarious position, given that the Department of Bantu Education had taken control of the mission and its art school away from the provincial government during his tenure. Bell reported that Atkins “vanished” midway through the 1960 academic year, perhaps prompted by the Sharpeville massacre and violence that followed. Fortunately, Bell was well positioned to take over. He criticized his predecessors for their allegiance to their preferred media—painting for Ewan, sculpture for Atkins. This unfairly “imprinted [their] own artistic values” on the students, he remarked. For his part, Bell said,“I discovered how dangerous it is to offer guides. The student interprets them as rules and soon each student’s work is identical to another’s.” Instead, he followed Lowenfeld: “I got my students to scribble. Just literally scribble.” This “took some time to catch on, but when [it] did, I demonstrated to them how

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Figure 4.8 Abednego Dlamini (left) and fellow student at Ndaleni, 1960, Ndaleni

Scrapbook 1, with the permission of the CC

each student’s scribble was unique to him.” Gradually, as he saw it, student work improved enough to become “authentic mirrors into their individual minds.” Such critiques aside, Bell followed many of Ewan’s and Atkins’s habits: he, too, did not work from a syllabus and instead granted his students tremendous latitude to experiment. Art school, for him, was about responding to the “creative urgency in the individual.”40 Like Atkins, he encouraged students to contribute to the artistic life of the campus, and over his short tenure, murals, mosaics, and large concrete and wire statues rose to interact with the painted walls and smaller, baked-clay figures done by previous classes.41

Bell modified the school’s admission policy as well. Whereas both Ewan and especially Atkins had weighed the quality of the works students submitted along with their character references and other materials, Bell began to think in terms of the school’s impact on the country. For him, talent and personality were secondary to geography and gender: “I selected the students on the basis of an equal number of boys and girls . . . and as wide a geographical distribution as possible.” He started the aforementioned ARTTRA, a periodic newsletter, in order to connect former students to each other and to their alma mater; this became increasingly important after 1960 when financial considerations reduced the course to one year, making it difficult for newly arrived students to learn from those already familiar with the program. (The newsletter’s title was derived “from the word ‘art’ against its mirror image— implying a self-examination, self-criticism.”)42 Bell shared his students’ work with his own instructors, such as the sculptor Ivan Mitford-Barbeton at Michaelis, yet he was quick to push back against tired notions of what African work ought to be. “I would personally prefer to [have them] work in the traditional style,” he responded to Mitford-Barbeton’s suggestion that Bell have the students make masks, “but . . . the fact that they don’t would suggest that they are not intended to do so. It would be phony if they did.”43 Like Nkasha and Hobe, Bell believed that authentic, self-expressive art had a vital part to play in the future of South African society. “The future of this country, its economic, social and cultural stability—your security, in fact—depends on the maturity, sympathy and wisdom of those to whom it falls to foster it,” he wrote in a fund-raising appeal to sympathetic white South Africans. “At Ndaleni we try to cultivate in the middle class African not only an appreciation of, but also a need for Western culture, and respect for its ideals. Besides being of great benefit to the African himself—we’d be wasting our time if it wasn’t—it gives the best promise of health and prosperity for our country.”44 Bell was no cultural nationalist; by “Western culture,” he meant those progressive philosophies manifest in the dictates of aesthetic education. At the art school, talented, accomplished Africans were “encouraged to examine all aspects of present day life in a critical and constructive manner. Through this process they develop [the] responsibility that follows upon self-examination. It is such people who will play a big part in . . . South African life.”45 Bell was a Bantu Education employee whose thinking transcended his employer, to reach toward a future when the work of art would be manifest in South Africa. He refused to conform his

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Figure 4.9 Peter Bell with students outside the painting room, early 1960s,

Ndaleni Scrapbook 1, with the permission of the CC

ideals to the realities of 1960s South Africa. This was apparent in his politics—his correspondence reveals that he was involved in efforts to protest National Party ministers’ visits to the Midlands, among other activities— and in his teaching.46 As we shall see, many Ndaleni graduates were unable to find teaching positions upon completing the course, and those fortunate few who did struggled to find time to continue to work on their own art. Yet in ARTTRA and elsewhere, Bell was never anything other than the rigorous art teacher that he knew himself to be. He chastised his former students for allowing their own students to use rulers when drafting, claiming that this inhibited creativity. He urged teachers to visit galleries and museums across the country, notwithstanding the limitations apartheid placed on African travel. He wrote long and lovingly about oil paints as the one medium in which the artist is truly “free to evolve his own method, entirely original and personal to himself,” even though oils were prohibitively expensive and beyond the reach of most African teachers.47 Bell knew this well—during his era, Ndaleni itself typically lacked paint other than egg tempura (although there were occasionally oils); the underfunded school had only wood and clay in

abundance. But Bell refused to compromise. He was an art teacher, Ndaleni was an art school, full stop. In this, he was more than a bit naive. One of Bell’s first students was Dan Rakgoathe, a graduate of the Botshabelo Training College in the Transvaal and a talented muralist, painter, and carver. Rakgoathe’s writing revealed a deep affection for a teacher, who had “dedicated his life towards the betterment of needy and frustrated people.”48 Lorna Peirson, Bell’s successor, described Bell’s emotional hold over his students. He excelled at “inspiration,” she remembered, even if his methods were a bit impractical.49 “Sometimes . . . he would utter such lofty ideas and those listening would remain with less understanding and wide mouths wondering how that little head could carry so much,” Rakgoathe recalled. The early 1960s were not the early 1950s. By the time Bell became the head teacher, the profile of the Ndaleni student had changed; no longer attracting generally accomplished talents such as Mvusi and Ngcobo, Ndaleni had morphed to attract primarily training college students such as Dlamini and Rakgoathe and especially those who had demonstrated a unique aptitude or affinity for art. That they were training to be teachers did not mean that they saw themselves as teachers, however. Many were frustrated, as Rakgoathe wrote, and on campus, they found a respite in self-expression. But then the year ended, and they were forced to find employment in the world beyond the campus, which was less forgiving. Bell, a student suggested, would too easily “forget what his students really were.”50 And soon, he, too, was gone. Bell had been tremendously frustrated by South Africa, even as he continued to imagine beyond apartheid. “I find myself ashamed to call myself a South African,” he confided on the first anniversary of Sharpeville.51 Dismayed at a National Party victory in a local by-election two years later, Bell allegedly placed an advertisement in the local newspaper indicating the farm of a prominent party supporter was for sale.52 An investigation ensued, and Bell began to look for a way out. In mid-1963, he received an offer from the Department of Extension of Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada, to organize art education classes for working adults. “I am very sad to leave,” he admitted, “but if only for [my] children’s sake, I feel like I cannot spurn this offer.”53 In September, Bell left campus, Richmond, and eventually South Africa. He settled in Newfoundland, where, over the next decades, he continued to work in art education. He eventually became a well-known painter, curator, and critic in maritime Canada.54

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Again, Grossert cast around for a replacement. Lorna Peirson had been involved in African art education since the days of Harrison. She had replaced Ewan at Mapumulo but had grown disillusioned after the department transferred the training college from the coastal highlands to the less salubrious confines of Vryheid. Offered the Indaleni position, she eagerly accepted. Upon arrival in Richmond she found a functioning art school that had successfully trained dozens of teachers, many of whom were now teaching, some of whom were teaching art, and a much smaller number of whom were successful artists in their own right. She found a vibrant campus that was festooned with color, design, and form. Peirson built on the legacies of her predecessors; she also sought to improve on them by keeping better records and developing a more thorough syllabus. In all things, she worked to modernize the Ndaleni art school in light of the realities of 1960s South Africa and the professional demands of Bantu Education. With her arrival, the first, somewhat elusive phase of the school’s history ended and the next phase began, about which we know much more. Yet certain rhythms persisted. The students were still on campus, talking, laughing, and creating. Graduates were in the schools, relating their experiences at Ndaleni and guiding their own students in the direction of Richmond. And as soon as Peirson arrived, so, too, did the applications, begging for entry in 1964. Travels, 1960 s–70 s

More than anyone else, Lorna Peirson determined what is knowable about Ndaleni. She was its head instructor, its publicist, and its institutional memory for the eighteen years that she commuted from her little cottage in Richmond across the valley and up to the mission. She was also its archivist. It is thanks to her instinct to collect, order, and file that we know much more about the lives of her students than about those who were taught by Ewan, Atkins, and Bell. Her archive contains recommendation letters, references, samples of work, applications for admission and for bursaries, correspondence with students’ families, South African Railways freight receipts, and telegrams from stations connecting Richmond to the rest of the country. The archive also contains clippings, drawings, bushels of correspondence, hand-written autobiographies, wedding invitations, birth announcements, and notices of deaths and burials.

Figure 4.10 Lorna Peirson (left) and Enid Motjale (right), 1967, photographer unknown, Ndaleni Scrapbook 3, with the permission of the CC

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Thus far, this chapter has been about the origins of the school. Now, we can turn to consider the origins of its students. It took many steps for a student to arrive at Ndaleni. Each student first needed to know that the school existed and then make the individual, familial, or community decision to apply. They needed to be accepted; to secure funds to pay for transport and tuition; and finally, to travel physically to a place far beyond the boundaries of what for many constituted the known world. “I’m utterly lost,” Amelia Shishuba telegraphed frantically from the Cape Town station in 1970. She held a train ticket but realized “there is no Richmond on this slip of paper.” She had no idea where she was going.55 Geographically and intellectually, the first steps toward art school were, for most students, steps into the unknown. Former Ndaleni students who already knew the way facilitated many journeys. Peirson recounted that when she arrived on campus, she discovered some issues of Bell’s ARTTRA lying around. She quickly improved on the newsletter by making it longer and including more student correspondence. She also used it as a forum to request material donations to the art school—especially wood and ilala, the palm frond that was well suited to weaving but not abundant around campus. Students who had been on campus before her time became critical conduits for both new students and materials. Joseph Mzileni, for example, had been one of the first students at Ndaleni, and he now taught in the ilala-rich area around Ubombo, in northern Zululand. Year after year, he dispatched trunks of palm via train to Richmond. Other former students scattered around the country provided an even more valuable resource—already vetted applicants. “I think I made a discovery this year at our school,” former Boksombende member Solomon Sedibane wrote from the Transvaal in 1965. “I discovered a group of girls who are talent[ed] in Art and like it better than anything else . . . they aim at going to Ndaleni Art School.” Sedibane was an inspiring teacher and Ndaleni an alluring prospect: “My problem is that I have too many students this year who would like to go to Ndaleni next year. There are nine in all (five girls and four boys) . . . we will be forced to use the sieve.”56 Sedibane’s position was a common one. From the outset, Ndaleni graduates used their positions as teachers to recommend talented others to their alma mater. After leaving campus in 1954, Selby Mvusi taught art at Loram High School, Durban’s preeminent African educational institution.

Figure 4.11 Leave Taking, by unknown Ndaleni student, 1950s(?), KCAV 2170, with the permission

of the CC

There he taught courses in art appreciation, painting, and sculpture and also extolled the virtues of his own training. Gabriel Kuboni was a student of Mvusi’s during the mid-1950s; Kuboni also studied with Eric Ngcobo, who took over for Mvusi in 1957. Given this lineage, it made sense that the artistically inclined Kuboni would arrive on campus in 1959, hoping to pursue his interest in watercolors.57 Patrick Nondikane was a student at Blythswood in the Eastern Cape, where his art teacher was an Ndaleni alumna named Muriel Jam Jam. “[She] was always telling us about it,” he remembered, “she was planting in our minds the wish to attend there.”58 Philemon Moerane grew up in an entirely different part of the country—in Lady Selbourne, near Pretoria in the Transvaal. There, his art teacher was Mabel Ledwaba, a Ndaleni graduate who had once studied with Solomon Sedibane. Like Nondikane, Moerane heard stories about the school from his art teacher and was determined to attend. Moerane’s is a revealing case. By the mid-1960s, Ndaleni had graduated enough students to staff the increasing number of regional teachertraining colleges that the government was developing to keep pace with its school-building program. All students in these colleges took art as a minor subject during their first year, and some chose to specialize in art during their second year. Only a fraction of these students decided to apply to

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Ndaleni for further training, however, regardless of how glowingly their teachers talked about the school. Moerane was not a natural student; he was often sick as a child and was forever failing and repeating his primary school standards. When he eventually made it to secondary school, he aspired to pass his matriculation in order to qualify for university or a better-paying profession, but he failed and drifted into teacher training instead. It was in teacher-training college that he met Ledwaba—and something clicked.59 Such a “click” can be hard to discern. For the masses of students, it never took place, but for others, the coincidence of a person’s interest in arts and crafts and the Ndaleni network was a life-altering event. Sophie Nsuza was a Bell student at the turn of the 1960s. She was from a poor family near Mahlabatini, deep in Zululand. Her parents were amateur artisans; her father made a living doing leatherwork for the local community, and her mother was an accomplished basket weaver. From a young age, Nsuza knew that “every day . . . I must touch something,” although her familial and school obligations granted her few opportunities do so. “Since my teenage [years,] my aim was to study ART but my parents passed away while I was young and I struggled to proceed with education facilities,” she related. In the mid-1950s, she displayed a few objects at a regional craft show while doing a teacher’s training course. Grossert happened to see the show, and he recognized her talent and encouraged her to apply to Ndaleni.60 Bongani Mtshali was also from Mahlabatini, but his trajectory was somewhat different than Nsuza’s. His family was better off and supportive—perhaps because his grandmothers were well known for their baskets, sleeping mats, and pots—and he found more time to experiment in “modeling clay, designing by engraving,” and so on. In 1961, he was in higher primary school when his work in wood, horn, and ilala won the first prize in a regional craft show. He was inspired by this and continued to seek out opportunities to do art in school. Eventually, he landed in a class taught by Caleb Ndaba, an Atkins student from the late 1950s, who turned him in the direction of Ndaleni. Mtshali made the journey to the Midlands in late January 1971.61 As a national school, Ndaleni drew on networks such as Mahlabatini’s— regional, rural, and occasionally based in local craft traditions—as well as on urban and more professional connections. Mbele Mavuso, from Johannesburg, was an example of the latter. He went to Ndaleni in 1976 with the support and encouragement of his parents, at least in part because a cousin,

Figure 4.12 Detail of a mural by Sophie Nsuza, 1963, photograph by the author

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David Mbele, was “a recognized black artist [who was] close to my family.” The artist Mbele was a Polly Street–trained painter, of the prominent “township art” school. Mavuso’s family was hopeful that Ndaleni would provide their evidently talented son with similar opportunities. By the time Peirson took over at Ndaleni, there were enough professional black artists around to make art a plausible career, especially in the cities. Patrick Mlambo grew up in Kwa-Thema on the East Rand. Like Moerane, he had been a sickly child and spent much of his free time indoors, experimenting with clay that a friend brought home “from his bird-hunting” excursions. When Mlambo was well enough to attend school, he was fortunate to have Lucas Sithole, “then an artist beginner,” as a teacher. This was during the late 1950s, when Sithole was teaching to supplement the income generated by the sculpting he had learned under Cecil Skotnes and Sydney Khumalo at Polly Street. Sithole sparked Mlambo’s interest in art: though he went to work in a stove factory after leaving secondary school, Mlambo also visited galleries “and read a lot about celebrated artists, local and abroad.”62 Eventually, he decided to go back to school and found his way to Ndaleni. So, too, did Mbekwa Tshabalala, who grew up in Soweto, where he “was influenced by an individual artist living in Soweto cleaning his studio daily after school hours.”63 White artists feature in students’ narratives of their trajectories toward Ndaleni as well. John Ndlovu, for instance, grew up near the coast in Port Shepstone, Natal, where an unnamed white painter on vacation from the Transvaal noted his interest in painting and helped him to procure supplies.64 Ndlovu’s family supported his interest, just as Mbele’s had done. This family support was critical, especially in areas without a preexisting population of artists to help make art school thinkable. Thatoeng Mompati was from Thaba Nchu, in the Free State. She loved making jewelry, especially rings, which she sold in the township for 20 cents each. “People in our location were crazy about rings and I gained a lot of money from them,” she explained. Like so many others, Mompati went on to become a primary school teacher, while continuing to do “necklaces and handbelts [bracelets?] as well as ear-rings with beads. Day after day I was creating my own patterns without being assisted by anybody.” Her mother sought out opportunities for Mompati to make art her career. “Then my Mother . . . read in the Bantu Education Journal that there is a school in Natal for Art. She immediately came with the Journal and showed it to me.” Mompati applied

once, did not get in, taught for two more years, and then applied again and was accepted.65 She was lucky that her mother approved. For many others, family disapproval complicated things. Paul Sibisi was a talented draftsman, popular with his peers first in Cato Manor and then in Umlazi for his caricatures of classmates and teachers. Like so many others, he had an Ndaleni graduate for his art teacher, who encouraged Sibisi to apply to the school. His parents were less sanguine. The only “artists” in their vicinity were sign writers and others employed to decorate the local shops; the best one of these individuals claimed to be “an artist” and apparently suffered a mental collapse. “He went lunatic,” Sibisi remembered, and the prospect of her eldest son doing the same was enough to turn Sibisi’s mother against the idea of art school. His father overruled her, though, and Sibisi made his way to Ndaleni in 1968. Still, his mother’s words rang in his ears: “Myself, I wouldn’t have allowed you to go do that course . . . I will point out to Mr. Sibisi whenever you get mad, I will say to him, ‘Yes! This is what I told you! That this young man was going to run mad in the end!”’66 As we have seen, Sibisi’s mother was not far off when she connected madness and creativity. As Dewey and others argued, successful artists are often comfortable on the edges of normal human behavior—they seek out tension and struggle for harmony. For his part, Mbekwa Tshabalala was fortunate that he met the unnamed artist who provoked his own interest in art school; through creating, he was better able “to maintain peace in my mind [and] to avoid losing temper.”67 In some circumstances, family support or a lack thereof was secondary to a person’s unique, personal drive. Across South Africa, there were people like Sophie Nsuza who felt an urge to “touch something.” Esther Ratlou came from a very poor family in the Northern Transvaal. She was shy and did not have many friends; she would spend hours by herself scratching designs and images in the wet dirt around her home after it rained. Ndaleni provided her a means to “express my art feeling,” and she was grateful.68 Others had similar stories—stories of growing up tremendously poor and missing school while peddling vegetables to support their families and, eventually, somehow making it through school and to training college. Having escaped extreme poverty, some found that something was still missing. “Before coming to Ndaleni, [I] lacked something to complete my happiness,” Edwin Nyatlo remembered. He itched to create,

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and in 1972, he went to art school: “The year . . . will remain the greatest throughout my lifetime.”69 Like most of their classmates, Nyatlo and Ratlou were in their twenties when they made their way to Richmond. Some others were significantly older. Wilson Langa was fifty years old when he applied in 1976—and he had already been teaching for nearly thirty years. He evidently still had the itch.70 Colben Mdleleni was a similar case: he was a twenty-year veteran of teaching and had even been a school principal (as well as a car salesman for a time). And yet, he found that “all these years the love of doing something with my hands has been within me,” so he applied to join Wilson Langa as the oldest members of the class of 1977. A year later, when he was back in his school, he described himself as “reborn.”71 Renate Chosane from Middelburg, Transvaal, was forty-one and married, with children, when she applied for the 1968 course. Peirson was concerned that she would not be able to cope with campus life, especially with her youthful classmates and the mission-mandated restrictions on women’s movement (about which more later). Chosane assured Peirson that it was nothing she could not handle, and she arrived on campus with funds enough to pay her own way for the course. She did terribly, finishing near the bottom of the class, but she felt the experience was worth it. She brought home a wall hanging that she had made and hung it in her sitting room. It gave her “great pleasure to look at,” she wrote.72 It is easy to get carried away with tales of midlife students refreshed at the mission by the gospel of art. Far more common were the stories of training college students, many of whom had no particular interest in teaching or any unique background in art until they found out about Ndaleni from their teachers and decided to apply. Solomon Baloyi went to primary school near Pretoria during Bantu Education’s early years; his father was a chef who occasionally carved wooden spoons during his free time. Baloyi himself was not that fond of crafts; like most students, he did little more than endure the handwork classes during primary school. In his school, students were required to produce items on a weekly basis. To get around this onerous prospect, he and his friends used to go to local shops and buy objects to present to their uninformed and uninspired teachers. If they were not bringing their work in from the outside, Baloyi and his classmates were just copying from each other. “And that [was just] demoralizing because if you have thirty-four children in that school, . . . everyone’s

Figure 4.13 Solomon Baloyi, 1976, photographer unknown, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4, with the permission of the CC

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[work was] just similar to the other,” he recollected. Baloyi continued into secondary school, where he did a very little bit of art, and then went on to teacher-training college. He was not enthused about being a teacher, but his mother urged him to get qualified. In his second year at the training college, he met Caxton Chauke, a Ndaleni graduate who “was not [very] . . . talented, but he was a good motivator [and] he supported talent.” Baloyi began to excel in art class, and Chauke told him about Ndaleni. “I never knew one could have a career in art,” Baloyi admitted, “until I went to teacher training, and I learned about Ndaleni. And then I went to Ndaleni. And that was in 1976.” 73 There, he met Christina Jikelo, from King Williams Town in the Eastern Cape, who could have shared a very similar story with him. Jikelo was a more earnest handwork student than Baloyi, but she conceded that most of her primary school teachers and classmates failed to see the point in that exercise. She remembered having to weave mats to show to the regional inspector at term’s end, after which “most of the stuff would stay in the school. I remember in the cupboards we would see old grass hats and mats.” She drew well, and her teachers frequently drafted her to draw teaching aids on the blackboard. Jikelo thought little of her skill, however—she was more interested in continuing her studies, matriculating, and perhaps going on to university. But in apartheid South Africa, the prospects for black university graduates, especially women, were very uncertain. An uncle was a vice principal in Zwelitsha Township, and he advised her parents instead to “give her . . . a bit of career, and then she can then develop herself from that.” Teaching was the default career for those with enough schooling, and Jikelo left home for St. Matthews, a former Anglican mission school turned Bantu Education training college in Keiskammahoek. It was there that she met Silverman Jara, who had been in Peirson’s first class in 1964. Jara took a special interest in her; he gave her supplemental assignments and discussed her work with the other teachers. Finally, toward the end of her second and last year at St. Matthews, she “was called to the staff room . . . [and he said] he would like to recommend that I further my studies in art at Ndaleni. . . . And then he said he is going to get me forms.” It was a whirlwind; her life was upended. She was going to art school.74 Once interested students decided to apply to Ndaleni, they or their teachers wrote to Peirson to request an application form and began trying to secure a bursary. In the 1950s and early 1960s, bursaries were difficult to

come by; a significant portion of Bell’s time was devoted to finding nongovernmental support for his students. By the mid-1960s, however, the Department of Bantu Education had become the sole provider of bursaries at Ndaleni (at least until individual Bantustans achieved nominal independence and were granted their share), and Peirson was able to admit as many students as she had bursaries and/or space for. Only very rarely did students come without government support, in return for which they pledged to teach for at least one year in a Bantu Education school.75 Peirson made the admissions decisions herself from 1963 until 1971, when an assistant teacher came to campus and doubled the size of the admissions committee (and the number of students admitted). Still, Peirson’s vision of a good Ndaleni student typically determined who would be accepted. Hers was not Atkins’s perspective nor Bell’s. These men had been most interested in admitting and training artists. In 1956, Atkins counseled potential applicants that they needed a “sound appreciation of art. . . . The course is open to those who have passed matriculation or school leaving certificates, or [to] holders of recognized teachers’ certificates who have ability in art.”76 Peirson took a different approach. “I selected the successful applicants, basing my judgment on a variety of factors, which included place of origin, general apparent intelligence, past history and ignoring the numerous personal CVs which would open with ‘I am a talented artist’ and whose abilities were not supported with a teacher’s certificate.”77 Ndaleni was not technically an art school, after all—it offered a specialist teacher’s course. “Most important to us is academic ability,” Peirson told an interviewer in the late 1970s. “Someone with regular intelligence who can get on in the theoretical subjects has enough intelligence to cope with the practical. We aren’t training fine artists.” She recalled with particular verve former students “who have done no art . . . before—we’ve had a few—and they catch up.” Some even discovered that “they have a talent about which they are completely unaware.”78 Although Peirson’s policy was apparently counter to Ewan’s, Atkins’s, and Bell’s insistence that they were training artists, her standards captured something familiar from Dewey, Read, and Lismer’s ideas about art. Like them, she believed that anyone was capable of achievement, given time, materials, and inspiration. Jessie Muthige attested to this. He was a school principal in Vendaland, near Sibasa, in the far northern reaches of the country. He applied in 1969. “I [had] never played around with pencil, colour of any nature,

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wood, cloth, wire or clay,” he later remembered. It was only after arriving on campus that he discovered within himself talent like a “dormant seed.” Since it was “not necessary to be a born artist to apply for admission,” he instead claimed to be interested in furthering the Bantu Education art program.79 “I have a special interest in Arts and Crafts for the sake of leading my own Venda nation since there’s at present not a single Venda to revive the art and skill of our forefathers,” Muthige wrote.80 That familiar motivation and his obvious academic acumen were enough for Peirson to pick his file from the pile. Notably, Muthige was not the only Venda to make such a case. Perhaps thinking about that community’s carving traditions, Mishack Raphalalani proposed to take the course “in order to know how to teach Vendas how to make use of their spare time.”81 Together, Muthige and Raphalalani captured two of the government’s main justifications for mandating arts and crafts: cultural preservation and social stability. Other applicants aspired only to teach. John Shimbambu applied from Meadowlands in the early 1970s. “I wish to take this course because I want to learn a better method of Arts and Crafts teaching,” he wrote. Shimbambu’s immediate goal was to teach students in primary or secondary schools, but he also understood that the course might have broader implications. “I want to educate individuals for manhood, work and service,” he explained, “for the way of good health [is] to do things creatively.” It is easy to see why Shimbambu’s application appealed to someone familiar with Jack Grossert’s ideas about art. Peirson approved a similar application from another Meadowlands applicant, who wrote, “It is due to my promising ability and interest in this subject that I intend to follow this course and find it profitable and benefit to me and my fellow men.” This applicant treaded the line between claiming to be an artist and desiring to be a teacher—and despite her subsequent claims that she favored teaching skill over artistic skill, Peirson did admit many students simply because they loved art and aspired to pursue it, as the Ndaleni archive reveals. “I wish to take this course because whenever I am doing any Arts and Craft work I feel happy,” explained one. Another applicant’s teacher recommended her as a “creative student [who] always experimented on her own.” The student herself claimed only “[to] have a natural inclination for creative artistic work. I feel the need to . . . exploit this urge in me to the fullest by undergoing training.” Some students trusted that their persistence would eventually overcome whatever reservations Peirson had about their applications.

I have already noted the Thaba Nchu jewelry maker, Thatoeng Mompati, who applied twice before joining the class of 1975. Boniface Malaza bested her, applying for three years before finally being accepted on his fourth attempt. Perhaps thanks to his parents, Artwell Ngongoma needed no such persistence. His application was one line: “I am interested in teaching art.” He was accepted, and arrived on campus for the academic year that began in January 1973. It is hard to know precisely how many students were admitted and then made their way to the mission hill outside Richmond. We do not have accurate numbers for the first decade, and evidence suggests that the yearly rosters printed in the 1999 art school retrospective catalog are at least somewhat incomplete. Some students were admitted but never made the trip; others came to campus only to leave for disciplinary infractions or because the school just was not for them. But we do know that between 1952 and 1981, first Atkins, then Bell, and finally Peirson invited close to one thousand applicants to come to art school.82 Some of those who made the decision to accept came because they wanted to be artists, others because they wanted to be teachers, others because they wanted or needed the salary supplement a specialist teachers’ certificate was supposed to bring. Some doubtlessly came just because they liked being in school; others because it was an adventure, a chance to do something exceptional. And still more attended because they had an itch to create, and in apartheid South Africa, it was rare indeed to find an opportunity to relieve that itch. They came with the support of their families and with their families’ misgivings; they came from nearby Pietermaritzburg and Durban and from scattered, impoverished rural reserves and far-flung dusty townships. They came from Johannesburg, from the Thornveld, and from within sight of the Limpopo. They came from King Williams Town. Christina Jikelo was twenty-two years old when Silverman Jara, her art teacher at St. Matthews, encouraged her to apply to Ndaleni. St. Matthews was in Keiskammahoek, 44 kilometers from her family’s home in Zwelitsha Township. Those 44 kilometers were the farthest she had ever been from home. Now, from Richmond came instructions for her to buy rail tickets from King Williams Town to Bloemfontein and from Bloemfontein to Pietermaritzburg. This was a journey of over 1,000 kilometers, which still left her 35 kilometers short of Richmond and an unknown distance from the mission station that was to be her home. It was overwhelming for the young woman. Her grandfather

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was absolutely opposed to her making the trip. She remembered that he said, “No, no. Let’s call this thing off. . . . How is she going to cope? It’s too far.” She continued, “And then my father was the type to keep quiet . . . but when it got closer he became more and more concerned.” He proposed to make the trip with her and then to turn around immediately and return to the Eastern Cape. This was hardly a reasonable solution, however, since her bursary could not cover his travel in addition to her own, the ticket was prohibitively expensive and the journey to Richmond was in the wrong direction from her father’s work as a migrant laborer in Cape Town. Finally, someone convinced her parents that she could do it on her own: “No man, she is fine, she will be fine.” So she packed a suitcase and a big trunk, and she left. Telling me about her younger self, Jikelo smiled. “I was just was brave enough and then everything was nice.” She does not remember many details of the trip. She left on a Friday, found a seat near a window, and watched the farms and mountains of the Eastern Cape give way to the open vistas and skies of the Orange Free State. The train resounded with the happy chatter of other students making their way from home to school. She changed trains at some point on Saturday and settled in for the trip down the Drakensberg Escarpment to the midsummer heat of Pietermaritzburg and Natal. On Sunday, two days after she had left home, she was most decidedly on her own: in a strange city, surrounded by people speaking isiZulu, English, and Afrikaans, she was trying to find the railway bus to Richmond and confirming that her trunk would follow via the rail freight service. Two and a half days after leaving her family at the siding in King Williams Town, amid the green of a Midlands summer, she found the girls’ hostel on Indaleni hill with its gate of mosaics out front— depicting a giraffe with its neck arching skyward, a crane, schoolchildren, and a Zulu warrior.83 Asnath Ramere left her native Venda for Ndaleni in late January 1969. “I have never gone as far south as Johannesburg,” she worried. “I do not know how many days this journey has to take me. I shall be leaving Pietersburg on the evening of the 27th. To me it will seem as one traveling to the unknown. I am coming to Ndaleni.”84 She was twenty-eight years old. For her, Natal, with its cane fields and its ocean, was an utterly foreign place, as it was for many other students. Lusani Mudau followed Ramere from Venda to Ndaleni in 1972. The journey itself gave him notoriety:

Figure 4.14 Left to right: Thabo Morathane, Credo Kubywana, and Christina Jikelo prepare for the year-end exhibition, 1976, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4, with the permission of the CC

“Many people are coming to ask me about Ndaleni, they want to come next year. Some don’t believe that I’ve seen the ocean and even had a swim.” For his part, Solomon Baloyi imagined himself a cosmopolitan urbanite, confident in his knowledge of the world. But he was also a twentytwo-year-old who had never traveled far beyond his Pretoria home, when the train carried him south through Johannesburg, the Free State, and the mountains. “I knew about Durban, [but] I never knew where Ndaleni was. I’d never been to the area.” He knew only that it was a Zulu area, and although he did have some isiZulu-speaking neighbors, he did not speak the language himself. For him Richmond was a shock. He changed from train to bus in Pietermaritzburg, which was relatively familiar—a big, bustling city. Richmond was something else. It was a sleepy town, boasting a few dozen houses and shops to service the surrounding farming community. The African population was particularly striking; as already noted, in the 1960s and 1970s Richmond had only a negligible permanent African population. Instead, Baloyi found rural Zulus conducting their business in town. To him, “It looked like they literally carried spears.” Wide-eyed and slightly alarmed, he located a taxi to take him and his trunk to the

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Figure 4.15 Monster, by Silverman Jara, and practicing school students, late 1960s, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4, with the permission of the CC

mission. “It was a quiet place,” he recalled, and he very quickly settled in and began to work.85 Ndaleni was a national school, but many students did come from elsewhere in Natal and Zululand. A significant number spoke isiZulu and were familiar with the sort of landscape in which the mission sat. Yet none came from a place quite like this campus, which by the early 1960s boasted dozens of monumental statues, decorative arches, buildings belted by stucco friezes on the outside and walls painted in ebullient colors on the inside. The breezeways of the training college told the story of the art school and its past students in paint. The dining rooms had murals; the kitchens had mosaics; and the practicing school’s swing was supported by giants: an elephant, a lion, a rhinoceros, and a ram. The taxi that took Jikelo from Richmond to the mission let her off at the bottom of the hill, where a metal cattle grate kept local animals from entering the campus. She shouldered her suitcase and walked uphill, passing a huge concrete monster on her left, its mouth agape. Children clambered on its arched back and hung from its neck, shrieking in delight. She introduced herself to Lorna Peirson and mentioned that she was Silverman Jara’s student. Peirson laughed and pointed to the road—“Do

you know that that big monster that you saw as you were coming in? It was his creation.”86 Thatoeng Mompati knew little about her journey to Ndaleni— literally. She had been teaching in Kuruman, near the border with Botswana, an area of unrelenting sun. Yet, she recalled, “when I arrived at Pietermaritzburg, it was misty and I never saw the way coming to Ndaleni.” The fog was thick and wet, and she was lost; eventually, she found the bus, caught a taxi, and walked up the hill to the campus. “When I entered the place where the school . . . is, I saw modelled cement sculptures and I concluded that . . . this is the place.”87 It had been a long trip, almost 1,000 kilometers. She was tired and needed her rest. Like Jikelo, Baloyi, Muthige, Jara, Nsuza, Sedibane, Ngcobo, Mvusi, and hundreds of others, Mompati had come to Ndaleni. And now art school was about to begin.

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began on a Monday in late January, early in the morning before the midsummer heat began to build and boil inside the tin-roofed classrooms. During Peter Bell’s era, the year began with an introduction to the campus, as well as a review of the school’s rules and expectations. Then, abandoning the mission station for a local forest, Bell led his students in search of wood. He was friendly with a local timber farmer named Ridge, who owned both a vast indigenous forest and one of South Africa’s numerous foreign specie reserves. Bell took the students into the natural forest first and got them “to walk around . . . , among the ferns and the undergrowth; they scramble over the rocky stream bed, look at the trees in the water, [and] climb over them.” Ndaleni art students were typically township residents who had arrived at this foreign and rural place. They were encouraged to smell the air “and generally to absorb the feelings of huge trees pushing their way to the sky. For most of them, it is a completely new experience.” Having introduced his students to trees in their natural habitat, Bell then began to teach. He and the students went back to the sawmill, and there, “from among the odd-shaped pieces of timber the mill cannot make use of—root-balls, forks, crooked stems—etc. they choose the pieces they

School typically

Figure 5.1 Detail of a mural by Samson Mahlobo, 1962, photograph by the author

find interesting. These we bring back to the art school, where they set to work. I make no effort to influence them in the choice of subject.” So went art school 1961, day one.1 By 1961, the students that Bell had walking the fields and tramping among the ferns knew they were only going to be on campus for one year. Unlike their predecessors during the time of Atkins and Ewan, they were all qualified teachers, and the expectation was that at Ndaleni, they would be trained to teach the arts and crafts syllabus in Bantu Education schools. Returning to campus with wet shoes and promising pieces of castoff wood, they quickly learned that to be educated at Ndaleni was to learn more than educational psychology, practice teaching, and practical art methods. In fact, their trip to Ridge’s farm summed up a good deal of the Ndaleni experience: the surprise of the new; the freedom to work, innovate, and create; and the limits of the material on hand. Bell used whatever he could find— scrap metal to form a base for poured cement sculpture, for instance, and “multi-colored potsherds that had been thrown away” to fashion mosaics to

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brighten drab, stained, concrete buildings.2 He scrounged stucco for friezes from nearby construction sites and taught students to mix scarce oils with beeswax to create colors suitable for application to the walls of the hall and breezeways down the hill in the training college. Students were given materials and “free reign” to spend months on a single statue or a mosaic or a mural, “something that could really be regarded as a big piece of work for which they could be proud.”3 That was Peter Bell’s art school. Peirson’s was a bit different. She arrived on campus after Bell’s abrupt midyear departure in 1963 and was aghast to observe how little other work had been done, aside from the murals, statues, and mosaics that Bell had “commissioned.” It was September, but “there wasn’t really a syllabus,” and students had not yet begun the practice teaching that was supposed to have been the primary motivation of an Ndaleni education.4 Peirson began to change things. She phased out the large sculptures and mural projects, focusing on smaller works in a variety of mediums, with an eye on what would be feasible in Bantu Education schools. She developed a syllabus—a neatly ordered schedule of educational psychology and art history, partnered with practical lessons and practice teaching. She acquired new buildings, built new studios, and accepted more and more students. Yet the legacy of those early days lingered throughout her nearly two decades at Ndaleni. Like Bell, she innovated and struggled to access materials; she balanced her students’ freedom to create with the rule of a mission station, decaying hostels, and poor conditions, just as Bell had done. Like her predecessors, Peirson weighed the privileges of art with the realities of Bantu Education and apartheid. And art—or Art, as her students frequently rendered it—was a privilege. To Ndaleni students, the term meant more than painting, sculpting, or drawing. Art—capitalized—was the experience of an Ndaleni education in its fullness, from long journeys to campus to shorter yet still intense treks through nearby fields and streams in search of wood and clay. Art meant learning how children think and scribble from Read and Lowenfeld; it meant understanding the joys of creative labor and the backbreaking, callous-making work of fashioning objects at the intersection of the imagination and the material. Art was art history and training one’s eye to notice the world differently. Art meant critically examining others’ work, while also understanding the laborious process that went into previously opaque objects. Art was travel and new experiences and, at the same time,

Figure 5.2 Foot Prints, drawing and poem by Solomon Mabusela, ARTTRA, no.

13, October 1966, 14

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restrictions on privacy, diet, mobility, and political expression. Art was gendered and blind to the differences between men and women. Above all, art was negotiation and compromise and the promise that it would be worth such concessions. “Awake the morning/out of the night/ think creatively/for the world is thirsty,” Solomon Mabusela wrote to accompany a drawing of students walking the well-trodden path from hostel to studio, to begin another day of school.5 Mercy Ghu, from Johannesburg, treasured similar walks, as well as morning’s “misty hills and the smell of wood . . . the sound of hammer and chisel in the free open air.”6 From the beginning of the school term, Christina Jikelo understood that “it was actually a privilege that you were there . . . to be taken into this environment and with this opportunity of being able to . . . express your feelings. So the first day when we’re introduced to art . . . it was unbelievable.”7 Mabusela attended in 1966, Ghu in 1970, and Jikelo in 1976. Each marked a step further away from Bell’s 1961 class of students, who had chosen odd bits of wood and left their monumental marks on campus. The syllabus changed, and students came and went, as did teachers. But the experience of a year spent learning at Ndaleni art school remained remarkably consistent, as did the potential that it could change a life. “This Art Course interested me to such an extent that when I had a chisel and a mallet or a brush and a paint in hand, I felt myself being an earthly imitative God,” Ernest Majova exulted. For him, Art was an experience that made everything else fade into insignificance. “Whether I can be deprived of all other earthly possessions or be led to enjoy solitary life, . . . having a chisel and a mallet or a brush and a paint in hand I have the whole world in my pocket.” He thanked his teacher for a year spent learning on a hill, apart from and within his tortured country.8 “Art Home”

As Bell understood, art education was fundamentally based on students’ engagement with their material surroundings. Milicent Dzingwe knew this as well. She arrived from the Transkei in January 1969. The campus greatly impressed her. “As one enters the mission gate from Richmond, one stops to look with admiration at the children’s swings guarded by statues of animals and enormous dragons built by Art Students.” Art school thus began outside the classroom, at “the gates, the outside walls, the inside walls [that]

Figure 5.3 Queen of Beauty, by Ernest Majova, 1964, Ndaleni Scrapbook 1, courtesy of the CC

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catch the stranger’s eyes and whisper in his ear ‘Welcome to Art Home.’” 9 Dzingwe began to learn about art, expression, and creativity on her first climb of the hill. It was evident that artists had been there; the challenge was “to find my space inside the school,” to answer the question “What am I here for?”10 By the time Dzingwe arrived in 1969, monumental works no longer featured in the Ndaleni curriculum. Creating murals, friezes, and sculptures involved wonderful techniques, but the work was also too time consuming, in Peirson’s opinion. The course only ran for a year, during which the students were expected to master the variety of arts and crafts called for in the Bantu Education syllabus—from wood carving to hornwork, basket making to papier-mâché. Given these demands, Peirson and her eventual coteachers thought that students’ time was “better spent on smaller and more various techniques,” as well as on the art history and educational psychology that Bell had neglected.11 And yet, students’ memories indicated that for them, the challenge of finding their place as both student and artist could not be separated from the experience of being where other artists had so obviously already been. Contemporary pictures from the early 1960s help us understand why this was so. The Indaleni Mission was a cluster of a few buildings dotted with trees. The practicing school and mission chapel lay toward the bottom of the hill, with the girls’ hostel across the road; the boys’ hostel and training college were farther up the hill. In the mid-1960s, Peirson and other lecturers had their offices in that area, and the art school had its two studios, right next to the mission hall. And connecting it all was the art. Statues, mosaics, and murals were typically the first things that outsiders noticed, whether they were only visiting or beginning the process of becoming local. “They call the Ndaleni Training College the place where the figures sprout from the ground,” a magazine reported in 1968.12 Sprouting hardly captured the work of creating as Atkins, Bell, and their students understood it, but the observation was apt. The campus was “a live museum,” Bell noted proudly.13 A student described it as a “Public Art gallery,” featuring work that might not have been “pretty-pretty, but [that] expresses strength or movement or humour and many visitors have found it stimulating to see.”14 Christina Jikelo certainly did. She remembered stepping up from the road to the girls’ hostel beneath Samuel Zondi’s fanciful cement-and-wire depiction of

Figure 5.4 Students building the entrance to the girls’ hostel, early 1960s,

photographer unknown, with the permission of the Richmond Museum

St. George and the Dragon. Moving closer to the building, she walked between Gabriel Vilakazi’s bright mosaic panels, constructed from broken crockery and cement. She passed under giant reliefs, raised on the stone pillars that had once held the mission bell. She ate her meals under the watchful gaze of a mural, similar to the one hidden from her view by a papier-mâché “Indaleni Missionary Institution” crest on the hostel walls. When she crossed the road to the art school, she could turn her head to the right to view the figure of a monk; on her left was Phillip Ndwandwe’s hooded Christ, arms spread wide, welcoming worshippers to enter the mission chapel. Or perhaps she was coming from town, climbing the hill as on her first trip to Indaleni. There was Silverman Jara’s “monster,” stalking passersby at the bottom of the hill. Children climbed and clambered on it, as they did the rhinoceros, elephant, ram, and lion that supported the practicing school’s swing. Jara had been a student in 1964, Peirson’s first year on campus; the four students who did the swing came in 1966. Abiah Ramadi studied in 1965; the practicing school blocked his super-life-sized Sower from

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Figure 5.5 Completed entrance to the girls’ hostel, late 1960s, photographer

unknown, with the permission of the Richmond Museum

her view. The sculpted figure is still there, reaching into his basket for seeds to cast on the valley below. In the training college, Jikelo passed Wiseman Mbambo’s statue of a woman pouring water, which served as a tap for the school garden. Higher up the hill stood Phanuel Pooe’s birdbath—a basin perched on the tail of a gigantic catlike creature, whose open mouth and wide eyes did not intimidate the local birds. Murals abounded, such as Sophie Nsuza’s, completed in 1963, that featured more than three dozen people in traditional dress, bustling across a rural landscape, over streams, and among huts and animals. Still farther up on the hill, past more concrete, wire, and waste statues—including the out-of-place figure of a baseball player, evidence of the game’s fleeting popularity in the mid-1960s—and past the art studios, was the main hall. There, the male students ate and all the students broke Richmond’s weekend monotony by dancing or watching films on Friday and Saturday nights. The hall had a stucco frieze depicting the Bible, from Genesis to Exodus, along its outside walls. At shoulder height, the work “conferred on the building the dignity relevant to an assembly hall.”15 More striking still were murals inside the hall, which filled the upper reaches of the walls and strived toward the building’s vaulted roof. Done by various students in 1962, some of these murals showed fantastic forest scenes. Others presented more familiar congregations—students arriving

Christ, by Phillip Ndwandwe, which stands outside the Indaleni Chapel, 1964, photograph by Cedric Nunn, 1993, with the permission of Cedric Nunn

Sower, by Abiah Ramadi, overlooking Ndaleni Township and Richmond, 1966, photograph by Cedric Nunn, 1993, with the permission of Cedric Nunn

Garden Water Tap, by Wiseman Mbambo, in the Indaleni Training College garden, 1965. Her head has since broken off. Photograph by Cedric Nunn, 1993, with the permission of Cedric Nunn

Birdbath, by Phanuel Pooe, in the Indaleni Training College courtyard, 1965, photograph by Cedric Nunn, 1993, with the permission of Cedric Nunn

Mural by Sophie Nsuza, on an external wall at the Indaleni Training College, 1963, photograph by Cedric Nunn, with the permission of Cedric Nunn

Solomon Sedibane (third from right) leads a woodworking group at Ndaleni Art School, 1968, unknown photographer, Ndaleni Scrapbook 3, with the permission of the CC

Detail of a Bible scene, by Francis Halala and Jacob Masike, 1962. This frieze, done in stucco scrounged from local construction sites, still belts the Indaleni Training College main hall, now the hall of the Indaleni School for the Deaf. Photograph by Cedric Nunn, 2009, with the permission of Cedric Nunn

Detail of giraffe mosaic by Gabriel Vilakazi, made of broken crockery, 1961, photograph by the author, 2011

at Indaleni Mission, bearing suitcases and trunks, under the watchful eyes of the local clergy; casually dressed art students frolicking amid felled trees and finished planks at a local timber farm.16 Male art students typically worked late into the night, but the female students had to return to the hostel for their evening meal. (They could, though, receive permission to return to the studio after dinner, as we shall see.) Jikelo occasionally took a different route back down the hill, passing through the breezeways of the training college and past murals by Abednego Dlamini and Hamlet Hobe. These murals also showed familiar scenes, art students in the landscape, painting, doing their laundry, and firing a kiln; students coaxing fantastic figures from concrete while a figure recognizable as the mission’s principal, the Reverend Thomas Moll, tinkered with a broken lawn mower; and uniformed practicing school students played in the background. All the life Jikelo knew was reflected back to her, frozen in beeswax and paint. Hobe’s mural was particularly interesting: it depicted the brightly painted art room with a wall cut away to reveal men and women at easels, while Peter Bell leaned against the wall, arms crossed, watching. By the mid-1960s, the history of the art school was written on its walls and on its lawns; to walk to class or to eat a meal was to move through time past and time present, through unfamiliar scenes that would soon be familiar. In the process, the student was challenged to make their own mark in a space filled with the work of others. There were other challenges as well. As we have seen, Ndaleni students came to campus alone and knew little about the place and those who would be their classmates. Like Bell, Peirson believed in admitting students from a range of geographic backgrounds. The year 1969 was a representative example. Twenty-two students arrived at the mission in late January: five from the townships around Johannesburg; two from Pietersburg in the Northern Transvaal; and one each from Durban, Pretoria, Lusikisiki, Matatiele, Cofimbava, Potgeitersrus, Butterworth, Springs, East London, Ladysmith, Dennilton, Orkney, Piet Retief, and Louis Trichardt.17 Those from the Rand were used to living in close proximity to people from a variety of backgrounds; others were anxious. In January 1963, the father of student Linda Njoloza confided to Peirson that his daughter “had certain fears and anxieties on her arriving there as she was coming among scholars of a different tribe.” Thankfully, those fears “vanished like mist” as soon as she grew accustomed to a place others

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Figure 5.6 Mural by Hamlet Hobe, 1960, photograph by the author

compared to the United Nations because of “[the] many different types [that] meet [there] for acquiring knowledge.”18 Over the course of the year, teachers equipped their students who did not speak isiZulu with a list of terms necessary to teach the local children in the practicing school. Otherwise, the art school demanded that students have proficiency in English (and occasionally in Afrikaans) in order to use the library, understand lessons, and communicate with each other.19 This put some at a disadvantage: Solomon Mabusela, for instance, was proficient enough to write poetry for ARTTRA but not enough to pass art history. “It is not necessary for you to fail,” Peirson chided him, “your grasp of English is increasing.”20 Each year brought new students to campus, but the process of becoming an art student remained the same—absorbing the place and the other students; shifting from Tshivenda, isiZulu, Sesotho, and other languages to English and Afrikaans; and finding friends and allies, becoming, as one student described it in the early 1970s, “a unit, . . . brothers and sisters.”21 Change did happen beneath these circulating rhythms, even as much remained the same. Most years, there were more men than women but occasionally more women than men; classes grew larger with each passing

year; and events such as the Soweto uprising suppressed applications from certain areas and increased those from others. In 1971, Peirson was joined by Frieda Lombard, Silverman Jara’s old teacher from Healdtown, who became an assistant teacher; she lasted a little over a year and was replaced by Craig Lancaster, an arts graduate from the Natal Technikon who had visited Ndaleni along with some other white students in 1971 and eagerly applied when the position was advertised to begin in 1973.22 Unlike Peirson, who lived in Richmond during her entire tenure, Lancaster took a room at the mission itself, which allowed him to spend evenings with the students, showing movies and supervising studio work. Peirson remained the senior teacher, however, and it was her steady presence and influence on campus that allowed the art school to, as she put it, “like Hitler, acquire different areas.” The school eventually expanded from its two studios to include a clay room, a library/lecture room, a sculpture workshop, and “a thatched roof with low walls called the summer-house, for sculpture.”23 Peirson’s 1970 students built the summerhouse during the first week of their second term. Even as the curriculum moved away from monumental works, it retained the conviction that students ought to leave their mark on campus. “Every year the students had to do one non-educational physical task . . . which was their job for the year,” Peirson told a campus visitor in 1979.24 The airy structure was a notable highlight—its construction was the “noisiest week ever experienced here! Seven or eight pairs of thatchers shouting at their invisible partners or singing to give speed to the long needles. It was a rollicking good week and when it was all over a sudden hush fell on us as we conducted a small opening ceremony in the shade of our handiwork.”25 This was enjoyable and necessary work; the Department of Bantu Education rented the buildings from the Methodist Church, but it made few resources available for routine maintenance. By the turn of the 1970s, the mission’s buildings were deteriorated and in poor condition. Students supplemented this lack: the “United Nations” of 1969, for example, “made shelves for the workshop, cement drains for the new claywork room, [and] concrete paths between the buildings,” while also “planting trees, shrubs and creepers” between the buildings and among the statues.26 Those who followed built shelves to hold the library’s ever-expanding collection of art history and educational psychology texts; they immortalized their gardening and paving activities in linocut prints, which were reproduced in ARTTRA and distributed to

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remind graduates of the ways in which they had inscribed themselves on the campus.27 Time passed. Trees and plants filled in the space between buildings. Some statues collapsed. Murals began to fade—or suffered worse fates, as bees tried to reclaim what had once been theirs.28 Students continued to maintain the campus along with their other responsibilities, but theirs was a futile struggle. By the late 1970s, Peirson frequently bemoaned the “decaying environment around here.”29 Students struggled to keep it in good shape, but South Africa’s biggest art school was what it was: “[an] old, old crumbling mission school.”30 Such was the physical environment of Ndaleni art school, full of color and creation, rich in vistas and poor in maintenance. It was decaying yet annually renewed, as increasing numbers of students arrived every January to make that first trip up the hill, past the monster and the seesaw and the swing ever polished by “the little hands and feet of the clambering children.”31 They ate beneath the murals and listened to lectures surrounded by books cataloged and shelved. They walked paths and smelled flowers left by those who had come before. The hillside continued to provide the context for the transformation of individuals from around the country into a unit of artists, all of whom desired, like Christina Jikelo, to find their place and to leave their mark. Seeing

Peirson was clear: Ndaleni was an art teacher’s course, not an artist’s course. She was “horrified” to see how little teacher training had gone on before her arrival on campus; she completed the 1963 course as best as she could and spent the summer holidays that year planning for the arrival of the 1964 students. The Department of Bantu Education gave each of its teachers a bound Boek vir Skema en Verslag van Werk—Scheme and Record of Workbook, in which they were supposed to note the lesson of each school day and which was to be made available to the inspectorate. Peirson’s workbook began on a Wednesday, January 22, 1964, with the arrival of the students, the handing out of materials, and the tidying of campus. It ended on a Friday, November 20, 1981: “Students depart.” Between those dates, each page was divided into three columns: the date, “theory,” and “practical.” The workbook is both a thorough source and an insufficient one. In its pages, day after day, month by month, year by year, we see the rhythm of

Figure 5.7 Seesaw by Elliot Nyawo, 1964, Ndaleni Scrapbook 1, with the permission of the CC

Ndaleni art school. We see the repetition of subjects such as educational psychology and “Bushmen” art; we also see subtle variations and changes over time—more weeks spent on practice teaching or fewer; more time spent prepping wood for sculpture or learning how to dig clay from riverbanks; or the introduction of new subjects, among them South African art history in the mid-1970s. Additional sources help to make the workbook elaborate on what went on. Educational psychology was largely about “how children’s minds develop and how different stages of art expression as they do develop,” Peirson told me; her lectures on this subject were “largely Victor Lowenfeld,” so by consulting him, one can gain a general idea of what students heard on a Tuesday morning in mid-April 1964.32 First Peirson and then Lancaster frequently published refresher notes on art history in ARTTRA; so, too, did students complete research assignments on ancient Greece or Egypt, on West African art or the Renaissance. So we can imagine ourselves taking notes on August 2, 1967 (on West Africa) or March 3, 1977 (Egypt—New Kingdom).33 Yet both Peirson and, eventually, Craig Lancaster’s workbooks are insufficient sources because so much of what Ndaleni students were

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supposed to learn was invisible. This is particularly apparent in the “practical” column, as when in August 1972, day after day, there is only noted “solid paper maché figures . . . solid paper maché figures . . . solid paper maché figures.”34 According to a 1975 school prospectus, the course as a whole was intended to “enrich the personal experience of each student and help to develop his personal abilities and a sense of aesthetic discrimination.”35 Somehow, the day-by-day drumbeat of lectures and practical work was supposed to spur changes in the students’ selves, in their talents and their tastes. Every day for two weeks, there was papier-mâché and the conviction that the course was about “experimentation . . . so that students may learn to think for themselves.”36 Interwar theorists such as Dewey and Lismer and postwar correspondents such as Lowenfeld and Grossert had set for Ndaleni art school an enormously challenging task. All four theorists held that art was fundamental to education because art was how people learned, above all, about themselves—about their own unique capacities, about their being in the world. To return to Dewey for a moment, art was an ultimate experience within the experience of life—to see art was to consider human action in and on the world. To make art was to tap into the stream of human subjectivity and to claim for oneself the authority of consciousness, which was the authority to act and impact society and the environment. Art teachers, after Read, Lismer, and Lowenfeld, were tasked even further: to them fell the responsibility not only to transmit knowledge to young children but also to transmit the knowledge of self-knowledge—to avoid filling the students with what the teacher had learned but instead to cultivate in them the capacity for self-expression and self-realization that teachers themselves had developed in that zone of self-conscious activity that was the space of art. The workbooks laid out schemes—“collage, landscape,” “lettering, sculpture,” “Greek sculpture,” “The Roman Arch,” “German Expressionism”—and red checkmarks indicated the inspector’s approval. The real work of art was elusive, on days such as January 29, 1964, when students and their teacher discussed originality, or two weeks later, when they considered what it meant to be creative.37 Notably, despite Peirson’s protestations that hers was a teachertraining course, not an art course, the school year never started with practice teaching—that typically began in August or September, during the students’ final months on campus. But creative work and art history began

immediately. The prospectus called for students to develop their “sense of aesthetic discrimination.” Thus, the work of the self began with learning how to see. The 1969 students first heard talks on so-called Bushman art (“description, techniques, styles and examples”) and proceeded through Egyptian (“background, tombs, Temples, sculpture”); Greek (“vases, orders of architecture, Parthenon, sculpture”); Roman (“Forum, Pantheon, Coliseum, Aqueduct”); West Africa (“masks, figures, Bronzes”); and, finally, introduction to modern (“impressionists, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Gauguin, Picasso and Pierneef (S.A.).”38 Lancaster eventually took over art history, adding detail and variety here and there, but the scheme was consistent. Students took notes and consulted books, which were made available according to the subject at hand. They completed essays and wrote exams on the subjects they had studied. Some excelled at this sort of learning. Silverman Jara finished first in art history in 1964, for instance.39 Marcus Lebethe spent days researching his essay on West African art, which Peirson republished in a 1967 issue of ARTTRA.40 Others were less successful, including an unnamed student who, tasked with drawing the figures found along one exposure of the Parthenon, drew a perfectly executed line of penguins, in the style of ancient Greek statuary.41 Unique in the curriculum, art history required extensive supplemental book research, which was an experience that few students had had before arriving on campus. The library was thus a less visually spectacular but no less profound indicator of the privilege of Art. Ndaleni’s library began with Peirson’s personal collection, shelved in a corner of one of the studios; as the school expanded, the library came to occupy its own space, with shelves, tables, and projection facilities to illustrate the daily lectures that took place there. Graduates sent art books along with donations of wood and stone. Three years after she left campus, Salphy Phoshoko found a used copy of The Lives of Raphael at a Johannesburg area book sale. She bought it and shipped it to library.42 The Bantu Education Department periodically released funds to buy books as well, at Peirson and Lancaster’s discretion. By the turn of the 1980s, the library had well over one thousand volumes, cataloged according to the subjects on the syllabus and available for consultation.43 Their teachers were never satisfied with how students used the library—Lancaster in particular frequently expressed his disappointment

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Figure 5.8 Detail of a mural by an unknown artist, late 1950s, photograph by the author

about students doing less than thorough research for exams. Yet even if they did not perform at exam time, students marveled at the variety of art available for them to consider and consult. “Art books describe a world that is open and free for all who possess the sense of sight,” a 1975 student exulted.44 He and his classmates were “proud” of what they thought an “up-to-standard” collection. Working from library books, students compiled pages of notes on artists and epochs, which they took home with them from campus at the end of the year. Many treasured these. Pat Khoza recalled the care she took in reproducing images with which to teach her students and remind herself.45 Joseph Mzileni deplored the “unspeakable tragedy” of having lost his “self-made history notes” when his home burned down in 1968. Occasionally, students just came to the library during their free time, to page through texts, examine images, or simply read about the lives of their fellow artists.46 Paul Sibisi was not an excellent art history student; he finished in the middle of his class. But he remembered the books and the artists. He

recalled Vincent Van Gogh’s ear and the self-portrait with his bandaged head. “And then I said to my fellow classmates ‘Hey! My mother mentioned that someone who was doing [art] . . . could sometimes run mad.” Other legends made an impression as well, such as Honoré Daumier, with his depictions of common people, or Pablo Picasso, whose work demonstrated the subjectivity inherent in creating. “Picasso could draw a woman realistically,” Sibisi remembered learning, but instead, he drew “subjectively,” in the way he alone saw her.47 Picasso was a towering figure in twentieth-century art; it is thus not surprising to see his famous name invoked more frequently than any other in the archive. Each year, Peirson’s or Lancaster’s art history lectures culminated in postimpressionism, Camille Pissarro and Picasso. So plotted, the Spaniard was the culmination of Western art history’s long march from the Greeks and the Bible through naturalism and expressionism. Picasso died during the 1973 school year; students turned to the library to prepare obituaries, two of which were published in ARTTRA. To an art student, Picasso’s life offered lessons about experimentation, variety, and originality: “He never stopped to continue exploring the possibilities and improving on what he had discovered,” Petrus Khumalo noted, “he was not stereotyped in his thinking but adapted himself to the changes of life through the decades.”48 Khumalo’s classmate took a different tack but still read Picasso’s life in terms of lessons that might be applied to her own. She emphasized the physical conditions that structured his genius: what sort of light he preferred (oil lamp, as opposed to electric, she claimed) and that he preferred quiet to noise, a stool to a chair.49 For students struggling to find their own space within a school and to develop their own uniquely expressive self, artists such as Picasso were models. “It is in the interest of all those struggling amateur artists to follow in the footsteps of the more capable and experienced such as Pablo Picasso.”50 Picasso and other luminaries provided a grammar within which students could describe themselves and their developing work. From “Vincent,” as he came to call him, Sibisi developed an interest in expressive brushstrokes.51 Sibisi’s classmate Bernard Kgaffe tended to sculpt distorted human figures with big heads and tiny bodies; upon studying West African sculpture, Sibisi and others in his class concluded that Kgaffe must have actually been a West African, accidentally born in the continent’s southern tip.52

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Figure 5.9 Man with Stone, in papier-mâché and paint, by Leonard Mbuli, 1980, from the collec-

tion of the Tatham Art Gallery, with the permission of the Tatham Art Gallery

Despite her protestations that she was training teachers, not artists, Peirson played her part in her students’ identification with acknowledged masters. She taught them to finish their papier-mâché figures first with gold paint and then with a layer of black; by rubbing off some of the latter, students produced works that approximated the look of bronze. The metal was well beyond the means of the Ndaleni art school, of course, but on a shelf, if the light was right, newsprint, flour, and water did look a bit like a Rodin or a Giacometti.53 Art history thus helped to both explain students’ work and widen their experience of being in the world. For some, exposure to artists and art was personal and private. As a young girl, Daphne Biyela had been in one of Johannesburg innumerable train accidents. The train derailed and burst into flames; she saw people burned alive and suffered grievous wounds to her arms and face. Life went on—she did teacher training at Indaleni, witnessed the inspiration of the art school, and eventually returned for her specialist teachers’ certificate. In art history lectures, she saw Guernica, and

the piece evoked a profound personal response. She saw her own trauma reflected in Picasso’s depiction of the brutalities of the Spanish Civil War, and she wept.54 Other students had not gone through Biyela’s experience, yet the act of seeing still influenced their ways of being in the world. Ndaleni students inevitably passed through Pietermaritzburg on their trips to and from Richmond. Traveling under the influence of art history, they had a different relationship to that city’s built environment. Walking along Pine Street to the railway station in 1975, David Mayindi “observed some colonnades holding the old buildings of the City. These were of the following Orders: i) Doric Order ii) Corinthian Order.” He knew these terms from the books and the slides Lancaster showed in the library. Now, he could apply them to the world in which he found himself. “Ancient Architecture is still dominating today,” he noted.55 Esther Ratlou studied art history a few years after Mayindi passed through Pietermaritzburg. On a class visit to that city, her art history lecturer had noted how the Edwardian era city hall was based on classical antecedents. Ratlou was enthused enough to buy a postcard to send to her sister, who later traveled to Ndaleni to accompany her on the journey home. In Pietermaritzburg, Ratlou reported, “[we] passed City Hall and my sister could see it although she couldn’t see its inner appearance. She was very happy to see it more especially because I sent her a postcard with its photograph.” To see with one’s own eyes was to prompt and provoke an emotional response. That was why Ndaleni students studied art history, gathered in the library, and traveled in search of art.56 The Ndaleni experience was framed by the often-monumental trips students took to campus. To set off into the unknown and to journey home full of knowledge was a unique experience, another of the privileges Art granted to a select few. Small trips each school year complemented those longer journeys and spurred further experiences of art. In early May 1964, students commenced their study of so-called Bushman art; on May 23, they traveled to Giant’s Castle in the Drakensberg Mountains to see the cave paintings for themselves. Peirson was an avid hiker; using her connections, they borrowed tents from boy scouts and camped out, bending the rules against Africans staying overnight in the park. “I almost couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw those wisely painted Rhebuck,” Lucas Matlebjane reported. Some of his classmates had apparently been skeptical that such

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Figure 5.10 Students hiking in Giant’s Castle, 1964(?), Ndaleni Scrapbook 3, with the permission of the CC

paintings could have existed; now they were face to face with them. Peirson shared her love of the Drakensbergs with her students. There was an ineffable quality to being so high above everyday life, she explained, “a lightening . . . you start to laugh at nothing.” None of her students had done such a thing before or been in such a place. It made a huge impression. Silverman Jara was from the Eastern Cape; he found the high Berg “so cold that when one tried to talk the sound froze in one’s mouth . . . we couldn’t hear each other except those who had matchsticks to melt their voices.” For others, it was the vistas, the air, and the experience of standing in the presence of ancient creation, there to sketch with pencils clutched tightly against the chill. “It was a very great and important visit,” the class of ’64 concluded.57 No less important—if less spectacular—were trips to Pietermaritzburg and Durban to visit galleries and catch the latest trends. A few months after coming down from Giant’s Castle, Jara, Matlebjane, and their classmates traveled from their hillside home to Durban to visit both the University of Natal Fine Arts Department and the Durban Art Gallery. That year, there was a survey of “Oriental” art at the museum—a subject notably

Figure 5.11 Students sketching in Giant’s Castle, 1964(?), Ndaleni Scrapbook 3, with the permission of the CC

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absent from their art history curriculum. They were in the midst of studying West African art at the time; perhaps they explored the museum’s collection of objects, masks, and statues, many of which were already familiar, since Grossert had drawn reproductions of them for his chapter in The Art of Africa, which the Ndaleni library owned.58 Peirson’s assistant, Craig Lancaster, later described how such visits worked: first, the teachers gave the students a work sheet with questions based on their study of art history—find an impressionist piece, a West African one, something Greek, something Egyptian, and so on—then loosed them in the gallery. The goal, Lancaster explained, was to give students the opportunity to “experience . . . looking at a wide variety of work.” Looking with one’s own eyes—being in the presence of objects—was the point. “They have illustrations in their notes and then they go down to the museum and they can see the works, which is important and nice.” The Natal Museum in Pietermaritzburg boasted a good collection of insects and animals in addition to art; half the students would wander through the natural history galleries and practice sketching, while the others looked at the art. They followed this pattern at the Durban Art Gallery, where “to everyone’s amazement they have an Egyptian mummy. No one has quite believed this story about mummies until they see that . . . and again they draw [it], for future reference.”59 Visits to Durban and Pietermaritzburg were not as obviously dramatic as hikes in the high Drakensberg Mountains, yet they were still thick with the drama of experience. For one thing, class trips under apartheid meant overcoming tremendous logistical problems. Peirson “knew [how] the country was, but you had to take a bus load of thirty-six young black adults and it appears as if South Africa wasn’t prepared for these people to have bladders,” she remembered. In 1960s and 1970s Durban, “there was nowhere around where they were allowed to just go to the bathroom, and so we had to keep coming back to the railway station,” even though they had traveled by chartered bus.60 The night spent camping in Giant’s Castle was exceptional; in general, every trip, no matter how far, was a day trip, as students’ passes did not grant them the right to stay overnight anywhere other than the Indaleni Mission station. This could make for arduous journeys. In 1976, for example, students traveled across Natal to visit the famed Rorke’s Drift art center, which was run by the Evangelical Lutheran Church and had trained many emerging artists. Students went just to “look around,” Lancaster explained. They left Richmond by bus

at 5:30 a.m., arrived in Rorke’s Drift at 11:00 am, spent a few hours there, and then returned home, arriving just before midnight. It was a long haul, made even more so by the restrictions on African travel and rest.61 Those restrictions were only one side of the story, however. In exchange for the discomforts of travel, the students were able to enjoy the glories of new experiences and the ever-unfolding story of the self. Nowhere was this more apparent than on Durban’s beaches. In the last chapter, I mentioned a Venda student who reported how no one believed his tales of having seen—and swum in—the Indian Ocean. The archive abounds with similar stories. The 1964 class came had traveled to Durban ostensibly to visit the Oriental art exhibit, but it did not hold their interest; instead, they were drawn, inexorably, to the sea. Many were from the dry, high Transvaal, and eagerly or cautiously, all “immersed themselves in salt water for the first time.”62 Hearing them talk excitedly about this on the trip back to Richmond, Peirson evidently decided to make ocean visits a regular part of the experience of Art. Subsequent trips had an agenda: visit the Durban Art Gallery, “then we take them down to the Ocean Terminal for lunch and they do some more drawing, and in the afternoon they go to the beach and some of them have never swum before. We make it compulsory,” Lancaster later explained, with a laugh.63 Some students took to the water, some did not, but like Jara when he encountered the cold on the mountain, all were struck by the experience. A 1971 student summarized a trip to Durban: “It was a song of seeing the sea and swimming or bathing in waters our parents never did and some will never do.”64 Ndaleni students were preparing to become teachers; they thus observed with interest the pedagogy of their own instructors. By taking them to the beach and cajoling them to swim, Lancaster and Peirson “[told] us indirectly what to do with our own children [students],” Manasseh Nkole concluded. Education was about “interest and value, as well as recreation.” That sort of education was what one got for enduring long journeys and government restrictions. He was grateful to “Art, [which] gives you the opportunity. I am most happy . . . recalling the joy I experienced in Durban.”65 The swimming and hiking were memorable. But ultimately, students were traveling for art. By the mid-1960s, the Durban Art Gallery had emerged as one of South Africa’s most progressive spaces; the Art South Africa—Today exhibit, sponsored by the SAIRR, was an annual highlight. The 1965 show contained many abstract works, over which the students puzzled. “The funny thing was that if you were two or more looking at

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Figure 5.12 Crab, by Fish Molepo, ARTTRA, no. 37, May 1979, 2

a certain picture, both of you might see different pictures in that one abstract,” one noted. This forced students to think about what they themselves saw and to speculate as to what the artist might have seen. “I feel not ashamed to point out that . . . the first glance at the pictures evoked no concept at all,” the unnamed student continued. She undertook a “thorough and careful observation” until her eyes adjusted, and then she saw “a concept.” The students had arrived skeptical of abstraction, but found that, having learned to see, “we were so interested in abstracts that we each chose which one we regarded as the best.” To see was the achievement of an individual aesthetic, to appreciate how “life would be impossible if we all had the same way of thinking out things.”66 Aesthetic theorists such as Dewey held that created objects were a dialogue between creator, material, and spectator. Ndaleni students were eager to participate. In 1974, they visited Durban to take in a traveling exhibition of large paintings by the Italian Futurist Giacomo Balla. Patrick Nondikane had arrived wary, since Balla’s work was abstract and he personally did not “appreciate this abstract art.” Yet “since I saw Balla’s work,” he later announced, “I am converted.” It was evident that “a lot of thinking was applied” in the artist’s work, and Nondikane at last understood that “when someone is abstract he really is thinking creatively. Everything he does he

puts much thinking into it, unlike the one who is realistic.” He continued his critique, arguing that, unlike the abstract artist, the artist “who is realistic is not using all his creative thinking . . . [indeed,] we can say that he is not creative at all because he is copying something which exists.”67 For Nondikane, Balla’s art was true art because it was creative and entirely subjective. Others disagreed. “I don’t understand Balla’s work at all!” Johnny Mazibuko declared. “I claim that Balla’s work is too abstract,” too subjective: “It’s one man’s work i.e. he is the [one] man who understands his work.” For Mazibuko, art needed to communicate, and Balla had failed to do so. He and Nondikane felt differently about the work; thus, each demonstrated the subjectivity and critical self-consciousness that seeing art entailed. Standing before hung paintings, walking around a mummy, crying at a memory of mangled bodies and flames—through Ndaleni, students became part of the dialogue that was the work of art.68 Over time, their country and their school became part of art history as well. In 1969, Peirson lectured on the twentieth-century South African landscape painter Jacobus Pierneef; it was the first time Ndaleni students had studied any South African art other than rock art. By the mid-1970s, Lancaster was assigning students to research other local artists: first, white artists such as Maggie Laubser, Irma Stern, and Eduardo Villa and, eventually, black artists including Sydney Khumalo, Ezrom Legae, Julian Motau, and Lucky Sibiya. The field of South African art history was less well developed than that of impressionism or ancient Greece; students consulted the library’s collection of government information service magazines such as Panorama and Bantu, as well as Esme Berman’s foundational text Art and Artists of South Africa, for their assignments. They evidently enjoyed the work. Of Lucky Sibiya, for instance, Mbuso Mbele wrote in 1977: “The drums of Black Africa thundered. Heavy machine gun fire rattled the beautiful gardens of Czechoslovakia. To and fro, up and down, ran the inhabitants of the earth and the year was 1942. . . . Naked, lost and looking surprised, came into the world Lucky Sibiya.”69 Mbele had fun with the assignment, but apart from Sibiya’s nationality, it was little different from the other research projects he completed on cubism, postimpressionism, and Roman art. Students did not research their own school’s role in South Africa’s art history, yet they could not help but note it. While puzzling over abstracts at the 1965 Art South Africa—Today show, the students also considered entries by Ndaleni graduates such as

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Solomon Sedibane and Eric Ngcobo. Their classmate Wiseman Mbambo, creator of the garden tap, left campus with them that morning; there in the gallery, they saw his work on view before the province’s cultural elite.70 Dan Rakgoathe wrote frequently to announce one-man shows and group exhibitions in Johannesburg and other centers.71 In 1974, Peirson reviewed the recently published volume Contemporary Art in South Africa in ARTTRA, noting, “Students from Ndaleni Art School can be proud to know that their school is well represented on the pages of this book.” “When looking at the illustrations and reading the text one is aware of being part of the Art History of our country.” She urged all students to find R10 to buy a copy of the book for their own collection and stimulation.72 Ultimately, stimulation was why art history mattered, whether in lectures, in the library, on a mountain, in a gallery, or in the Indian Ocean. Art was a series of interlocking conversations. One work provoked disagreement among students; another piece, after careful study, evoked a concept in the mind of the viewer; and physical sensations such as the shock of cold or salt drying on skin spurred further realizations of self. Art history, as part of the experience of “Art,” was an essential voice in that conversation, which helped students to understand their own styles or their subjects. Peirson remembered a student who was so stimulated by Asante fertility figures that he fashioned one for himself, a wholly invented family totem— an image in a textbook was made real by the application of a student’s talent and creativity.73 As a mid-1970s Ndaleni school prospectus had put it, art school was supposed to “enrich the personal experience of each student,” in part by developing “aesthetic discrimination.” Having studied and learned to see, that student was enriched. But teaching students to see was only part of the art teacher’s brief. Art was about experience and the dialogue between self and world—it was about saying something, just as the anonymous mountain painter had done, as Picasso had done, as Mbambo and Rakgoathe had done. So in the mornings, students attended lectures and learned to see, and in the afternoons, they worked in the studios, drew in the library, or sculpted in the shade and tried to figure out how to do. Doing

The workbook’s third column listed each day’s practical work assignment. Practical work meant cultivating at least three skills: first, how to do the

tasks called for in the syllabus; second, learning how to make do with what resources were at hand; and third, practicing and refining one’s own creative voice. In 1972, for example, the workbook listed practical tasks such as coiled basketry in February, still life in powder colors in April, and sculpture in October. These and other techniques were practical because they were “suitable for teaching to Primary School Classes” in Bantu Education schools. Practice also meant training students to be resourceful. “Expensive equipment is not used but methods are always being looked for and invented by the students to make the field of work as wide as possible, without the use of such expensive equipment,” Peirson explained. Such inventiveness was the second prong of practical training. Upon leaving Ndaleni, teachers would be assigned to teach art in Bantu Education schools. These schools wanted for materials and equipment, so at art school, student teachers practiced the improvising they would need to be successful—as did their own instructors at the chronically underfunded institution.74 Regarding the third dimension of practical training, Peirson stated: “During a course of one year’s duration, one cannot attempt all the practical work listed in the [Bantu Education] syllabus [and] therefore the usual Bantu crafts are omitted and emphasis is heavily placed on the expressive arts: painting, modeling, [and] sculpture.” The syllabus called for primary students to do beadwork, basketry, horn- and bonework, and other socalled traditional crafts, yet these only briefly featured in the work book. Instead, implicit in Peirson’s explanation of the course was the assumption that her students needed to practice and cultivate expression to complement their technique. Perhaps the most challenging aspect of studying at Ndaleni was having to work to be creative in all things. Creativity was an ideal taught and a practice learned. It demanded discipline and selfsacrifice; in return, it promised insight and expanded vision.75 “What is this concept called Art?” the Peter Bell student and muralist Sophie Nsuza asked in 1966. Peirson responded with what she called her “trick.” She took the word’s three letters in turn. “A is for aspiration,” which she described as “the driving spirit which impels some people to create. R is for response—for the sensitivity with which the artist reacts to the world around him. Here it seems necessary for the artist to be suffering from some form of conflict without which his work lacks tension. An artist who finds the world easy to live in will appear to lack depth.”76 This was pure interwar art theory: artists are those sensitive individuals who are compelled to speak

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Figure 5.13 Wood Working Room, by Wiseman Mbambo, ARTTRA, no. 10, May 1965, 10

back to what they see. Finally, Peirson continued, “T is for technique—for the mastery over materials and tools. But important as such control must be, technique is nothing by itself, there must be Aspiration and Response as well.” The t in art was meaningless without the a and r, just as talent and medium were mute without the actions of the knowing human subject. During our time together, Peirson elaborated on this statement. She kept a small collection of student work in her retirement cottage outside Howick; she showed me a small sculpture of a seal that was carved by a student named Astrea Mahaye in 1974. I expressed my amazement: it was a perfectly executed seal, detailed down to its whiskers and its eyes. She was less enthusiastic. “I would fault it on not being genuine,” she explained, because Mahaye had never actually seen a seal. He had found a picture in a book and reproduced it with apparent skill—but that had not been the assignment. The seal “was not his own, original concept.” It was a technically proficient depiction of a seal, but it was not an eloquent expression of Astrea Mahaye.77 To develop eloquent expression was the goal of practical work. The 1969 class had been “working” steadily all year when Peirson reported on their progress in late October. Now, she said, “we have reached that interesting time of year when . . . students discover their personalities and develop their own styles.” The timing was about right; some students reported

Figure 5.14 Lorna Peirson with students, carving en plein air, late 1960s, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4, with the permission of the CC

that it took them at least five months of regular experimentation before they truly began to create. Like Bell, Peirson began the school year by introducing students to wood, which was frequently the only material Ndaleni had in abundance. In 1969, the woodpile was located up the hill, above the hall and near the mission’s tennis court. One afternoon, Peirson walked Pat Khoza and her classmates around the pile; picked up the odd piece; and ticked off the qualities of teak, jacaranda, silverwood, yellowwood, and mthombothi—whether the wood was soft or hard, whether it was easy to polish or required a chisel to finish, or whether it cracked or softened with moisture or heat. “I teach them the techniques, how to choose wood from the point of view of suiting the wood to an idea they might have.” The method was deceptively simple: “Visualize a solid figure within your log, then you simply uncover the figure. Visualize a form to uncover and never cut into the form itself.” The wood had its part to play in the act of creating. It either contained within itself some characteristic that spoke to the artist, or it did not. Pat Khoza’s first Ndaleni sculpture was a chicken. “When I looked at the wood, I didn’t carve before I turned it around in many directions to see what can come out nicely out of this wood,” she told me. She found a good, dry piece that “already looked like a chicken,” so that was what she carved.78

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Figure 5.15 Fikile Langa blocking out a sculpture with an ax, 1975, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4, with the permission of the CC

Solomon Baloyi had never carved wood before arriving on campus in 1976. Now, he was being shown what he thought were logs. Yet his teacher insisted, with a straight face, that the wood at her feet was in fact a group of sculptures. “We started smiling” and exchanged confused looks, he remembered. The sculptures were hidden and mute; they needed the intervention of a thinking person—an artist—to speak. “Give me the wanted,” Peirson told them, “and discard the unwanted.”79 So they picked among the “sculptures,” began to work, and quickly realized that it was not so easily done. Some students panicked; one later reflected that he found the wood so perfect on its own that he froze at the thought of “robbing the block of its nature, vigour and beauty.”80 For his part, Baloyi embraced the task of making the wood sing his song. He developed into one of the year’s best sculptors; as the supply of wood dwindled toward the end of the term, he was frequently given first choice. On one occasion, he even stepped in to rescue a piece of wood from a classmate’s mistakes. It was hard not to cut into the envisioned form; “once you’ve sculpted it, it’s do or die, one time,” Baloyi explains. That other student had “lost the plot”—he had made a cut where there ought not to have been one, and he could not complete the figure he had imagined. Baloyi took over and “improvised,” to create the figure of man doubled over in pain, collapsed around his stomach and disfigured rear end, which was where the first student had made his unfortunate mistake. At the time, it had been an improvisation, but later, Baloyi was startled to see in the figure the face and shattered body of a friend whom he had learned was dying, just before he set out for Richmond. Another student’s mistake was Baloyi’s fortune; the collaboration between two students, Baloyi’s feelings about his dying friend, and a piece of wood had resulted in what Baloyi described as “one of the best works I ever made.”81 As Peirson saw it, her job was simple: “Get the materials and push some kind of button [and] then leave it . . . to happen.”82 This pedagogy was reminiscent of ideas that we have seen before. Her style also recalled Arthur Lismer, who had suggested that art teachers ought to circulate around the classroom, asking questions but never instructing. Khoza narrated a typical Peirson studio: Pat Khoza: She would just come in the middle of the period when we’re out carving, or doing clay [or] doing something else. Then she would come and stand like this.

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Daniel Magaziner: With her arms on her hips and she’d look . . . PK: “Hm, oh, look, carry on.” Then she would go, and then said, “OK, thank you, I think we’re all working very hard and very well now. Bye.”83 There was more to teaching than that, of course. Students were talented in different ways and to different degrees, but they were all people. If they could not express themselves, then they needed to be pushed. Before traveling home for the winter holidays in June, each student received a thorough written report, noting their grades on exams, position in the class, and areas for improvement. Silverman Jara did very well in the first half of 1964; his theoretical work was the best in the class. Despite this, Peirson cautioned him that he would “have to do some excellent practical work” if he hoped for a first-class pass at year’s end. She hoped that he was moving in that direction. “You have the imagination to do [it],” she noted, “in your latest piece of sculpture there is strong feeling.” She urged Jara to dig deeper, to resist the temptation to rely too much on his technical skill and thus to limit himself to realism. “Do not . . . work like a usual type,” she cautioned, because at the Ndaleni art school, “you will have greater success in portraying feeling.” This was more than an endof-term report: it was therapy.84 Many students had trouble with the book-reading aspects of the Ndaleni curriculum. Some, such as Solomon Mabusela, had limited English and struggled to keep up with the lectures and written assignments. But the most common knock against Ndaleni students was that their practical work failed to measure up to the school’s standards of personal creativity. Hosea Kgame was a 1972 student; he failed the first term due to his low art history marks and his practical deficiencies. “You seem to be unaware of the effort required from art students,” his teacher wrote, noting that even though “technically your practical work is good, . . . it needs deeper thoughts.” Note the definitions of effort and work here. Effort was not just physical—it was mental, and it was manifested in the good work of demonstrating deep thinking.85 Kgame’s classmate Maurice Huma had similar problems. He did fine in theory and had proved to be a “sensible and steady student,” but

Figure 5.16 Untitled sculpture, unknown artist, unknown year (Ndaleni Collection), from the collection of the Tatham Art Gallery, with the permission of the Tatham Art Gallery

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that was not enough. “There is nothing very exciting about your practical work,” Peirson lamented, urging him to “try to be bold and experimental next term.” That year’s assistant teacher was Frieda Lombard, who agreed with the assessment. Huma had talent and intelligence, but he needed to be “open minded [and] unconventional to succeed.”86 With Ndaleni’s standards in mind, we can read Patrick Nondikane’s conversion to abstraction at the 1974 Giacomo Balla show in a different light. He and his classmates visited Durban and saw the exhibit in mid-August, a few weeks after commencing their final term. Two months earlier, Nondikane had returned home, carrying his report. “Your work is careful, but ‘static,’” he had read, “try out looser techniques and exercises, get down to deeper feelings and try to say something with your art.” The work of art was not the completed object; the work of art was the effort to say something, to communicate, to express “deeper feelings.” We can almost hear those words resonating in Nondikane as he stood in front of a collection of abstracts and strained to listen.87 Peirson gave herself two tasks: to gather materials and to push the button. Reports demonstrated that sometimes the button needed to be massaged, and sometimes it needed to be pressed repeatedly, with emphasis and force. Becoming an artist required its own particular kind of training; as with any discipline or craft, one needed practice and mentoring in order to become an accepted member of the guild of expressive creation and deep feeling. So, too, did the use of materials require training; the challenge before Ndaleni students was not only to say something but also to say something using only the means at their disposal. A lack of materials had bedeviled the school from the outset. Peter Bell had wood but lacked almost everything else. “We have no elaborate equipment, fancy tools, nor even well lighted rooms,” he told an audience in the early 1960s. “We have no capital funds to draw on and our income is about twenty pounds per year. We make our own tools and equipment.”88 Peirson was faced with the same limits. Because of a lack of funds to buy suitable material, she wrote to Natal-based firms “for donations of waste materials.”89 The school’s only paper came from the Natal Witness, which donated the unusable ends of its newsprint reels. When the supply of wood dried up, Peirson appealed to the South African Railways for access to old railway sleepers, usually teak, that had been replaced after maintenance on the line.90 As we have seen, she frequently relied on students to ship wood or ilala from distant corners of South Africa where it was more abundant. The situation was

Figure 5.17 Student with a railway sleeper, cover by H. Mohlopi, ARTTRA, no. 13, October 1966

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occasionally desperate. “I want to beg for wood,” Peirson wrote in 1972. From time to time, her students were reduced to cannibalizing older works that were still around, as when, in 1966, they broke down a large mthombothi figure sculpted by Abiah Ramadi, so that they, too, would have the opportunity to say something in wood.91 Waste materials were more abundant. Bell had collected discarded potsherds, and Gabriel Vilakazi had turned the refuse into the mosaics that greeted Jikelo at the girls’ hostel. A decade later, Craig Lancaster proved to be of a similar mind. During the summer holidays before he moved to the mission, recurring shipments of “cartons of broken pottery, plastic bags full of rags, cigarette boxes and toilet rolls” indicated that “Mr. Lancaster was in the process of arriving.”92 During their art history tours, Ndaleni students occasionally visited fine arts programs at the University of Natal and eventually at the University of Durban–Westville, where Jack Grossert had developed a fine arts degree for Indian students. It was difficult not to envy those relatively well-resourced institutions, with their neatly arrayed paint tubes and brightly lit studios. Like all good teachers, Peirson developed cheery aphorisms to help stave off despair. The wonder of Ndaleni and its graduates was in “making something out of nothing,” she repeatedly stated. Yes, it was true that, in 1966, “the more expressive art forms were seldom taken on because of the high cost or the lack of materials,” but no matter: “The emphasis of this year’s art course was therefore on economy and finding unusual methods of making something out of nothing.”93 The lack was most pronounced in the painting studio, as students seldom had access to enough paints to justify the space. And yet, “a gay splash of colour greets the eye as you walk through the door,” Margaret Leefe of the South African Woman’s Weekly reported in 1968. “At first glance you think that only the best oils, poster paints and watercolours have been used to create the pictures, but when you draw nearer, you see that they are composed of shoe-polish, stones, shavings, matches and grass seeds stuck to the paper with gum.”94 Ndaleni was not about creativity and expression in the abstract. Rather, it was about innovating under the sign of the possible. What did it mean to be an artist, so conditioned, so disciplined? It meant recognizing that “all . . . scraps and waste can profitably be used to create something.” Artists scrounged and saved, they picked through refuse piles, salvaged bits of color, and searched for potentially expressive forms. “Is that not something to be appreciated? Surely it is.” 95

Practical training was conditioned by the lived experiences of want under apartheid. Ndaleni was a school to train artists who would be teachers, and Peirson wanted her students to be equipped to meet the particular material challenges of the Bantu Education school. Bell had promoted oils as an expressive medium, and he mixed them with beeswax for the murals that adorned the campus. Oils were expensive, however, well beyond the reach of the average apartheid era primary school. Since Ndaleni students would eventually have to teach with what was on hand, oils were phased out of the syllabus and replaced with more affordable powder colors, egg tempura, and occasionally wet chalk. Students were trained to improvise; one of Peirson’s favorite projects was to send them home on holiday with the assignment “to make a picture out of something they could find there.” In some townships, there were colored pencils and paints. In rural areas, the situation was frequently quite different. She remembered one student who returned to campus with an image executed in “sheep droppings.”96 That was Esther Nopece, from Ngcobo in the Transkei. To finish her image, she needed green, so she used what was at hand. “The sheep dung being wet, I ground it to make perfectly a fine paste. To this paste I added egg and started to paint . . . it was just the Green I wanted.” She was pleased enough to share the method with her classmates, albeit with the caveat that “this dung turns brownish after some time.” 97 Peirson applauded Nopece’s initiative. Unlike wood and paint, sheep dung was abundant in many areas—where there were sheep and initiative, there could be green. Ndaleni’s students disciplined themselves to speak in the voice of the possible: whether in potsherds, used railway sleepers, cannibalized sculptures, or feces. Material want was another voice in the conversation between students and the world, in its multiple and specific manifestations. Nowhere was this more apparent than in students’ relationship to clay. “Clay epitomized the reality of our situation and that in which our students would find themselves as art teachers,” Lancaster remembered.98 During his tenure, Bell had learned that at the mission, the “nothing” that could be “something” was most abundant along the banks of local streams, in soil that, with labor and care, could be turned into usable clay. His earliest appeals for financial support noted this and asked for the monumental sum of £150 to buy an electric kiln, to better exploit this abundance.99 Ndaleni student autobiographies frequently claimed that their early experimentations with

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clay had set them on the road to Richmond. In these accounts, clay was everywhere and needed only to be gathered for self-expression to begin.100 That gathering was a bit more complicated than many accounts related. In the 1920s, a teacher in Nqutu, Natal, reported it took an entire day just to amass enough clay for a single handwork period.101 This was true decades later as well. Gathering clay was backbreaking labor, a “timeconsuming and hand-blistering exercise, requiring a large degree of preparation before any creative work could be considered,” as Lancaster put it.102 Students dreaded clay—they resented it and complained about it—and then they molded it and marveled at its uniquely pliable and expressive qualities. Clay demanded sacrifice and promised reward. Far from a mute substance, it was a powerful metaphor for the physical, intellectual, and aesthetic challenges of artful living during apartheid. Forty-four years later, Pat Khoza still remembered how she learned to prepare clay. She had grown up in an urban township and had occasionally been given clay to work in school, but she had never known the work that went into prepping material for a class session. At Ndaleni, there were two streams with clay in their banks. One was uphill, behind the principal’s house and above the training college and art school. The other flowed along the side of the hill, marking off the mission property from the reserve, where cattle grazed. Khoza and her classmates first learned to identify clay by its “putty like texture” and then were sent downhill to find it in the soil there. “It was hot. It was very, very hot,” she recalled. They dug out the lumpy raw clay, “put it into a tin, or whatever you brought, plastic [bucket.] Carry it back uphill, to the institution. And the following day we all show [Peirson] our clay.” Working with clay was physically taxing; the soil got under students’ fingernails and in their mouths; the grit of the sand caught in their teeth. The river was far from the studio, so the students carried as much as their bodies could bear. The climb back uphill was steep and hot, and the clay weighed them down like stone, straining against the bottom of the students’ buckets.103 A few years after Khoza left campus, Lancaster published a step-by-step guide to clay production in an issue of ARTTRA, complete with a photograph of students with shovels digging next to the river. I was struck by this image, which fit awkwardly in my visual catalog of black South Africans digging in Kimberley or the Rand. But listening to Khoza, it was clear that even if preparing clay for expressive use was not mining, it was unquestionably work.104

Figure 5.18 Angel Mavuso digging clay, 1980, Ndaleni Scrapbook 2, with the permission of the CC

Upon their students’ return, teachers inspected the clay and showed the class stones on which to spread it to dry. Now, the sun and heat were their allies (as long as the humidity did not build or rain come). As soon as the clay was dry, they ground it with other stones, an act similar to grinding maize into meal—a labor that was familiar to some of the more rural among them. This was work for everyone, however, and Ndaleni’s teachers

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Figure 5.19 Susan Leboso digging clay, 1981, Ndaleni Scrapbook 2, with the permission of the CC

were exacting. The clay first needed to be ground into dust “finer than flour,” Khoza explained, and then sifted to remove any stones or grass that had also hitched a ride up the hill. From there, it went back into buckets, and students poured water over it, which mixed with the fine particles and forced whatever foreign objects remained to float to the top. For days—or occasionally weeks—the buckets sat as the mixture settled. Only then did students drain the excess water and roll the clay into balls, squeezing out any impurities and air bubbles that might result in an accident when, at long last, a student’s creation met the heat of a kiln.105 Lancaster’s students complained bitterly about the effort and slow crawl of this process, but he was convinced that they also grasped the reasoning behind it. “If the students are going to do their own clay work [with their own students], they are going to have to dig up the clay, they aren’t going to be able to buy it,” he explained to a visitor, upon recounting the method, step by painful step. Preparing the clay was only the first part of the process, which culminated in the firing of students’ creations into objects that they could hold and share and treasure as their own. Bell had begged for an electric kiln at least to make the firing easier. Over the course of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Peirson and Lancaster also bemoaned the old, wood-burning, smoke-scarred brick and dirt kilns to which they committed student work, year after year. As we saw in chapter 1, in the mid-1970s the Department of Bantu Education finally bought them the electric kiln, but it was to sit unused until the course closed in 1981. Recall Lancaster and Peirson’s change of heart “because the students will never come across one of those [kilns] in the schools [where they would teach].” So in the last half of the twentieth century, students at Ndaleni continued to work with and build kilns based on what was guaranteed to be available—a pit dug into the ground and bricked; scrap hardwood for burning to a heat of 900 degrees centigrade; and, ideally, the willingness to do “a tremendous amount of work.”106 Streams and dirt were everywhere; so was clay, if you were willing to dig for it. The gray or red putty had tremendous expressive potential, but an African art teacher was not going to able to go to a store and buy professionally processed clay for her students. So Pat Khoza noted the work that went into preparing clay for class, committed it to memory, and carried that knowledge with her from Ndaleni, both on paper and in her tired body. Decades later, she ran her eyes over her arms and hands and remembered how “in the first few months I developed callouses and blisters. . . .

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My nails were broken, my hands were very hard and ugly, which they still are, even today.”107 Her skin cracked under the pressure of axes, mallets, chisels, and shovels. There was clay dust and sawdust everywhere, “flying through your hair, [onto] your face, coating your feet.”108 Daphne Biyela recalled that her male classmates in particular tried to beat their materials into saying something; Peirson noted that regardless of gender, broken chisels accumulated, along with bruised arms and gashed legs.109 As we have seen, success at the Ndaleni art school required students to discipline themselves to the emotional task of creating; so, too, did art school demand that they become accustomed to the embodiment of that act. Creating was a dialogue between self and material; the intellectual space of Art was also a physical, visceral reality, a territory bounded by aching bodies, shoddy living conditions, bad food, and rules and restrictions. This was especially so if you were a woman. For Pat Khoza, being an art student meant letting go of the pride she took in her clothes and her beauty, in exchange for dust on her face, torn skirts, and hands gnarled by exertion. She and her female classmates lived in the girls’ hostel with the training college students, who dressed in their tidy uniforms everyday and lived lives governed by the chapel bell’s call for meals and class. Compared to their hostel-mates, “we looked like fools,” she told me.110 The other women looked down on the art students, who although often older and more educated, were so extraordinarily pressed and taxed. “There was no night time” in the art school, Khoza wrote, nor a break for lunch if there was a task to complete.111 “And when we got into [the] dining hall for supper, [sometimes] all the food has been eaten,” save a slice or two of bread “put aside by merciful [training college] students.”112 There were typically more men than women in the course. During Solomon Baloyi’s year, the male art students were able to commandeer their own section of the boys’ hostel and muster their forces to ensure a regular supply of food. By contrast, the female art students had less of a critical mass and encountered more hostility in the girls’ hostel. That massive, three-story building had been dark and cracking in Peter Bell’s time, which is why he commissioned Vilakazi’s mosaics and various murals to provide a more welcoming atmosphere. Still, the hostel grew steadily gloomier as time passed; it was drafty or stifling, depending on the season, and the roof leaked. The Methodist Church was responsible for the upkeep of the living quarters and the diet of the students, as it was for the overall condition of the

campus. In both regards, it failed. Peirson conceded that she had “no flag to fly . . . for the poor accommodation and food” that her students endured in the hostels.113 Their diet was boring and barely sufficient—“samp and beans, with [the] rare inclusion of meat.”114 On one occasion, a student “announced that he could not eat samp” and vanished from campus. The majority of the students accepted their lot, however, just as they did the exertion of preparing clay.115 Students’ bodies remembered their time at Indaleni Mission. “[Have the new students] already ground the clay?” Salphy Phoshoko asked of those who came after her.116 Edgar Xaba had practical advice for his successors: “They mustn’t be afraid to ask the gogos in the kitchen for more samp during lunchtime,” he counseled. “That’s where all the solution lies. We (last year’s students) used to tell the gogos that since we work hard for the whole day outside, we need more and more energy. Then they would understand.” Reflecting on the relationship between the intellectual and physical work of creation, he winked and said, “Only after a full stomach [will] they see something inside the wood, and release it.”117 All students who disciplined their minds and bodies at art school needed to figure out how to live within the restrictions of a mission station as well as those of an education paid for by the apartheid state. When Peirson arrived on campus in September 1963, she found that Bell’s students, “inspired” by his trust in them, generally behaved themselves in exchange for permission to leave campus on evenings and weekends. Peirson thought this privilege was appropriate, given that art students tended to be older and more educated than the majority of the training college students (who were always restricted to campus). Accordingly, she advocated for her students’ special rights in 1964 and 1965. But she came to regret that decision when stories began to trickle back to campus that art students spent their weekends in the nearby Zulu reserve, crashing weddings to avail themselves of the free booze. Carousing aside, the art students’ relative privilege could also drive a wedge between them, the local African community, and other students in the hostels. Peirson recalled that “lots of people thought the arts students thought far too much of themselves.” She smiled, remembering their pretensions. The garage attendants in Richmond called them the “amaexcuse-me” because they would say “excuse me,” rather than address the locals in isiZulu. Art students were a small, cosmopolitan, and self-important

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group within a largely Zulu school and rural population; they were artists, and as such, occasionally “put on airs.”118 By 1965, things had grown strained enough that Peirson publicly chastised her students for their “self-importance, which had done so much harm” in the hostels.119 When the 1966 students arrived on campus, Indaleni was to be their home for the year. It did not matter how old they were, whether they were married, or even if they had children older than some of the other hostel residents: art students were students, and they lived in the hostels and were subject to its rules. Other than sanctioned trips for art, all students were restricted to campus when school was in session, and they were kept under the watchful gaze of mission staff and the hostel authorities. Peirson did not hide this reality from prospective students. Before Solomon Mabusela struggled in art history, he was an unknown applicant begging for entry into Ndaleni in 1966. He had been out of school for a few years, working as a teacher, and he came highly recommended as a talented, interested, and affable fellow. Peirson accepted him but warned him “to prepare . . . for becoming a student again—that is be prepared to live under Hostel rules and doing duties as other students do. You have had two years away from student life and you may find the rules are strict here as they have been tightened up this year.”120 Living in the hostel meant eating its food and attending church. It also meant being restricted to campus, following a dress code (which was adapted to the physical work of art students), abstaining from drink, and obeying strict rules on cross-gender fraternization. After 1966, Ndaleni’s teachers considered applicants’ willingness to follow these rules along with their talent and overall intelligence. It helped that most potential art students had recently graduated from teacher-training institutions, which typically forced students to abide by similar rules. Peirson leaned on her networks in those schools to assess applicants. She wrote to Solomon Sedibane about a former student of his in 1969, for example, and Sedibane reported that although the young man was talented, he was also a drinker and frequently insolent. “He may disturb hostel discipline,” Sedibane warned, opting not to endorse the applicant.121 Another similar case involved a student who applied from Sedibane’s school in 1971. While at training college, Benedict Nkhi had been lashed “seven times with a light whip” for getting drunk and sneaking into the girls’ hostel. Peirson eventually decided that Nkhi was compelling enough to be worth the risk; she accepted him even though she had been “forewarned.”122

The church authorities installed another behavioral regime to complement that of the art school. Students had to attend church every Sunday, whether or not they were Methodists or even believers. There, they heard sermons by visiting ministers and the principal, who for most of the 1960s and 1970s was the Reverend Moll. Students remembered him as a generally sympathetic character; they could hear him tinkering in his workshop while they worked in the studios. Moll was not averse to bringing down the moral thunder, however. On his campus, there would be none of the fuss young people were making around the world, he wrote in 1969—no “taking to drugs, revolting against convention and authority, and generally making themselves a nuisance to society.”123 On each Sunday in 1976, Christina Jikelo, Solomon Baloyi, and their classmates were supposed to file past Phillip Ndwandwe’s Christ statue into the chapel for morning, afternoon, and evening prayers. “We had to go,” Jikelo said, “there was no choice.” The hostel matron carefully noted who was present. Baloyi knew this well, but he was not a Christian and had no interest in going to church; instead, he and some of the other male art students would take the opportunity to sneak off campus. They occasionally returned drunk. They were always caught, he told me, and made to mow the lawn or perform some other less than edifying task.124 Baloyi’s account does suggest that some students compromised with hostel life by resisting wherever possible. At least two male Ndaleni graduates reported having met their future wives while on campus, which at least raises the possibility of resistance to the mission’s sexual policing as well. But that is harder to see. What is evident is that every now and then, a student would be expelled (often against Peirson’s wishes) for drinking. “I wouldn’t have minded keeping [the drinkers],” she reflected, but drinking was a clear violation of hostel rules. It was thus out of her hands: “That was the mission, sacking them.”125 It is revealing that in her eighteen years at Ndaleni, Peirson only expelled one student for failing to abide by the disciplinary standards of the art school itself. Lindiwe Ntuli was a fashionable, popular student from Durban who took less kindly to the physical demands of Ndaleni than Pat Khoza did in 1969. Against mission rules, she continued to wear makeup on campus; against practicality, she refused to “correct her style of dress.” Both the physical and the creative aspects of the work did not come easily to her; Khoza remembered Ntuli pleading with the other girls to complete

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her sculpture or her painting. Ultimately, she was expelled—not because of her behavior in the hostels but because she tried to pass off another student’s work as her own and thereby violated the ethical discipline of the art school itself.126 Hers was an exceptional case. Where students abided by the rules of the art school, their teachers did what little they could to ease the restrictions under which they labored. Peirson lived in town rather than on the mission, and she ate lunch at home, in part to avoid the mission’s objectionable food. She eventually began to take students into Richmond to give them brief moments of freedom, during which they could shop for clothes and supplement their meager diets. Apartheid being apartheid, these visits were short lived: students were always expected to return to campus before night fell. Such trips were small privileges, which echoed the larger privilege of days spent away from campus in Durban or Pietermaritzburg. But they were privileges nonetheless.127 Art students earned important privileges at the mission as well, in terms of both time and, through the labor of their bodies, sensation. They followed a different schedule than others in the hostels who were from the training college. Training college classes generally ran from 8:30 or so in the morning until just after 2:00 p.m, when students would eat their main meal of the day. Peirson and Lancaster ignored this schedule. “We never listened to the bells ringing down there; we had our own timetable,” Peirson said, which helps to explain why the art students were regularly short of food.128 They attended lectures in the morning and then had a short break, which fell in the interlude between breakfast and the training college students’ afternoon meal. This was not ideal, but it was also a privilege—they alone could ignore the bell’s call during the week (if not on Sunday). Moreover, although their creativity was materially limited, their time was their own. “Even if there wasn’t a bell, you just ate porridge standing and drink your tea halfway. Because you were hurrying back to see if your work dried nicely, or whatever.” Life was both tremendously restricted and wonderfully free.129 Art students were able to work for as long as their bodies and minds were willing, which often meant long after the rest of the student body had gone to bed. “I have driven past the art block at 2 am and seen the lights burning,” Lancaster reported.130 The particular demands of their education granted them the freedom of the studio; art students alone could check out of their hostels to go and work. This was easier for the men, whose hostel

was just a few seconds’ walk from the studios. The women’s situation was complicated by their hostel’s distance from the main training college campus, but they, too, could speak to the matron and come and go. (In fact, before 1972 they did so more frequently than the men because there were no female toilet facilities near the studios then.) Studios were unlike any classroom Paul Sibisi had ever experienced. During the school day, the teachers would come in and walk around, not saying much; they did not interrupt or silence students as they chatted with each other or exchanged advice and criticism. If the weather was fine, students took their work outside, under the trees or wherever the vista promised inspiration. For decades after he left Ndaleni, Sibisi treasured a particular photograph: in it, he and his classmate Edgar Xaba were stretched out on the grass, taking a break from sculpting wood.131 At night, the dark world outside their studios was a sober mission station, and beyond it were the realities of apartheid. But inside, they worked by candlelight or dim lamp, as Picasso had. Inside, together, they were artists. Struggle

And yet, the world beyond the mission station was real, and the Ndaleni art school was very much a part of it. Virtually every student who attended the school did so on a government bursary, whether from the Department of Bantu Education or, after 1973, from a Bantustan education ministry. The terms of their bursaries held that, in return for the privilege of studying art at Ndaleni, they pledged themselves to teach for at least one year in a Bantu Education or Bantustan school. No one made them apply for these bursaries. On some level, each made the decision that in exchange for “Art,” they would be employees of the apartheid government—as most of them already were. So were their teachers. Peter Atkins and Peter Bell had been government employees in the 1950s and early 1960s, while also supporting the African majority’s struggles against apartheid. Ultimately, both men had found the tension unbearable and left their jobs and the country. Lorna Peirson was already teaching when the National Party government took control of African education after 1954. The Mapumulo Training College had been a Lutheran School; while she was there, it became a node in the developing circuitry of Bantu Education. Atkins and Bell had chosen to leave; unlike them, she chose to stay.

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She remembered walking and talking with a colleague in the late 1950s through the hills around Mapumulo. “Everybody had to make [a] decision,” she acknowledged, and “a lot of people left.” Yet she chose to stay on because she believed in education and wanted to continue to teach. “I felt education was the only way” to move the country forward. She was not particularly political; she described her ideological orientation at the end of the 1950s as that of a “pale pink liberal,” but once she decided to stay on at the school, she refused to risk taking a political stand, as Peter Bell had done. She arrived at Ndaleni in his wake and loved the job. Like Jack Grossert, Dewey, Read, and Lismer, Peirson was a true believer in the work of art in self and society. Ndaleni was a tremendous opportunity. So, she said, “having made this decision, I had to keep a clean nose.” As we have seen, she reorganized the course to better suit the purposes the government set for it. She did not train artists, she trained teachers, whose most enduring creations would be their own students and what she hoped would be art’s ever-expanding influence in South African society. She opened her books to Grossert’s successors as organizer of arts and crafts—a procession of men of declining ability, in her opinion. Every year, she drove to Pretoria to attend the Bantu Education syllabus meeting and sat quietly among bureaucrats in “printed safari suits with shorts and little socks.” In exchange, Peirson earned a trip back to Richmond and the annual privilege of welcoming new students to art school. There, she would shake them up “like a bottle of beer,” before popping the top to see what “marvelous things” fizzed out.132 In Peirson’s account of her life, both sides of the exchange were clear. She retained her position in the white minority state, in which she helped to sustain part of the education system that was perhaps its most lasting and damning legacy, and in return, she got to teach a subject she believed essential to human development and in the way she believed it ought to be taught. She was less clear about how her students reconciled themselves to the exchange. When I asked why she thought they went to Indaleni and implicated themselves in the system, she essentially dismissed the question, replying, “Well, they had to live, didn’t they?”133 For many, that was surely true. The archive is clear that in exchange for a year spent studying art, some wanted only a salary bump and a bit more security in tenuous times. Others were looking for little more than a respite from the rigors of their lives in the throes of apartheid’s reality. Milicent Dzingwe was in her forties

when, in 1969, she exchanged the Standard Four (fourth grade) class she taught in New Brighton for a bed near Pat Khoza’s in the girls’ hostel at the art school. She was joining a “quiet class of teachers, [who] share the same jokes and sing the same songs.” Ndaleni was a year of “wonderful relief and recreation,” and for her, that was enough.134 Apartheid and its politics were distant from campus in the late 1960s and early 1970s, manifest only in periodic visits by foreign dignitaries, government officials, and department bureaucrats. The world beyond Richmond was “muffled,” Peirson asserted. In Lancaster’s opinion, the students’ lack of overt political engagement was rational, given the choice that they had made to live on the campus. To speak out against the state or Bantu Education was to court a punishment worse than being made to mow the lawn. It guaranteed expulsion, which “carried serious socio-economic consequences for a mature adult being sent back to his/her family in disgrace, with no teaching post to return to and with a broken contract to settle with their employer.”135 This was Pat Khoza’s experience as well. She recalled hearing about political meetings in the reserve and in town, which some students apparently attended. But “to be honest with you,” she confessed, “I never had time for other things besides art. I shuttered my ears, I never attended meetings.” Those who did attend kept quiet about it, as they, too, went about their work.136 The art school community valued the expression of feelings so much that students were willing to trade the security of family and home—and their relative economic security as teachers—for drafty, dim hostels. It is clear that students sometimes had feelings to express about what went on beyond the mission’s gates, despite all the claims that the school was a place apart. For every chicken or sick friend that sculptors uncovered in wood, others discovered in themselves and their material voices that spoke to wider South African realities. Political concerns “would come out very strongly in the artwork,” Christina Jikelo observed, “there would be statements coming out of sculpture and drawings, because it was something that was everywhere.”137 Michael Likhi was a student during the late 1960s, a period during which Ndaleni began to hold annual sales to raise money for the school (which I consider later in this chapter). Burned wood carvings were frequent best-sellers: students took a plank of wood, scorched its face, and etched a design onto its blackened surface, thereby creating a strong contrast between light and dark elements. This was similar to woodblock or linocut printing but cheaper, requiring only wood, awl, and fire,

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not expensive ink or paper. Likhi does not appear in the archive; he is only a name in a list of students who attended the course. But at the end of 1967, the Eckstein family of Pietermaritzburg bought one of his burned wood carvings; in 2013, it hung in their sitting room. Entitled The Railway Workers, Likhi’s piece shows four recognizably African figures, heads bent and eyes downcast under the weight of a rail sleeper that they carry along a twisting track. The scene is in many ways reminiscent of Gerard Sekoto’s well-known Song of the Pick, down to the white overseer who observes the Africans’ labor, casually resting his foot on a stump. Whether Likhi was familiar with Sekoto’s painting or not, he was obviously familiar with the sorts of scenes the painter had observed—subjugated African bodies at work, white bodies at rest, “supervising.”138 Peirson and Lancaster both claimed that Ndaleni was not a place for overt speech-making, but it is evident that objects such as Likhi’s carving had ample opportunity to comment on the world students inhabited. Likhi most likely produced The Railway Workers in late September 1967, during practical sessions devoted to burned wood carving (after mornings spent studying Picasso). He probably displayed his piece and had it subjected to Peirson and his classmates’ critiques on or around September 29; by the end of October, he and the other 1967 students were editing their annual output and deciding what to put on the market. This was a dialogic, critical process in which students and their teachers collaborated to consider which pieces would best represent their school. Likhi’s piece was well received. It was hung, displayed, and sold to the Ecksteins, on either December 1 or December 2, 1967. From then on, the piece lived as an art object and as part of the Ecksteins’ lives. But for weeks before the sale, it and its creator lived at Ndaleni and quietly commented on what all parties there knew to be South Africa’s political and economic reality. Likhi’s was not the only piece to express such sentiments.. ARTTRA occasionally offered a venue for commentary, whether by students or, rarely and subtly, by their teachers. In 1972, for example, Edwin Nyatlo published an ink drawing to accompany his article on the lamentable quality of arts and crafts teaching in the schools. It was a lament of a different sort: it shows a homeless African man on a street corner, a half-eaten, stale loaf of bread at his side. The man’s clothes are torn, his shoes ragged. He leans against a building with barred windows, through which we see what he so obviously lacks: neatly hung clothes and brand-new shoes. Nyatlo’s

Figure 5.20 Railway Workers, by Michael Likhi, burned wood carving, 1967, courtesy of Brenda

Eckstein

fairly transparent image was circulated without elaboration or comment within the art school community.139 Clearer still was the work of another 1972 student, Jacob Ndlazi from the Eastern Cape. While at art school, he did a sculpture in jacaranda of a mother, father, and children—bodies distended and distorted, eyes vacant—and called it Dimbaza Family, referring to the poverty- and disease-ravaged Ciskei town of the same name, where the government had dumped tens of thousands of Eastern Cape Africans in the late 1960s (a crime made famous by Cosmos Desmond’s exposé, The Discarded People, in 1970). His piece had an unlikely buyer—his teacher, Peirson. It is revealing that she bought it and felt strongly enough about it to give it as a wedding present to a beloved niece. To be sure, for Peirson it might not have might have been the obvious political content of Dimbaza Family that gave the piece its power. Perhaps it was how effectively the sculpture communicated the essence of Jacob Ndlazi. She remembered him years after he left campus and wrote to him that she “hoped that you are not losing your creativity.”140 At Ndaleni, creativity was the currency of the highest value; teachers and students alike believed that investing in it would pay remarkable dividends, both

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Figure 5.21 Jacob Ndlazi with Dimbaza Family, 1972, Ndaleni Scrapbook 3, with the permission of the CC

personally and socially. The art school might not have been a space for the sloganeering and organizing that marked political life elsewhere in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but Peirson and her students still believed that they were “on the side of the forces of good in [a] muddled world.” Ndaleni was a place with an ethic of conscious, constructive behavior, whether overtly political or not.141 Not surprisingly, the school’s quiet, approach to things was shaken by the explicit challenge of the June 1976 school protests and subsequent crisis in Bantu Education. Ndaleni students were in class on June 16, studying picture making and design, as students marched and police killed in Soweto.142 It took a little while for news to filter to Richmond and eventually to the mission, for there were only a few radios on campus; Lancaster had one, as did some of the other lecturers and church officials. Students remembered listening to the occasional soccer match but only very rarely the news. Lancaster evidently kept things under wraps as best he could; in time, though, word got out. Solomon Baloyi was from Pretoria, where the uprising spread soon after beginning near Johannesburg. He listened anxiously with other students from the Transvaal, hoping for updates from home. There was a more proximate source of anxiety as well. As we have already seen, the local African community was wary of the “foreign” art students, as were many of the local students in the training college. Rumors apparently circulated that a group of locals were going to invade the mission—a Midlands echo of the tension between urban students and hostel-dwelling migrant laborers, many of them Zulu, that marked the action in the Transvaal. Moll, the principal, “decided that the educational facilities had to be protected against a rumoured invasion and that resident male members of staff would be allocated four hour patrol shifts at night and over weekends,” Lancaster remembered. In the days after June 16, art students lost the privilege of working late into the night, as they were confined to their hostels to protect them from incursions. Baloyi watched Lancaster—whom the students called “Hippy”—nervously patrolling campus, sometimes with a large stick. The invasion never materialized, and the “home guard was disbanded after a week.” June 22 also marked the end of the school term. There had been no overt protest on campus, and Peirson had a braai to thank her students for remaining calm. It was a new era, however: the police arrived on campus to watch while the art students chatted and ate.143

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The next day, the students went home. Christina Jikelo went back to King Williams Town, a center of Black Consciousness agitation that had remained relatively calm during the protests. But nearby East London and Port Elizabeth were inflamed; she had classmates from there and heard their stories. Solomon Baloyi traveled with others from the Transvaal back to a world transformed—schools closed, students battling police, fires, marches, and funerals. Three weeks later, the hostels reopened and classes began: West African art history in the morning, clay in the afternoon. Students brought back stories of dodging police, former schools burned, and townships aflame with protest—yet not one of the class of 1976 chose to leave Bantu Education to join the nascent rebellion. All returned and resettled in the hostels. I asked Christina Jikelo why she and her classmates had done so. The answer was simple. For her, protest was about expression, and at Ndaleni, art students were granted “their way of expressing” their reactions to events. Their art was their involvement. As before, there were those who spoke clearly in objects—she remembered one classmate in particular whose work grew increasingly strident after June 16 and who gave his sculptures names such as How Long Shall We Suffer?144 Her classmate Alphey Motsomane responded with an ink drawing that appeared in the first ARTTRA published after the killings in Soweto. Entitled simply Why? Motsomane’s drawing depicts a huddled mass of ten figures. The right side is dominated by a vaguely West African mask, in silhouette and in tears; at the center, a confident woman gazes into middle distance, her arms wrapped protectively around two young men. But the men are already being transformed by circumstances into inhuman vampires, with fangs and anguished expressions.145 The scene is crowded and violent. Motsomane’s work was an eloquent statement, published at a remove, for an intimate audience. Such statements aside, Ndaleni remained calm amid the country’s general tumult. “It has been like a drink of cool water in the desert to experience the eager response from you [the students],” Peirson wrote. “Living in a period when history is being made can be uncomfortable. It can make everyone examine the principles by which he lives and much of this selfexamination is going on at present in our country.” The prevailing calm on campus suggested that as a community, teachers and students agreed their work played a “little part in the building” of a better society.146

Figure 5.22 Why? by Alphey Motsomane, ARTTRA, no. 33, October 1976, 16

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In early December, the 1976 students left Richmond. Eight weeks later, the 1977 students arrived. After them came the 1978 students, then the 1979, 1980, and 1981 classes in turn. The teachers felt that the overall quality of their students declined after Soweto. Discipline broke down more easily, and there was more drinking and less cohesion on campus—but only when compared to the almost absolute calm that had prevailed before 1976.147 After that year, many students went to Ndaleni precisely because it offered a refuge from the increasingly tense situation in the schools. “We carried a lot of baggage with us to campus,” Daphne Biyela said of her classmates in 1978. They had come in the wake of the government’s brutal crackdown on black political organizations and the murder of activists such as Steve Biko; she remembered talking about these things while working unobserved in the studio at night. Biyela was from Soweto; she had been teaching during the protests and was overwhelmed by the violence there. For her, Ndaleni was an “escape,” both in terms of its physical distance from major centers and in the community of like-minded souls that found their way to the hill. Hers was an emotional community, a place where people played guitar and sang, where they shared a common “craziness”: “All those crazy people would fight one minute [and then] the next we would be laughing. And we’d be thinking about what we left behind.” Like many of her classmates, Biyela had been conscientized by events beyond the mission. She challenged the school’s disciplinary regime. She boasted a modest Afro, which drew the ire of the hostel matrons; she also brought a record player from Johannesburg and played music in the hostel and the studio. At one point, she was threatened with expulsion. The principal and matron called Peirson to campus; the latter drove in and, as Biyela put it, “told them where to get off.” These were her students and her school; Biyela’s “crime” was not like Lindiwe Ntuli’s—she had not violated the ethics of the art school itself. Instead, with her hair just so and her hands working to the beat of her music, Biyela was being herself, which was exactly who art students were supposed to be. She arrived on campus in 1978, when the first rumors that Ndaleni was going to close began to circulate. The campus was dilapidated, the hostel gloomy, and the discipline harsh. But she and her classmates needed art, so they got to work. Many had experienced violence and trauma firsthand, and so they doubled their efforts to find the release, balance, and harmony—the sense of self-satisfaction and growth, the confidence and consciousness—that together were the promise of the work of art.148

Vision

In our conversation, Biyela smiled as she remembered an otherwise unremarkable day spent in the studio, listening to music and creating. So did George Kulati, who had gone to Ndaleni a generation before her, in 1964. Kulati liked to listen to the sound of “mallets in the workshop,” which to his ears was the music of human creativity. He and his classmates were creating, he reflected, “one of the most pleasant activities which a man can embark upon.” What was he, an artist, like? “I [am] nothing but a mad fellow who derives great pleasure from knocking a block of wood . . . who thinks that he has conquered the world when he has done a painting. . . . Art is essential to me.” Kulati thought himself “mad” because of his intense inwarddirected focus and the satisfaction that he derived from following his urges. But he comforted himself: Ndaleni was full of such “madmen” just as, indeed, the whole world was full of such “madness.” To be an artist was to tap into a stream of human history—“art [that] has been there for ages and still will be there till the end of the world.” His art education allowed him to place himself in that stream: to listen to an Elvis Presley record to its end, for example, and understand that “even now though the music has stopped I can still hear it, for it is prolonged by the knocking sound of the mallets and axes, yes, I can even hear the swooshing of a brush.” Such glorious madness was everywhere, if you knew how to see it; “Presley has been singing and John here next to me is painting.”149 To be an art student and alight at Indaleni hill between the 1960s and the turn of the 1980s was to participate in an interlocking set of negotiations, some big, some small. There was the big compromise with South African political realities: you would be subject to the state and owe it a debt, and in return, you would find a measure of freedom in the studio. You would be subject to the discipline of the hostel, as well as its poor conditions and food, and in return, you would get occasional journeys to town and the rare opportunity to climb a mountain or swim in the ocean. But there was another exchange that was at the core of the entire enterprise and was much harder to quantify. Kulati understood it. “Creating takes off loads that overcrowd my feelings,” he remarked, “and seeing these loads in the form of art gives such content to my inner self that I usually feel that I could go days without food, but instead just stand and stare at my accomplishments.”150 Art school was about being alive in South Africa in the middle part of the

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Figure 5.23 George Kulati with birdbath, constructed with cement, wire, and waste, 1964, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4, with the permission of the CC

twentieth century and seizing the opportunity to say something. Upon leaving Ndaleni, “you take the world as your own invention,” a 1976 student wrote. To be an artist was to be the author of your own experience. It was to see the world differently and to envision your own self transformed.151 Kulati understood this. So did Jessie Muthige, who had applied in 1969 to “revive the art and skill” of his Venda forefathers. He arrived on campus in January 1970, labored at art for six months, and returned home to his wife and children for the winter holidays that June. He was busy there, yet he found time to pen a quick note to his teacher. “The Arts and Crafts course has really changed my way of life. I see things in a different way,” he wrote. Having traveled to art school and back, he was in the world differently. He saw through his eyes in a new way, observing paintings, drawings, design, light, and form; in turn, he knew that he looked different in the eyes of others. The man he knew himself to be was transformed. He was “proud because my friends seem to see something new in me.” He knew it, his friends knew it, and “they are sometimes so jealous that they promise to apply for next year.”152

Muthige was not alone in expressing such insight. Peirson had taken a chance on admitting Benedict Nkhi, given Solomon Sedibane’s warnings about Nkhi’s indiscretions at training college. He enrolled the year after Muthige, did well, and left similarly enthused. “I thank the Indaleni Art School for having opened my eyes,” he noted, “I am now able to observe and appreciate beauty.”153 This vision went beyond the beautiful to take in the aesthetic object of life itself: “I am not sorry for the year I spent at Ndaleni,” another student wrote, “I do not ever see the year’s salary I lost, instead I see great improvement and prosperity in all spheres of my life.”154 The archive abounds with students’ lyrical celebrations of lives transformed. For many Ndaleni students, their year at art school seems to have exemplified Dewey’s notion of art as an experience set apart from normal, quotidian life. It was a time lived more intensely. “I had eyes but I couldn’t see with them,” one student said, “I had ears but I couldn’t hear with them but through you, you made me see and realize the things that are near me you made me hear the things that pass around me.”155 Art students came to live through senses primed by the breezes and birdsong of their hillside home. Art was the experience of working in the studio, studying after lectures, and seeing an object of your own creation take shape. Joseph Maimane said he could feel art “flowing in my veins,” surging into his limbs, inhabiting him. Because of it, “I know where to place my feet and where to throw my eyes and where to listen.” Art spilled out of him, not only in the creation of objects but also in the evolving experience of his life in society. Having encountered art, he observed, “I am full of confidence.”156 The reference to Art, not art, was a common thread running through different generations of Ndaleni students; Art with that capital A defined their experience of art as something unique, set apart from regular human creative practice. Much as their material want was not just any material want but rather the specific limits imposed by South Africa’s politics and history, so, too, was their experience of Art unique to Ndaleni in its intellectual foundations, its geographic specificity, its personalities, and its tiny and great negotiations. Maimane’s metaphor was telling. Art was not him but in him—almost an object that he had ingested and that now flowed through his veins and changed how he lived his life. “It seems to me that since I came here I am changing,” one of Jessie Muthige’s classmates claimed. “I say this because I no longer look at things as they are, but in another way. . . . I did not know that mere lines had a meaning, the scribbling of a small child meant

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something. . . . I am learning a lot.” He conceded that these were small examples and that students learning a different subject might make similar claims. But he insisted that his education mattered because it was happening to him. “This might not mean anything to other people but to myself it means a lot,” he continued, because “when I look at my work these days, whether a drawing or anything I find myself judging it from a complex point of view.” Art was real in his life; ultimately, that was what mattered: “The most important thing about Art is the very fact of its existence in our lives.” Art illuminated the simple scribbles of child and revealed the mysterious human creativity inherent in a single line: “I think I am learning magic.”157 Daphne Biyela had been scarred, literally and figuratively, by her life in twentieth-century South Africa: the train crash that had burned her skin as well as the violence that had rocked her school after June 16, 1976. She thought herself a bit a crazy and was comforted to share her madness with her classmates, as George Kulati had been to share his madness with the singer Elvis Presley and the painter John Ngcobo. Thirty-five years later, Biyela and I met at her office in Soweto. She wanted to show me some photographs, so we drove to her home in Jabavu. Two of the photos stood out. The first is from her early 1970s stint at the Indaleni Training College. She and a classmate are neatly dressed in blue frocks and white shirts; they look like children and are posed in front of Thomas Hlatshwayo’s 1965 sundial. Flash forward eight years to see Biyela, now an art student, sitting on one of the studio’s workbenches. Behind her is a wall of drawings and paintings, landscapes and figures, with a label at the top: “Daphne Biyela.” This is her work. Her little Afro is tucked under the straw hat she wore while sculpting in the sun. Her face is composed, with a hint of a smile as she looks off to her right. Actually, it is not just a smile—it is pride. It is late November 1978, summer in the Midlands and across South Africa. It is warm, the trees are full, rains settle winter’s dust in some areas, and heat begins to scorch the ground in others. Daphne Biyela sits in a room on a hill, in front of a good year’s work, with her classmates and her teachers—magic, indeed.158 Departures

During the Peirson era, art school ended with a rhythm of annual events. The first was the culmination of the learning that students had done on campus: the moderation of theoretical and practical work—exams,

Figure 5.24 Ntombi Mdunge (formerly known as Daphne Biyela), 1978, courtesy of Ntombi Mdunge

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critiques, an exhibition of student work, and a prize-giving ceremony. The second, a sale, was open to the public, who went to the campus at first and then, after 1967, to the Metropolitan Methodist Hall in Pietermaritzburg. There, they would pick and choose works to buy and to bring to a new life as art objects, separated from their creators. Sales were quick affairs, lasting only a day or two, after which students followed their creations down the hill and over the cattle grate and resumed their own journeys. Exhibitions were a regular feature of South African art education, going back to the days of Loram’s handwork scheme. Under apartheid, shows picked up the additional ideological weight of proving that government schools were continuing the good work of stimulating African culture. The art school played its part in this scenario by holding an annual competition for African schools during the late 1950s. It was open to all students taught by graduates of the specialist teachers’ program, as well as those who, like Abednego Dlamini (second prize, 1959), were studying art in a training college. By 1960, the most common exhibition venue for Ndaleni art was Wolfson’s, a contest that began in 1953 and was funded by Isaac Wolfson’s eponymous department store in Durban. Wolfson’s was not a typical school show: from the outset, it was open only to works of “graphic art,” which led Bell in particular to treat it as a surrogate for the Ndaleni school show at the Durban Art Gallery that he aspired to pull off but never quite managed to do.159 The best works submitted to Wolfson’s were toured around Natal, stopping at schools, training colleges, and universities; award-winning pieces earned annual pride of place in the windows of the company’s stores in Durban and Pietermaritzburg—and a few pounds in store credit for the winners. In Bell’s opinion, Wolfson’s competition was how Ndaleni students could measure themselves against each other and thereby ensure that their work remained fresh and original.160 By 1965, however, submissions to Wolfson’s were slow in coming. Graphic art was beyond the reach of most teachers and their students, as it was limited at Ndaleni itself. Peirson served as a judge that year and found the submissions wanting: “Many schools and training colleges sent in entries that have been traced or copied, thus showing that the teachers in these schools were unaware that Art must be genuinely original and must come from the feelings of the artist and that a slick copy is worth nothing,” she declared. By 1968, the contest had ended. “You have the death of this brain child of Mr. Wolfson on your conscience,” Peirson fumed to all the

Figure 5.25 Nathaniel Ntombela (left) and Rightwell Temba (right) examine student works, 1966, Ndaleni Scrapbook 3, with the permission of the CC

current and former students who had failed to submit adequate work. “The murderer was lack of initiative.”161 There were other venues, of course. A year earlier, for instance, a former Ndaleni student had written to Peirson to announce that she was submitting work to an exhibition at Fort Hare, to be organized by that

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college’s African Studies Department. After clearing up some initial confusion as to whether the show was open only to Xhosa artists (Fort Hare having been reduced to a Xhosa tertiary institution under Bantu Education), Peirson spread the word. Each year thereafter, a few Ndaleni students submitted work for consideration. (This eventually led to the school’s prominence in Contemporary Art in South Africa, a book written by E. J. De Jager, a professor in Fort Hare’s African Studies Department; see the discussion previously and in the epilogue.) Like the Wolfson’s exhibit, the Fort Hare show was racially delimited and tended to coalesce around sculpture and what was increasingly known as township art. Although hers was a school that claimed not to train artists, Peirson recognized that exposure at Fort Hare presented a rare opportunity for her most talented students—“a first foot on the ladder,” as she put it.162 The timing was a bit problematic, however. The Fort Hare show took place annually during the first week of October, which was perilously close to the end of the school year, when works needed to be on campus for Ndaleni’s own year-end examinations, exhibition, and sale. The school’s “usual request,” therefore, was to treat the Ndaleni submissions differently from the rest: they could not be sold, and they needed to be repackaged and returned immediately following the Fort Hare exhibition’s close. Each year, the curators asked for permission to keep some works because “our public is fascinated by the ideas expressed in [the students’] work.” Peirson denied every request to sell the works outright. She cited her responsibilities as a teacher: “There must be about 200 sculptures produced each year and it is not easy to remember even the best clearly after a month or so. So to me, it is worth the effort of packing.” The curators relented and shipped all the works back in time for the end-of-year exhibition and examinations.163 No Ndaleni student ever attended the Fort Hare exhibition, nor did the teachers. It fell right in the critical period of the school year, when students began to move toward exams and the completion of their final practical projects. The exhibition was rather opaque to the Ndaleni students. They submitted work, a few won cash prizes for their efforts, and some earned a bit of a following among the art-buying public. But they did not receive the critical feedback that their instructors thought vital to the ongoing conversation about art, which was why the school needed the work back in the first place. “People are continually trying to get our work from us during the year and the only way to make a fair arrangement of each

student’s work is to have everything kept here until the final examinations are over,” Peirson told the curators.164 Exhibitors at the Fort Hare show were seldom given critiques; occasionally, one curator or another would write to Peirson about a certain student’s success or to note that a visiting art luminary such as Walter Battiss seemed impressed with a student’s work.165 Perhaps Peirson shared these sentiments with the students; if not, all they would learn from exhibiting at Fort Hare was whether people wanted to buy their work or if they won a prize. Back at the mission, on the other hand, there was a year’s worth of work, and teachers and students could participate in the dialogue that completed the work of art. They could assess technical accomplishments, engage each other’s failures and successes in conveying deep feeling, and they could celebrate their time together. It is hard to get at the fleeting moments of critical assessment that marked these occasions. Although I have many semester (June) reports, the Ndaleni archive contains none from the end of the year. Presumably, these would have been quite different. Whereas the semester reports tended to exhort students to dig deeper in their practical work, as we have seen, one imagines that the end-of-year (November) reports would have been a bit more summary. In 1965, Dan Rakgoathe wrote an essay critiquing the work of his classmates from five years earlier. He remembered Abednego Dlamini working diligently, with great energy, but felt that he was not a great draftsman. Rakgoathe noted that Dlamini tended to hide his weaknesses with big, active compositions; Dlamini was particularly bad at drawing hands, so his figures always moved. (Dlamini’s art school–inspired mural in the training college breezeway bears this out.) To describe Hamlet Hobe, Rakgoathe reached for his training in art history: “His satirical inclinations always reminded me of Goya and his love for the lighter side of Toulouse-Latrec.” That is, his work was reminiscent of Francisco Goya and Henri Toulouse-Latrec; in terms of personal character, Rakgoathe thought another student similar to Van Gogh. These are precious few examples of the critical work that went on within the school community itself, from which we can tentatively conclude that honesty was valued—Dlamini was bad at drawing hands (terrible, in fact), and Rakgoathe was not being gratuitously cruel to note that fact. The Hobe judgments were a bit more subjective; yet they were also serious—it was no small thing to compare Hamlet Hobe to established masters. At the very least, some Ndaleni students took their classmates seriously as artists and thereby solidified their status as such.166

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There are two other things we can know for certain: exhibitions and collective critiques were regular features of the school syllabus, and students were enthusiastic and eager to display their work. In 1964, students displayed their work on at least seven occasions prior to the end-of-year exhibition; a decade later, there were at least eleven critiques over the course of the year. Both lists exclude special displays for visiting dignitaries and the organizer of arts and crafts, who made periodic appearances on campus. (The minister of Bantu education attended Peirson’s first year-end exhibition and prize giving in 1964.) Assessments were cumulative; although Peirson did not note this, works such as Silverman Jara’s Monster and Phanuel Pooe’s Birdbath were doubtlessly considered as part of their marks. Unlike those monumental pieces, smaller works could be crowded into the hall for the final exhibition and prize giving, to present overwhelming evidence of the year’s creative output. Biyela remembered the scale and variety of the “beautiful works” she saw in the hall while attending the training college in the early 1970s. Pat Khoza remembered the other side of that exchange: she had never gotten along with the other women in the hostel and watched “with pride” as they marveled at her work—“Look at this! Look at this! Woo!”167 Peirson was frequently critical of how her students overcrowded the hall with their accumulated works. “The eye receives no rest and each exhibit is overpowered by those around it,” she complained, when the aim ought to have been “to select only the best work and to display it spaciously.”168 But who could blame her students for their enthusiasm? For a year, they had eaten and studied under the watchful eyes of others’ work; now, here was their own. Daphne Biyela’s satisfied expression told the story. The personal benefits of vision were real and apparent, marked in confidence and contentedness. But to see your work reflected in another’s eyes was something else—it was to be recognized and to be heard. And the cash was nice, too. After the moderation of marks and the distribution of prizes, students had one final task: they had to winnow their collections down to a few pieces, which they carefully packed for Pietermaritzburg. In Peirson’s first three years, students offered work for sale to whomever made the trip to the mission. They raised R200 in 1964 and R300 in 1965 and by all accounts had a good time showing visitors around campus. Peirson felt that they could do even better. “One day we will hold an exhibition of only selected work if we reach a high enough standard,” she

Figure 5.26 Exhibition in the main hall, 1971, Ndaleni Scrapbook 3, with the permission of the CC

promised.169 Soon, such exhibitions and sales became a regular feature on the region’s cultural calendar: Ndaleni was holding its “annual display of painting and sculpture, models, craftwork and patterns,” the Natal Witness reported in December 1966.170 The next year, they began to hold the display in Pietermaritzburg, at the Metropolitan Methodist Church. The first year was a disappointment—they only made as much money as they had during the 1966 show on campus—but gradually, more people came to see the work and money flowed. Pat Khoza sold her chicken at the 1969 show, during which visitors spent upwards of R1200. “That is so much that it looks bad,” Peirson blushed. Created objects began to leave Ndaleni, and as the work of art was transformed into artworks, each year’s art students took their first steps away from their temporary home.171 The Pietermaritzburg show was designed to help the school recoup some of the cost of materials. It was the final negotiation between Ndaleni art school and its students. As they began to produce objects over the course of the year, the students were repeatedly reminded that their best works were destined for the exhibition. “You people are going to make things and other people are going to want to have them,” Peirson explained, “if you want to have them, if you want to take them home, you’re going to

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Figure 5.27 Exhibition at the Metropolitan Methodist Hall, Pietermaritzburg, 1975, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4, with the permission of the CC

have to pay for them.”172 Since the materials belonged to the school (albeit enriched by the students’ labor), the school received 50 percent of the proceeds from the sale; the artists took home the other half. Students generally agreed to this, although they frequently grumbled that Peirson set the prices too low. This was probably true; she admitted that she priced objects to move quickly, in order to take advantage of the narrow sales window the church hall offered. Besides, they were students, not artists, she confided to the curators at Fort Hare, and as such, they could only sell at low prices.173 What Bourdieu called the “social alchemy” of the art world was a foreign concept to her students, who had devoted numerous class periods to learning how to scavenge for materials but none to the market that might exist for their work.174 Yet as she priced their sculptures, drawings, burned wood carvings, and other objects, each student became a commercial artist, subject to the imagination and whims of the market. Away from campus, the objects were separated from the thoughts and deep feelings of the artists who created them. Many Ndaleni sculptures sent to Fort Hare in 1971 arrived cracked, for instance, and Peirson advised the curators not to attempt repairs. It had been a dry winter; the wood was brittle, and “my own feeling about cracks is that I prefer to accept them as

a natural tendency of wood and therefore a characteristic” of the piece.175 It was the “character” of Ndaleni art that tended to attract buyers in the first place, especially the sculpture. Nothing sold better than wood sculpture. In 1971, Peirson shipped the first batch of student work to Fort Hare in June, months before the October exhibition. “The sculptures have stirred a great deal of excitement,” the curator there noted, “and even before the exhibition takes place four of them have already been earmarked by the Gallery and the staff.”176 She gently reminded Fort Hare that eager buyers would need to wait for the school’s own exhibition to be concluded. By then, Peirson was familiar with the occasionally crazed response the buying public had to her students’ work. In the mid-1960s, visitors to campus had been able to reserve sculptures ahead of the sale, but by decade’s end this practice had been stopped to stimulate demand on the day of the sale itself. This led to remarkable scenes. On the morning of the sale, students packed their creations in sacking and boxes and loaded them onto a borrowed lorry for the journey to Pietermaritzburg. Often, they would arrive to unpack and find that a crowd had gathered, and many people were only too eager to help unload. Peirson remembered eager hands taking boxes off the lorry. One year, she had to reprimand a friend who was sitting on a sculpture rather than allowing it to be taken into the hall and set on display. She said, “No, and not until half past nine. We’re starting the opening at half past nine.” Her friend would have to wait, like everyone else. In the years bracketing 1970, it was standard practice for a certain class of Maritzburger to own a piece of Ndaleni sculpture. Brenda Eckstein accompanied her husband’s family to the sale annually, and she frequently saw other people that she knew there. Upper-middle-class, liberal, English-speaking Pietermaritzburg loved the work and collected it assiduously. In June 2013, Peirson was discussing my impending arrival with a neighbor in her retirement community outside Howick; he was a retired architect who had lived in Pietermaritzburg during the 1970s. To her surprise, he went into his cottage “and he produced a little dog” fashioned by one of her students, decades before, which he had bought at the Metropolitan Methodist Church hall.177 Why were the works so popular? Initially, Peirson explained Ndaleni’s commercial success in terms the art students would have understood and appreciated. The works were “sincere and unstereotyped,” she reasoned in 1968, “and sometimes the sculpture is quite competent.”178

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There is, of course, another, more cynical explanation for the school’s short-lived (and relative) success as a productive center. It is certainly plausible that Ndaleni sculpture was attractive to a certain type of person because a certain type of person thought that Ndaleni sculpture was what African art was supposed to be. As we have seen, South Africa was generally considered to be deficient in indigenous African artistic traditions, of which wood sculpture was the example par excellence. (Ndaleni went so far as to play up this angle, as when, in 1977, the invitation to the yearly exhibition was adorned with the image of a West African style mask.) Jack Grossert had valorized craft-as-art both because he believed that to be true and because to do otherwise would have been to undermine his entire pedagogical project. Now, more than a decade after the founding of Ndaleni, there was a school of black South African wooden sculpture, which happened to emerge at precisely the moment that the global supply of “authentic” African art objects was beginning to dry up.179 Buyers did not necessarily know what went on at the Ndaleni art school. They did not grasp the intellectual foundations of the place; its insistence on authentic expression; or its faith that the work of art was actually the process of creating, not the creation itself. Nor were they likely to know of the unique conditions under which Ndaleni art students labored, conditions that favored the production of wood sculptures not because Africans had a natural inclination for the medium but because there was a reliable pile of logs up by the summer house and frequently little else suitable to the task of self-expression.180 In other words, in their enthusiasm for the objects that existed, the crowds at the Pietermaritzburg Metropolitan Methodist Church typically paid little mind to the experiences of the artists themselves. They were African artists, who had come to town to hawk their African art. It was not surprising to learn that among those eager buyers were people who “came from Durban in the guise of interested individuals, but they were actually working together for some curio shop or flea market where our stuff was resold at inflated prices.”181 Sculpture’s popularity had other results. As we have seen, the Ndaleni experience was different for men and women. The sale marked a further gendering of the art school. Both men and women sculpted, but the physical demands of working wood tended to favor those stronger of arm. Each student had the opportunity to offer a handful of objects for sale in Pietermaritzburg; they worked together to identify the best pieces in each medium, and

usually, the end result was that women offered smaller and fewer sculptures than men. Pat Khoza was a rare female whose sculptures could compete with her male classmates’; a more typical example was another 1969 student, a nun from the Eastern Cape named Sister Camilla Ndaba. Her convent eagerly followed her work at Ndaleni; the sister superior wrote to Peirson months before the final exhibition to ask whether it was necessary for them to reserve some of her works. Peirson let them down easily: “Some people sell only one or two articles, depending on the demand,” she explained. “It is mostly sculpture that is sold and here I do not think that Sister Camilla’s work will be much in demand.” When the sale finally came, Sister Ndaba offered two batiks, an embroidered wall hanging, and a burned wood panel to the buying public. Her convent ended up buying all four pieces.182 Nearly a decade later, Daphne Biyela’s experience was similar. Demand for Ndaleni sculpture had risen across the early 1970s, only to begin to sink after 1976. Peirson tended to peg the rise and fall of profits from the sale to the white, art-collecting community’s sense of economic and political security. This makes sense, and it might explain Ndaleni’s declining sales after the eruption of student protests. It is also possible that after more than a decade of sales, the relatively small Midlands market could not absorb anymore sculptures. Regardless, Biyela and her classmates were instructed to offer a minimum of four sculptures along with their other work. Only the most spectacular of these sculptures—all carved by male students—were bought. Just days after she had sat proudly in front of her drawings in the hall, Biyela found the transfiguration of artist into art object was a very different experience.183 And yet, there was more to selling than the commodification of the object suggested. Mercy Ghu won the practical work prize for 1969; she was not a good sculptor, however, and her drawings earned only a fraction of what her peers’ less accomplished figures drew. Still, the sale was a thrill for her: her grandmother made the long journey from Johannesburg to Pietermaritzburg so she could walk among the tables in the hall and see her granddaughter’s work.184 The sale was a final collective effort. Every student spent time working in the hall, with explicit instructions not to push their own work at the expense of the group, while the rest enjoyed one last visit to Pietermaritzburg— maybe visiting a favored building, or buying some food to erase the taste of

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the hostels. If they were fortunate, their time in town included the promise of actually receiving money for their work. “I sold a number of pieces,” Solomon Baloyi remembered, and he returned home with a fair amount of cash in his pocket. He brought home some sculptures as well and proudly presented them to his father, the spoon-carving chef whose love of wood had rubbed off on his son. Baloyi’s father was tremendously pleased. Baloyi reminisced:“[He] would polish them. They would shine like I would never see a piece of wood [shine].”185 Pat Khoza’s satisfaction was more personal. She sold everything she put on display. For her, the sale validated the effort she had put in during the previous year—as well as the bad food, the dirty looks, the torn clothes and busted hands. She was emotional: “Ooh! I nearly wanted to cry.” Art was supposed to be a conversation, and with a sale, the conversation was joined. It validated the experience. “You perhaps cannot believe how much just that sentence has invigorated me,” a former student wrote in 1964 after having learned that the school had sold one of his pieces.186 In 1976, Christina Jikelo’s offering was modest: a small sculpture and a “string picture,” which was actually a composition in yarn glued to paper.187 She sold only her small sculpture; it was the first and only sale in an ephemeral starburst of a career. She grinned in recalling the satisfaction of that moment. It was enough.188 The sale closed. The students reunited and packed the remnants, which went back to the mission and were either discarded on campus or stuffed into trunks to return home with their creators. Peirson stayed behind to go to the bank. The following day, she came to campus and distributed to the students their portions of the proceeds, along with a written copy of their final report. And then the students clambered into shared taxis for the short trip to Richmond, the now-familiar journey to Pietermaritzburg, and the train home. Peirson and Lancaster stayed behind, tidying up, exhaling, and readying campus for the class to come. The campus was empty and still. Lorna Peirson took her work seriously; her students remembered her, affectionately, as being “like a man.”189 She described herself as having a very stoic, English, “stiff-upper-lip” disposition. But in the quiet of the library or the studio, each year like clockwork she cried. This was the last beat in the school’s annual rhythm. She missed her students. Their song was hers, and it had gone silent. No more mallets, no more brushes—at least, none until next year. In 2013, the memory of each year’s end was still enough to bring tears to her eyes. In the past, year

Figure 5.28 Alex Mauwane at the exhibition, 1978, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4, with the permission of the CC

after year, her tears would eventually stop and she would get back to work. As night fell, she would gather her things and walk among the statues and murals to her car. She made her way carefully down the rutted road, past the girls’ hostel and the practicing school, past the swing and Silverman Jara’s monster, and home to her house in Richmond. Her thoughts then turned to the challenge of introducing yet another class of students to the labors and privileges of art.190

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Chapter 6

Apartheid

On Monday, September 15, 1980, Silverman Jara was stoned to death. He was killed by his own students as he attempted to prevent them from burning their school.1 His was the fourth death resulting from the riots that had roiled the Ciskei over the previous fourteen days. The Bantustan’s top official, Chief Minister Lennox Sebe, flew in by helicopter and noted that such a thing had never happened before. “People must realize that we are no longer contending here with students but with terrorists who have no consideration for human life,” he insisted, “I am convinced these children will kill their own parents.”2 Thus was Silverman Jara—a teacher and an artist—enlisted in the raging conflicts of his time and place, conflicts that saw students taking up arms and politicians using teachers to advance their own agendas. Jara’s brutal fate attested to the inescapable fact that there was a harsh world beyond Richmond. If students typically left campus enthused, filled to the brim with the essence of Art, they were forced to adapt quickly to the reality of teaching and working in 1960s and 1970s South Africa. Knowing this, Daphne Biyela did not want to leave. “If I had it my way, I would have gone on and on in an environment like Ndaleni,” she remembered, “but unfortunately, we were supposed to be there for a year and from there we

Figure 6.1 Ndaleni residents and Monster, by Silverman Jara, 2013, photograph

by the author

were supposed to go and face our crude reality and see what we could do about it.”3 For some students, the challenges were quick and devastating. Kenny Muthambi left campus with his classmate Amos Mbuthu; they traveled together to Pietermaritzburg, then went their separate ways. Mbuthu never made it home—he was knifed to death by “thugs” during his journey.4 The world beyond the mission gates could be an ugly, dangerous, violent place. Francis Halala had helped make the frieze around the mission hall. He left campus more than a decade before Mbuthu’s ill-fated journey. Unlike Mbuthu, he made it home and tried to find a position teaching art. His personal and professional quest was soon diverted, however, for in 1963, his community was deemed a “black spot,” and the people were moved to a new location. Their new home was filthy and mosquito ridden; the rains failed that year, and “the heat dried crops before they neared maturity.” Halala wrote to Peter Bell: “I have seen nothing except drying. . . . I did not think I would see starvation in the near future,” he told his art teacher, but now famine was everywhere.5

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Halala was an art teacher, not a farmer or a politician. He found some work to occupy himself in the new location. A local church hired him to make three mosaics and one concrete sculpture. “I shall struggle to represent Ndaleni Art Teachers [and] the name of Art,” he assured Bell.6 Like Silverman Jara, Amos Mbuthu, and Daphne Biyela, Francis Halala reentered the wider world of apartheid with the skill set he had developed during his study at the art school. Like most of his fellow students, he was convinced that art (or Art) was fundamental to personal and social progress and he had determined that the Bantu Education system was where the work of art would continue in South African society. He longed to teach. We have seen how art students had compromised with the state in order to spend a year studying art; now they had to spend at least the same amount of time teaching for the government bureaucracy that had funded their education. The year on campus had necessitated numerous other compromises and adaptations, the upshot of which was the unique experience of Ndaleni—a neat, self-contained space that was a part of but also apart from apartheid. Yet the art school was also framed entirely by apartheid, which meant that once back home or back in their schools, art teachers needed to continue to adapt in order to practice their own, particular art. For them, apartheid was no abstraction. It was the bureaucratic complications of travel, ethnicity, and residence. It was the challenge of finding the sort of position for which one had been trained and teaching as one had been taught. Apartheid was compromise unto collaboration; apartheid was protest and moments of devastating collision between radical students and dedicated teachers like Silverman Jara. Apartheid was navigating Bantu Education and Bantustan bureaucracies for wages and materials; it was a school with fifteen teachers and more than one thousand students.7 Apartheid was also recurring wedges of color forced into what Biyela described as “grey reality.”8 Elijah Zwane began to teach in 1961; in March, he wrote to Bell about his initial impressions. “Wishing to see what I had in my class, I introduced modeling in clay and picture painting, and the work of the pupils struck me with wonder,” he reported. It was marvelous to “see what talents [are] buried in the nerves of an African child.” 9 As more Ndaleni-trained art teachers went out to teach, their school’s correspondence files thickened with stories about the challenges they faced in working for Bantu Education. Yet so, too, did reports of successful exhibitions and stimulating class sessions trickle in; so, too, did graduates send to their

teachers at Ndaleni small examples of their own students’ work, talismans of the work of art within—and irreducibly because of—apartheid. For these art teachers, apartheid was as much the promise of progress as it was the reality of limitation. Bantu Education art teachers’ successes—and their own sense of themselves and of the possibilities of their own lives—were embedded in the structures of white supremacy. Which meant that art teachers faced new challenges by the end of the 1970s, as those structures entered into a decline marked by moments such as the death of Silverman Jara. This world beyond Richmond was where Silverman Jara lived. Apartheid was what he had to work with; it was his raw material. It was through apartheid that he was able to say something and from apartheid that he, and so many others, strove to create something lasting and beautiful. Teaching

Ndaleni graduates were trained to teach art in the Bantu Education schools, but that was quite different than actually being able to do so. As the course developed in the mid-1950s through the early 1960s, it was only the rare graduate who found a position teaching as he or she had been trained to do. Selby Mvusi was a lucky one; after he left campus in 1954, he moved to Durban and took up a position at the Loram High School, while continuing to develop his own art practice. For two years, Mvusi taught art. He trained his students in watercolors and landscape and successfully petitioned the Durban Art Gallery for permission to visit the collection.10 We have already seen how Mvusi inspired students to make their way to Ndaleni. The same was true for his successor at Loram, Eric Ngcobo, who took over the post when Mvusi left to study in the United States (see chapter 7). Yet Mvusi and Ngcobo were exceptional. Dealing with frustrated graduates was among the many pressing tasks that faced Lorna Peirson when she took over for Peter Bell in 1963. The first-generation Ndaleni graduates were exceptionally well educated, which led the Bantu Education Department to regard them suspiciously. Indeed, unlike the situation during subsequent years when the department invested in art teachers by funding their applications, many of the first Ndaleni graduates had no relationship with the government bureaucracy that they hoped would employ them.11 Before he was a witness to starvation, Francis Halala was simply trying to find a job. He wrote to Bell repeatedly in the early 1960s, asking

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Figure 6.2 Practice teaching, 1968, Ndaleni Scrapbook 3, with the permission of

the CC

for any news about positions and begging both his teacher and Grossert for help. After the stimulation of Ndaleni, he was bored. “Nothing is more tiresome . . . than doing the very same thing repeatedly,” he confessed. “Hardly [a] stone [has] escaped my eyes in the two hundred square yards” around him. Halala applied for jobs beyond the schools, including an apprenticeship at a pottery workshop in Johannesburg—only to find that another Ndaleni graduate had already taken the position.12 Bell tried to comfort Halala by advising that he seek the counsel of Solomon Sedibane, another Rand-based art teacher who had finally found a position. “I hope you will not repeat his many years unemployed,” Bell admitted, “but his patience during his time demonstrates [that] he . . . has ‘kept faith.’”13 Sedibane had indeed kept faith with art education, although it had not been easy. He was a member of Die Boksombende, the group of four students from Lemana Training College who had gone to study with Atkins in 1956. But Sedibane had not yet completed his teacher qualifications, and he had a difficult time securing a position upon finishing his specialist teacher’s certificate. He returned home to the Johannesburg area in 1958 and tried to eke out a living teaching wood carving to anyone who was interested. “He was a true missionary,” Bell remembered. Apart from that tutoring, however,

Figure 6.3 Solomon Sedibane, 1968, Ndaleni Scrapbook 3, with the permission

of the CC

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by 1961 Sedibane was spending most of his time working on a farm. A few African artists were making a name for themselves in Johannesburg, and Sedibane was interested in pursuing that path. But sculptors such as Sydney Kumalo worked in bronze, not wood. Sedibane asked Bell if he knew of any place where he, Sedibane, might be trained in the medium. “It would be a wonderful thing if you could develop a reputation for bronze work,” Bell enthused, but it was an expensive prospect. They schemed together about it for a few weeks before Sedibane was finally appointed as the art teacher at the Wilberforce Institute in Evaton, south of Johannesburg. Wilberforce had been founded by the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, but was now a Bantu Education training college. Sedibane started working in May 1961. He had been unemployed for three years.14 Since Wilberforce was a training college, art was already part of the curriculum as an elective subject. Sedibane had thus landed softly. He was well aware that he was fortunate and empathized with his classmates who had not enjoyed his good luck. Training colleges were feeders in and out of Ndaleni. Silverman Jara did his teacher training with Frieda Lombard at Healdtown in the Eastern Cape before going to Ndaleni; after completing his certificate, he moved right into a position teaching art at St. Matthews Training College. He, like Sedibane, was actually able to teach art, whereas many of his classmates despaired of finding any work at all. Like Sedibane, George Khubeka had proved to be a talented sculptor during his time at Ndaleni. Unfortunately, his skill did not translate into being a hirable Bantu Education art teacher. “I am stranded of any post,” he grumbled in March 1961. He had been forced to do some clerical work to pay back his Ndaleni bursary and was struggling with an “illness of the brain,” as he put it. “I suspect nerve breakdown or whatever people call it,” he told Peter Bell. His life beyond Richmond was not what he had imagined it would be.15 In the mid-1960s, Khubeka had recovered enough to find and hold a position teaching Afrikaans in a primary school in Natal. There was no art in his school, and he worried that Ndaleni was rapidly receding behind him, given that he “hardly had time to think or remember” what he had learned there.16 Abednego Dlamini was anxious that he was doomed to a similar fate. “Here outside the conditions are not favorable for the gospel we have in our veins and brains,” he moaned. Dlamini was a training college and Ndaleni graduate, yet he was learning that although “one may have a desire to paint and carve,” little was possible without “the necessary

apparatus”—in other words, a job.17 Like Khubeka, he flirted with despair when considering “the torturous thorny scenery of this outside world which we are traversing.”18 He remembered Ndaleni fondly and wanted desperately to contribute to the institution—or at least to make a donation to cover the cost of the school newsletter. But in 1961, he could not afford even R1. It pained him to admit that “I am now struggling as a man.”19 Bell did his best to reassure Ndaleni graduates that their efforts would be worth it, reminding them of his own struggles to pay for school and to find work. In September 1963, their frustrations became Peirson’s challenge; she began to field complaints from around the country and to petition both Grossert and his successor, a Pretoria-based bureaucrat named M. M. K. Moolman, to place specialist art teachers where they could actually teach art. Her own research suggested that apartheid South Africa lacked the infrastructure to support the course it had created. Arts and crafts—still called “handwork” in many places—was a required subject only in the primary schools, which meant that demand for art teachers was highest in schools serving the youngest children. This suited the developing Ndaleni syllabus, with its emphasis on child art and the experience of teaching primary school students in the practicing school. But across the country, “the bulk of the work is craftwork and the expressive arts such as picture-making, modeling and carving are given less attention.” Expressive art was fundamental to the “gospel” Dlamini and the others had imbibed at Ndaleni, and even if they were able to find a position, they would be challenged to shift the focus beyond so-called traditional crafts. Yet to teach craftwork in the primary schools was the best-case scenario in the mid-1960s. Art was an elective subject, available in some higher primary schools; just a few schools—such as Mvusi’s Loram High—offered art at the secondary, junior certificate level. Only a minuscule fraction of the already tiny percentage of black South Africans who went on to do their senior certificate studied art, and beyond teacher-training colleges, art was unavailable in any technical college or university for Africans. The outside world thus presented many “closed doors and [a] lack of opportunity,” Peirson conceded in 1965. Therefore, she saw her task as not only to teach art to the students on campus but also to reassure those who had left that they had not attended art school in vain. “Is it not . . . the case that the Art of a people depends in the final instance on the creative energy of the people?” This was Ndaleni’s task in South Africa: to find, develop, and cultivate that energy, to “step in . . . and make history. You who are

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teaching, can you keep your mind on the need for young people to be stimulated into expressiveness?” Those without positions had work to do as well. “Can you give the children near your home some inspiration” by continuing to work, without financial or other reward? Ndaleni the institution had been intended to service the Bantu Education syllabus; it was clear that it had in fact leap-frogged beyond the system’s capabilities. But that was no excuse. Peirson had faith that when the government “sees that the Africans of South Africa are bursting with energy of their wish to express themselves . . . then schools will appear.” To have no conventional outlet for one’s unique background and perspective was alienating and lonely—but loneliness and isolation were the natural conditions of the avant-garde.20 Having spent a year studying the vital role of art in education—and having experienced the work of art in their own lives—graduates were eager to spread the gospel. “We have, as leaders in this field, a great responsibility resting on our shoulders,” Dan Rakgoathe told his fellow graduates in 1964. He applied a Sotho proverb—“to have a tree down, you have to work at its base”—to the teaching of art. “Let us begin now with the few that art [has] entrusted to our teaching, to work doubly hard to make [from] them a better and a civilized nation of tomorrow.” Through Bantu Education, art “entrusted” South Africa’s students to Ndaleni and its graduates: “Let us teach the true principles of art!”21 By the late 1960s, art had entrusted students to Francis Halala as well. He was teaching art and other subjects in a primary school in the Eastern Transvaal, near Kruger National Park. He was never satisfied with the position, but at least he was getting paid to teach—and besides, he needed to keep working to look after the “aunties and mother . . . [who] suffered in educating me.”22 Halala had witnessed the scourge of deprivation firsthand and knew that he was fortunate to have found work. He settled into the regular rhythms of teaching under Bantu Education. After years of struggle, “undoubtedly, this is life,” he reflected.23 Halala’s relative success coincided with the demographic and infrastructural expansion of Bantu Education in the 1960s and into the 1970s. Those years saw the number of both students and schools increase dramatically, especially at the primary level, which was where art teaching was concentrated.24 By 1967, Peirson could report that three-quarters of correspondents were teaching in Bantu Education, with half of these actually teaching art. Both the percentage of graduates employed by the state and the percentage who taught art continued to increase over the next decade.25

Getting work was only the first challenge for the graduates. Once within a Bantu Education school, art teachers were forced to adapt what they had learned during their year at Ndaleni to the economic and political realities of their new context. Ben Keva began to teach arts and crafts in the Cape in 1966 and quickly found himself overwhelmed at the thought of needing to translate what he had learned into lessons. Peirson calmed him. “I would start with one lecture where I would try to make it clear why art is taught in schools,” she advised, “i.e., to develop the natural capacity for self expression.” Art was about encouraging the “thinking required from the children when they are to make something,” which in turn “develops their personalities and leads to development of . . . imagination.”26 Here, Peirson echoed her mentor, Jack Grossert, who spoke regularly about the need for teachers to translate philosophy into pedagogy. An art teacher’s first task was to “try to understand what the child has tried to say,” he explained to an audience of educators in the Northern Transvaal in 1960. Art teaching was thus not teaching as typically understood under the prevailing system of ‘Christian National education.’ One could not merely dictate “how to draw a tree or landscape” without prompting “uninteresting repetition.” Instead, teachers needed to cultivate “inspiration, or sincerity, or truthfulness,” the development of which were the ideal outcomes of the art course.27 Such lofty aspirations were grounded in both the material that was available for student work and the everyday negotiations between art teachers and their colleagues in the schools and bureaucracy. Grossert and his successors could not be everywhere; even before the massive expansion of the l960s, Grossert estimated that it would take the national art organizer thirty years to visit every single African school.28 When it came time actually to teach, art teachers were on their own; their lessons, distilled from a year of wide-ranging study, typically came down to utilizing the material at hand. Solomon Mabusela was delighted with his surroundings in Potgeitersrus, off the Pretoria-to-Pietersburg road. “It’s been raining cats and dogs,” he reported, and “I am sure of good results for art because there is enough plaited grass.” He developed lessons that exploited the environment: his students wove floor mats from the grass, for example, and accessorized these with plastic and glass beads.29 Isaiah Mnguni found a position about 200 kilometers from Mabusela, in Bronkhorstspruit. There, too, there was enough grass for his classes. “The place is teeming with material,” he exulted.30

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Figure 6.4 Students of Amelia Shishuba (class of 1971) with weaving, 1970s, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4,

with the permission of the CC

Not all materials were equal in the eyes of Ndaleni graduates, however. Mabusela thought that the thick grass around his school meant good results for art, yet his own training had emphasized graphic art and sculpture rather than the crafts associated with the plant. For his part, Mabusela was undeterred, but others recognized that it was limiting to teach with grass alone. “The local materials are wanting,” the mosaicist Gabriel Vilakazi noted. Yes, there was grass, “but in a place like this it is practically impossible for one to do anything in the line of Art.”31 Many teachers reported success in locating materials for grass-, bone-, and hornwork, and a steady drip of news coverage revealed school shows across the country where pupils’ skills in so-called traditional crafts were displayed. For Vilakazi and many others, however, their work was about self-expression, not local craft traditions, and to work in grass alone was a disappointment. They did what they could to provide students with opportunities. Ejijah Zwane had carved and painted while at Ndaleni. His school had neither paints nor wood, so he mixed different soils with water and had

his students “paint” with reds, grays, and browns.32 Alice Kepu used wet chalk and crayons instead of paint; her area wanted even for suitable grass or ilala, so her students wove as best they could with recycled wool.33 Nathaniel Masinamela lacked even that option: his students outside Pretoria used “rolled plastic bags” to make floor mats.34 Such innovative use of materials demonstrated the creativity of Kepu and Masinamela; it is less clear whether rolled plastic bags and tired wool were materials well suited to their students’ creative expression. For that, the Letaba-based teacher Joseph Shimbambu needed wood, “but there is no wood, because the school is right in the location.”35 Herman Tsebe wanted wood as well; like Mabusela, he taught in Potgeitersrus, but he was not satisfied with the ample local grass. “Things are tough this side because of a lack of materials,” he confessed. “The chief of this place . . . does not allow people to cut wood or dig clay from the river or anywhere, because this, according to him, might cause soil erosion.” The chief’s attentiveness to apartheid era betterment programs did little to advance the cause of art education in his area. “I’m unable to do anything with wood and clay,” Tsebe concluded, and he, too, began to focus on grass.36 Ndaleni graduates who were interested in teaching via a more expressive medium had to improvise. Students frequently wrote to Peirson in 1967 to inquire whether the school had a reliable supply of either wood or stone. Ndaleni usually had none to spare. Peirson recommended that they contact the local municipalities, since “trees are commonly grown in towns and are often being cut down to clear the way for electric cables and telephone wires.”37 Waste materials, suitable for art teaching, were a welcome byproduct of South Africa’s ongoing modernization. Teachers scoured construction sites in search of used cement bags, the linings of which took on a second life as paper for “school children to draw on.”38 Gilbert Nguza advised that “art material is free and cheap from all over”; he cited “factory dust bins” as a reliable resource. Nguza also recycled used magazines and newspapers from the local white community. Each of his students contributed around a quarter pound of “flour from home and a teaspoon of fat or so,” and together, they had the ingredients for papier-mâché and glue to fashion an original collage.39 Vivian Bopape wanted to be similarly resourceful with her students in Mamelodi township, adjacent to Pretoria. She wrote letters to various local companies, seeking permission to access their waste, and she received

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a number of positive responses: sponge, used sugarcane stalks, pieces of decorated glass. She had met the challenge of materials, but she was soon defeated by a new challenge. Citing a lack of resources, her principal canceled the art classes at the school. Bopape had to write back to each firm to let them know they could trash their waste.40 Bopape’s correspondence revealed that teaching art in Bantu Education was not just about training and materials—it was about personalities as well. The Bantu Education Department was a distant bureaucracy, embodied in directives from Pretoria and occasional visits from the inspectorate. The intimate relationships between teachers and their principals constituted the day-to-day shape of the system.41 Bopape’s principal did not explain why he had canceled the art classes; perhaps he knew that many other schools found other uses for students’ and teachers’ time. Michael Ncamane reported that at his school in Thaba Nchu, for instance, “we do gardening instead of art” during the period set aside for “handwork.”42 The old association of handwork with labor died hard; at Edwin Nyatlo’s school, the time allotted for art saw children “ordered to do just funny odd jobs such as carrying stones to and fro, cutting of grass, and all sorts of funny things.” Nyatlo protested that not all handwork was the same—surely this was maintenance, not art!—but the principal was undeterred.43 Given the frequency with which such anecdotes came to Indaleni, it was not surprising that Peirson was repeatedly urging both the department and her graduates to do what they could to take the term handwork out of circulation.44 Some principals willfully (or ignorantly) misused the educational opportunity art afforded to their students, but others were guilty only of neglect. Salphy Phoshoko’s principal was simply not interested in art: “He promised to help me but now I can see he ignores [me] and even avoids me . . . I feel like crying.”45 Bantu Education schools were generally unpleasant places to teach; there were too many students, too few resources, and too little appreciation. Perhaps it was to be expected that pervasive insecurity would spill over into teachers’ relationships with each other and each others’ disciplines. Alice Kepu reported on the failings of her fellow teachers, “who did not attend the Art course [and who] discourage children” by laughing “when sculpture is displayed.”46 Maurice Huma’s situation was even worse. His school already had an art teacher, but this individual had not gone to Ndaleni and evidently felt threatened by his better-trained colleague. “I don’t … know how to overcome [the] things

happening here,” Huma fretted. The other teacher “misuses the subject Art and Craft. He encourages copying [and] my words just [go] right over his head.” It was a pity. Huma’s principal supported the art program, there were materials, and Huma “had already seen some junior artists in the group.” But the other teacher was “spoiling the cream of our school” and “damaging some pupils’ talents.” The Ndaleni graduate’s efforts to instill creativity were withering under the assault of instruction that encouraged students “to make the same thing they saw the previous year.”47 Copying was the bane of art teachers’ existence. Their training at Ndaleni had emphasized originality over and against technical facility or talent—indeed, the case of Lindiwe Ntuli revealed that copying was the ultimate cause for expulsion. “We want our children to be original at all times because copying destroys self-confidence,” declared Eric Ngcobo, Mvusi’s successor at Loram High and, in the mid-1970s, the organizer of arts and crafts in Zululand. Copying, he asserted, “builds false skills, hinders initiative, and kills the imagination.”48 Francis Malinga agreed but found himself overpowered by other teachers who wanted students to copy the work of their more accomplished classmates. He protested that “work should be more expressive than impressive.” His was a common lament: “What can an art teacher do when faced with a problem of uninterested and unwilling staff members?” Malinga had learned a particular pedagogy of vision while at art school. Beyond Richmond, not many shared that view.49 Malinga’s complaints were echoed by Stuurman Thulare, who taught near Pretoria. The city saw a number of tourists, many of whom were interested in returning to Europe or the United States with authentic “tribal” curios. At the Pretoria Zoo, for example, there were “Ndebele women who sell their craftwork to visitors.” Some of Thulare’s better-off students reasoned that it would be easier to buy some tchotchkes to pass off as their own than to struggle to meet the technical standards his colleagues evidently preferred. “Many children go [to the zoo] and buy their craftwork,” he reported, and “many teachers are pleased to see the beautiful work ‘done’ by their pupils.” This impoverished both teacher and student—the former because the student thought him or her “foolish” and the latter because the child missed the opportunity actually to experience art. Thulare deemed the situation appalling: “Our Africans should never be composed of nurses, doctors, lawyers, teachers and ministers, but artists also.” Copying undermined African society’s future.50

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Thulare’s colleagues were more interested in their present economic circumstances than the future of African art. Although Thulare did not say so explicitly, the coincidence of the students buying crafts and teachers applauding them for doing so suggests that the teachers were thinking in terms of the financial benefits students’ “work” might bring into the school. Economic considerations had been at the root of Francis Malinga’s philosophical conflicts with his fellow teachers as well. “The principal and his staff [are] more interested in selling beautiful, financially valuable and very realistic articles,” he explained, which is why they wanted the less talented students to mimic the more talented.51 Art teachers were apoplectic at the prospect, but we can easily see the market’s appeal. Bantu Education schools were poor, often desperately so. Viola Ntlabati begged her principal to buy paints for her classes in a King Williams Town primary school. He refused: “Where will I get funding? Where will I get money to buy these paints?”52 In schools like Gabriel Vilakazi’s, where students were forced to kneel on the floor when writing because of a lack of tables, many considered art materials an unnecessary indulgence.53 Hosea Kgame reported little progress in his art classes. He speculated that the “cause of my problem” was that the school’s buildings were “shanties”; they were due to be modernized, he said, expressing hope that “things will go smoothly and better.”54 Godfrey Mpulu might have wished for shanties—or structures of any sort. He taught in Guguletu, a new township outside Cape Town (he was one of the very few Ndaleni students who actually came from the Western Cape, reflecting that region’s lack of Bantustans and recognized African settlements). His was a “school without buildings.” Yet he still worked and taught his students how to do things such as make fanciful masks from papier-mâché.55 As many teachers attested, given the prevailing constraints the craft market was an opportunity to bring money into the schools. It was also a tremendous threat to the ideals of art education, as Grossert, Peirson, and their students understood them. Grossert rejected the idea that schools might become centers for the production of traditional crafts. “Primary schools cannot be turned into vocational schools,” he warned, since “art and crafts . . . are taught because they provide the basic education experiences for the development of imagination.” The tension was between the expressive use of whatever materials were available and the need to please the market. Teaching with selling in mind “merely fosters curio crafts,” not original

Figure 6.5 Students of Godfrey Mpulu (class of 1974) with masks, Gugulethu,

Cape Province, 1970s, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4, with the permission of the CC

expression, Gossert stated. Yet the idea that schools might serve as industrial centers, à la Charles Loram (and Grace Dieu) reemerged under apartheid. As early as 1950, educational authorities had seized on the idea that an African economic modernity would be fashioned in part through craftwork in the schools. In June of that year, for example, the Transvaal Education Department announced “big plans” to strengthen “visual education.” Modernity, filtered through tradition, was the premise—“the application of the African motive to modern tendencies” through the “development of original Bantu art and craft.” Students could learn how to make a “beautiful hand-bag made of grass,” for example, “[which] could well be used by the ordinary housewife as a shopping bag.”56 Many Ndaleni graduates eventually learned that the idea of schools as sites of practical production was difficult to eradicate.

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Indeed, the market for African craftwork infiltrated even the Ndaleni system through the 1960s and 1970s. Sometimes an issue of ARTTRA that extolled originality would also report about new opportunities to market work under the rubric of “tribal curios.” In 1966, for instance, Peirson reported that F. J. De Villiers of the Bantu Investment Corporation had contacted her in search of “Craftwork and Works of Art by Africans, to be sold by him to visitors and tourists.” De Villiers was not an art education theorist, but he knew the words to the song: he sought to establish craft depots around the country “to encourage people to produce what lies within them in the way of creativeness. It is feared that the old traditional crafts are being lost.” “Creativeness” sounded good, as did the call for Africans to “produce what lies within them.” Yet this could only go so far. He wanted work with an “African flavor,” Peirson related, because that was what would sell.57 School arts and crafts competitions were regular events and had been since Loram first instructed that school-aged children should devote time to working with their hands. To read the Bantu World or other media across the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s is to read numerous accounts of such competitions and shows. Each told the same story: schoolchildren displayed their wares, local people gathered en masse, a few whites bought objects as “tribal curios,” and a government representative (typically an educational official or frequently a “mayoress”) applauded the local community for holding on to its traditions. Standing in front of a display of students’ “beadwork, hornwork, tinwork, wirework, . . . basketry and artwork,” a Bantu Education official hailed the students of Moroka township in 1961, to cite one example, and declared that “all the talents possessed by children should be tapped and developed.” An estimated ten thousand people visited the show.58 Although descriptions of these art events were couched in the language of cultural preservation, the primary incentive behind school shows was financial. De Villiers and the Bantu Investment Corporation already knew that so-called tribal curios were a growth industry in the Northern Transvaal. Newspapers regularly covered the Ndebele women’s success in selling beads along the Johannesburg–Pretoria road. “There is a moral here,” Bantu World concluded, “it will pay the Africans to use their spare time in making things with clay, skins, leather and wood.”59 Since students were already doing that, art teachers were pressured to produce items suitable for the tourist trade. This was the context within which art teachers

reported that students were buying items at sites such as the Pretoria Zoo in order to use them as models for their own arts and crafts at school.60 This approach demonstrated initiative—and maybe even industry?—yet it was hardly in keeping with Ndaleni’s ideals. When Abednego Dlamini reported from Natal that his math and science students had expressed interest in making baskets “because they saw their parents selling them on the South Coast Road,” Peirson urged him to resist the temptation to be so market driven. But she was also realistic. Students’ families needed money, and crafts sold: “I wonder if you could influence these parents to raise their standard of craftsmanship,” she compromised. Market demand led to “coarse and loose baskets,” obviously “made in a hurray.” The tribal curio trade was regrettable, but that was no excuse for shabby work.61 Student-created baskets might look similar to conventional curios, but Peirson hoped that within their woven strands there might be hidden evidence of the work of art. Art never exists in a vacuum. As Dewey knew, artists were necessarily social beings, and their work was mute without the prevailing material and intellectual conditions. Teachers lacked materials as well as financial and intellectual support. So they worked with what they had—wool instead of grass, plastic instead of ilala, or dirt instead of paint. Copying was anathema, but the means to promote original expression were far from assured. Art teachers struggled to navigate the line between the ideal of self-expression and the possibly more immediate wages of the work of art. They had been trained for these challenges. Even as Michael Ncamane bemoaned that his students gardened during the art period, he thanked Peirson for “her inspiring words and talks to the art students” in his class. “Today I am a man who is able to face many difficulties and hope just because of you,” he declared. At Ndaleni, he had learned that art was tiring labor. It had not been easy there, and it was not easy on the other side of the mission gates. Ncamane had lost a year’s salary to train as an art teacher— but there was no art in his school. He spent his free time searching the waste bins of Bloemfontein for scraps of wood. He found little. Still, he told Peirson, “You did a lot to my daily life which you didn’t know, but I knew it myself and I realized it.”62 He was grateful for his patience and persistence. He did not say so, but perhaps he shared Peirson’s conviction that struggles were actually the point—did his life not epitomize the artist’s challenge of facing the world imaginatively and creatively? “In art especially there must

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always be a struggle,” Peirson wrote, channeling Dewey, in 1970. “The tension of an inward conflict in a creative mind adds vibrations of vitality to works of art. So my special message to artists and teachers is to try to succeed but beware of success when you find it.” Embedded in government schools across apartheid South Africa, teachers worked and waited for the opportunity to be spoiled by success.63 Politics

By the early 1970s, the success that art teachers awaited was in the hands of new bureaucracies and newly empowered bureaucrats. Hosea Kgame’s Mabopane school was a collection of shanties, and he had no material with which to teach, he told Peirson in 1974. But since she was a Bantu Education employee, this was technically no longer her problem: Mabopane was in Bophuthatswana, and the schools there were the responsibility of that Bantustan’s department of education. Kgame knew this. “I even wrote to Mr. Kgasi”—the organizer of arts and crafts in the local government—“and informed him about my problems. In reply I received so many promises [that were] not fulfilled.” A. R. Kgasi “promised to pay a visit to our school,” Kgame wrote, but he had not yet come. “Even now I am waiting for him.”64 A. R. Kgasi had graduated from the specialist art teachers’ course in the 1950s. By the time Peirson arrived on campus, he was a “well-known Warmbaths artist and sculptor,” who supported his art by teaching at the local Emmarentia Geldenhuys School.65 A decade later, he was a government official, in charge of arts and crafts for Lucas Mangope’s administration. From the outset, Ndaleni art teachers had navigated the material and philosophical limitations of Bantu Education schools. But these schools were situated in fluid political space, on the interstices of the white Republic of South Africa government and the numerous, ostensibly independent black states that the apartheid government had willed into being. Ndaleni art teachers had embarked on unexpected journeys across apartheid South Africa, to experience the freedom of vision that the campus offered. But, as their travels to Durban and Pietermaritzburg in search of art had indicated, they were also black in South Africa. That they had learned to see differently often mattered little in a society that demanded they navigate the bureaucracies of ethnicity, residence, and patronage that constituted the black experience of apartheid, just like anyone else.

Requests for paperwork were part of the regular business that flowed through the Indaleni Mission’s post office. By the late 1960s, the vast majority of students attended art school on government bursaries, in exchange for which they pledged to teach in Bantu Education schools for at least one year. In addition to the year of training, the government promised a slight bump in their salary, in recognition of their specialist training. This was confusing—did one actually have to be teaching art to earn the increased salary? It was hardly fair to penalize students for the government’s failure to create enough positions to meet the supply. The certificate students received for passing the course became yet another piece of exceptionally important paper under apartheid. With it and a position, things were a little easier—which helps to explain why, after Ezekiel Mabusela’s house burned down in 1965, he urgently needed a replacement certificate.66 Old students reappeared in the archive after long absences in need of documentation. Hamlet Hobe had worked with Abednego Dlamini on the training college breezeway mural in 1960, but in the years that followed he struggled to find work and eventually went silent. Seventeen years after his last missive, in 1979 he appealed to Peirson to replace a lost certificate, so that he might continue to justify his marginally augmented salary.67 At times, former students appealed to their teachers even when there was little they could do to alleviate the quotidian frustrations of the apartheid bureaucracy. Virginia Vapi asked whether Peirson could attest that Vapi had filled the terms of her bursary by teaching for a year after leaving Ndaleni. Vapi had done so, but for some reason, the department did not believe her and demanded that she repay the loan. There was nothing Peirson could do.68 Michael Mzondeka from Boksburg made a related appeal to Lancaster in 1974. He needed a letter to prove to “the Influx Control Board that I was with you for the whole of last year.” In his absence, Mzondeka had lost his residency qualification under section 10 of the Group Areas Act. “At present I am not permitted to be in the area [in] which I was born,” he said, and he was enduring a Kafkaesque experience of running “from office to office [because of] reference book troubles.” He hoped a letter from Lancaster would prove why he had gone away and that he was qualified to remain. The archive does not reveal whether Lancaster’s letter helped to restore order.69 Solomon Sedibane was a diligent record keeper, who managed not only to keep his own papers in order but also to navigate bureaucratic hurdles and send numerous Wilberforce students to Ndaleni. Yet his bookkeeping

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skills did not preclude conflict with the system. Wilberforce had been an AME school. The relationship between the church and the government was similar to Indaleni’s: the AME continued to own the land and the buildings while the government ran the school. By the late 1960s, the physical infrastructure of Wilberforce had deteriorated badly; that, combined with the pressure of too many students and not enough support, prompted Sedibane to take a position at the Hebron Training College, elsewhere on the Rand. “I am quite happy here,” Sedibane reported, but unfortunately, he was “only [able to] remain here for a year or two because of Ethnic grouping.” He was Pedi, ostensibly a citizen of the Lebowa Bantustan, who had had a special dispensation to live in Evaton while working at Wilberforce. But now, he was teaching in a Tswana area. It was a pity—he liked the school and was beginning to develop a pipeline there to rival his former network at Wilberforce. The principal and he worked well together, to the degree that the administrator suggested that he “register as a Tswana.” Sedibane refused. “That would create a big problem for my family and my relatives,” he explained, and he resigned himself to moving on, which he did in early 1972. Peirson was sympathetic to his plight but pragmatically took advantage of the situation to suggest that he recommend Abiah Ramadi—the creator of The Sower on campus—for the post. Ramadi had struggled to find a suitable position, and she stressed that “he is a good man, [of] good character, intelligent, artistic. He . . . should be in such a post.” It certainly helped that “he is Tswana.”70 Peirson understood that ethnicity increasingly determined who got which positions and the relative authority and security that went with employment. Sedibane knew this himself. While still at Hebron, he schemed with Dan Louw, Moolman’s successor as national organizer of arts and crafts, about the vacant position of arts organizer in Lebowa. Unfortunately, Louw let this be known publicly, angering both Sedibane’s principal and the Lebowa government officials, who preferred to appoint their own man for the job. Sedibane’s reputation suffered; he reported rumors that he was “mentally mixed up.” He was relieved to move on to a new position at the Rehlahliwe Training Institution, a Lebowa Bantustan school near his family home in the northeastern Transvaal. Rehlahliwe was a new school that had been built to satisfy the region’s growing demand for teachers. There was no art program yet, but Sedibane’s principal was “a great lover of art,” and he commissioned the

new art teacher to “work on a cement bust of twenty four inches to fit on the main gate.” Sedibane was content enough in his new position at least to feign enthusiasm for the Lebowa government’s eventual appointment of Ndaleni graduate (and grass enthusiast) Solomon Mabusela to the position of organizer. Mabusela passed through Rehlahliwe on his initial tour of Lebowa’s schools. “It was a happy day for us because it was our first meeting since we parted at Ndaleni” after a refresher course, Sedibane reported. “We promised to help each other in Art circles . . . I wish him the best in his efforts.” Sedibane was a proud man. His good wishes were presumably spiced with envy.71 Organizer was an enviable position to hold. Organizers controlled what funds there were for arts and crafts; the Ndaleni school archives are replete with entreaties from teachers to their respective organizers, pleading for money and materials. And even if funds and materials were not available—as they often were not—to be appointed organizer was to be guaranteed the opportunity to continue one’s involvement with art, at the very least. This is not to say that it was an easy job. Mabusela, Sedibane’s rival, reported the scale of his task shortly after his appointment. Under him were 12 circuit inspectors, 4 training colleges, 54 secondary schools, and—demonstrating the nature of education under apartheid—733 primary schools. The task was a big one. Within three months of his appointment, Mabusela had “already visited more than 80 schools.”72 He doubtlessly agreed with his colleague A. M. Mahosi, the organizer in the Venda schools who had visited 34 schools in his first three months, when he admitted to Peirson that “the distances are frightfully long.” Both Mabusela and Mahosi could attest to Grossert’s conclusion that the dedicated supervision of Bantu Education arts and crafts was work that stretched the definition of possible.73 Still, organizers had a measure of power, and many coveted the position. Jessie Muthige was inspired following his completion of the art course; he aspired to channel his energies into the Vendaland administration as organizer, once the Bantustan received self-government. Bantustan bureaucracies were both opaque and personality driven, however, and Muthige’s application soon ran into a series of problems. First, the administration claimed to have misplaced it; undeterred, he applied again. Art was his life, Muthige explained, and if his application was unsuccessful, he intended to attempt a fine arts degree. Peirson suggested that he focus on an organizer position: although organizer posts were few, they were more plentiful than

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fine arts programs for black people. In mid-July, Muthige learned that the administration had once again rejected his application.74 Muthige saw politics at work. He had been a highly accomplished teacher, a successful principal, and one of Peirson’s best students; his reference letters attested to his intelligence and capabilities. Yet all that had not mattered. Muthige’s father-in-law was apparently “a politician against the Venda office bearers,” and the rumors that reached him suggested that such family ties were enough to deny Muthige the post. “This they told Mr. Louw [the national organizer] in the presence of Hobyane,” an Ndaleni alum who was the organizer for Gazankulu. Moreover, Muthige said, “there is someone I’m not on good terms with holding a seat in government.” That was the Vendaland education planner, which meant that Muthige’s career prospects were murky. He quickly began to sour on art education. “Arts and Crafts is proving a failure in Vendaland,” he steamed, “we shall soon lose faith in it.”75 Peirson tried to reason with him, begging his patience and perseverance: “Try to achieve whatever you can without any help so as to prove your value,” she advised. “Settle down in your own school to do some good work for a couple of years.”76 Muthige did not respond to her encouragement. He decided instead to concentrate his energies on his family’s security. He bought a van and began to make plans to bring fruits and vegetables to serve “the white community in Sibasa town.” He still loved art, however, and began to think beyond the schools. Muthige’s last letter told of his plans to open a curio shop featuring the work of local craftspeople. Peirson was supportive, but she reminded him that “the thing about curio shops is that they are fine for making money but very often they do not deal in real art. So try to know the difference and do not cheapen real art by getting it copied again and again. If you find a creative artist among your people . . . warn him of this.” With that, the file on Jessie Muthige closed.77 And another opened. “It is Mahosi . . . their clerk who will be coming down for training,” Muthige had reported angrily in October 1971.78 “Their clerk,” indeed—the Venda administration’s favored candidate was Andrew Mahosi. He had been working as an inspector’s clerk in Bantu Education since the system’s advent; he was forty-four years old in 1971 and had no background in art.79 “Jessie Muthige has been found unsuitable for the Arts and Crafts Organiser post,” Louw informed Peirson, “instead A. M. Mahosi has been supported by the . . . authority.”80 Mahosi was prepared to apply to

Ndaleni to receive a year’s training, and Louw instructed her to admit him. Muthige had been one of Peirson’s favorite students; her affection for him and his for her are evident in their letters. Yet Ndaleni was a government school and she a government employee, which meant that in this case, the Ndaleni ideal of just reward for creative, diligent labor was subsumed within the vicissitudes of apartheid South Africa. Artists worked with and through the world that was, and that world favored Andrew Mahosi. He was admitted to Ndaleni, finished fifth in the class, and returned to Vendaland to assume his position. At least he took the job seriously. “I realize the immense task which I have to tackle this year,” he acknowledged, “from the looks of thing it appears as if nothing was ever done” to promote art education in the region.81 The advent of Bantustan art officials shifted the balance of power a bit away from Peirson and her school to the Bantustans. She had always chosen which students to admit; now, bureaucrats were able to ensure that their preferred candidates arrived on campus. Peirson was glad to have the help, especially after 1973 when the national government halved the number of bursaries it provided for African students and allotted the difference to the various Bantustan authorities. Upon learning the news, Peirson immediately wrote to the organizers—most of whom were graduates of the Ndaleni art school. One by one, they assured her that their respective departments were committed to allocating bursaries enough to fund the students she admitted. Peirson expressed her relief to Solomon Mabusela, the Lebowa organizer who had vanquished Solomon Sedibane. “In my mind the appointment of homeland art organisers is the best thing that has happened to art education since I first started working with African art,”she declared. She looked expectantly toward the future: “In the next few years we all will be able to see progress.” Mabusela wrote only a very brief reply. He was busy.82 The period immediately following the advent of Bantustan art organizers was the apex of the Bantu Education art program. Authority was decentralized, as the white central government had intended. Funds, however limited, were dispersed to the Bantustan authorities, and more and more students began to do art. What power was available flowed to the peripheries. Under Mahosi, it took material form: following his instructions, the Vendaland authorities supplied “each school with three tins . . . of primary colors (powder colour paints).” Three tins per school was not much, but multiplied across hundreds of schools, it was an investment worth noting.83

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As Mahosi saw it, powder paints addressed two of Vendaland’s stubborn problems: “shortage of materials in most schools visited. . . . Natural materials in most instances are being made use of.” Paints freed students from an environment that favored wood and ilala exclusively. Consequently, “at most schools where I touched, art was neglected and only craft was receiving attention.” His art history education had taught him that paints were a uniquely expressive medium, and this he hoped to promote in the schools under his authority. “The work done at almost all of the schools is mostly stereotyped work,” Mahosi explained, and three tins of powder paints, intelligently utilized, offered a new direction.84 By 1974, Mahosi was ready to declare the Venda arts and crafts program a success. “I am getting every assistance from my Department in the promotion of the subject [and] in the way of materials,” he noted with satisfaction.85 What is more difficult to discern is what that meant for Venda students’ experience of art. How did the students—and especially the primary school students who were the majority—experience being taught by a cadre of occasionally empowered and frequently inspired Ndaleni graduates? The archive is relatively silent about what went on in primary school classrooms, and oral sources are insufficient. (Think back to the first years of your own systematic education. How well do you remember a particular assignment? Probably not very well.) Yet there are hints. Nomvula Hadebe was a student at the Indaleni practicing school in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Her father taught music in the training college, and she and her siblings grew up surrounded by art, like the swing set on which they played. At school, her art teacher was Reynold Mavuso, who had graduated from Ndaleni and then moved down the hill to teach. Forty some years later, she still recalled two of her assignments. The first was a pattern assignment, using a combination of powder paints and what was at hand. No sooner had the students settled in than they were instructed to stand up and go outside in search of a leaf. Hadebe remembered the instructions: this was to be your leaf, different from another’s leaf. They went out and walked the schoolyard, bending down and picking and choosing among the fallen leaves. Back in the classroom, “we would be given paint [and paper]. You dip your leaf in the paint . . . [and] you create your own pattern with the leaf that you have.” This was a very simple assignment, but it captured the essence of art teaching in a rural area like Indaleni. There were some store-bought or scrounged materials

(paints and paper, most likely reel ends begged from a local company) and what was at hand—in this case, leaves. Mavuso combined these elements in an assignment designed to promote originality; no two works would look the same because no two leaves were the same and no two patterns would be exactly replicated. It was exceedingly simple. Hadebe remembered it as nothing more than her “artwork for the day”—but she remembered it as her artwork, which was precisely art education’s point.86 Solomon Baloyi returned to Pretoria after finishing his art training. In his urban setting, he worked to develop assignments that similarly emphasized originality over and against technical facility. He had paints in his school and had his students experiment with color, noting, “You have all the colors, even when they’re using ordinary [primary] colors.” Students explored the possibilities that inhered in the mixing of red, blue, and yellow and learned that, depending of who was doing the mixing, “colors are not the same.” As a teacher, Baloyi’s task was to get students to see the beauty of their particular color scheme and the originality of the image that they created with it. “The proportion might be wrong,” he said, “but when they’re finished, it’s quite good, in terms of how the color has been applied.” He circulated throughout the room and encouraged the students that “this is beautiful. And they can look at it [for hours] and say ‘I made that.’ And it means something to the students. When he takes it home, what he has done is different from the other.” Baloyi was successful with such simple methods, in spite of lacking both material and professional support. He shrugged in remembering how the principal used to send “trouble makers” to art class for punishment. It was no matter—even the worst-behaved students were soon arm deep in paint.87 The experience of one’s self as unique was Nomvula Hadebe’s lasting impression of primary school art classes. In addition to the leaf pattern project, she recalled being assigned to model an animal out of the practicing school’s hard-won clay. She made a cow—but not just any cow: “It was a very special cow to me because it had horns.” Her family kept chickens, which they occasionally slaughtered. Her assignment was on her mind one evening when she was disposing of the uneaten remnants of a chicken. How could she make her cow her own? Hadebe had her father remove two of the large chicken’s talons, and the next day, she affixed them to the head of her model. When the clay animals were ready, Mavuso had the students display them on a table. There they stood, drying, cracked ochre,

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misshapen, lumpy. Hers had chicken toes stuck into the sides of its head. It smiled at her twelve-year-old self. “It was a very special piece of art work for me,” she remembered, “I kept it for a long time.”88 Thousands of kilometers away from Indaleni, during 1973 and 1974 Andrew Mahosi continued the regular work of visiting schools and encouraging teachers to avail themselves of both government and environmental resources. He was proud of his work. He alone among Peirson’s hundreds of correspondents typed each letter he wrote, typically on Venda Authority letterhead. His plan for improving arts and crafts in Venda’s schools was “working perfectly,” he related.89 Peirson saw this as well. When I visited her in 2011 and again in 2013, we reflected on the successes and failures of art under Bantu Education. Both times, she asked me to pause while she rummaged through her collection of student work and art books, before producing a small pig, about 4 inches from snout to tail, that had been woven from grass around a wire frame. She does not know who made it, only that it was made by a Venda child who had been taught by one of her students during the 1970s. “There is no other pig in the world like it, it is unique,” she explained. To me, it was a mystery—I would have no idea how to turn grass into a pig. But to her, it was a talisman of the work of art. In her mind’s eye, she could see that child, forty years and a thousand kilometers distant, probably twelve or so years old, “sitting in the sun” and thinking about his or her creation. The pig, she concluded, “is the summit of my success.”90 To be sure, having a dedicated organizer and well-thought-out classroom assignments did not erase the realities of apartheid. Organizers were cogs in the system that held black life captive, as were art teachers and their students. Solomon Sedibane continued to teach at Rehlahliwe throughout the 1970s. Another Ndaleni graduate eventually joined him there—Kenneth Molotana, class of 1969. Like all Bantustans, Lebowa was a jumble of puzzle pieces, scattered across the Transvaal. Molotana could not find a home near the school, and the white areas surrounding it made for an onerous and expensive commute. “He gets up at 3:30 am and arrives home at 6 pm daily,” Sedibane reported, “[and] he spends R42 a month on bus and taxi fare.”91 Sedibane was very familiar with the logistical challenges the proliferation of political authority presented; he had supported an applicant to Ndaleni who had mistakenly identified himself as a Lebowa resident and had been offered a Lebowa bursary, only to

Figure 6.6 Lorna Peirson at home in Howick, KwaZulu-Natal, 2013, photograph

by the author

have the offer withdrawn because “he does not live in Lebowa.” Ndaleni had lost the bursary and the spot, and Peirson was quite annoyed. From then on, Sedibane made sure to confirm the residential address of each applicant he supported.92 Bantustan bureaucracy forced teachers to make tough choices as well. Kenneth Muthambi had a residential permit in a white area in the Northern Transvaal. But he was a Venda, which meant that he was more likely to receive a Vendaland bursary, and he would

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have to move his family in order to teach under the Venda Authority, not Bantu Education.93 It was rarely simple, yet in exchange for the bureaucratic headaches, for a few years in the mid-1970s, teachers and students across rural Venda, Bophutatswana, Lebowa, Gazankulu, Zululand, Ciskei and elsewhere could avail themselves of bureaucrats dedicated to the cause of art in African education. Mahosi reported in August 1973 that he was just back from a barnstorming trip across the Transvaal. He, Mabusela, and Samuel Hobyane of Gazankulu had made the trip together, offering lectures and inspecting student work. “I offered four lectures—the meaning of arts and crafts, the aims of teaching of arts and crafts, arts and crafts in education and the provision and use of materials,” Mahosi noted.94 It was enough to make art teachers in urban areas jealous. Can we not have a “supervisor in Art to help our Inspector . . . here in Joburg?” complained a Soweto teacher. “Our inspectors don’t know a thing about Art. Really it’s heartbreaking.” The teacher had even “tried to give [the inspector] some books to read,” but the white inspectorate had not attended Ndaleni and could not see.95 This teacher’s frustration was evident. Others were convinced that they still could achieve a great deal, even in urban areas and even without Ndaleni-trained organizers and the relative bounty of the natural environment. Mercy Ghu won the top prize at Ndaleni in 1969 and returned home to Orlando West. It was not her ideal location—she was always complaining about the dust and the lack of green compared to Richmond. But her classroom was a space apart. Her students’ “imagination is fairly wide when it comes to clay or paper mâché modeling. They make all sorts of peculiar animals!” This was precisely the situation for which she had been trained; she found the students “interesting, for kids who have only just started with art.” The future was bright: “They are not at all inhibited!”96 Townships were typically denuded spaces, lacking trees and any of the conventional markers of beauty. But it was still possible to do good work there. Geoffrey Dibetsoe taught near Ghu in Meadowlands; his principal supported art classes and wanted him to bring color and light into the school. “He tries by all means to beautify the school, and in such things my presence is felt,” Dibetsoe proudly reported. He taught at the same school through the 1970s and transformed it with a mural painting of an aquarium (perhaps recalling his class’s trip to the Durban aquarium) and various painted statues. Students, teachers, principals, inspectors—all “are always pleased with my work.”97

“I’m experiencing great progress in my students’ artwork,” Philemon Lerata was happy to relate. “Everything we attempt becomes a success.” His students liked art; more important, he said, this success “brings pleasure to me. . . . Art has become my darling.”98 Enoch Malolo taught on the opposite side of the country, outside East London. There were numerous art teachers in his township, and they enjoyed competing with each other to put on shows and promote their students’ work. “I am aware of the fact that I owe you some gratitude,” he wrote to Peirson in 1974, “for what you did for me.”99 Stephen Shabalala taught in the Eastern Transvaal; there, he, too, related the enduring value of his training. “I enjoy it when I see my children concentrated in whatever they do in art,” he said of his students, “every child has that creative aim.”100 The most successful teachers were those who took initiative to make the most of what was available. Philemon Sepato went directly from Indaleni to Zeerust, in the northwest part of the country, near the border with Botswana. He surveyed the landscape and saw potential: there were “many things that one can use.” From a colleague, he heard rumors “of a soft stone,” suitable for carving. Life was busy, but as soon as he had time he intended to set off across the veld to hunt for this precious raw material of art.101 From time to time across South Africa, circumstance and personality flowed together to make classrooms into studios, as they had been at Ndaleni, and there, students and teachers built a barrier called art between their selves and apartheid’s world. Francis Malinga’s colleagues encouraged copying, but then in 1969, he was transferred to a new school. The principal there was an “art lover,” and Malinga could barely contain his excitement. “[On] what must an art teacher concentrate . . . when given a chance like this?” he asked.102 Elijah Zwane held a succession of temporary posts across the 1960s, each less fulfilling than the last. The years “behind my back seem to have been wasted,” he mourned in 1967. Four years later, his fortunes abruptly changed. In 1971 he found a new position, outside Lydenberg in the Eastern Transvaal; there, he grew into the job. He traversed the region, following rumors of “precious natural wood,” abundant and suitable for carving, and he introduced students to the joys of creative work. As he grew busier, he wrote less, but in one letter, he enclosed a photograph:a class of boys in their school uniforms, squinting against the sun,beaming as they worked wood outside their Bantu Education school.103

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Figure 6.7 Students of Elijah Zwane building a hut, Lydenburg, Transvaal, 1971, Zwane student

record, with the permission of the CC Endings

The barrier made of art was not impermeable. The appointment of African art organizers was the apex and the grass pig a summit. The foundation was weak, however, and by the mid-1970s, inefficiency and widespread discontent began to take the edifice apart. Bantu Education schools had always been open to politics beyond the ideological violence of their creation and the bureaucratic poison of their regular functioning. “Our school is falling this year,” Sedibane said of Wilberforce in 1963. “Students went on strike during February” to protest the sacking of the vice principal, a holdover from the institution’s previous incarnation under the AME. Half of the student body was expelled. “The start is so bad . . . that we will not be able to enter any Art Competition this year.”104 Ndaleni was an island that relied on the teeming seas of apartheid for sustenance; similarly, teachers’ studios necessarily fed from their schools and their locations, no matter how foul the food. The mosaicist Gabriel Vilakazi was a teacher dedicated to making

the best of what he had, but there was nothing he could do about faction fights between rival gangs that left nearly a hundred dead around his school in the early 1970s. “I used to spend the night in caves and in thick bushes,” he wrote. Not surprisingly, “the school was greatly affected,” as were his classes.105 The most sustained and widespread challenge that teachers faced began in Orlando West, Soweto, on June 16, 1976, and spread like wildfire across South Africa’s urban townships. Orlando West was where Mercy Ghu worked. “We have had such a restless and frightening time since the 16th of June . . . that one is unable to think straight,” she related. Her life since June was schizophrenic: mornings started normally enough, “with not a trace of unrest in the air, only to find ourselves and the kids running . . . for shelter from . . . stones and bullets.” She had loved listening to her students chatter while they worked; their voices reminded her of her own time at Ndaleni. Now, the clatter of stones and the roar of guns overpowered all other sounds. By September 1976, attendance had stagnated below 50 percent. She had little to say: “I am going through one of those times in life when everything seems to have come to a standstill.”106 Soweto teachers’ experiences were soon shared. Township post offices closed or ceased to function; teachers lost touch with their alma mater and the biannual succor of its newsletter. The government tried to shift the onus of the school crisis onto teachers and administrators, threatening to withhold the teachers’ pay if the students did not return to class. The annual Fort Hare show was canceled, as “disturbances” spread to the Cape.107 Reports from across the country flowed to Ndaleni, bringing news of classes canceled, materials lost, exhibitions impossible. Julius Gambu quit teaching in 1977 “because of Soweto’s situations.” Like Ghu, he had loved teaching. His voice quavered with regret, as hers did when bemoaning the quiet in her classroom. Outside the school, it was a time of unrest, excitement, and tremendous, epoch-shaping possibility. But Mercy Ghu wanted her students to come back, she longed to hear the song of their hammers and chisels, which was her song, her gift. She wanted desperately to be an artist, and her students were her art. Another art teacher lamented: “I wish everything could come to normal.”108 Solomon Sedibane shared those sentiments. In July 1976, he was grateful that “our school experienced no difficulty in the recent schools’ unrest in the Transvaal.”109 He and other Bantustan art teachers had enough

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problems of their own. By the mid-1970s, the economics and corruption of their situations had begun to set in. Samuel Hobyane was a Bell student who returned to Ndaleni in 1970 in preparation for becoming the organizer in Gazankulu. He was as enthusiastic and energetic as his peers—and as poor. After 1976, the Gazankulu art program was cut due to a lack of money. Hobyane was reassigned to a training school, where he did not even teach art.110 Hobyane’s authority suffered as Gazankulu’s waned. Other organizers did what they could to use their positions to increase what authority they had, in keeping with common practices in Bantustan administration. Personal conflicts became political conflicts, which in turn undermined the functioning of the art educational program. Solomon Mabusela simply did not like Solomon Sedibane, the lead art teacher at Rehlahliwe Training School. Mabusela began to privilege students at other schools over those recommended by Sedibane, on whose judgment the Ndaleni school had come to rely. Rehlahliwe students began not to receive bursaries, and Peirson was furious. “The choice of students for this course if my business,” she reminded Mabusela, “it should not influence you at all which college they attended.” She reminded Mabusela of their long association; as an Ndaleni student in 1965, he had struggled with his English but had come to embrace the course. He wrote a poem about his sentiments to accompany his drawing of students striding the path to the studio, and he fashioned the rhinoceros that supported the swing. (See chapter 5 and the back cover of this volume.) Now, a decade later, she wondered whether she could trust his judgment.111 Mabusela’s letters grew more curt and his slights more personal. In 1976, Sedibane applied for Lebowa government support to travel to Richmond and attend a refresher course; he was denied. Mabusela was the sort of person “who wants to dominate others,” Sedibane lamented. A few years later, Sedibane applied again. This time, he was told that the course was only for organizers and other administrators. He was but an art teacher and therefore could not attend. Eventually, word reached him that other teachers from Lebowa had in fact been funded to attend the course. “My suspicion is correct that someone is behind it,” he noted. “We will not easily forget.” Sedibane was a stalwart; his relationship with Ndaleni stretched from Atkins through Bell and Peirson. He was a steadfast supporter and correspondent. But he was also a poor, Bantustan art teacher, subject to

the authority of his rival. He had attended a refresher course on campus in 1968, where he led a sculpture group. He would not visit his beloved place again. Sedibane had no power; Mabusela had what power was possible. Despite Peirson’s repeated admonitions, Lebowa bursaries went to Mabusela’s favorites, regardless of their intelligence and talent. She was appalled to learn that one subpar student had been appointed to teach in a training college upon his return from Natal. “He is not capable of doing justice to such a post!” she fumed.112 Such issues were not unique to Lebowa. After its promising start, art education in Vendaland also began to lose its way. In 1975, the Venda administration posted a check for R480 to pay the costs of the four students to whom it had awarded bursaries. Peirson returned it: she had not accepted those students but instead chose four others who had never turned up, citing their inability to pay tuition. Not a single Venda would be trained in art that year, nor many thereafter.113 Mahosi was an energetic administrator and political striver, and art was just the beginning for him. By 1979, he “had been promoted way beyond organiser,” and the once-prominent population of Venda students at Ndaleni had dwindled. Between 1976 and 1980, the only items in Mahosi’s file in the Ndaleni archive were Peirson’s entreaties to please send applicants to campus, since there was money available and surely still a need.114 “Art Education seems to have gone very quiet in Venda,” Peirson wrote in 1980. “Perhaps you . . . see no purpose in [it].”115 There is no record of a response. Evidence suggests that students were still being taught. In neighboring Bophuthatswana, for example, the government was encouraging students to participate in the “development and revival of art” by selling their crafts at the side of the road.116 But the inspiration was gone. From Sedibane’s perspective, it was clear that “Art is dying slowly in the [region’s] primary schools.”117 Other deaths came suddenly, without warning. Over the course of the late 1970s, the student uprising that began in Soweto spread to the rural areas where people such as Sedibane and Silverman Jara taught. The latter was an accomplished art teacher, who had held esteemed positions at both Ciskei and Transkei training colleges. To the training college art teachers fell a lot of responsibility; although there were many art teachers in the area, neither of the Eastern Cape Bantustans had managed to be as organized as their Transvaal counterparts, and well-placed instructors such as

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Jara were critical links in the pipeline between the region and Ndaleni. (At one point, the Ciskei apparently had an art organizer who came from Fort Hare, not Ndaleni; there is no record of the Transkei ever filling the position.)118 Jara was proud of his students, like Christina Jikelo, whom he sent to Ndaleni, and of his own continued efforts toward self-improvement. He passed his matriculation examinations while teaching, “with four cs and two ds,” he informed Peirson. Jara continued to work as an artist, both in class and beyond. “I have been appointed as a member of two top committees of the Art Association of the Republic of Transkei,” he told Peirson in 1977, adding that one of the committee members—“who is holding a high post in the Transkei Government”—held the Ndaleni art school in “high esteem.” With that official imprimatur, Jara hoped to bring an exhibition of Ndaleni student work to Umtata. He promised to be in touch.119 The Borders region where the Ciskei, Transkei, and Cape Province met had a long tradition of protest and violent suppression. During the 1970s, it was the epicenter of organizing associated with the Black Consciousness movement, which preached noncompliance with the Bantustan authorities.120 Jara apparently identified with Black Consciousness; his family described him as a “Black Consciousness Movement” supporter in their submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.121 Perhaps he saw no contradiction between his teaching in government schools and the movement’s wider call for black self-reliance, dignity, and social and personal development. He was an art teacher, after all—although, by the end of the 1970s, he scarcely had time to teach art. The Ciskei government had embarked on a school-building campaign, and there was a new junior secondary school in the village just north of Alice where Jara had been born. It was called the Imingcangathelo Junior Secondary School, after a local subchieftaincy, and in the late 1970s, he was appointed principal. There was always unrest in schools, especially those near Fort Hare, where student protest was the order of the day in the 1970s and into the 1980s.122 The first weeks of September 1980 saw protests spread to Imingcangathelo. Students there refused to go to class, citing the bankrupt authority of the Ciskei government and its education system. Most lingered just beyond the school gates, intimidating those few students who continued to attend. Jara would occasionally plead with the striking students to return to class. On Monday, September 15, the start of a new week, he did so again. The students refused and began to throw stones at the building,

breaking windows. Word of what happened next quickly reached Jara’s former student, Christina Jikelo, who was teaching in nearby King Williams Town. Jara again tried to stop the students—it was fine if they did not want to come to class, but why destroy the school?—and some in the crowd turned their stones on him. He was a lone figure, an art teacher, a man who had once climbed a mountain to sketch cave paintings and who had built a huge concrete monster with his own hands, on which children still played. “He fell and then one student came with a big rock and crushed his head. That was the end of him.” Born six years before the National Party came to power, Silverman Jara was thirty-eight years old when he died.123

 Newspaper accounts of Jara’s death privileged Ciskei Chief Minister Sebe’s interpretation of events—Jara was a productive Ciskei citizen, killed by terrorists. The story mentioned nothing about his life before the stones. Either Peirson or someone who knew that story clipped the article and put it into Jara’s file. It was one of the final pieces of the Ndaleni archive. The Indaleni school was physically deteriorated by the late 1970s. In early 1977, the department announced its intention to shut down the Indaleni Training College and to move the staff to a location near Pietermaritzburg, where it would be under the KwaZulu authority. The art school was “interethnic,” however, “and plans are being prepared for the inclusion of this course in a big new training school north of Pretoria at Mabopane.”124 Bantu Education was under assault, and the government wanted to bring the specialist training programs closer. Peirson and Lancaster made the trip to Pretoria and expressed enthusiasm for what they saw there: “The school buildings were most impressive for their modernity and practicality.” There were ample materials, electric kilns, and factory-made shelves for the library’s books. Although “we will move from a soft Natal landscape to a hard townscape,” Peirson wrote, “the move is necessary [and] we look forward to the future with optimism and hope.”125 Lancaster was married and settled in Natal. He took the offer of a position with the resettled training college in Edendale Township, on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg, off of the road to Richmond.126 For her part, Peirson intended to make the move to Pretoria, which was scheduled for the close of the 1980 school year but was pushed back, first to 1981 and then again until 1982. A local arts graduate named David Moon took Lancaster’s

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place for 1981, which was the last time the specialist art teachers’ training course was offered. Farewell to Ndaleni, wrote Solomon Sedibane. Mabopane might be modern, but “one thing sure it will never keep the standard and the tradition” of his alma mater.127 Peirson agreed and decided that 1981 would be her last year as well. After two decades, “the rolling hills of Richmond with their patchwork coat of greenery” held her tightly.128 Besides, she had never liked Pretoria; she abhorred bureaucracy and guessed that the proximity to the national government would not be to the course’s benefit. She flirted with retirement but needed only four more years to qualify for a better pension. Like Lancaster, she chose to join the staff of the new training college, christened Indumiso. There, art was just one among many subjects, as it was in all of the other training colleges across South Africa. She taught for four more years, “students coming in like a mob for two periods once a week. You never learned their names and you taught them how to teach art.” She admitted that she was burned out and that she did not take the work very seriously.129 David Moon taught at Indumiso as well. He remembered the years differently, recalling that there was violence and terror in the township and that students drew images of Casspirs and flames. In their own way, those masses of anonymous students continued to develop their own selves in dialogue with the world around them.130 For her part, Peirson did not elaborate on Indumiso, beyond noting that she received a promotion and a raise there, her first since arriving at Indaleni in 1963. She commuted to Edendale for four years before finally retiring to her small cottage in Richmond, there to watch apartheid’s violent denouement in the Midlands. Her students at Ndaleni had helped her paint the cottage’s walls. At the end of 1985, for the first time since she had arrived in Richmond, she prepared a canvas for herself and began to paint.131

Chapter 7

Artists

The editors of the World were skeptical and hesitated before publishing the picture in their newspaper. It was newsworthy that a twentyfour-year-old Soweto artist had won a R100 merit prize from the South African Breweries, however, so the editors gritted their teeth and published the image. They shared their misgivings with their readers. “On the opposite page today there is a picture drawn by a Soweto artist,” they warned. “It is called ‘Mother and Child.’” Dumile Feni’s charcoal drawing depicted a typical maternal scene—a child in its mother’s lap—disturbingly askew. “The head of the mother seems to have fallen off,” the editors continued. The work was so flawed, they editorialized, that “we got the same feeling when we looked at this picture as we do when we look at the bottom of an old garbage can.” They urged their readers to reject this sort of image. It was a “sickly kind of art,” better suited to the decadent societies of Europe and the United States than Africa. “In Africa let us refuse to have this stuff pushed on us. Let us keep it out of our homes. Let us keep our art . . . African. Our African art shall be a thing of beauty, as art is meant to be.” Dumile might have been an artist in the eyes of South African Breweries, but in the eyes of the World’s editors, “this is not our art.”1

Figure 7.1 Mother and Child, by Dumile Feni, winner of a R100 merit prize

from the South African Breweries, World, October 28, 1966, 5

A few days later, a different interpretation came in from Soweto. “I feel it is my duty to vent my feeling about the leading article, . . . concerning Art,” wrote Ezekiel Mabusela. It was his duty to explain that Art was not what the editors understood it to be. “Art is nothing but self-expression,” he explained, and it was “through study of art that you can get to know different people’s moods and characters.” It was not a matter of beauty. Or, rather, the beauty was in “how an artist should express his individual feelings.” Mabusela suggested that readers ought to ask what Dumile was trying to say by distorting the mother’s body so dramatically. Each viewer ought to come to their own conclusion; for his part, Mabusela felt that “though the head is twisted, the arms are still clinging to the baby. To my mind the message is ‘there is no greater love than mother’s love amidst all tribulations.’” The message—what Mabusela called “the language”—made the image beautiful, not the superficial qualities of the drawing. The editors disagreed, responding, “If somebody sits on the piano, is that music?” But Mabusela had had his say. He knew a bit about art—he was a window dresser at Edgars department store in the Johannesburg central business district, where he had worked since finishing his Ndaleni certificate in 1963.2 Dumile Feni is a towering figure in South African art history. Ezekiel Mabusela is not. Art history tends to follow fame and the markers of high artistic achievement—gallery shows and commercial success— whereas Ezekiel Mabusela worked anonymously, arranging mannequins and other items to attract the eyes of passers-by. Mabusela was not an artist like Dumile, but, spending his days creatively, he considered himself still to be doing the work of art.3 Some Ndaleni students did manage to move from the student world into the art world; more were teachers, who measured success in their students’ achievements. Schools and galleries were not the whole of life, however; the need for beauty and creativity was everwhere. “Finding myself in a new township with the monotonous matchbox houses,” Eric Ngcobo decided to bring “Art out of the classroom” by guiding students to erect statues and complete murals around KwaMashu.4 Others, like Mabusela, sought different avenues for their creativity—window dressing, sign design and writing, mural painting. Still others sought selfsatisfaction in marriage, children, and the quotidian beauties of being. Ndaleni art school trained hundreds of students, who negotiated discipline and opportunity and did what they could to make their way through apartheid. Most could not claim to be artists in any way that art history

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would recognize. But then again, perhaps the problem is more with the conventional definition of artist than with Ndaleni students’ actual experiences. Recall Petrus Khumalo’s dictum from his student day in the early 1970s: “What we normally regard as waste and scrap, an artist will always find something to do with it. Is that not something to be appreciated?”5 Artists were those who made the most of bad situations, repurposing tired, wasted materials to create and to speak. Black South African political, intellectual, and social life was strewn with rubble. Rubble was what there was, so these South Africans built with it. To this point, we have followed the unfolding of art education in South Africa and the rhythms of learning, creating, and teaching that marked the lives of Bantu Education art teachers. More fundamental than these categories of identity—teacher, student, artist—is the still broader category of “person,” alive in time and place. Beyond bureaucracy and occupation, how did people live? How did they relate to each other and to the society in which they found themselves? For all of her positive contributions to her students’ lives, Lorna Peirson was still a white South African in the twentieth century, who occasionally lapsed into the racial logics favored by that particular tribe. In low moments, she worried that even her most successful students would lapse into “dullness” and the “stereotyped behaviour” typical of African society. “African cultures do not usually encourage individuality,” she claimed, which inhibited the race. “It is individuality and initiative that makes people great! These qualities raise the human race above the animal level and produce our thinkers and leaders.”6 Without individuality, there could be no greatness, and Peirson thought Africa behind on this count. Somewhat contradictorily, she also occasionally tapped into the persistent concern that Africans in general were becoming less African. “At present I feel that our African students are losing their African qualities,” she wrote in 1980, echoing Grossert’s anxieties from decades before and those of so many others before him.7 Even as she preached open-ended self-expression and creativity, she imagined her students to be bound by culture and ethnicity to create as Africans and to founder in the shoals of that socially ascribed identity. In this, Peirson was like the editors of the World, who thought themselves experts on who and what Africans were supposed to be. I have found no evidence of a Mabusela who responded to Peirson and gently disabused her of these ideas—that is, no evidence beyond that

accumulation of lives lived by the Ndaleni community, in their variety of aspirations, achievements, disappointments, and artistry. Some tackled these questions head on, to consider and test the limits of what “Africans” were supposed to be. Others actively embraced ideas like Peirson’s about the inviolability of the individual, buffeted by the impersonality of society. Some did so by seeking out the warm embrace of others like them, understanding that a person is constituted of other people, just as art is made of the union of mind, hand, and material. All sorted through the shattered crockery of South African life and did what they could to reassemble it and to order it to catch the light. Native Lands

Selby Mvusi left Indaleni for Durban in 1954. It was a short trip in a life full of long ones. Within four years, he was in State College, Pennsylvania, to study art education with Viktor Lowenfeld. From there, it was on to Boston University to do a degree in fine arts, then to Atlanta, followed by a brief sojourn to South Africa in the immediate aftermath of Sharpeville and the state of emergency. South Africa was his home, but he would not stay; Mvusi traveled first to Southern Rhodesia and then to independent Ghana and Kenya. At every step, he painted, drew, wrote, and thought about the nature of the intellectual and artistic life that he had begun to study at the Indaleni Mission.8 As we have seen, Mvusi began his teaching career at the Loram High School in Durban, where his art course “proved to be a great success.” His first classes earned a 100 percent pass rate.9 Mvusi frequently took his students to the Durban Art Gallery and impressed the guides there with his knowledge and lectures on art appreciation. In 1957, one of them—a man named J. M. Braithwaite—happily noted that when assigning practical work to his students, Mvusi “has attempted to develop in them a true Bantu interpretation of art and has not encouraged them to copy European styles.”10 In the mid-1950s, such careful racialist pedagogy was de rigueur. Yet evidence suggested that Braithwaite did not quite grasp the nature of Mvusi’s approach. Mvusi was an artist, as well as a teacher. He attended evening classes organized by the Bantu Indian Coloured Artists collective, a group that had been organized during the early days of apartheid. In 1950, BICA members

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Figure 7.2 Selby Mvusi at home in Durban under his Adam and Eve,1955, photograph

by G. R. Naidoo, 1958, with the permission of the Bailey’s African History Archive

applied for a government grant, noting the lack of suitable outlets for the training of nonwhite artists and promising to do so in keeping with the prevailing spirit of their time. “Our aim is to encourage students to develop along their own Racial lines,” a BICA representative assured the Adult Education Committee in 1950.11 A regional education inspector visited BICA’s classes and concurred. The white instructors taught Africans, Coloureds, and Indians differently, to the extent that “the principles of apartheid naturally found their expression in the radical differences between these groups as regards their understanding and experience of the arts.”12 He suggested that the government approve a grant to support the organization’s efforts. Mvusi was a student during this exchange. He finished his bachelor’s degree at Fort Hare in 1951 and moved home to Richmond in 1952 to study with Alfred Ewan. Ewan did not subscribe to such racially tinged ideas about education. Neither, it appears, did BICA stay in the government’s good graces for very long. By 1953, the local adult education representative in Durban no longer saw anything redeemable about the organization. “It has become apparent to me that BICA has developed into a Society or organisation for equality for all groups, becoming a common platform for discussion of cultural matters,” he wrote to Pretoria. All the artists there were doing the same thing and being trained in the same way, and the bureaucrat concluded that the government ought no longer support the organization.13 Mvusi found a temporary home in the community of artists the government rejected. They were a multiracial group of “signwriters, window display artists or workers in the printing industry,” who studied painting, carving, and drawing at the city’s Bantu Men’s Social Centre and other venues during their free time. Rare among the group, Mvusi actually worked in the arts, and he greatly impressed those he met during his time in Durban. Bill Ainslie, a fine arts graduate from the University of Natal, was in the BICA orbit, and years later, he remembered how Mvusi stood out. “He spoke seriously about the possibility of serious art development in South Africa involving blacks,” Ainslie recalled, “he was [way] ahead in terms of thinking.”14 Mvusi began to earn a reputation as a painter and sculptor during his years at Loram; he showed work at the Natal Society of Artists and elsewhere, and his oeuvre eventually began to attract the attention of art historians in search of the midcentury development of black South African art. But, as Ainslie knew, Mvusi was also a thinker, consumed with the

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question of what it meant to be both an artist and an African in the middle of the twentieth century. In 1957, Mvusi left Durban for Pennsylvania and began his journeys. He continued to paint but also began increasingly to speak and reflect, often on precisely those same issues about which theorists such as Grossert and Peirson fretted: whether the African qualities of African art were being lost and whether African societies could promote the consciousness of experience contemporary thinkers deemed essential to artistic success. For Mvusi, these were not esoteric issues. He agreed with theorists like Dewey that the arts were fundamental to life. “It is not so much because of a concern for ‘culture’ or ‘refinement’ that the Arts are studied,” he explained in 1960, “but rather because of a sense of concern for man and for those qualities that characterize him as being human.” His writings reveal Mvusi to have been a confirmed existentialist and phenomenologist. Being unto becoming was critical to him. The arts did not explain life, they emerged from it. The arts “concern themselves . . . with living in the world in which we are, responding to the abundant experiences which life offers,” he continued.15 This argument impelled two related questions that Mvusi wrestled with during his travels across the 1960s. What was the nature of life in contemporary Africa as revealed in Africans’ creations? And given that the arts were concerned above all with life as it was lived, what did it mean to live? Mvusi was skeptical about the category of ‘African’ art. He was close to Jack Grossert—the latter even visited him in Pennsylvania while Mvusi was studying with Lowenfeld—but he shared neither his countryman’s fondness for West African art nor his desire to elevate southern African craft to a comparable plain. “I have always had the uncanny feeling that East and Southern African [art] may surprise many in shooting forward faster and further than West Africa[n],” Mvusi wrote to Bill Ainslie in the early 1960s. But this would not happen unless Southern African artists ceased “to bow before the gods of Benin.”16 These were both characteristic and uncharacteristic sentiments. Characteristically, Mvusi rejected “classical” West African art as the appropriate metric for contemporary expression. Uncharacteristically, he allowed for the existence of distinct categories of artist, bound by geography. Indeed, elsewhere Mvusi scathingly rejected any efforts to categorize art as reductive and lazy. “When words and phrases such as ‘primitive,’ ‘western,’ ‘tradition,’ ‘fetish,’ ‘indigenous,’ etc. are introduced, confusion often

confounds Art,” he wrote in 1962. He added “African” to this list of problematic terms, lamenting that “African Art is rarely spoke of in term of the specifics found within the discipline of Art [so that] the basis of analysis becomes not Art but the African.” It is likely that Mvusi’s own experiences had helped him to form this point, given South Africans’ fetish for African art that fit their standards of “Africanness” above all. Against prevailing South African primitivism, as revealed in the writings of Grossert and his peers, Mvusi asserted that “Art is neither primitive nor modern. . . . It is never limited by . . . a culture and a civilization.” We have seen how the emergence of black artists in the interwar period provoked tremendous anxiety about whether Africans would be able successfully to straddle the two worlds of Bantu culture and colonial modernity. Mvusi was a painter; he had studied art, attended university, and displayed his images in galleries. He rejected the premise of the anxiety. “The contemporary African artist is not a man of two worlds,” he scoffed, “there never were such worlds.”17 Of course, it still mattered that he was an African. Mvusi spoke frequently to audiences of intellectuals and others concerned with African affairs. He addressed the second meeting of the American African Studies Association in 1959, for example, as well as the US National Committee of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) at a 1961 meeting about African culture. Thus, it behooved him to develop a working definition of the phenomenon of African personhood in the mid-twentieth century. Here, he took his inspiration from the nationalism then blossoming across the continent. “African nationalism is a creative force,” he told an audience in Boston, “the African today . . . is urgently called upon to reorder . . . his institutions so that they measure up to the needs of man today.” To meet the evolving demands of the present, all Africans needed to think like artists: they needed to be flexible and creative and, above all, to embrace change. Artists did this by developing new symbols and languages to “serve [the African’s] survival through the years of change.” In the face of enslavement, colonialism, and dehumanization, “survival” was the preeminent quality of the “African personality.”18 The demands of the present were why Mvusi unequivocally rejected the fetish of the past. He mocked those who warned that Africans were losing their African selves. Such concerns “condemn Africa’s inventiveness and her innovations” and “indict novelty itself,” he parried. He, by contrast, comforted himself with the conviction that “it is . . . only by standing up

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to the challenge of our time that we truly extend and revitalize the values and ideals of our forebears. In this are we honored in their eyes; through this we do honour their efforts.”19 This argument—presented to a conference of cultural luminaries in distant Boston—was remarkably consistent with Mvusi’s first published drawing, which we can now read differently. Recall that it showed a young schoolboy working a lathe, watched over by his ancestors. Grossert doubtlessly published it in Native Teachers’ Journal because he interpreted it to show the unbroken tradition of Bantu craftsmanship—and perhaps that is what Mvusi had meant at the time. Yet his subsequent intellectual trajectory suggests an alternate reading: the ancestors approved not of the object that the boy was creating or the way he was making it but of the very fact of creation—that he was responding creatively to the demands of his historical epoch. (See chapters 4 and 5) Mvusi imagined the connection between himself and his ancestors not as a restraint but as something more organic, a branch that could bend and flex and grow and change. “At no time has the African ever been divorced from his past,” he wrote elsewhere, “he is, today, the end product of his culture, his traditions and history.” The human being was an end and, through the act of living, a continuation: “At the same time, he is the creator of culture, of tradition and history.”20 Life, as experienced, is “never complete.”21 Against racial typology and geographic destiny, of the African he claimed “his journey is his native land.”22 This was Mvusi’s critical, inescapable point. In 1959, he displayed a series of paintings at the African Studies Association meeting in Boston. To introduce the images, which were largely nonfigurative, he talked about a poem that he had written while studying at Pennsylvania State University. It was called “The Nightwatchman from Zululand” and told of a “man with a glorious past of bravery and conquest caught up in a present he cannot manipulate or order.” This was the African predicament, he explained; outsiders had rendered the once-proud continent powerless. The nightwatchman was a “lion long tamed,” the scion of “warriors long dead.” But this was not just Africans’ predicament; rather, Africans “share this predicament with modern man in general.”23 The African experience of feeling severed from the past and being forced to redefine one’s identity was a universal one; “all over the world the nature and character of change itself has changed.” Accelerating change and resulting confusion was a universal human condition.24

As the 1960s progressed, Mvusi moved away from art to embrace a new discipline, industrial design. His study of history suggested that industrialization was the most fundamental and far-reaching force in the contemporary world; it was the foundation that supported structures such as colonialism, anticolonialism, nationalism, and apartheid. Everywhere, human beings were seeing slower, cyclical, and rural ways of living effaced by new lives saturated with technology and governed by bureaucracy.25 The challenge, Mvusi suggested at a 1964 design conference in Belgium, was to respond creatively to the era, to live with it as previous generations had lived in their own times. Machines were new, but no less than in the past, being human meant “taking the machine into oneself, so that the producer is not the machine but man himself.”26 A world humanized through man’s creative living—this was the true meaning of art, and it was ongoing. Africans needed to learn design to be equipped with new tools for the forever task of living. Human “experiences are not absolute . . . they are not final. In the process [of living] we accept only to reject, re-arrange, re-organize and re-define. The process is fluid.”27 Mvusi’s own experiences showed this to be conclusively true. He was a black South African at the dawn of apartheid; an artist and a thinker who seized what opportunities there were to change, to adapt, to survive. He considered himself an artist, an identity he defined in a way similar to Dewey: a uniquely sensitive individual, whose sense was defined by the community in which he or she lived. “The artist is the people, whether he or the people know it or not,” he explained, “meaning is realized and resolved [by] linking the individual with the collectivity.” Art was real and tangible, and it was also eloquent and legible. It was lights shining from and on society to say, “This is how we are living right now.” “Life is not just existence. Life is the living it is.” The “living”—active, ongoing, connected to the past and open to the future—that was how Mvusi lived.28 His was a remarkable life, cut short in a car accident outside Nairobi in 1967. Like Silverman Jara, he too was thirty-eight when he died. His journeys beyond South Africa afforded him a unique perspective for an Ndaleni student. But his ideas resonated even with those whose longest journey was between Richmond and home. “African” or, in South Africa, “Bantu” or even “black” were categories that were artificially animated by power. Art was not the fetish object museums knew it to be but rather experience and creative responses to prevailing conditions. And the act of

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creating—the act of responding—was what it meant truly to live. “Our first question, therefore, is ‘what is the time now?’ It is not, ‘what is the African to be at this time?’”29 Mvusi escaped the geographic and juridical boundaries of apartheid. Other Ndaleni students did not. It would be foolish to assume that they all thought like he did. And yet, Mvusi provides a template; he cleared the ideological brush and made his doing so explicit. What was left was, to paraphrase him, life as the living it was. Life had always presented opportunities for art, and even for those he left behind, it continued to do so. Language for Living

Eric Ngcobo was Mvusi’s classmate at Ndaleni. He took over as art instructor at Loram High School upon Mvusi’s departure for the United States. In time, Ngcobo’s career took him far afield as well—to Coventry, England, in 1970, for example, to attend a conference along with Jack Grossert, whom he later visited in the United Kingdom in the early 1980s. (See chapter 3.) Yet Ngcobo never truly left South Africa; from Loram, he moved to KwaMashu and then into the Zululand administration, in which he eventually served as organizer of arts and crafts. Like Mvusi, he, too, lectured about the nature of art in society, although his audiences were somewhat more familiar. In 1974, he spoke at the Ndaleni prize-giving ceremony and welcomed that year’s class to the profession. As art teachers, they were charged with “making people who have not been involved in art like ourselves to be aware of the fact that they live with art, are surrounded by art.” To art teachers, Ngcobo granted only the awareness of the world of art, not possession of it. That awareness was the privilege Ndaleni granted to its students—they knew and could speak knowledgeably about art. But art was not exclusively theirs. Rather, “it is our task as art educators to make people understand that art is a natural language of man . . . a living language.” Like Mvusi, Ngcobo saw art as fundamental to human existence. Art was beautiful and satisfying design. It was well-chosen clothes, “the industrial designs of tomorrow, the Jaguar Mark 2, the Concorde [and] wooden spoons.” Art was how people marked their passage through the world, materially and imaginatively.30 As a Bantustan art organizer, it was perhaps not surprising that he spoke frequently about the extant craft traditions of the Zulu and other South African communities. Here, Ngcobo departed from Mvusi. For him,

there did exist an art of the Ndebele people, a singular Xhosa craft tradition, and so on. Or rather, he held that such traditions had existed in the past; in the present, Ngcobo saw only change. As Grossert and others had done, he observed that “the manufacture of traditional craft articles is . . . steadily decreasing,” yet he did not regret this decline. Instead, he saw new opportunities for artistic expression and social development in the passing of the old. To render his thought in Mvusi-esque terms, if it was true that a group called “Zulu” once had existed, it was truer still that such a group still existed, which is to say that “Zulu” was a living, changing, evolving entity. As artistic practices waned, others took their place, “leading to the formation of a new group within the society,” a vanguard that would move the community forward. “A new age is being born . . . and the old age of the Bantu is dying.” This cycle of death and regeneration was natural. Without death, there could no ancestors; without ancestors, there was no progress.31 For Ngcobo, as for Mvusi, living ultimately mattered more than heritage. He offered a vision to his fellow art teachers: “Our goal is a way of life made beautiful and expressive.” Mvusi’s quest for this goal had taken him far from Indaleni mission. Ngcobo stayed local, traveling first to Durban and eventually to Ulundi before he, too, died in a car crash in KwaZulu’s waning days. He too had tried to reach that goal through the schools, his travels, and his paintings.32 Ngcobo was a talented painter who held one-man shows as early as the mid-1960s. Like Mvusi, he was an artist in the conventional sense (even as he expanded the category to encompass expression as a way of life). Only a fraction of Ndaleni students were able to claim that vaunted title. “[Nathaniel] Ntombela is one of the few students who [have] passed through this art school and who [have] the ability to become [an] artist,” Peirson wrote about one such student in the mid-1960s. “He has all the technical qualities that make an artist, he received the prize for painting, he experiments with different media and has shown great initiative.” These attributes marked him as someone with potential. Others left Ndaleni determined that they, too, would make it in the world of galleries and exhibitions.33 Thelma Radebe was a classmate of Silverman Jara’s. She moved back to Johannesburg upon completing her certificate, and it took her a while to find regular work. She made the most of her free time. “I am enjoying . . . the art shops and art galleries,” she reported. A show that she wanted to see was about to open, and she planned to invite some friends to travel to town

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to see it with her. She confided in Peirson that “I am only hoping they will be intelligent observers who will benefit from what they will see.”34 Art was her privileged possession, and she eagerly sought out opportunities to use it. “For Thelma’s part, I am really in heaven,” she exulted in 1966. “I have discovered some white people in town—Mr. Bill Einsley [Ainslie]—who has really offered me . . . tools, paints, etc. for art free.” By the mid-1960s, Ainslie had moved back to South Africa after a stint at Patterson’s Cyrene in Rhodesia. He taught classes in Johannesburg and was a great supporter of Dumile, among others. Radebe was enthused to know him. “He is a teacher of Art,” she explained, “he has been a great help.” She anticipated the end of the school year when she would have more time to create. “Art” had “gripped” her “so much” that she was considering quitting teaching entirely.35 Radebe and a few other Soweto-based alumni formed a club that they called the Arttra Studio early in 1967. The window dresser (and World correspondent) Ezekiel Mabusela was among the eight graduates who came together to paint and draw with materials donated by Ainslie.36 “We . . . thought it a waste for you to have taught us this wonderful and exciting art and for us to waste it by not doing anything to improve it,” Radebe related to Peirson. The group met many times a week for a few months, until someone stole most of their paints, leading some of the members to drop out. Such setbacks notwithstanding, a year later Arttra Studio was still there, albeit reduced to meeting only on occasional weekends as its members’ busy lives necessitated.37 It was no accident that Arttra Studio met in Soweto. South Africa’s largest conglomeration of townships was the epicenter of black creative life. A significant percentage of Ndaleni students had come from the Rand, and many returned home determined that they, too, would make it as professional artists there. Dan Rakgoathe was a Peter Bell student who had taught in primary schools during the early 1960s. He wanted to be an artist, however, and went to Soweto in search of work. He encountered the Arttra Studio in 1969, when he assumed a position assisting the Johannesburg artist Bill Hart, whose night classes in Soweto were the successor to Cecil Skotnes’s shuttered Polly Street. “I feel lucky to have to occupy this position,” Rakgoathe wrote. He had worked other jobs long enough to know that it was hard to make time for both work and art.38 Godfrey Ndaba quickly learned this as well. He was a rarity—a nonteacher who went to study at Ndaleni in 1969. He received a bursary, which

meant that he had to teach for a year upon returning to Soweto. Before that year was over, he had “discovered that teaching and Art as past time do not mix, [since] both need hard work.” Ndaba was determined to make it as an artist. As Radebe had done, he organized a small group of Ndaleni alumni, including his classmate Mercy Ghu, and they practiced together.39 Before long, he had quit his job to work exclusively on his painting. He needed to make a living, so week after week across 1971 he traveled from Orlando to Joubert Park, where there was an open-air art market in the shadow of the Johannesburg Art Gallery.40 There, he displayed his paintings and gradually amassed a following. By 1972, he could happily report that “in reality, I’m a full time artist.”41 Ndaba soon found that being a full-time black artist in South Africa demanded compromising with the market. Among the whites who attended the Joubert Park art market were dealers who snapped up black artists’ work to flip to other whites eager for trendy “township art.” Ndaba had excelled as a sculptor and technically proficient draftsman while at Ndaleni. In his professional life, he produced canvas after canvas of recognizable township scenes—jazz musicians, laborers, huddled township homes—all rendered in pastels or paint, with the bright colors and distorted bodies that are the hallmark of the style. He found a steady market for such work. Ndaba worked tirelessly and repetitively, filling orders for anywhere between ten and twenty paintings in a given month. The dealers advanced him the money for materials, and he in turn accepted that they were reselling his canvases for many times the R5 or R10 he was making. With this compromise, he was able to live from his art.42 Ndaba’s teachers and peers understood what making it as a full-time artist entailed. When he informed Peirson of his plans, she predictably warned him against growing stale. “When an artist starts to sell he enters a testing time,” she reflected, during which the artist begins to “paint to sell rather than to paint to communicate.” The market tested the artist’s “integrity,” she cautioned, reminding Ndaba that it was the artists who painted “to express themselves” who created the sort of work that “lasts in value.”43 Yet in his career, Ndaba demonstrated that he learned other Ndaleni lessons well. He knew that being an artist meant responding creatively to changing conditions by changing—in his case, to suit the desires of the market by disciplining himself to remain more or less the same. Years later, it was evident, as he put it, that his work “doesn’t really change.”44 The

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market was the market. Another Ndaleni student named Robert Komane admitted the obvious: “One cannot live without money . . . I am compelled to sell one or two articles to drive the wolves away from the door.” The money earned was both the wage and the cost of being a black South African “employed by art.”45 Ndaba was unique—as far as I can tell, he was the only former Ndaleni student who made his living entirely from sales. Other relatively successful artists, such as Dan Rakgoathe and Paul Sibisi, combined painting with teaching. The latter studied at Rorke’s Drift after leaving Ndaleni, but he still went into teaching to supplement his art practice. From teaching he earned a regular salary that freed him from some of the constraints Ndaba faced. As an aspirant artist, he took advantage of what living near Durban had to offer. “I was very much taken by Kevin Atkinson’s ‘Triangles’ Exhibit at the Durban Art Gallery,” he reported in 1972. Atkinson was a Cape Town–based abstract expressionist whose monochrome geometric canvases toured the country in the early 1970s, much to the bemusement of the general public. Sibisi admitted that he first looked at Atkinson’s triangles with “no idea at all” what they meant. But he stayed in the gallery, viewed the short film that accompanied the works, and gradually began to understand Atkinson’s rather obtuse point. (Sibisi observed: “He reminded us of the correlation between various spheres of life. The metaphysical part and the psychological part and the physical parts being intermixed in this life.”) Sibisi left the gallery and returned home to Umlazi, his students, and his art. That very month, he was preparing work to be sent to the annual Fort Hare exhibition; he enclosed a reproduction of a recent drawing, entitled Introspection I.46 It was an engaging piece. Throughout his career, perhaps inspired by his mother’s concerns about artists’ mental health, Sibisi returned repeatedly to the idea that artists needed to mine their minds, to find in themselves evidence of the “joys, depressions, anger, anxiety, calmness and cruelty” that marked society. He agreed with Mvusi and Dewey that artists were those who observed “this ever-changing world” and “built up a mental encyclopedia of information” about it. Ngcobo called art a language; Sibisi reflected that he had an “artistic vocabulary” of “forms, shapes, colors and textures which [he could] recall as the need demands.”47 Introspection I featured two figures, their bodies intertwined to such an extent that it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. Sibisi declined to

Figure 7.3 Introspection I, by Paul Sibisi, 1972, Sibisi student record, with the permission of the CC

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unpack the piece for his teacher. Did he mean that introspection was an encounter with self as other? Or that introspection revealed that one was never truly alone? The latter was surely true in Sibisi’s life, where privacy and time to be alone were difficult to find. He taught until the late 1990s, when he finally took his pension and retired.48 (As late as 2011, though, he was still substituting in occasional primary school art classes.) He remained poor. He defined art as “an endless road of searching for one’s self,” while painting after work “and on weekends [in the 1980s] in a corner of his parents’ living room while the rest of the family watches television.”49 Trying to balance his art and the demands of social life was at times maddening, even if his was not the sort of madness his mother had once feared. Many Ndaleni students found conditions such as Sibisi’s intolerable—“all I need is material, time and to be left alone!” Daphne Biyela complained in 1979— but Sibisi accepted his situation. The necessary interplay between creator and community was the constant, inescapable fact of his creative life.50 Sibisi never enjoyed Ndaba’s commercial success, but like the Sowetan, he could claim to be an artist. Art took him on journeys far from South Africa, eventually to Europe and to the United States. Both Ndaba and Sibisi earned mention in various studies of South African art history. Many others did not, yet they still strove to live with art. Nhlanhla Ngubane turned his house into a gallery. “I have never known Nhlanhla so devoted to his work the way he is with Art,” wrote his mother, Gertrude, in February 1972. “There is not a single corner of the house without Art work on show! Anyone visiting our home exclaims . . . ‘there is an artist at this house!’”51 He entered competitions and experimented with new mediums “like oil pastels … and charcoal.”52 Ngubane’s immediate community was his primary audience. So it was with George Ramagaga, from Thaba Nchu. “I have improved a lot, especially with sculpture,” he updated Peirson. His grandmother was his public: “At the moment I am just painting and carving to show [her] my talent.”53 Years later, he reflected that although he “had just woke up one morning and decided to be the top African sculptor,” that was not a realistic goal. He needed to make money, and there was not enough time. Still, “I can’t depart [from] art,” he said, and he kept himself active by doing “a lot of sign-writing on the shops and cars.” Ramagaga was frustrated by the limits of such work, but it was something.54 Like sign writing, window dressing was a way to make a living while still being creative. As we saw in the last chapter, Abednego Dlamini had

a hard time finding work after leaving Ndaleni in the early 1960s. Peirson suggested that he contact Edgars, a representative of which came to campus in 1963 to recruit students for that position. Ezekiel Mabusela was one of four who went immediately to work for the company. The salary was competitive—almost R800 per year in the mid-1960s—and it was aesthetic work. Part of the recruiter’s pitch was that “you learn things like qualities of materials and the goods in the shop have to be thoughtfully known.”55 Dlamini liked the idea, but he was unable to secure a position. That was unfortunate. Window dressing was a good, creative life. In 1966, Peirson was shopping in Durban when she ran into Reuben Mabaso, who dressed windows in the Edgars store there. She noted, “[He] looks well and says he is completely satisfied with his work.” Given the conditions under which most of her students labored in the apartheid schools, news of an alumnus finding complete satisfaction in his work was rare and worth sharing.56 Agnes Ratshivumbo tried to live creatively through sign-writing. She began with stencils and developed a clientele ranging from cafés to the local driving school. “Even on cars, those who advertise on the doors . . . want designs on them.” She was especially proud that she was increasingly using a “free brush” for her designs; “I am improving little by little each time I work.”57 Some occupations imposed limits on expression. Lucas Matlejoane did illustrations for a Christian publishing house. It was steady work, but he found it tiring always to subdue his “natural style to the requirements of the work.”58 Phanuel Pooe was a classmate of Matlejoane’s; he had been responsible for the cement, waste, and wire birdbath that filled a courtyard on the training college campus. In 1965, he found work painting pottery for a company called Exquisite Crafts, which specialized in tribal exotica. “The work is mostly filling in of colours,” he explained, “the drawings are figures of naked people, animals and landscapes.” The work was technical and precise, and he enjoyed being able to spend his days in a quiet studio, with paints and brushes. Still, he was hopeful that something better would come along so that he might “further my Art knowledge.”59 As Pooe attested, satisfaction was difficult to sustain. Many Ndaleni graduates were nagged by the feeling that life ought to have turned out differently. Sophie Nsuza excelled under Peter Bell, and she completed a monumental mural under the eaves of one of the training college’s buildings; it was still there in 2014, a bit faded but intact. After completing her

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certificate, she took a position at Amanzimtoti Training College, the former Adams College. She was the first African woman to hold a specialist art teacher’s position in a training college.60 Nsuza had grown up tremendously poor near Mahlabatini, and in 1966, her family’s poverty compelled her to move back home. For the next many years, she ran a small cash shop there. “To run a business is not a joke, it needs a man and a half,” she joked. The shop took up most of her time, yet she was happy to report that she was still “experiencing and making new discoveries” in sculpture and beadwork.61 She missed teaching, however, and seized Peirson’s suggestion that “through your daily contact with ordinary people you will still have an influence.”62 Nsuza began informal classes, inviting the local children to “come and sit under the tree just in front of the shop so that I can help them [with their carving].”63 She continued to do her own work at night. Nsuza entered contests— including one sponsored by the Teaspoon Tips Magic Paint Company, in which she won a radio—and sent works to be exhibited at Fort Hare. And yet, she could not escape the feeling that she had wasted her talents. Nsuza wished that she had time to study art again, “but crying over spilt milk doesn’t help except bringing tears to the person who is dreaming about better education in Art.” She wrote to Peirson with great frequency, as if compensating for her isolation by attempting to reconnect her current self to her former one. “Oh, my dear, I can write until I finish the whole pad when I think of what I am,” she lamented.64 Still, she went on living. She married, had children, and made enough money to donate frequently to support ARTTRA. By the mid-1970s, she had stopped creating. She had finally accepted that “business gives one no chance.”65 Others found the tension between art and life even harder to bear. Samson Mahlobo studied with Peter Bell in 1962, during which time he completed a mural on the south interior of the Indaleni hall. It showed art students in bright, disordered clothes, merrily harvesting wood from the timber farm. Bell considered him “very talented” but worried that he lacked the rigor and discipline to make it as an artist.66 Mahlobo was determined to prove Bell wrong. In 1963, he established himself as a teacher at Zakheni Bantu School in Nigel, where he encouraged his students to explore new mediums and organized student shows.67 He continued to paint and sculpt, as well as to promote himself.68 “I’ve a number of charcoal sketches,” Mahlobo wrote

to Nat Nakasa in 1963, upon reading about Nakasa’s new arts and culture journal, the Classic. “I’ve got quite a lot in store for ‘your’ classic.” He enclosed photographs of a concrete sculpture of Christ that he had recently completed, explaining that it was “not aimed at casting a Blasphemy or to Ridicule Christianity at all, [but instead] I made it under some inspiration I still cannot describe.”69 Mahlobo loved being an artist. During 1963, a Johannesburg gallery displayed two of his sculptures, and he visited frequently, often with a group of “admiring females” to whom he “proudly showed . . . his work.”70 Yet Mahlobo did not find the going easy. He bemoaned apartheid’s impact on his career. Except for his time in Natal, Mahlobo had spent his entire life in Nigel, a Transvaal industrial town to Johannesburg’s southeast. As an aspiring artist, he reasoned that he needed to live closer to the big city and angled for access. The system made things difficult. Between 1963 and 1966, he repeatedly applied for and was denied permission to relocate to Johannesburg. “My life as an artist has been handicapped by . . . the laws of our South Africa here. . . . Were it not for the reason, I would have made tremendous progress thus far,” he wrote to a supporter. Mahlobo threw himself into teaching instead, since “as a teacher I have not given up hope.”71 Still, the dream of being an artist died hard, and he continued to apply for endorsement to Johannesburg. He struggled for materials and access to the art world, and increasingly, he came to blame the state for his troubles. “I’ve been out of pockets,” he wrote in 1964, “the reason—well, the law and so on. I’m afraid to comment too much on that.”72 Like many other frustrated South Africans, he wanted to escape the country and begged his correspondents for any information about opportunities overseas: “I have no place to go to except abroad.” He was stuck in Nigel, however, so he scavenged for materials and continued to work. He painted from pictures in the newspaper, producing works with titles such as “Soweto Train Victim” and “Semi-paralysed Victim.” He attended local jazz shows and asked overseas correspondents to send the latest Blue Note recordings to him, as well as “sportswear”— size medium—and stylish, lace-free moccasins.73 He continued to apply for permission to move to the cityand finally, in 1966, he reported: “They had first refused me permission to work in Joburg according to our influx control board and laws of our S. Africa, but eventually having appealed to

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Mr. Carr the Manager of the Bantu Affairs Department I succeeded.” He was planning a one-man show, in hopes of building enough of a reputation to apply to study in Paris. “It’s really a matter of 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration that will lead me to success. Hard work really!”74 Unable to secure lodging in the city, Mahlobo stayed at the “same old address” in Nigel, and commuted back and forth to the gallery to which he had promised thirty works. The quantity was daunting; like so many others, he lacked materials and pleaded with his “beloved brothers and sisters” from Ndaleni to help him out. The school had no stone and scarce wood, however and the show never materialized.75 Still, he schemed, first to return to Ndaleni to attend the 1968 refresher course—he was unable to do so because of a lack of funds—and then to continue his art education by writing matriculation exams and petitioning the University of South Africa (UNISA) to take him on as a fine arts student. For Samson Mahlobo, aspirant artist, the 1960s were an unrelenting struggle. “I think I’ll die if I miss this chance,” he told a reporter for the Golden City Post when first he failed to gain access to Johannesburg in 1963.76 By the end of the 1960s, he apparently could no longer bear the strain, and he killed himself.77 His death was a blow. “I didn’t know he was so unhappy,” Hilda Mohlopi reflected, “his letters showed a happy-go-lucky person with a lot of humor.” She had never met him in person—they were “pen-pals through ARTTRA”—but she had identified with his struggles across the 1960s: “I’ll miss him.”78 The Ndaleni archive details other deaths. It has reports of “nerve breakdown or whatever people call it,” depression, and alcohol abuse, it has information about certificate holders who were fired from their jobs and sent to rehabilitation centers.79 “He hopes eventually to return to teaching and a normal life,” Peirson wrote about another student laid low by misfortune.80 Given the challenges of living, the artful life was one best lived together. Art teachers spoke a particular language, and no matter how much success they had translating it to others, it helped immensely to “hear from people with whom you share the same feelings and ideas and are struggling together to make your presence felt.” This is why Sophie Nsuza wrote so many letters to Lorna Peirson, even as her art practice faded away. To connect to the school was to bring Ndaleni—to bring Art—beyond the mission gates. Hearing from his fellow students convinced Dan Rakgoathe that he was “not utterly alone” in the world.81 “Now that I have received ARTTRA,

I feel at home,” Priestess Xego sighed contendedly, “because before I felt that I was living in my own world with nobody like me.” When reading the journal, she was convinced that “I am with people, though they are far from me.” The school circular, shoddy and skimpy as it sometimes was, transcended space.82 In the mid-1970s, four Ndaleni graduates found work around Madadeni, in the coal-mining region of northern Natal. None aspired to be a full-time artist (one was a serious long-distance runner, which hardly left time for anything else). Yet they came together nearly every weekend at one or the other’s home, “discussing our points on the field of art.” It was, as Richman Simelane described it, “marvelous when we are around the table sharing our ideas and experiments.” Life, like art, was a matter of seizing opportunities and transforming them, turning the raw material of proximity and presence into the intangible stuff of beauty. It was hard to do, but from time to time and place to place, it was also possible.83 The Art of Life

Even as news of Mahlobo’s suicide reached campus, there was happiness to share. “News of creative activities is continually coming in,” Peirson commented, “home-building, school-building, marriages, births . . . problems overcome, friendships made . . . paintings and sculptures exhibited.” As Mvusi had said, the most enduring tradition was survival. Without living, there could be no art.84 Alumna Cecilia Nququ was not a professional or even a practicing artist. Nonetheless, she found that “personally Art is still with me. I recognized it when making a flower garden at home. How I arranged things inside the house too.” She had learned to see at Ndaleni and carried that vision back to Fort Beaufort, for her family and herself.85 Unlike Nququ, Vivian Bopape managed to work as an art teacher for a time, until her principal canceled the classes (see chapter 6). She instead focused her enthusiasm on her daughter, remarking, “She’s so active and seems to be the best future artist with her frequent meaningful scribbles on the walls, floors or wherever she sees a blank space.”86 Samuel Hobyane saw an artist in his son and noted that his daughter, Glory, “is very much interested in Art and she draws wonderful circles representing heads and eyes and sticks for legs and arms.”87 Benedict Nkhi sent one of his daughter’s drawings for critique.

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Figure 7.4 Group shot, late 1970s, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4, with the permission of

the CC

Cecil Moruthane lived and taught in Jabavu, Soweto. He had little time for his own art, but he sent his children to the local community center after school, where they learned from Dan Rakgoathe.88 Eve Moroka, from Thaba Nchu, turned her home into a veritable laboratory for Ndaleni art theory. For three years she sent her son Sebe’s scribblings to the art school, along with explanations and commentary. “He is already passing from the purely kinesthetic stage to the stage of visual imagination,” she reported in 1977. Readers could watch his expressive self grow and change before their eyes, as all children grew, and as they themselves had done, before coming to art school and learning what it meant.89 Students married and divorced. Abiah Ramadi lived near Pretoria; he had left The Sower on campus, perched high above the valley. He taught and found time to visit galleries in the city “almost every weekend.” In 1969, he was happy to report “social progress” as well: “This year I am married to a certain Evelyn. She is not an artist but shares my artistic interests. I believe that she is going to serve as a greatest source of inspiration.”90 For some, changing relationships promised a new birth of creativity. Pat Khoza’s marriage had stifled her. Upon divorcing in 1976, she stated, “I feel like a human being again,” and she was getting back to her art.91 Philemon Kutemela was happily married and happier still to welcome a daughter,

also in 1976. He named her Lorna. “We wish Miss. Lorna Kutemela a long and happy life and may she soon enter the scribbling stage!” he toasted.92 For many Ndaleni students, Peirson was both a person and an ideal—a teacher but also a cherished memory of an experience ever receding in time. Abednego Dlamini painted a portrait of his wife, Yeni, whom he met while they both were studying at Indaleni, and sent it to Peirson.93 In 1964, he invited his teacher to celebrate their first anniversary. There would be chicken, he promised, and “I [have] long wanted to give you a fowl.”94 Peirson and Dlamini were close. He was one of her earliest students; he had qualified as a teacher at the Mapumulo Training College during her time there. He arrived at Ndaleni in 1960 to study with Peter Bell.95 Twenty years later, the campus still retained a powerful hold on his imagination: As you alight at the College you will not help but be revived artistically. The whole College is adorned from Chapel up to the tennis court. . . . Against that library window is a place to lean and sumptuously chew an apple while appreciating aesthetically. Go to the Training College. On entering the corridors you will observe long strips of mural painting shimmering with harmonious and contrasting shades of colours in oils and beeswax. . . . Such were the beauties my mind [can] carry and remember.96 Dlamini left Ndaleni at the end of 1960 and tried to find work teaching arts and crafts in a Bantu Education school. He failed, repeatedly. This is not to say he failed in life, for he got a job teaching, earned promotions, married, and had a son. But he nevertheless mourned that he had “no means of applying my artistic talents.”97 It was Dlamini whom Peirson encouraged to apply for the window-dressing position at Edgars. He had been interested but was unable to secure the post. Besides, he still held out the hope “that one day I will get one of the [teaching] posts.”98 “I will never be happy before I teach craftwork,” he confessed.99 Peirson sympathized with his travails. She kept his picture in the art school’s staff room, “to remind me of our long association.” His life was forever disappointing him, and the lower he went, the more frequently he wrote to campus—at least three times a year for more than a decade. Abednego Dlamini “has had a life full of struggle,” Peirson regretted.

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That life went on. Dlamini took up a position teaching science in 1964.100 His school was developing its arts and crafts curriculum, and he was hopeful that he would be given the opportunity “to get an art teaching post [thus to] gratify my aesthetic taste before I die.”101 He kept himself engaged with the arts. In 1968, he informed Peirson that “I will be one of the students who will attend the refresher course at our school!”102 Later that year, he and a number of others returned to Ndaleni to marvel at its physical changes, refine their techniques, and hear a University of Natal professor advise “that teachers should discourage children from following the Western form of proportion in sculpture as that kills their traditional art.”103 Soon thereafter, art came back into Dlamini’s life. His principal relented and allowed him to instruct arts and crafts, in addition to his other responsibilities. He was enthusiastic enough—and had been financially successful enough—to use his own money to buy supplies for the class, including paints in colors suitable to what he thought would be great achievement in graphic art. He had fifty-one students and stayed for an extra hour and a half per day to ensure that they received adequate instruction. It was a “heavy interesting burden,” he commented, but it was worth it. He scrambled to organize an exhibition of his students’ work. It was not a success. Visitors bought only “the works that, to me, appeared a gesture of little achievement,” he complained, and the rest of the staff members saw the exhibition as “a sheer waste of time.”104 But Dlamini kept at it. He asked his principal to allow him to model a concrete statue in the school garden, and he bought oil paints from a local art supply store in order to “go on practicing since I realize my talent is beginning to fail me now . . . due to the situations which have always tended to bar my expression in art.”105 Life soon raised new bars—and presented new vistas. He won awards for his biology teaching and in 1971 became the principal of a school in a different part of Natal. There, he did not have time to teach art, but before the school year began, he “made a small statuette of a reading boy in the quad with wire and cement” to greet his students. This was the art of life in South Africa. Abednego Dlamini, teacher, father, husband, artist, observed in 1974: “Although I have not improved . . . much in painting or sculpture” since leaving Ndaleni, “there is improving art in my progress in life.”106 He grew busier. He was studying for a BA from UNISA during his free time; he wanted to specialize in African art, but the university lacked adequate resources for the course. In 1975, Dlamini was transferred again, to

Illovo Beach, to be the principal of a higher primary school. He introduced art as a subject and wrote to Peirson to ensure that his educational psychology and art history notes were still up to date.107 Time passed, and the work consumed him. He fell silent after nearly two decades of writing multiple letters per year, only to emerge in 1980 to join in the collective tears over Ndaleni’s closing. He had succumbed to what Ndaleni students frequently referred to as the “outside world,” with its “attention to home, school and daily demands of society.”108 In 1961 Dlamini had written to Peter Bell to bemoan his “struggles as a man.” Two decades later, he no longer entertained dreams of being an artist, but he could write with evident pride about the person that he had become. In the foregoing I have tracked the idea of artful living from theorists (such as Mvusi and Ngcobo) to professional artists (Ndaba and Sibisi) to parents (Bopape) and teachers (Dlamini). This chapter has been about their lives and their ideas, which were the things they made—their art, whether or not they recognized their creations as such. Yet even if Dlamini did not consider himself an artist, I would be remiss not to consider lives like his in light of the lessons of art. Art theorists contend that history inheres in the forms that artists produce, and as such, works of art are not pure acts of the imagination—they are dialogues, constituted of the interplay between person and object, emotion, insight, and material reality. Dlamini lived apartheid. The state, the economy, Bantu Education, and society’s racialist ideologies were his reality; all limited the form of his life. So, in his own way, like Silverman Jara, like Selby Mvusi, like Sophie Nsuza, like Solomon Sedibane, like Jessie Muthige, like Lorna Peirson, he chiseled that reality and tried to make something beautiful of it. So many others did the same. Leslie Cindi was a teacher and a sculptor, although he rarely had material for his students, let alone himself. As we have seen, Ndaleni carvers often used railway sleepers that the South African Railways had replaced in the process of maintaining the line. In 1974, Cindi got his hands on one. He worked it after school for two weeks until he at last finished a piece, which he described to his art teacher. “It is called ‘s’bongimpilo,’ which means, ‘we are grateful for life,’” he told her. “The wood used is sleeper wood.” Sleeper wood was hardwood that was past its prime (which is why it was available in the first place). An old sleeper was what Cindi had, and he found beauty in its flaws. “The cracks on its side form such beautiful horizontal lines and they give depth to the

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Figure 7.5 Leslie Cindi, 1973, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4, with the permission of the CC

feeling of my subject,” he wrote. He reveled in his creation; he would never sell it because it was his “treasure.”109 Leslie Cindi worked far from the limelight of South African politics and popular memory. His was the work of an artist practicing his art away the glare of his country’s art history. There he was under the trees with his chisel and his wood, working while the day slipped into night, patiently, methodically creating a treasure. S’bongimpilo—life is the living it is.

Epilogue The Art of the Past

In late February

1963, a letter from New York arrived in Richmond. Earlier that month, the Christian Science Monitor had featured a short article on the Ndaleni art school, illustrated with a detail of Horatio Mavuso’s mural in the hall, a Gabriel Vilakazi mosaic, and a small statue by Samuel Zondi. The article soon caught the attention of the New York–based Harmon Foundation, which was busy with an ongoing project compiling information about contemporary African artists. Evelyn Brown, the assistant director, read the article and quickly wrote to Peter Bell. Her letter arrived a week after the article went to press.1 Over the next few months and years, first Bell and then Peirson engaged in a lively correspondence with officials at the foundation—about art, about South Africa, and about Ndaleni’s place in the art history of their age. This correspondence and the publications that ensued marked the first and last time that Ndaleni art school was deemed relevant to the art history of its country and its continent. The Harmon Foundation closed its doors in 1967 and donated most of its holdings to the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., thousands of kilometers and a world away from Richmond. Gradually, Ndaleni was written out of South African art history and all but forgotten, even on the hillside that had once been its home. Forgetting Ndaleni

The earliest correspondence between the Harmon Foundation and Ndaleni foreshadowed the school’s erasure. Founded in 1922 by a prominent New

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York real estate developer, the foundation was an early supporter of what came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. During the foundation’s first decades, it exhibited and promoted African American art and writing that emphasized modernist themes; it was a prominent patron of Langston Hughes, among other luminaries. Over the course of the 1930s and 1940s, it developed an educational initiative, which organized tours of African American art across the United States, seeking to make the case for the vital importance of black artistry in American modernism. After World War II, under the leadership of Mary B. Brady and Evelyn Brown, the foundation increasingly began to focus on African modernism, by collecting and promoting artists from across the continent.2 The Harmon Foundation established contacts especially in West Africa in the years after 1945; in the early 1950s, it funded the pioneering Nigerian modernist Ben Enwonwu’s visit to the United States. Working with a professor at a historically black college in Atlanta, the organization published a short pamphlet on contemporary African art in 1960, which the authors regretted was full of holes, especially regarding southern Africa. In 1961, the foundation organized a display of African art to coincide with the US commission to UNESCO meeting on African culture in Boston. There, Evelyn Brown, the assistant director, met Selby Mvusi, with whom she began a long correspondence about art under apartheid. Mvusi wrote to her about his experiences at Fort Hare, in Durban, and in the United States. He did not mention the two years he spent at Ndaleni. Indeed, it was not until Peirson later shared a volume of ARTTRA with Brown that the latter realized that the Ndaleni alum Selbourne Mvusi was the very same Selby with whom she had established a close relationship.3 Regardless, she had been thrilled to discover that there were more people like him in Richmond, and in February 1963, she wrote to Peter Bell to request more information on the school, its students, and its marvelous art. With that, Ndaleni artists begin to live far beyond the limits of South Africa. At the same time as he was organizing his own departure from Natal, Bell was busy selecting works to be shipped to the United States. He left a crate for his successor to dispatch; in it were six sculptures and a selection of photographs of student work. One of the sculptures, by Cyprian Ramosime, was a massive piece that showed figures struggling with a giant snake. Dubbed “Atomic Sausages,” it was 5 feet by 1.5 feet in size—too big for Ramosime to take home from Ndaleni. Peirson shipped it and the

Figure Ep.1 Atomic Sausages, by Cyprian Ramosime, early 1960s, sold to the Harmon Foundation

in 1963, Ndaleni Scrapbook 1, with the permission of the CC

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other sculptures to New York, and throughout 1963 and 1964, the foundation used the works to illustrate its touring lectures on contemporary African art. Ramosime’s sculpture was a smash, but Peirson was unable to find him to share the news. To her consternation (and Brown’s), the existence of “Atomic Sausanges” was the only evidence of his relationship with Ndaleni.4 By 1966, the foundation had lost the sculpture as it transited across the United States. Other sculptures suffered a similar fate. The foundation was initially interested in purchasing a piece by Abednego Dlamini that showed a figure kneeling at prayer. Bell thought the piece marred by the figure’s “inappropriately dwarfed hands,” however, so he recommended that the foundation take two of Samuel Zondi’s pieces instead.5 The foundation donated one of these, which depicted a woman praying, to the United Presbyterian Church headquarters in New York. The church displayed it prominently in its lobby until 1988, when the Presbyterians established a new national headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky. Zondi’s Prayer was apparently lost in the move, leaving the cement St. George and the Dragon that he did to top the gate to the girls’ hostel as the only physical remnant of his time at Ndaleni.6 In addition to acquiring its modest collection of Ndaleni sculptures, the Harmon Foundation eagerly corresponded with numerous other Ndaleni graduates in the early 1960s and cultivated a supply of photographs and slides of Ndaleni works for its programs. The collection contained color reproductions of work by Solomon Sedibane, Elijah Zwane and Francis Halala, as well as representations of work done by Samson Mahlobo, who wanted so desperately to make it as an artist. In 1966, the foundation codified him as one. His name was among the eighteen Ndaleni graduates (out of twenty-six South African artists in total) highlighted in Brown’s Africa’s Contemporary Art and Artists, a volume that was intended as a compendium of then-ongoing art activities across the continent. The South Africa chapter opened with a discussion of the unique challenges of making art under apartheid. Then it touched on night schools such as Polly Street in Johannesburg before pivoting to devote the majority of its pages to a discussion of Ndaleni, “the only [art] school specifically for Africans” in the country. Brown addressed the typical themes—that it was poor and underresourced, run by the government, and aimed primarily at training teachers rather than artists—but her argument was that these were artists and that Ndaleni was where South African

contemporary art lived. Never mind that Abednego Dlamini was then struggling to find a position teaching art, let alone doing his own work: in the foundation’s eyes, he was “a graphic artist” who happened to “teach art in a Natal school.” Similarly, Solomon Sedibane was a “most resourceful artist who shares his enjoyment of creative work with those around him,” and Samson Mahlobo was destined for big things. “Both a sculptor and a graphic artist,” he was “employed in an art gallery in Johannesburg” and ready to leave teaching altogether “to pursue his art career.”7 Mahlobo’s relative fame was short lived, as was his school’s. Africa’s Contemporary Art and Artists was published in 1966, and a year later, the foundation donated its collection to the Smithsonian and closed its doors. Soon, other art schools began to supplant Ndaleni as the best-known incubators of South African creativity. A new narrative of South African art history gradually coalesced, and it did not include the little school near Richmond. Peirson knew this was happening even as she collaborated with Brown on the latter’s publication. Since the 1960s, the story of South African art making under apartheid has had two marketable tropes: one about cooperation across the color line and the other about political engagement. Although Ndaleni was a multiracial space, its racialist orientation—only African students, for African schools, paid for by and under the authority of the apartheid state—made it an uncomfortable fit. In the early 1960s, Brown had written to Cecil Skotnes, the famed teacher at Polly Street, about black art. He harshly critiqued her project’s emphasis on black artists alone in a letter to Peirson: “I must point out that Contemporary African art includes both white and non-white artists in this country and that one cannot split art down the centre because artists belong to various racial groups.” The foundation’s racialism troubled Skotnes’s own self-definition as an African artist.8 Peirson was somewhat sympathetic, although she wondered whether he was being “hypersensitive,” given that most writing on South African artists had long focused only on whites. Still, she understood the political stakes: “Probably Mr. Skotnes considers this little art school”—Ndaleni—“as being beyond the pale because it is directed by the Department of Bantu Education.” Collaboration and cooperation with the apartheid government was hardly the story that the South African art world wanted to tell about itself.9 Perhaps this stain was why Selby Mvusi had so carefully edited Ndaleni from his résumé. Art history would help him to erase the school from the record soon enough.

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Within South Africa, the first efforts to write an inclusive art history began in the early 1970s. E. J. De Jager—the Fort Hare anthropologist who had organized the exhibitions in which Ndaleni artists participated— published his first catalog in 1973.10 Contemporary African Art in South Africa focused on forty artists, seven of whom were Ndaleni graduates. Eric Ngcobo was the only one who received an extended discussion; others, including Solomon Sedibane, were counted only in photographs of wood sculptures. De Jager would revisit his collection two decades later, in the lavishly illustrated Images of Man: Contemporary South African Black Art and Artists, and in this volume, Ndaleni was reduced to a thirteen-line paragraph, most of which discussed the history of the mission station and the white teachers who taught there. Hundreds of students and their works were reduced to a list of nine names, most of whom—such as Paul Sibisi and Dan Rakgoathe—were included because they came to be associated with Rorke’s Drift, a much better known and studied art center.11 During the 1960s and 1970s, black South Africans came to Rorke’s Drift from across the country and there developed a signature style of blackand-white linocut prints, many of which conveyed clear political comment. Numerous graduates from the center went on to become celebrated artists in the 1980s, just as the world began to pay increasing attention to black South African art.12 In the late 1980s, the Johannesburg Art Gallery organized a massive retrospective on black South African art, aptly titled The Neglected Tradition. From Ireland, Jack Grossert pleaded with the organizers to remember Ndaleni, citing his “old friend” Sedibane as one of South Africa’s most neglected and deserving artists.13 Sedibane was not included in the show. In 2011, Witwatersrand University Press published a comprehensive, four-volume history of South African art. Ndaleni, which had trained hundreds of black South Africans in art history, drawing, painting, sculpture, and clay—exponentially more than any other institution in the twentieth century—earned three short paragraphs, emphasizing how some of its students had left the school and “interfaced with the burgeoning urban art centers.” It was in the cities, Visual Century implied, where the real work of art was being done.14 It is easy for collections like Visual Century to dismiss Ndaleni. Its students were teachers, its patron the apartheid government. And its works— or at least the works most art historians know about—were the wood sculptures that students sold in Pietermaritzburg from the late 1960s through

the 1970s, works that “often had an appealing ‘African’ quality, while the style and technique operated within a Western paradigm that appealed to Western tastes.” No mention was made of the way in which the realities of apartheid required students to raise money for their school; nor was there any discussion of the other works that students either chose not to sell or were unable to sell. Wood sculptures equaled African art that appealed to unsophisticated, conventional, “European”—read white South African— tastes. Ndaleni was hardly worth the art historian’s time.15 The white aficionados to whom Ndaleni art appealed were primarily in Pietermaritzburg, where memory of the school lingers, albeit faintly. The Johannesburg Art Gallery’s Neglected Tradition exhibition was the first of a number of exhibitions aimed at redressing historical imbalances in South Africa’s art capital. Out in the provinces, smaller galleries did similar work. Pietermaritzburg’s Tatham Art Gallery had always emphasized regional art and collected Zulu handicrafts—primarily beadwork, headrests, knobkerries, and so on, many donated by missionaries. Under the directorship of Brendan Bell, in the 1990s the Tatham began to emphasize the region’s contemporary African artists. As we have seen, Ndaleni had once earned a devoted following in the town, so in the late 1990s, the Tatham decided to stage a retrospective of the school and its works.16 Bell and the art historian Juliette Leeb-du Toit reached out to Lorna Peirson, who had inherited a collection of pieces that her sister had purchased at the Ndaleni annual show. She donated these to the retrospective. The gallery printed advertisements in the Natal Witness soliciting loans from the local art-buying community to fill out the show. In all, 133 pieces were sent in, mostly from Pietermaritzburg. Brenda Eckstein (see chapter 5) and her family loaned dozens of pieces they had purchased over the years, primarily wood sculptures but also string pictures, burned wood carvings, and a batik entitled Urban Landscape that she had bought from Leslie Cindi. Maritzburgers loaned works by relatively well known artists such as Paul Sibisi and Godfrey Ndaba; others submitted the work of unknowns including Daphne Biyela and Kenneth Molatana. From Fort Hare, where he lectured Fine Arts, Solomon Baloyi dispatched some of his own work to be exhibited. A nearly 1-meter-long crocodile, which Samson Mahlobo had carved in glorious detail from a single piece of wood in 1962, joined the other pieces in the Tatham’s nineteenth-century building in central Pietermaritzburg.17

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The exhibition opened in September 1999 and ran for two months. News coverage was limited to a short article in the local Natal Witness and a brief mention in the national Mail and Guardian. The Witness emphasized not the students who had created the works on display but Lorna Peirson’s role as their teacher. Indeed, Bell suggested that the exhibition was essentially to honor her contributions to the region’s art. She was “chuffed,” he remembered. A handful of her former students who lived in the area attended the opening reception; she recalled Paul Sibisi and Pat Khoza, who arrived from Durban, and Zakhele Hlatshwayo, one of her last students, who was then teaching art in a local township high school. Bell and Leeb-du Toit commissioned a few short essays from students, as well as from Peirson, Lancaster, and Peter Bell, and they compiled a catalog. In November 1999, the show quietly closed.18 Pieces went back to their owners. Since 1999, some have presumably followed the local white community’s ongoing exodus to the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States. None entered the Tatham’s permanently displayed collection. “We did the show and then we moved on to other things,” Bell explained, “it’s kind of a been there, done that.” He confessed that before my visit, he had not looked at the catalog “for ages.” For two months, the Tatham’s smattering of visitors had walked among the productive output of a long-vanished community. The works, like the school, remained marginal—“so far away and hard to get to”—in mind if not in fact.19 By 1999, Lorna Peirson had retired to a small cottage in Howick. She did not have the space to take back the works she had loaned for the show, so they were put into storage in the Tatham’s basement. You can visit them there: drawings in pencil, pen, and crayon; paintings; wood panels; papiermâché sculptures treated to approximate the look of bronze. Many artists have had their work exiled to the storage facilities of lesser and greater museums. Samson Mahlobo’s crocodile is in the Tatham basement, too, alone on its shelf. In a way, his crocodile’s lightless solitude indicates that Mahlobo himself has made it as an artist. Post-

In 2012, the Wits Art Museum opened to Johannesburg, garnering rave reviews and awards for its architects. It is a truly beautiful space, glass walled and open to the booming and gentrifying inner-city suburb of Braamfontein

beyond the university walls. The university’s art collection is magnificently displayed and available. School groups frequently pass through; in April 2014, I tagged along with a group of students from the Pridwin Preparatory School as they explored an exhibition on the art and experience of migrant labor.20 It was evident immediately that these students—the vast majority of whom were white children of privilege—were conversant in art. They had an art teacher who helped their discussions along; they sat confidently sketching what they saw. Art was familiar to them, as it would have been to most of their parents had they, too, been so privileged in the past.21 That is decidedly not the case for the vast majority of South African schoolchildren who, despite generations of effort, lack both the opportunity and the incentive to study the visual arts. The forgetting of Ndaleni began in art history while the school still functioned; after its closure, the efforts of its students who became teachers were gradually forgotten as well. In the mid-1980s, for example, the University of Bophuthatswana commissioned a study on art education in that Bantustan’s schools, based on a careful analysis of instruction in the Molopo magisterial area. Researchers found it severely wanting. Their report revealed there was an overemphasis on craftwork, often for the tourist trade, at the expense of creativity. It was just another example of how “the European presence [has] almost ruined African Art,” the investigators complained. They considered the history of art education under apartheid and concluded that the white-minority state had withheld true art education from African students. The region’s students had been introduced only to the rote, repetitive industry of craftwork, rather than the more edifying awareness that “they are the masters of change, initiating culture and directing it to new creations.”22 As far as the report was concerned, the mid-1980s were an opportune moment to effect positive change. The Department of Bantu Education was no more, replaced by the Department of Basic Education and Training; indeed, in 1979 at long last, the Transvaal Education Department had finally changed the subject’s official name from arts and crafts to art education. The report surveyed Bophuthatswana, identified problems, and proposed solutions. Less than a third of the schools had any teachers qualified to teach art—there ought to be more. Principals controlled school funds and were stingy with supplies—they needed to do better. There were only two art inspectors and over eight hundred schools across the Bantustan—this could not stand. By dealing with these practical problems,

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Bophuthatswana might at last overcome the legacy of Bantu Education and “de-colonize” its art instruction. The report cited various theorists who might help them once they overcame these challenges, mentioning Herbert Read, Viktor Lowenfeld, Arthur Lismer, and the “good but informal” art school at Ndaleni by name.23 Within a few years, Bophuthatswana was no more, and the problem of visual arts education shifted back to the now-democratic central government of South Africa. But the report is a useful marker, even if it was only a case study of a handful of schools set within the broader context of one Bantustan. Despite nearly thirty years of nationally mandated art education, the vast majority of black South African students still wanted for qualified teachers, materials with which to create, and some idea why it was worth their while to do so. The “good but informal” art school at Ndaleni was easily forgotten at least in part because, for all of its efforts, that school’s graduates had been unable to make things much better. Since 1994, the South African government has repeatedly stated its commitment to art in schools. Immediately after the first democratic elections, there was a push to extend the visual arts in the secondary schools, the lack of which Lorna Peirson repeatedly cited as one of the great failings of the Bantu Education art system. Daphne Biyela received one of the first postings; in 1994, she began to teach art at P. J. Simelane High School in Dobsonville, Soweto. It was a relatively new school, and she the first art teacher. As happened under apartheid, she was met with incredulity by many of her fellow teachers: “to them, Art was something that children at a crèche did—to play or while away time.”24 The department inspectors were little better; in a time of dramatic political transition, art seemed a distracting extravagance. She persevered by activating networks of high school art teachers in established programs around Johannesburg, mostly in formerly white Model C schools, and by establishing contacts with fine arts graduates from Wits. She drew on the knowledge and techniques she had learned at Ndaleni: she scavenged for materials, begged for donations for paints and canvases, and beautified the premises by having her students paint colorful murals extolling the early twenty-first-century virtues of safe sex and HIV/AIDS awareness. She made some progress, but it was a grind. In the first decade of the new century, the visual arts were incorporated into “Arts and Culture,” one of the eight learning areas in which

Figure Ep.2 Mural at P. J. Simelane School, Dobsonville, Soweto, 2013, photograph by the author

all South African students are expected to become proficient under Outcome-Based Education. Biyela was seconded to teach the entire Arts and Culture learning area: visual arts, music, dance, and drama. She likened the experience to “fighting a tsunami with a mop.” She endured the storm until 2005, then left teaching and moved into an administrative position at the University of Johannesburg–Soweto. Her students’ murals are still there, but they are fading and peeling off of P. J. Simelane’s walls.25 Biyela’s new position reflected a broader shift in South African education. The University of Johannesburg–Soweto was once Vista University, a technical and vocational tertiary institution opened by the apartheid state. Since 1994, there has been a move away from such institutions, which were tainted by their association with state-sanctioned limits on black educational attainment. The current government broke from the past in other ways, including by closing down the teacher-training colleges that had pipelined thousands upon thousands of Africans into the schools of the apartheid state. This move made a good deal of sense; the training colleges

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were under the auspices of UNISA, which meant that they were riddled with the ideological legacy of apartheid’s authoritarian education system. Teachers under apartheid had been trained to believe that students were “nonadults”—empty, imperfect beings needing to be molded into what society expected them to be. Yet, as Ndaleni shows, not all of the teachers trained there saw things in this way, and a great deal of personal and institutional knowledge went away with the closure of the colleges.26 This is especially evident in art education. As Biyela experienced, in 2002 the government Department of Education produced a new set of standards for the so-called Curriculum 2005 reforms. The educational theorists and activists that developed the new system identified Arts and Culture as a critical learning area for the “redressing” of historical “imbalances” in South African education. Arts and Culture would help the state “to deal with the legacy of cultural intolerance . . . and affirm the diversity of South African cultures.”27 To that end, the department attempted to animate culture in the curriculum without replicating the tribalist and racialist calcification of Bantu Education theory. Early twenty-first-century researchers asked how children’s games, praise poetry and local musical styles could be incorporated into the Arts and Culture curriculum, with the desired end result being students conversant in all of the arts and capable of seeing the arts at work in the world around them. Notably, the visual arts alone had no local cultural referents; instead, the commission that drafted the policy trusted that teachers would be able to guide their students in the active, conscious experience of art. By Grade 1 all students were expected to be able to articulate and narrate their creations in drawing, clay, and paint and thus their own personal, creative, and imaginative worlds. By Grade 7, all students were to be able to “understand” art: to be better citizens by creating “art, craft or design works commenting on human rights issues” and to be aesthetically sensitive people, able to “gather information from field trips, excursions, interviews and other sources to analyze the contribution of art, craft and design to everyday life.”28 To be sure, the foregoing are wonderful sentiments. John Dewey would recognize their insistence that every child is an artist in their own way and that exposure to the arts makes better citizens for a modern democracy. But in the department’s desire to break with the past, the policy makers failed to consider the reality that such sentiments had long circulated in South Africa only to fall victim to inequality and ignorance.

Biyela’s experience of being overstretched and undersupported is typical. In the words of a member of the Arts and Culture policy commission, the curriculum was “the epitome of naiveté,” however lovely its ideas.29 There have been important modifications to Curriculum 2005, and it needs to be acknowledged that it is a powerful corrective. It takes Lancaster’s move toward including black South African artists in art history to the next necessary level by demanding that art learners be conversant in the work of Sekoto, Mancoba, Kumalo, Pemba, and others.30 Yet without an adequate supply of specially trained teachers and with more career options open to aspirant blacks—including art schools now open to applications from all South Africans who want to pursue art (at least in theory)—there remains a sharp disconnect between the ideals embodied in the curriculum and the reality for most black students. Without teachers and adequate oversight, the good words are empty; in practice, visual arts are still expensive and obscure. Art remains foreign to most students, especially when compared to the other elements in the Arts and Cultures syllabus. Even schools that excel in those areas typically lag in visual arts; art remains a language for living spoken and understood by the very few. Take the area around Richmond and the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. The Tatham Art Gallery has a vigorous outreach effort in the schools, but it fails to attract significant interest from the townships and rural areas. Although invested teachers remain—among them Zakhele Hlatshwayo, the Ndaleni graduate who continues to teach at a township high school—art still lacks the systemic support that drama, music, and dance enjoy. The mandated teacher-to-student ratio is 35-to-1—meaning that the government will pay for only one teacher per thirty-five students. With teachers in such short supply, dedicated visual arts teachers are an extravagant luxury in most state-funded schools. So in the poorest schools, visual arts instruction is typically the short straw, invariably drawn by the teacher with the least experience and authority.31 The situation is different in the region’s numerous Model C and private schools, where student fees supplement the curriculum and often support thriving art programs. In post-1994 South Africa, tens of thousands of black students have been able to avail themselves of these opportunities. When I visited KwaZulu-Natal in 2014, Durban’s King Shaka International Airport was displaying a dramatic life-sized rhinoceros, fashioned by female students at Pietermaritzburg’s Russell High School to promote the

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province’s antipoaching efforts. As at Ndaleni, the students worked with what was at hand, using “aluminum cans, which were cut and painted, beads, dried tea bags and broken glass” to construct the rhino’s hide.32 Russell High’s art teacher at the time, Alana Leigh, is descended from a long line of South African artists. Her emphasis on recycled materials—her students have made dresses out of plastic straws, to cite another example—reveals Leigh’s sensitivity to the economic realities of art education in contemporary South Africa. In this, she is like her Ndaleni-trained predecessors, who sought out pruned tree branches, used sponges, and deteriorated railway sleepers for their own students.33 Russell High’s students are fortunate that they have a teacher able to provide the incentive and resourcefulness without which art is impossible. As under apartheid and Bantu Education, access to visual arts in schools depends on individual teachers: their own training and energy, their ability to interface with those who control funds and set the curriculum for the schools, as well as their own ability to find materials with which students can work. The end result of this situation is that now, as then, the visual arts remain largely a privilege of the wealthy. As under Bantu Education, efforts to incorporate systematic and ubiquitous training in the visual arts have failed. This failure is evident especially in Richmond at the Indaleni School for the Deaf, which today occupies what was once the Indaleni Training College and Ndaleni art school. The Hillside

The past decades have not been kind to Richmond. The waning of KwaZulu authority and the easing of apartheid residential restrictions saw the urbanized population of the region boom across the 1980s and early 1990s, filling the valley between Indaleni mission and Richmond town. This population boom coincided with the province’s well-known post-1990 competition for loyalties between the African National Congress (ANC), Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party, and other groups. In Richmond, this competition took the form of a violent rivalry within the local ANC (with occasional support from other organizations, such as the United Democratic Movement) that culminated in a near-constant state of violence through the late 1990s and hundreds of deaths. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the area had settled into an uneasy calm, with the

Figure Ep.3 Entranceway to girls’ hostel, photograph by Cedric Nunn, 2009, with the permission

of Cedric Nunn

ANC triumphant—but as recently as April 2014, word of thwarted assassination attempts and successful automobile torchings had begun to circulate again. Politics aside, Richmond remains a poor, underserved backwater, with rampant unemployment and a prevailing lack of opportunity.34 Where once Indaleni Mission was a vital educational resource for the region, in the past decades it has provided resources of a different sort. The buildings on the west side of the mission road have been scavenged for building materials. The girls’ hostel—once among the largest buildings in the region—is a shell. Its roof is gone, its upper floors have been systematically disassembled, its beams and thousands of its bricks have been reclaimed for other uses. The once-splendid gateway to the hostel is reduced to a nonsensical collection of mosaics and statues, and the giant papier-mâché relief that once proclaimed the name of the Indaleni Missionary Institution is gradually eroding, returning a mural from the 1950s to the light. Various other buildings near the girls’ hostel have suffered a

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similar fate, each revealing their scars in absent roofs and the marks of sledgehammers plunged into walls to loosen the precious bricks within. Shards of masonry, garbage, and weeds are scattered among these ruins, as are some cement-and-wire statues, seemingly startled to find themselves so situated. The creative destruction of Indaleni is ongoing; in 2011, the girls’ dining hall still had locked doors; a roof; and, dimly visible through a broken window, an outstanding mural of a school scene done in vibrant blues and yellows. (This was purportedly done by Selby Mvusi in the 1950s, although I have found no evidence of this.)35 In 2014, the roof, walls, and doors were gone, as was the mural, which had fallen victim to the violence of the sun, wind, and rain.36 The east side of the mission road has fared better, although time’s destructive passage is still evident. Phillip Ndwandwe’s robed Christ figure still stands outside the mission chapel, although his face and hands are gone. Local lore has it that during Richmond’s troubles, someone threw red paint—symbolizing blood, doubtlessly—over the figure, but there is no longer evidence of that. Silverman Jara’s monster is still there. Its open mouth is occasionally used as a rubbish bin, but children continue to play on its back. Farther up the hill by the practicing school, three of the four swing-supporting animals are still there, if damaged. Solomon Mabusela’s rhinoceros is gone, as are the swing (absent as of 2011) and the metal pipes that once supported it (as of 2014). The three remaining animals are now a curious grouping, standing at a wary distance from each other, with no evidence of their former purpose. The massive oak tree that once shaded the swing still stands, commanding its view over the valley. When the wind blows through its leaves, you can almost imagine a squealing child, held aloft by giants, soaring through the air. Many of those giants’ contemporaries are still standing, if in disrepair, protected by their enclosure within the fence of the Indaleni School for the Deaf. The ground has grown up around the base of Abiah Ramadi’s Sower, concealing the artist’s signature beneath decades of accumulated dirt and grass. The baseball player has lost his arms and his bat, but he still watches the ball in flight. Sophia Nsuza’s monumental mural endures, only slightly dimmed, on an exterior wall, as do murals by Abednego Dlamini, Absolom Eichab, and Hamlet Hobe in a breezeway. Peter Bell’s technique of mixing oil paints with beeswax ensured the longevity of the various murals in the main hall as well. Samson Mahlobo and other students completed them

Figure Ep.4 Statue by unknown Ndaleni art school student, photograph by Ced-

ric Nunn, 2009, with the permission of Cedric Nunn

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Figure Ep.5 Students of the Indaleni School for the Deaf meeting in the main

hall, photograph by Cedric Nunn, 2014, with the permission of Cedric Nunn

all in 1962. A half century later, they are still vibrant raconteurs of the life of the art school and its students. The site’s current occupants know little about the art school that was once there, even though many live on campus and all frequently assemble beneath the murals in the hall. The Indaleni School for the Deaf serves hearing-impaired students from across KwaZulu-Natal, from the youngest learners to those old enough to be preparing for their matriculation. There is something fitting about the deaf school’s existence at the site, despite obvious differences between it and the art school. Ndaleni students understood art to be a language that was shared by a few but obscure and opaque to many. As long as the school and its newsletter existed, so did students’ anxiety that others simply could not grasp what it was that they were trying to say. This is not to say that art students’ experiences were therefore parallel to those of the sign language–conversant learners at the Indaleni School. The barriers that the typical art student faced were not comparable to those still faced by the deaf in a South Africa that lacks the infrastructure needed to support their progress.

Yet there are similarities. For most of its students, the Indaleni School will be their last, just as the art school was. There is no dedicated higher education for the hearing impaired in South Africa; given that reality, the Indaleni School imagines itself to be more of a vocational school, teaching creativity and resourcefulness more than anything else. Students there study needlework, hairstyling, knitting, carpentry, computer programming, welding, and basketry; each subject is taught with the goal of equipping the students with some basic skills, through which they might somehow earn a living. Like the art school before it, the Indaleni School is always short of resources for its projects, and it relies on the generosity of local Methodist congregations, especially white ones in Pietermaritzburg, for donations. Otherwise, the work of making something out of nothing continues. When Cedric Nunn and I visited in April 2014, there were large pieces of sponge drying on the grass. A teacher, Lydia Mngadi, explained that the sponge was from old mattresses, which had been replaced. Students had washed it; once it was dry, they would sew the sponge into pillows of their own design, which they would then try to sell. Hearkening back to Charles Loram and his disciples, such activities are “occupation,” not art, intended to help poor children become somewhat less so. But there is art also at the Indaleni School. Or at least there was, for a time. In 2013 and 2014, a sign-language-proficient Arts and Culture diploma holder and artist named Busi Mkhize was teaching on campus; she was eventually given space to begin a dedicated visual arts program. She began drawing and painting classes, at first for the school’s “problem” students and then for the rest of the population. Mkhize faced immediate and unique challenges: for instance, sign language lacks common art theory terms such as toning, which meant that she had to find roundabout ways to explain things. Yet her biggest problem was a familiar one—a lack of resources. So Mkhize improvised. On the Internet, she found instructions for a simple project needing nothing more than a heat gun and recycled plastic. A donor provided the former; she sent her students rummaging through refuse bins in search of plastic, and she herself visited various shops around Richmond to collect masonite bottoms from discarded tomato crates to serve as canvases for her pupils. Such are the raw materials of art. Mkhize began to teach her art classes in January 2014. For a few weeks, creative exclamations were once again seen at Indaleni, as students layered plastic on masonite and applied heat to create works of personal,

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Figure Ep.6 Artwork by the students of Busi Mkhize, masonite and plastic, Indaleni School for the

Deaf, 2014, photograph by the author

unique, irreplicable artistry. The art teachers who preceded her would have cheered Mkhize. But her art course will be short lived. When we spoke in April 2014, she was awaiting departmental approval to transfer from Indaleni School to another deaf school nearer to Durban. She wants to be an artist; there are no galleries in Richmond and no community to support her work. So, she will descend from the mission, and there are no plans to replace her. Art will remain foreign to most students at the Indaleni School, as, to be sure, it is to most students the world over who are not provided with the opportunities Arthur Lismer once called for: to share space with creative work and to be encouraged themselves to create. The students at the Indaleni School are surrounded by art, but in general, they do not know what to make of it. I asked a group of them who they thought had made the paintings that festoon the hall in which they assemble and the passages through which they walk. “White people,” one volunteered—perhaps

Figure Ep.7 Birdbath, by Phanuel Pooe, photograph by Cedric Nunn, 2009, with the permission

of Cedric Nunn

because the only people she had ever seen painting on the walls were local Maritzburg Methodists, whose Disney-inspired mural, painted in the late 2000s, was already peeling off an interior wall in one of the hostels. In spite of the aspirations of the Arts and Culture curriculum, questions about art and its appeal to the senses make little sense to most of the students at the Indaleni School. And yet. As we walked around the school, I asked students to point out pieces of art to me, and when they did so, I asked them what they made of the works and how the works made them feel. Most of our exchanges were fruitless. Eventually we came to Phanuel Pooe’s birdbath, which even in 2014 was remarkably intact: the feline monster still balances a basin on its tail, its mouth playfully agape. One student seemed quite taken with the work; I asked why. Because it is beautiful, his teacher translated. “Why?” He paused, then looked skyward. The basin fills with water when it rains,

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he explained, and the birds come to splash and bathe. This is part of the rhythm of the hillside as the student experiences it: rains rolling in and birds at play in the work of human hands. This is the rhythm of his life, as he stands and watches the birds. A half century ago, an art student stood where this student now stands. The art student surveyed the scene and used what he had—his ideas, his hands, cement, waste, and wire—to coax forth beauty from his land. The art student is forgotten now, but in the rain, in the life and the work he left behind on a hillside in South Africa, he endures.

Notes

Prologue: Handwork 1. Richard Elphick, The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 181. 2. Fred Sithole, “The Success of Manual Work in Out Schools,” Native Teachers’ Journal, October 1926, 52–53. 3. Perhaps the best known of works on the subject is Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, The German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). For a Francophone example of these debates, see Kelly Duke-Bryant, Education as Politics: Colonial Schooling and the Political Debate in Senegal, 1850s–1914 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015). For a longer-range history of British education in Africa, see Charles Lyons, To Wash an Aethiop White: British Ideas about Black African Education, 1530–1960 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1975). 4. See Brahm Fleisch, “The Teachers College Club: American Educational Discourse and the Origins of Bantu Education in South Africa, 1914–1951” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1995), as well as Richard W. Hull, American Enterprise in South Africa: Historical Dimensions of Engagement and Disengagement (New York: NYU Press, 1990). 5. Fleisch, “Teachers College Club,” 50. 6. Peter Kallaway, “Introduction,” in The History of Education under Apartheid, 1948–1994, ed. Kallaway (New York: P. Lang, 2002), 14. 7. Cited in Fleisch, “Teachers College Club,” 47. 8. See Charles Loram, “The Phelps-Stokes Education Commission in South Africa,” International Review of Mission 10, no. 4 (1921): 496–508. 9. Kallaway, “Introduction,” 10. 10. C. T. Loram, The Education of the South African Native (London: Longmans, Green, 1917), 34. 11. Ibid., 280–81. For two important critiques of Loram, one more confidently imperialist and the other more “progressively” liberal, see A. Victor Murray, The

Notes to Pages xxv–5 292

School in the Bush: A Critical Study of the Theory and Practice of Native Education in South Africa (London: Longmans, Green, 1929) and Edgar Harry Brookes, Native Education in South Africa (Pretoria: J. L. Van Schaik, 1930). 12. John Watt Grossert, Art and Crafts for Africans: A Manual for Art and Craft Teachers (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter, 1959), 72–73. 13. See, for example, Cynthia Kros, The Seeds of Separate Development: Origins of Bantu Education, 1st ed. (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2010), as well as Elphick, Equality of Believers. Both are excellent studies, consumed with the question of how these historically progressive ideas became the foundation with white supremacy. 14. A. B. Zunga, “Native Crafts: An Occupation,” Native Teachers’ Journal, July 1930, 214. For a nineteenth-century iteration of this white artisanal protectionism, see T. J. Tallie, “‘To Become Useful and Patriotic Citizens’: Education and the Politics of Belonging,” paper presented at the North Eastern Workshop on Southern Africa, Burlington, Vermont, April 2016. 15. Fleisch, “Teachers College Club,” 54. 16. Cited in ibid., 162–63. Chapter 1: A Hillside in South Africa 1. Kepu to Peirson, July 31, 1972, Campbell Collection, University of KwaZuluNatal, Ndaleni Collection, Student Records, Kepu File, 1. 2. Shimbabu to Peirson, February 11, 1974, 2. 3. ARTTRA, no. 10, 1965, 18. 4. Bopape to Peirson, undated, 1. 5. Radebe to Peirson, February 24, 1965, enc. 6. ARTTRA, no. 8, 1964, 8. 7. Juliette Leeb-du Toit, ed., Ndaleni Art School: A Retrospective (Pietermaritzburg: Tatham Gallery, 1999), 5; Ndaleni Collection, Killie Campbell Archives, Scrapbook 3, excerpt from the Natal Daily News, December 5, 1974. 8. See also Elizabeth Rankin, “Creating Communities,” in Visual Century: South African Art in Context, vol. 2, 1945–1976, ed. Lize Van Robbroeck (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2011). 9. Zwane to Bell, March 20, 1961, 1. 10. Ghu to Peirson, KC—Ndaleni—Student records, October 5, 1970, 2–3. 11. Ghu to Peirson, KC—Ndaleni—Student records, July 15, 1971, 1. 12. Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 6. 13. Scholars have only occasionally explored the actual institutional functioning of apartheid. See Ivan Thomas Evans, Bureaucracy and Race: Native Administration in South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Adam Ashforth, The Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); and Deborah Posel, The Making of Apartheid, 1948–1961: Conflict and Compromise (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) and “The Apartheid

Project,” in The Cambridge History of South Africa, vol. 2, ed. Robert Ross, Anne Kelk Mager, and Bill Nasson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 319–68. My contention is that an institutional history is able to break down some of the easy narratives about apartheid and its functioning to get closer to the actual terrain of experience under the system. See, for example, Simonne Janine Horwitz, Baragwanath Hospital, Soweto: A History of Medical Care, 1941–1990 (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2006). There is also a developing literature on the Bantustans, which has a tremendous amount of potential for deepening knowledge about political practice beyond the struggle. See, for instance, a number of essays written in response to an early 2010s conference at the University of the Witwatersrand, cheekily titled (after Steve Biko) “Let’s Talk about Bantustans.” Selections from this conference were subsequently published in the South African Historical Journal. See, for example, Laura Evans, “South Africa’s Bantustans and the Dynamics of ‘Decolonisation,’” South African Historical Journal 64, no. 1 (2012): 117–37, and Sekibakiba Lekgoathi, “‘You Are Listening to Radio Lebowa of the South African Broadcasting Corporation’: Vernacular Radio, Bantustan Identity and Listenership, 1960–1994,” South African Historical Journal 35, no. 3 (2009): 575–94. One of the main thrusts of revision has been to consider which elements of Bantustan political life were redeemable, if any. Health care and culture have emerged as two favorites; for the former, see Anne Digby, “‘The Bandwagon of Golden Opportunities’?,” South African Historical Journal 64, no. 4 (2012): 827–51, and Fraser McNeill, “Rural Reggae,” South African Historical Journal 64, no. 1 (2012): 81–95. See also Tim Gibbs’s magisterial study of the politics of the Transkei: Mandela’s Kinsmen: Nationalist Elites and Apartheid’s First Bantustan (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2014). 14. My thinking here is influenced by writings about identity formation, notably that of Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry, no. 17 (1991): 773–97, and Frederick Cooper (with Rogers Brubaker), “Identity,” in Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Both Scott and Cooper contend that “identities” should be seen almost as narratives, unfolding across time, rather than as completed, closed processes that are typically retrospective rather than historical. In South Africa historiography, Paul Stuart Landau, Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), insists that we begin with these social processes of becoming rather than the now- or once-current political identifications back onto the past. I will return to this issue later in this chapter. 15. Consider the response to political commentator and historian Jacob Dlamini’s 2010 study, Native Nostalgia (Johannesburg: Jacana Media). For memoirs and the question of other sorts of lives under apartheid, see Zakes Mda, Sometimes There Is a Void (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), Fred Khumalo, Touch My Blood (Johannesburg: Umuzi, 2011), and Redi Tlabi, Endings and Beginnings: Story of Healing (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2013). Such memoirs frequently

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transgress onto the terrain of the struggle memoir, exemplified by Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, but in other respects, they are in keeping with Njabulo Ndebele’s mid-1980s call for black South African writers to “rediscover the ordinary.” See Ndebele, “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary,” Journal of Southern African Studies 12, no. 2 (1986): 143–57. For more on the debate Ndebele’s call prompted, see David Attwell, Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 137–69. As noted previously, Mda and others are heirs to a long tradition of black South African nonfiction writing, much of which powerfully critiques the flattening of the black South African experience to that of the struggle alone. See, for instance, Bloke Modisane, Blame Me on History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), and especially Essop Patel, ed., The World of Can Themba (Braamfontein, South Africa: Ravan Press, 1985). For a trenchant critique of “intimate knowledge” and the practice of memory in South Africa, see Jon Soske, “Open Secrets, Off the Record: Audience, Intimate Knowledge, and the Crisis of the Post-apartheid State,” Historical Reflections 38, no. 2 (2012): 55–70. It is far less common to find a monograph on some nonstruggle aspect of twentiethcentury South African history; welcome exceptions are Clive Glaser, Bo-Tsotsi: The Youth Gangs of Soweto, 1935–1976 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000), Anne Kelk Mager, Beer, Sociability, and Masculinity in South Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), and Meghan Healy-Clancy, A World of Their Own: A History of South African Women’s Education (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2013). A recent book that does a marvelous job interweaving the struggle and the quotidian is Leslie Hadfield, Liberation and Development: Black Consciousness Community Programs in South Africa (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2016). Other fields, notably anthropology and literature, are more practiced at recovering some aspect of everyday life in the twentieth century. See, for example, David Coplan, In Township Tonight! Three Centuries of South African Black City Music and Theatre (Auckland Park, South Africa: Jacana Media, 2007) and especially Rita Barnard, Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). New scholarship elsewhere in Africa is providing a more sensitive accounting of twentieth-century politics by considering in particular how the dynamics of cultural and intellectual production colluded with state policies to create new political and social forms across the postcolonial era. See especially Andrew Ivaska, Cultured States: Youth, Gender, and Modern Style in 1960s Dar Es Salaam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Jonathon Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); James Brennan, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012); Nate Plageman, Hi-Life Saturday Night: Popular Music and Social Change in Urban Ghana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); and Michael McGovern, Unmasking the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

16. Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post–Civil Rights Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 18. 17. Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily Lynn Osborn, and Richard L. Roberts, eds., Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). See also Clifton C. Crais on agricultural specialists in The Politics of Evil: Magic, State Power, and the Political Imagination in South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Sean Redding on tax collection in Sorcery and Sovereignty: Taxation, Power, and Rebellion in South Africa, 1880–1963 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006). For case studies of so-called middle-people in the Union (and early apartheid) era, see Colin Bundy, “A Voice in the Big House: The Career of Headman Enoch Mamba,” Journal of African History 22, no. 4 (1981): 531–50, and Paul La Hausse, “So Who Was Elias Kuzwayo? Nationalism, Collaboration and the Picaresque in Natal,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 32 (1993): 469–507. African policemen and soldiers are other well-studied intermediaries. See Gregory Mann, Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Tim Parsons, The African Rank and File: Social Implications of Colonial Military Service in the King’s African Rifles, 1902–1964 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999); and David M. Anderson and David Killingray, eds. Policing the Empire: Government, Authority, and Control, 1830–1940 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002). For South Africa, see Keith Shear, “Chiefs or Modern Bureaucrats? Managing Black Police in Early TwentiethCentury South Africa,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no. 2 (2012): 251–74. Frederick Cooper is among those credited with moving the literature beyond the simple oppression/resistance binary that characterized many earlier Africanist histories of colonialism; see his “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking African Colonial History,” American Historical Review 99, no. 5 (1994): 1516–45. For a vital intervention in this field, see Michelle R. Moyd, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014). 18. On beauty and the social politics of self-expression, see Ben Davis, 9.5 Theses about Art and Class (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2013). 19. Joan Wallach Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), esp. chap. 2, “Fantasy Echo”; Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), esp. “An Unthinkable History.” 20. Rudolph Ware III, The Walking Qur’an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge and History in West Africa (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 7. 21. Bell to Brown, February 26, 1963, LOC—Harmon Foundation—MSS51615— Box 103—South Africa, 2. 22. Bell, ARTTRA, no. 1, March 1961, circular letter; KCAV 200/201.

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23. KCAV 200 / 201; Lorna Peirson, personal communication, February 10, 2014. 24. There are too many narratives of the struggle to list here. What is worth noting, however, is that even when not explicitly about apartheid and the struggle against it, South African historiography has tended to focus explicitly on the social, economic, and political conditions that promoted white supremacy from the nineteenth century on, often with the implicit or explicit suggestion that these conditions structured the nature of popular resistance or compliance as well. Notable and classic works include Colin Bundy, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Peter Delius, The Land Belongs to Us (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone, Industrialization and Social Change in South Africa (New York: Longman, 1982); Charles Van Onselen, The Seed Is Mine (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996); and Diana Wylie, Starving on a Full Stomach (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001). An important recent reassessment of the scholarly consensus is Clifton Crais, Poverty, War, and Violence in South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Crais argues that the origins of South Africa’s mass immiseration go back to imperial conquest in the middle to late nineteenth century, rather than in the rise of the segregationist state. This puts the onus of responsibility (as it were) on the process of colonization, which is a more familiar argument elsewhere in colonial Africa, as in Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), esp. the conclusion— although the idea of a total imperial break has been critically reexamined by Holly Hanson and others. Back in South Africa, although the weight of the scholarship is on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many historians have also written about apartheid, of course. Collaborative multivolume efforts such as Gwendolyn Carter, Tom Karis, Gail Gerhart, and (recently) Clive Glaser’s From Protest to Challenge in South Africa, 6 vols. (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972–2010) and the state-sponsored South African Democracy Educational Trust’s Road to Democracy in South Africa continue to narrate the history of the struggle. Important monographs include Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1982), and his recent Sharpeville: An Apartheid Massacre and Its Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). General histories of apartheid include Dan O’Meara, Forty Lost Years: The Apartheid State and the Politics of the National Party (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996) and Posel, Making of Apartheid, whereas more focused monographs include Leslie Witz, Apartheid’s Festival: Contesting South Africa’s National Pasts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); Anne Kelk Mager, Gender and the Making of a South African Bantustan: A Social History of the Ciskei, 1945–1959 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999); Ineke van Kessel, Beyond Our Wildest Dreams: The United Democratic Front and the Transformation of South Africa (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000); and my own The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010). These

volumes are all about some aspect of state segregation and popular resistance, as is the large and better-read popular literature on the country’s history. 25. Catherine Burns, “A Useable Past: The Search for a History in Chords,” in Hans Erik Stolten, ed., History Making and Present Day Politics: The Meaning of Contemporary Memory in South Africa (Uppsala, Sweden: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2007). Burns is careful to underline her use of the term post-anti-apartheid, not post-apartheid, given how many of the long-dead system’s social conditions continue to bedevil contemporary South Africa. See Steven L. Robins, ed., Limits to Liberation after Apartheid: Citizenship, Governance and Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), Richard Pithouse, Writing the Decline: On the Struggle for South Africa’s Democracy (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2016), and too many volumes in between for critiques of the post-1994 dispensation. 26. The scholarship on emotion and its cognate, affect, in Africa is slowly accumulating. For an introduction and vital case study, see Kathryn M. de Luna, “Affect and Society in Precolonial Africa,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 46, no. 1 (2013): 123–50; see also de Luna, “Hunting Reputations: Talent, Individuals, and Community in Precolonial South Central Africa,” Journal of African History 53, no. 3 (2013): 279–99. The scholarship on love is particularly rich. For a marvelous recent example, see Carina Ray, Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015) and this conversation between Ray and myself about the state of the field: http://africasacountry.com/2016/02/love-race-and-history-in-ghana/ (accessed on May 11, 2016). 27. On the multivalence of technology in Africa, see especially Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Julie Livingston, Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); and Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). For a devastating indictment of the role technology—or a lack thereof—plays in entirely discordant experiences of modernity, see Akhil Gupta, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 28. Like the artists about whom Martin Duberman writes, as members of “marginalized communities, even when comparatively well educated and gifted,” Ndaleni art teachers lacked “an abundance of all resources except suffering.” Yet like poets on the “battlefield of AIDS,” the challenges of art under apartheid did not excuse sitting on one’s hands. (Duberman, Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of AIDS [New York: New Press, 2014], 17.) 29. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3. 30. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 30, 32, 61, 64.

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31. Mbembe, “African Modes of Self-Writing,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 242. 32. See, for example, Mcebisi Ndletyana, ed., African Intellectuals in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century South Africa (Pretoria: HSRC Press, 2008). 33. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, “Introduction,” in Global Intellectual History, ed. Moyn and Sartori (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 1. 34. See my Law and the Prophets, esp. chap. 9. 35. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 242. 36. Mbembe, “African Modes of Self-Writing,” 258, 272. 37. Chakrabarty, 221. Notably, Chakrabarty refers to this as the “art of living.” 38. Chika Okeke-Agulu, “The Challenge of the Modern: An Introduction,” African Arts 39, no. 1 (2006): 15. 39. Partha Mitter, “Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery,” Art Bulletin 90, no. 4 (2014): 541. 40. For a long while, art historical literature on black artists fixated on their responses only to socioeconomic and political conditions. This literature tended to make black artistic creativity automatic and unreflective; the artists themselves were therefore written out of history, a process that some art historians have begun to correct. An important exception is Diana Wylie’s biography of the preeminent “protest” artist Thami Mnyele. Wylie’s account is acutely sensitive to the unfolding of Mnyele’s creative practice, in dialogue with his circumstances. Her biographical approach is a vital departure from most South Africanist art history. Wylie, Art + Revolution: The Life and Death of Thami Mnyele, South African Artist (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2008). For other, if less accomplished, examples, see N. Chabani Manganyi, Gerard Sekoto: ‘I Am an African’: A Biography (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2004) and Prince Mbusi Dube, Dumile: The Story of a Great Artist (Johannesburg: Mutloatse Heritage Trust, 2010). 41. John Peffer, Art and the End of Apartheid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), xv; Kirsten Nieser, “Michael Zondi: Creating Modernity” (PhD diss., University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2010), xii. 42. This is regrettably true in the recent blockbuster Visual Century collection as well. The collection’s four volumes are amazingly complete—they offer a very thorough accounting of the history of visual production in twentieth-century South Africa. But although they effectively democratize the canon, the authors do not employ new research or data to reimagine the creative practices of black artists. They remain ciphers for their historical era in the best case and robots awaiting the animating touch of white artists in the worst. Only rarely do the art historians charged with writing the history of the 1920s through the 1970s read beyond typical art historical sources (objects, reviews, etc.) to consider the wider social context in which artists worked and which yields a thicker understanding of the possibilities of creative thought in time. This is not to say that it is not a worthy collection—it surely is, as far as it goes. For a spirited defense of it, see Lize van Robbroeck,

“Unsettling the Canon: Some Thoughts on the Design of Visual Century: South African Art in Context,” Third Text Africa 3, no. 1 (2013): 27–37. 43. Scott, “Evidence of Experience,” 791–92 44. Anitra Nettleton, “Writing Artists into History: Dumile Feni and the South African Canon,” African Arts 44, no. 1 (2011): 8–25. 45. Joshua Cohen, “Masks and the Modern: African/European Encounters in Twentieth-Century Art” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2014), 202. 46. John Berger, A Painter of Our Time (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1976), 148. 47. Peffer himself does this excellently in his discussion of township toys, Art and the End of Apartheid, 121. 48. Arthur Danto, What Art Is (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013) 39, 41. 49. See Frederico Freschi, “Afrikaner Nationalism, Modernity and the Changing Culture of ‘High Art,’” in Visual Century, vol. 2; Jennifer Beningfield, The Frightened Land: Land, Landscape and Politics in South Africa in the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2006) ; Annie Coombes, History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Clive Kellner, ed., Thami Mnyele and the MEDU Art Ensemble (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2010). 50. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigree Books, 2005 (1934), 2. 51. Jon Berger, “The Work of Art,” in Selected Essays, ed. Geoff Dyer (New York: Vintage International, 2003), 434. 52. I almost hesitate to draw readers’ attention to this book, because it’s one of the best things I’ve ever read and therefore risks drawing attention away from my more modest work, but in its focus and diachronic coverage, the present study is formally similar to Martin Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (New York: Dutton, 1972). Actually, forget my hesitation: read the book. 53. Berger, “The Work of Art,” 434. 54. Examples of Africanist scholarship sensitive to the aesthetic dimensions of postcolonial Africa include Marissa Moorman, Intonations: A Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, from 1945 to Recent Times (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008); Nate Plageman, Highlife Saturday Night: Popular Music and Social Change in Urban Ghana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Michael McGovern, Unmasking the State: Making Guinea Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); and Andrew Ivaska, Cultured States: Youth, Gender and Modern Style in 1960s Dar es Salaam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 55. Paul Landau, Popular Politics; Steven Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tanzania (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Neil Kodesh, Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010); Sean Hanretta, Islam

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and Social Change in French West Africa: History of an Emancipatory Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 56. Harry West, Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 237. 57. Berger, “Moment of Cubism,” in Selected Essays, 92. 58. Michael Taussig, Beauty and the Beast (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 5. 59. Berger, “Moment of Cubism,” 92. 60. For works that consider similarly fraught conditions of everyday existence in wildly different societies, see, for example, Dorinne Kondo, Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). An exemplary historical iteration is Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). For “intense attention” to time, see Dewey, Art as Experience, 2, 11, 26, 208. 61. For studies of self-making in South Africa, see Judith Coullie, Selves in Question: Interviews on Southern African Auto/biography (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), and Jacob Dlamini and Megan Jones, eds., Categories of Persons: Rethinking Ourselves and Others (Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2014). Jean Comoroff and John Comoroff have raised similar issues in their Theory from the South: or How Euro-America Is Evolving Toward Africa (London: Paradigm Publishers, 2012), esp. chap, 2, “On Personhood.” For historical examples elsewhere on the continent, see especially Karin Barber, ed., Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and the Making of the Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). Other studies vital to my thinking about this include Jan Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005) and Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). All of these works share the conviction that selves are dialogic, constituted of the interplay between a person and his or her material and intellectual worlds. Goldstein shows how technologies such as lectures and texts were used to maintain and constitute supposedly inviolate and independent nineteenth-century French selves; Hellbeck shows the same was true for twentieth-century Soviet diaries. My thanks to two veterans of Northwestern University’s 1999 senior thesis seminar for the recommendations—Ken Alder and Anatoly Pinsky, respectively. The debate over community versus individual has resonated in South Africa through Ciraj Rassool and Jonathan Hyslop’s debate about biography writing. See Jonathan Hyslop, “On Biography: A Response to Ciraj Rassool,” South African Review of Sociology 41, no. 2 (2010): 104–15, and Ciraj Rassool, “The Challenges of Rethinking South African Political Biography: A Reply to Jonathan Hyslop,” South African Review of Sociology 41, no. 2 (2010): 116–20, as well as Rassool’s study, “The Individual, Auto/Biography and History in South Africa” (PhD diss., University of the Western Cape, 2004).

62. Catherine Burns, “Letters of Louisa Mvemve,” in Barber, Africa’s Hidden Histories, 90. Mvemve’s “girders” function similarly to what Rassool describes as the ongoing “productions” of life history, revealed especially through writing. Rassool, “Individual,” 12. A recent study that takes this in exciting new directions is Stephanie Newell, The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013). 63. Scott, Fantasy of Feminist History, 141. 64. Godfrey Lienhardt, “Self: Public, Private—Some African Representations,” in The Category of the Person, ed. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 145; Ingrid Monson, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call out to Jazz and Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 294–96. For Sidney Kasfir and Till Forster, it is talent—activity—set within the context and limitations of an artists’ workshop. “Introduction,” African Art and Agency in the Workshop (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 4. 65. Dewey, Art as Experience, chap. 3. 66. In South Africa, see, for example, Witz, Apartheid’s Festival, Beningfield, The Frightened Land, and Wylie, Art + Revolution. 67. Isak Niehaus, “Witchcraft and the South African Bantustans,” South African Historical Journal 64, no. 1 (2012): 58. 68. See, for example, Noah Tamarkin’s wonderfully rich account of the Lemba Cultural Association’s attempts to be granted recognition—and thus Bantustan authority—during the 1970s. Tamarkin, “Religion as Race, Recognition as Democracy: Lemba ‘Black Jews’ in South Africa,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 637 (2011): 148–64. 69. Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995), 106–14; Hanretta, Islam and Social Change, chap. 8, 227–52. 70. Ruth Marshall, Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 10–12, 46–47. 71. Stephen Ellis, External Mission: The ANC in Exile, 1960–1990 (London: Hurst, 2012); Ellis and Tsepo Sechaba, Comrades against Apartheid: The ANC & the South African Communist Party in Exile (London: J. Currey, 1992); Jacklyn Cock, Colonels and Cadres: War and Gender in South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Njabulo Ndebele sounded an important tempering note in his wonderfully provocative novel, The Cry of Winnie Mandela, particularly in the idea of “mellowness”—calm acceptance of what has been—as a necessary politics in South Africa (59–60). 72. Among others, here I am thinking about T. Dunbar Moodie, Going for Gold: Men, Mines, and Migration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: University of

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Notes to Pages 20–22 302

Chicago Press, 1990); Derek Peterson, Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent, c. 1935–1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Marshall, Political Spiritualities; Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003); Anne Kelk Mager, Beer, Sociability, and Masculinity in South Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Timothy Parsons, Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004); Michelle Moyd, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014); Susan Geiger, TANU Women: Gender and Culture in the Making of Tanganyikan Nationalism, 1955–1965 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997); Jonathon Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); Priya Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). My The Law and the Prophets considers the productive dimensions of ideological conditioning as well; see esp. chaps. 3, 7, and 9. (I also have in mind the multiple maneuvers of the African National Congress between 1913 and the present, the scholarship on which is too voluminous to cite here.) 73. Kenneth MacLeish, Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 13. 74. Paul Landau, Popular Politics. 75. This is a critique famously made by Jacob Dlamini, in his Native Nostalgia. See also Hugh Lewin’s wrenching memoir, Stones against the Mirror: Friendship in the Time of the South African Struggle (Johannesburg: Umuzi, 2011). 76. Thomas Blom Hansen suggests that real, honest friendship under apartheid was only possible within the shelter of the racially homogenous enclave. I think that Ndaleni tells a rather different story. See Blom Hansen, The Melancholia of Freedom: Social Life in an Indian Township in South Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 77. For more on the possibilities and limits of friendship in South Africa, see Shannon Walsh and Jon Soske, eds., The Ties That Bind: Race and the Politics of Friendship in South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, forthcoming). 78. Rakgoathe, ARTTRA, no. 8, October 1964, 1. 79. For recent work that covers similar ground in West and Equatorial Africa, see especially Chika Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), chaps. 1–2; and Sarah Van Beurden, Authentically African: Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015), chap. 2. 80. The interwar period was notable for the range of critiques that drew on ideas about Africa to levy critiques against imperial hegemony. Gary Wilder has

explored this period (and the immediate post–World War II period) in two vital books: The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). To my mind, T. J. Clark has written the preeminent account of cultural critique during the interwar period. See his Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). 81. Dilip Gaonkar explores autocritical approaches to the present—and of the non-Western world’s role therein—in “On Alternative Modernities,” Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999): 1–18; for post–World War II efforts to imagine a humane future, see Wilder, Freedom Time. 82. There is a massive and growing literature on the politics of heritage in contemporary South Africa. See, for example, Annie Coombes, History after Apartheid; Daniel Herwitz, Heritage, Culture, and Politics in the Postcolony (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Sabine Marschall, “Serving Male Agendas: Two National Women’s Monuments in South Africa,” Women’s Studies 33, no. 8 (2004): 1009–33 and “Visualizing Memories: The Hector Pieterson Memorial in Soweto,” Visual Anthropology 19, no. 2 (2006): 145–69; and Beningfield, The Frightened Land. See also Anne Laura Stoler, ed., Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). I will have much more to say about this in the epilogue. Chapter 2: Craftwork 1. Angela Read Lloyd, The Artist in the Garden: The Quest for Moses Tladi (Nordhoek, South Africa: Publishing Print Matters, 2009), 90. 2. Bantu World, May 30, 1936, 11. 3. Osmond Victor, CR, “South African Letter,” January 1932, HP—AB1385, 1. 4. Bantu World, April 16, 1938, 17. 5. For a chronology of 1930s exhibitions, see the appendix to Visual Century, vol. 1, 203–10. 6. From an article in Umteteli wa Bantu, cited in Read Lloyd, Artist in the Garden, 90. 7. On “aesthetic governance” after difference, see especially Elizabeth Harney, In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960–1995 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 4. See also Souleymane Bachir Diagne, African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude (London: Seagull, 2012). 8. For a similar discussion of the tensions between liberal art education and racialized art, see Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism, esp. chap. 2. 9. A 1934 prize-winning work showed the view as he saw it from the garden, ranging across what is now forested suburbs toward Tladi’s family homestead, in the open country near what is now Bryanston. 10. Read Lloyd, Artist in the Garden, 23, 45, 55, 90.

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Notes to Pages 27–30 304

11. Ibid., 103. Pim noted that the white visitors did not seem unduly exercised by the native gardener’s presence in the whites-only gallery. 12. Ibid., 113. 13. Bernard Lewis in The Cape, early 1930s, cited in ibid., 126. 14. “Native Art Genius,” Natal Mercury, October 11, 1930, JAG—Neglected Tradition—File 183, n.p. 15. This notion of artistic genius, which Bourdieu calls the “charismatic ideology” of art, reached its apotheosis in the rise of American abstract expressionism in the wake of World War II. Frances Saunders and other have demonstrated the extent to which the art world’s celebration of individual attainment dovetailed with American foreign policy. See Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, 76, and Frances Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000). Peffer considers this question of individualism and abstraction in Art and the End of Apartheid, chap. 5. 16. For more on Grace Dieu, see Elizabeth Morton, “Missions and Modern Art in Southern Africa” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2003). 17. A. Fouche, “’N Kaffer Kunstenaar,” Die Huisgenoot, May 30, 1932, 20. 18. Oxley to M. Webb, April 1, 1936, HP—AD843RJ—SAIRR—Kb28.2, 1. 19. O. J. P. Oxley, Art Education in the United States: Report of a Visit to the United States of America under the Auspices of the Visitors’ Grants Committee of the Carnegie Corporation of New York (Pretoria: Carnegie Corporation Visitors Series, 1930), 47. 20. Rankin, “Lonely Road,” Visual Century, vol. 1, 101–3. 21. Pemba to Shepherd, February 12, 1937, JAG—FUBA—Pemba—File 9/13, 1. 22. Pemba to Shepherd, August 5, 1937, JAG—FUBA—Pemba—File 9/13, 1. Pemba’s supporters and instructors in missions and universities believed in the possibility of individual attainment and talent that might overcome racial and structural deficits. Canon Edward Patterson was an Anglican minister who taught at Grace Dieu in the early 1920s and was instrumental in organizing its handwork program. He left Pietersburg in the late 1920s to establish a new craft program at Cyrene Mission, near Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia. He introduced arts and crafts as a subject at Cyrene in the 1930s; his reflections on the program demonstrated that sort of thinking that led Pemba to Grahamstown and Tladi to the Johannesburg Art Gallery. “The development of Art is entirely a matter of incentive,” he claimed. A potential artist needed to be presented with opportunities to recognize his talent and to “accept his art.” Genius was a particular, not a universal category, whether in Africa or elsewhere. “The percentage of artists in any large group would seem to be no higher than two percent,” he suggested. By “artists,” he meant those “inventive and creative . . . inceptors of new styles,” and his experience at Cyrene demonstrated that “the Bantu is endowed with artistic gifts different in no whit from those of other peoples.” In other words, 2 percent of his students there showed true talent and originality. In southern Africa as elsewhere, that 2 percent

needed only to be granted the opportunity and incentive to flower. See Edward Patterson, “The Bantu as Artist,” 1949, HP AB810f—Patterson, 2–8. For more on Patterson, see Morton, “Grace Dieu Mission,” and chap. 3. 23. Bantu World, April 3, 1937, 12. 24. “Weekly Message to Africans,” Bantu World, May 16, 1936, 8. 25. Bantu World, May 16, 1936, 11; September 5, 1936, 16; November 14, 1936, 16. 26. Interwar newspapers were thus in many ways “technologies of the self,” just as their West African counterparts allowed African writers there to try out new identities and personalities, frequently anonymously. See Stephanie Newell, The Power to Name. On technologies of the self and the work of individual consciousness, see Jan Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self. 27. Lynn Thomas, “The Modern Girl and Racial Respectibility in 1930s South Africa,” Journal of African History 47, no. 3 (2006): 461–90. 28. “Competitions Reveal Talent,” Bantu World, June 29, 1935 29. Bantu World, December 17, 1938, 18. Eisteddfods were medieval Welsh music, theater, and dance festivals; the term and the practice came to the Transvaal with British rule. The Transvaal Eisteddfod gradually evolved into the Johannesburg Bantu Music Festival, which included an arts competition by the late 1940s. Notably, in the late 1940s the organizers of the latter festival thought its viability under threat because too many choirs were scared to compete and to lose. “This spirit must be combatted at coming Festivals, as the importance of the festival lies not only in the winning of trophies, but in the participation of as many competitors as possible” (emphasis mine). Without enough participants, how could you be sure the winner was actually the best? “Report on the 1948 Festival,” no author, September 18, 1948, NAP—UOD Vol 575 x8/7/26, 3. 30. Rankin, “Lonely Road,” as well as the timeline in Visual Century, vol. 1, 205, 207. 31. On Nhlapo, see David Coplan, In Township Tonight, 154. 32. Bantu World, August 17, 1935. 33. The tension between individuated talent and social context has long been an animating concern of art theory. As we shall see, the interwar period tended to privilege the elevation of society over the individual artist, in South Africa and especially in postwar Europe. See Kathleen James-Chakraborty, “Between Revolution and Reform: The Bauhaus in Context,” in Bauhaus: Art as Life (London: Barbican, 2012); on the Bauhaus, see Arthur Efland, A History of Art Education: Intellectual and Social Currents in Teaching the Visual Arts (New York: Teachers College Press, 1990), chap. 7, as well as Dewey, Art as Experience. In the following chapter I consider the role of African art in this more fully; in short, the lack of announced authorship in much West African and Equatorial African art led many commentators to downplay the role of individual artists—and particular, precise subjects—in African visual culture. African art was frequently understood as the expression of a vaguely defined culture, not the unique expression of unnamed

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individuals. In recent years, artists and curators have begun to approach that concern from a variety of different positions. In the 1990s, for instance, the South African artist Bongi Dhlomo painted a typically Nguni headrest against a red background, and she titled her work Artist Unknown, thereby drawing the viewer’s attention to the absent signature on many similar objects. More recently, the curator of the African art collection at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art organized a show around the theme of “Heroic Africans,” which presented images of known historical personages, thus arguing for a historicity typically absent from precolonial collections. See Alisa LaGamma, Heroic Africans: Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011). 34. Oxley to M. Webb, April 1, 1936, HP—AD843RJ—SAIRR—Kb28.2, 1. 35. “Donation of Early Works by Gerard Bhengu by Dr K. A. B. Kohler on 7 June 1990,” mss., JAG—FUBA—Gerard Bhengu –3/3, 1. 36. M. Kohler, The Izangoma Diviners (Pretoria: Government Printers, 1941), 5. 37. Hampson Jack, “The Bantu as Imitator,” Iso Lomuzi 1 (September 1931): 29. 38. Bantu World, February 16, 1935, 9. 39. Bantu World, February 2, 1935, 2. 40. “The Art Club,” Iso Lomuzi 6, no. 3 (December 1937), 8. 41. K. H. Wilker, “Some Notes on Art and Art Teaching,” Iso Lomuzi 9, no. 2 (September 1940): 6–7. 42. It is critical to note how political authorities came increasingly to distinguish between Bantu cultural genius—as something bequeathed in the past yet with potential for development in a separate future—and especially Afrikaner cultural “heritage,” which was seen instead as the basis for the unique non-European white modernity of the apartheid South African state. For the role of Cape Dutch architecture in the ongoing articulation of white South African heritage, see Peter Merrington, “Cape Dutch Tongaat: A Study in ‘Heritage,’” Journal of Southern African Studies 32, no. 4 (2006) 683–99. For the Voortrekker monument and especially the memory of the Trek in mid-twentieth-century South African art, see Freschi, “Afrikaner Nationalism, Modernity and the Changing Canon of ‘High Art,’” Visual Century, vol. 2, chap. 1, and for a general discussion of the politics of heritage under white supremacy, see Daniel Herwitz, Heritage, Culture, and Politics in the Postcolony, chap. 3. Herwitz’s discussion fails to note the extent to which the promotion of “primitive” black South African art was a central concern of the white minority government during the decades before the 1980s. For the tribalist imagination in South Africa, see Beningfield, The Frightened Land; Foster, Washed With Sun: Landscape and the Making of White South Africa (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), chap. 9; and Leslie Witz, Apartheid’s Festival, chap. 2. 43. See van Robbroeck’s magisterial dissertation, “Writing White on Black: Modernism as Discursive Paradigm in South African Writing on Modern Black Art” (PhD. diss., University of Stellenbosch, 2006), esp. chaps. 3 and 4. 44. Bantu World, April 16, 1936, 20.

45. See Cohen, “Masks and the Modern,” chap. 3. 46. “May Esther Bedford Prize,” Bantu World, March 23, 1935, 5. 47. Bantu World, April 16, 1936, 20. 48. “Some Artists,” Teaching in Africa, December 1937, 13. 49. “Drawing,” Teaching in Africa, December 1937, 7. 50. Lipschitz, cited in the Sunday Times, undated clipping, HP—A2286—Berman Collection—Ba7. 51. Umteteli wa Bantu, December 19, 1931, 2. Given black South Africans’ apparent lack of a fine arts tradition, primitivist-inclined cultural theorists tended to look more frequently to Africans’ supposed aptitude for music to affect the sorts of curricular adaptions that they imagined. Observers agreed that Africans were a uniquely musical class of people. Music was the “natural art . . . of the African,” Umteteli wa Bantu pointed out, as was obvious to anyone who had seen the innate rhythm of “Natives who dig roads, handle hammers in industry, drill rocks in mines or hoe fields,” “Mlambo,” a “noted Native singer,” agreed. “If we want to make headway in life we should embark on those arts that are inherent in us [and] no other race resorts to song so much as the black race does.” (“The African Sings His Way through Life,” Bantu World, October 17, 1936, 20.) Many whites urged black singers not to copy European forms but instead to hold tightly to “the Native music, with its weird, strange harmonies,” which was the “true art of South Africa” (so said an English actress at the Wemmer Sports Grounds, according to Bantu World, October 26, 1940). The viability of this “true art” was in doubt, however, under the assault of European classical music—let alone jazz and vaudeville—and something needed to be done. (“Recorded Bantu Music: More of the Classical Type Demanded,” Bantu World, August 24, 1940, 5.) Similar concerns had brought the Englishman Hugh Tracey to southern Africa immediately after World War I. Over the next three decades, he published widely on the need to preserve African musical diversity from the homogeneity of European culture. In 1935, for example, he appealed to Adams College to establish a college of music, dedicated to African forms. Music’s “importance . . . is not in what it is but in what function it performs,” Tracey explained, and the “the function of music composed by Africans is to interpret the emotions and reflect the mentality of Africans.” Music defined and limited communities; this was not appreciation, it was salvation—without African musical forms, there could be no way for Africans to express themselves and therefore no Africans. “However beautiful and useful European music is to Europeans it can have very little importance to Africans.” Only African composers, working in African idioms, could “create something of intense value to his country.” (Hugh Tracey, “Mr. H. T. Tracey Discusses the Proposed College of Music,” Iso Lomuzi 4, no. 2 [November 1935]: 8.) Tracey’s hoped for Adams College of Music never materialized, but he continued to press the case, eventually founding the African Music Society in Johannesburg to promote his cause on a national level. The organization took every occasion to remind the government and charitable

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organizations about the urgent need to research and preserve “authentic” African music, “lest the innate artistic genius of the Continent be lost or irrevocably distorted by Western mannerisms.” (“Research in African Music and Culture,” Bantu World, December 16, 1947.) Tracey’s “salvage” project was in keeping with a variety of other efforts, such as the oeuvre of the photographer Constance Stuart Larrabee and others. See Darren Newbury and Albie Sachs, Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2009), chap. 1. By the 1930s, South Africa’s Bantu-speaking population had long enjoyed a reputation for musicianship, and Tracey’s audience was primed to accept his logic. Visual art was different and took more convincing. 52. Carry to Sampson, June 5, 1944, NAP—NTS, vol 9597, 431/400, 1, 2. As van Robbroeck writes, Battiss repeatedly expressed “the notion that a mysterious and elusive Africanness is genetically encoded in all Africans and the innate characteristics of this condition will determine all African cultural production” (“Race and Art in Apartheid South Africa,” Visual Century, vol. 2, 85). Given his primitivist inclinations, Battiss’s own work tended to find inspiration in San rock art. See Anitra Nettleton, “Primitivism in South African Art,” Visual Century, vol. 2, 147. 53. “Natives Who Want to Draw and Paint,” Star, July 4, 1949, JAG—Polly Street Collection—vol. 4, n.p. This concern with the correct direction of art education at Polly Street presaged debates about art education in négritude-inspired, postcolonial art. See Harney, In Senghor’s Shadow, 63–64, for more on this. Whether in Senegal, Congo, or Nigeria, the majority of European art educators tended to opt for the “less interference, more natural expression” school of thought. For a postindependence, often ironic example, see Peter Probst, Osogbo and the Art of Heritage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), esp. chap. 2. Margaret Trowell offered a similar approach at Makerere in Uganda, but her successors in the art department named after her took a very different approach. See Sundanda Sanyal, “‘Being Modern’: Identity Debates and Makerere’s Art School in the 1960s,” in The Companion to Modern African Art, ed. Gitta Salami and Monica Visona (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), chap. 14. 54. “No. 1 Polly Street Starts Its Art Classes for Natives,” Star, July 25, 1949, HP—A2286—Berman Collection—Ba10, n.p. This was the justification later adopted by Iba N’Diaye, one of the instructors at Dakar’s école des arts. N’Diaye bristled as the suggestion that he and his students were anything other than the “sons of African cities,” “hybrids,” able to work whatever medium they preferred, however they saw fit. Harney, In Senghor’s Shadow, 63. 55. Hadley to Secretary, SAIRR, July 3, 1948, HP—AD1947—SAIRR—54.1, 1. 56. Whyte to Hagley, July 29, 1948, HP—AD1947—SAIRR—54.1, 1. 57. “This Young Artist Has a Big Future,” Bantu World, September 12, 1953, 8. 58. For Cohn, see UWC—Mayibuye—George Pemba—Unboxed file, correspondence 1.4. 59. Cohn, Magic Brush, 222.

60. Ibid., 235. 61. Van Robbroeck, “Magnificent Generation,” 125. 62. Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, 80–81. 63. See, for example, the notice of Pemba’s visit to Johannesburg in Bantu World, January 31, 1942, 15. 64. Rankin, “Lonely Road,” 105. 65. A. S. T. Zwana, “Clay Modeling,” Native Teachers’ Journal 7, no. 3 (April 1928): 170. 66. A. B. Zunga, “Native Crafts—An Occupation,” Native Teachers’ Journal 9, no. 4 (July 1930): 215. 67. O. J. Horrax, “The Teaching of Art in Native Schools,” Native Teachers’ Journal 13, no. 2 (January 1934): 86. 68. Elphick, Equality of Believers, 193. 69. Arthur Lismer, “Art in Education,” in Educational Adaptations in a Changing Society: Report of the South African Education Conference Held in Capetown and Johannesburg in July, 1934, ed. E. G. Malherbe (Johannesburg: Juta, 1937), 156. 70. Welch, in Malherbe, Educational Adaptations, 171. 71. Malinowski, in ibid., 171. 72. Fincken, in ibid., 169. 73. Meyerwitz, in ibid., 170. 74. Welch, in ibid., 171. 75. Indeed, in his defense of clay modeling as a native craft, even Zwana had had to admit that he did not how to do it. Zwana, in Malherbe, Educational Adaptations, 170. 76. I. O. D., “Much Ado,” Teachers Vision 10, no 3 (March 44): 22–23. 77. Malinowski, in Malherbe, Educational Adaptations, 425. 78. Eiselen, in ibid., 412. 79. For an assessment, see Fleisch, “Teachers College Club,” 174–80, and Elphick, Equality of Believers, chap. 12. 80. Short to Rheinallt-Jones, August 30, 1931, HP—AD843RJ—SAIRR— Kb28.2, 1. 81. “Ethnologist” to Native Affairs Department, November 15, 1937, NAP— NTS vol. 9597 ref 431/400, 1. 82. Bantu World, January 13, 1939, 16. See Van Beurden, Authentically Africa, chap. 1. 83. See, for example, “Handwork in the Schools,” Teaching in Africa, May-June 1939, 47; “A National Collection of African Art and Crafts for Natal: An Immediate and Urgent Necessity,” Native Teachers’ Journal 29, no. 4 (October 1949): 36–37; “African Art: Exhibition in Cape Town,” African Drum, May 1951, 20. 84. A. M. I. Badenhorst, “Non-European Arts and Crafts Show at Springs,” NAP—NTS 9741—867/400 (8), 1.

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Notes to Pages 48–55 310

85. Memo to the Department of Native Affairs, re: Industrial and Commercial Exhibition at the Donaldson Orlando Community Centre, June 1950, NAP—NTS vol. 4572 ref 1206/313, 1. 86. Principal, Lovedale to Secretary of the Commission, September 23, 1952, NAP—S300 vol. 14–29, ref K20, 1. 87. Chief Native Commissioner, Pietermaritzburg to Secretary of Native Affairs, August 21, 1957, NAP—NTS vol. 9789 ref 989/400, 1. 88. Chief Native Commissioner, King Williams Town to Secretary of Native Affairs, May 15, 1957, NAP—NTS vol. 9789 ref 989/400, 1. 89. As when the Native Affairs Commissioner of Mafeking referred the Department to the nearby Tiger Kloof school in 1952. Commissioner, Mafeking to Department of Native Affairs, Pretoria, September 17, 1952, NAP—S300 vol 14–29 ref K20, 1. 90. See, for example, Warden, Gore Brown school, to Secretary of Native Affairs, March 15, 1954, NTS vol. 9738 ref 855/400 (1), 1. 91. Eiselen, in Malherbe, Educational Adaptations, 412. 92. Report of the Commission on Native Education, 1949–1951 (Pretoria: Government Printer, 1951), 148. 93. Ibid., 130. 94. Ibid., 103. 95. Inspector of Native Schools to Commission, August 4, 1952, NAP—S300 vol. 14–29, ref K20, 1. Chapter 3: Art 1. Grossert, “A Letter from Mr. Grossert,” ARTTRA, no. 7, March 1963, 2. 2. Grossert, Art Education and Zulu Crafts: A Critical Review of the Development of Art and Crafts Education in Bantu Schools in Natal with Particular Reference to the Period 1948–1962 (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter, 1968), 14, 15. 3. For more on the genesis of such critiques, especially in nineteenth-century America, see T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981). For Ruskin and the arts and crafts movement, see Tim Hilton, John Ruskin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). Notably, Ndaleni’s first two art teachers were Slade graduates. See chap. 4. For a succinct and empathetic distillation of the tension between what he terms “humanist modernism” (à la Grossert) and conservative nostalgia, or “rank bad faith modernist anti-modernism” (à la the tribal imagination of South African and other primitivism), see Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1982), chap. 5, esp. 324. 4. Walter Battiss, G. H. Franz, J. W. Grossert, and H. P. Junod, The Art of Africa (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter, 1958),15, 21, 111. 5. Ibid., 122, 22.

6. Ibid., 83. 7. Ibid., 84, 85. 8. Ibid., 83. 9. Battiss et al., Art of Africa, 18. 10. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Shocken, 1968), 217–53. 11. Van Der Leeuw in Malherbe, Educational Adaptations, 18. 12. Arthur Lismer, Education through Art for Children and Adults at the Art Gallery of Toronto (Toronto: Art Gallery of Toronto, 1936), 3, 7. 13. Lismer, Education through Art for Children and Adults, 7. 14. Albert C. Barnes, “Preface,” in John Dewey, Albert C. Barnes, et al., Art and Education (Philadelphia: Barnes Foundation Press, 1929), 7. 15. Dewey, Art as Experience, 8. 16. For more on Barnes’s social theories, see Jeremy Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 109–15. For more on the Barnes Foundation’s pedagogical practices, see Mary Ann Meyers, Art, Education, & African-American Culture: Albert Barnes and the Science of Philanthropy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004). For Barnes, Dewey, and Lismer, see Angela Grigor, Arthur Lismer: Visionary Art Educator (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002). 17. Dewey, Art as Experience, 5. 18. Ibid., 16. 19. Ibid., 36. 20. See Dewey on Cižek, “Individuality and Experience,” in Art and Education, 175–183. For Cižek, see Efland, History of Art Education, 194–204. Efland identifies Dewey as working with the “reconstructionist” stream, in that he was primarily interested in the end goal of a reformed twentieth-century society, as contrasted to Cižek’s influence in what came to be known as the “child centered schools.” 21. Efland, History of Art Education, 204. 22. Ibid., 175. 23. Herbert Read, Education through Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1943), 198. 24. Ibid., 202. 25. Ibid., 296. 26. This was evident especially at the Barnes Foundation. Barnes typically arranged his works according to either formal or thematic aspects that united the various objects on display. The paintings were the best-known part of his collection, but the galleries also integrated other, less celebrated objects that indicated Barnes’s universalist theory of art: handcrafted furniture, iron barn decorations, and frequently West African statues. As Jeremy Braddock argues, as a created object, Barnes’s galleries presented an argument about the work of art. Braddock describes a single room in the Merion building devoted to images of unhappy men and unhappy women; discord prevails there, just as Read claimed that it did in

311

Notes to Pages 56–63

Notes to Pages 64–65 312

wider society. Yet front and center, rising up from the middle of the floor, Barnes placed a Dogon statue—a married couple, seated side by side, the man’s arm gently placed around the woman’s back. The statue is peaceful and harmonious; if the discord in the room was a question, the anonymous sculptor’s figures were Barnes’s resolution. (Braddock, Collecting, 152.) 27. Dewey, Art as Experience, 18. 28. Ibid., 165. 29. It is notable how the primitive figured in Arthur Lismer’s projects at the Toronto Art Gallery as well. One of his most common practices was to invite children into the gallery to create costumes and objects with which to celebrate “exotic” occasions ranging from an “Indian carol” around Christmas to a “Mexican fiesta” and a “Maori meeting”—all of which typically featured exotically garbed white Canadian children in various shades of blackface. 30. Cohen, “Masks and the Modern,” chap. 3. 31. Guillaume and Munro, Primitive Negro Sculpture, 10–13. 32. Ibid., 47. 33. Paul Guillaume, “Primitive Negro Sculpture and Modern Art,” in Dewey, Barnes, et al., Art and Education, 167. 34. Guillaume and Munro, Primitive Negro Sculpture (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1926), 59. 35. Ibid., 56. 36. It is easy to imagine Ernest Mancoba finding inspiration in Guillaume and Munro’s images but less so in their confident assertions that African artistry and intellectual achievement no longer existed in any worthy way. Indeed, Mancoba’s trajectory veered dramatically in the years after he read their book, during which time he left South Africa for Paris and the art world. He stopped in London en route and gave an interview to the Anglican Church Times while there. The reporter met him at the British Museum and reported that he found Mancoba “passionately absorbed” in the African masterpieces on display there. The young South African noted that the figures were all serene and confident. “In Africa they carved figures strong and beautiful and free because they wished to lead the people of their tribe to strength, to beauty and to freedom,” he explained. Because of colonialism and Christianity, this was no longer the case; in this, Mancoba appeared to side with Guillaume and Munro. He mourned what was lost: “We are full of sorrow and disillusionment. We have the sense of having had everything taken.” His work was no simple engagement with the primitive inspiration but full of “perplexity as we stand on the cross roads, wondering which road Africa will take.” He soon left London for Paris, where he settled—and rejected sculpture in favor of paint. It would be specious to draw a direct causal link between Primitive Negro Sculpture and Mancoba’s decision to lay down his chisel and pick up a brush. But it is also tempting to see in those two events one person’s creative effort to balance what had been lost and could never be recovered. Mancoba left South Africa in

1938 and returned only fifty-six years later, in 1994. (“The Sorrow of Africa: An Interview with Ernest Mancoba,” Church Times, October 28, 1938, n.p.) For more on Mancoba’s trajectory, see Elza Miles, Lifeline out of Africa: The Art of Ernest Mancoba (Cape Town: Human and Rousseau, 1994); Araeen, “Modernity, Modernism, and Africa’s Place in the History of Our Age,” Third Text 19, no. 4 (2005): 411–17; and Cohen, “Masks and the Modern.” 37. Souleymane Diagne, African Art as Philosophy, 56. 38. Ibid., 34. 39. Dewey, Art as Experience, 36. 40. Diagne, African Art as Philosophy, 200. 41. Harney’s important study considers to what extent Senghor’s politics actually allowed for such an “open exploration.” Her consideration of Senegal’s postcolonial art program suggests that this was not the case. Senghor patronized artists and teachers who, like many South Africans, attempted to limit art teaching to appropriately “African” subjects and media. Senghor was leery of too great an emphasis on technical proficiency. Openness became instead “an ideology, losing much of its early revolutionary zeal and emerging as the language of a new realm of officialdom [and control] under the Senghorian government.” In Senghor’s Shadow, 48. It is worth noting that Julius Nyerere explored similar ideas in generating the theories of Tanzania’s ujamaa, or African Socialism. My thanks to Priya Lal for helping me to make the connection not only to Senghor and Nyerere, but also, ironically, South Africa’s National Party. 42. Sketchbooks, KC—JW Grossert files. 43. For example, J. W. Grossert, “My Confession of Faith,” April 9, 1975, KC— JW Grossert—File 1—KCM 25554, 1. 44. Grossert et al., Art of Africa, 18. 45. Grossert, Art Education and Zulu Craft, 142. 46. Ibid., 143. 47. This concept was not Grossert’s alone. In the discussion that followed Arthur Lismer’s presentation to the NEF, one respondent declared her absolute support for African unerring taste: “On the artistic score I have no fears. The Native will never conceive a utilitarian or other article of bad taste unless prompted to do so by some ‘enterprising’ ignoramus.” Here, she sided with Lismer, who, as we shall see, saw the issue as a matter of pedagogy. Malherbe, Educational Adaptations, 170. 48. Grossert, “Bantu Art of South Africa,” [1962], KC—JW Grossert—File 2— KCM 25566, 4. 49. Grossert, “Developing Appreciation and Good Taste: The goal of Art and Crafts Teaching,” November 5, 1956, KC—JW Grossert—File 1—KCM 25528, 4. 50. Grossert, “Bantu Art of South Africa,” 2. 51. Grossert, “Bantu Art,” June 1, 1953, KC—JW Grossert—File 1—KCM 25523, 10. 52. Ann Harrison, “What Is This Thing Called Art?” unpublished ms., undated, 84, 93. This source is an edited and bound version of the diary Harrison kept during

313

Notes to Pages 65–71

Notes to Pages 72–77 314

her years in South Africa. It was among Lorna Peirson’s private papers; she loaned it to me to make notes in 2013. I returned it to her in 2015 and as far as I know it remained in her possession at the time of her death. 53. Grossert, “Mrs. Ann Harrison,” August 13, 1989, KC—Ndaleni—yellow folder, no accession number, 2. 54. Dewey, “Individuality and Experience,” in Dewey, Barnes, et al., Art and Education, 178. 55. Grossert, Art Education and Zulu Crafts, 75. 56. Lismer, “Art in Education,” 155–65. 57. E. G. Malherbe, “A Great Art Educator,” Transvaal Education News, May 1969, 15. 58. Iso Lomuzi 6, no. 2 (1937): 5. 59. Grossert, Art Education and Zulu Crafts, 142. 60. Ibid., 148. 61. D. D. T. Jabavu, in Malherbe, Educational Adaptations, 434–35. 62. Angela Grigor, Arthur Lismer: Visionary Art Education (Montreal: McGill– Queen’s University Press, 2002), 135. 63. Lismer, quoted in Grossert, Art Education and Zulu Craft, 138. 64. My reading of the report is based largely (and unfortunately) on Grossert’s liberal quoting of it in his own dissertation. I have been unable to locate an extant copy of the report itself. Similar convictions had led O. J. Horrax of Edendale to instruct his peers not to try to change their students’ misshapen oxen. Horrax had more ideas about the teaching of art: it should take place in the afternoon, he wrote, which was a more relaxed part of day and therefore conducive to students doing “any form of creative work they like.” Horrax preferred to call the period “creative work” or “activity,” instead of art, since “the object of creative work is to produce something which is beautiful not to the spectator but to the creator.” In activity, students work “to satisfy an inner urge.” Activity was to be a break from the disciplinary ethos that prevailed in South Africa’s schools. “Silence should not be imposed in the Activity room . . . a faint hum of conversation is stimulating, and gives them a sense of freedom and joy without which no creative work is possible.” Lismer would have agreed with this Natal teacher. (Horrax, “Teaching of Art in Native Schools,” 82–85.) 65. Viktor Lowenfeld, Creative and Mental Growth, 2–4. 66. Grossert, Art Education and Zulu Crafts, 89–90. 67. Grossert, “The Arts and Crafts in Education,” Native Teachers’ Journal 29, no. 4 (July 1949): 248. 68. Grossert, “The Teaching of Arts and Crafts in Bantu Schools,” May 12, 1961, KC—JW Grossert—File 1—KCM 25540, 1—2. 69. Grossert, “The Universal Philosophy of Education Through Art,” March 25, 1964, KC—JW Grossert—File 1—KCM 25545, 2. 70. Grossert, Art and Crafts for Africans, 34, 50.

71. Grossert, “A Statement on art and crafts in Bantu schools made during a lecture to the African music society, Witwatersrand,” January 31, 1962, KC—JW Grossert—File 2—KCM 25569, 6. 72. Grossert, “Teaching of Arts and Crafts in Bantu Schools,” 1. 73. Grossert, “Indaleni Art and Craft Teachers’ Course,” 1953, KC—JW Grossert—File 1—KCM 25524, 1. 74. Grossert, “Creativity,” October 15, 1961, KC—JW Grossert—File 1—KCM 25524, 3. 75. Grossert, “Bantu Art in South Africa,” 9. 76. Grossert, “Creativity,” 3. 77. Native Teachers’ Journal 29, no. 4 (October 1949): 46. 78. Native Teachers’ Journal 32, no. 3 (April 1953). 79. In a 1956 publication, Grossert hailed Mvusi’s progress. He described in detail a statue named Family, “a group of three heads, tightly knit together in a dynamic movement of harmonious forms.” The sculpture had balance, harmony, and rhythm. It expressed the best of African art, but it also went beyond it to reflect on humanity in general, revealing in its form “the profound mystical relationship of father, mother and child, with features that are African, but a sentiment which is transcendental and universal.” This was the sort of art and the sort of négritude that Senghor would have celebrated. (Grossert, “Bantu Sculpture in South Africa,” November 10, 1956, KC—JW Grossert—File 1—KCM 25529, 4.) 80. Grossert, “Universal Philosophy of Education Through Art,” 5. 81. Grossert, “Statement on Arts and Crafts,” 7, 8. 82. Eric Ngcobo to Lorna Peirson, August 1970, KC—Ndaleni—E. Ngcobo. 83. “Killie Campbell Africana Library: Notes Taken on the Occasion of Professor J. Grossert’s Visit,” March 18, 1988, KC—JW Grossert—blue file, no accession number, 1. Chapter 4: Journeys 1. There is some debate about the origins of the mission’s name. Some think it came from the local term for “forest,” after the mist forest that predominated in the area before the advent of white settlement—this would derive from either ilala (a local palm) or ndala (a term for forest). The Reverend S’mangaliso Khumalo gave me an oral history of the mission in 2013, including the account of its founding on the “ruins” (his word) of Makuze’s polity. According to Khumalo’s rendering, “indaleni” also implied “the place of the ruins [of Makuze]”—a name that is certainly appropriate, given the school’s current state, whether technically correct or not. S’mangaliso Khumalo, interview by the author, June 17, 2013, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. The fullest account of the mission’s history is in M. J. De Haan, “Mission on the Margin: A Case Study of Reformed Mission Prospects in Enkumane, KwaZulu-Natal” (PhD diss., University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2010), chap. 11. De Haan’s account suggests that the amaMkhuze were a small group of people

315

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Notes to Pages 82–94 316

who had run afoul of Shaka and fled into the area. (164) Thanks to Simphiwe Ngwane for the recommendation. For more on Allison and the Wesleyans, see Norman Etherington, “Kingdoms of This World and the Next: Christian Beginnings among the Zulu and the Swazi,” in Christianity in South Africa: A Political, Cultural and Social History, ed. Richard Elphick and T. R. H. Davenport (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 2. Cited in M. J. de Haan, “Mission on the Margin,” 157. 3. Peter Bell, “A Very Special Place,” in Leeb-du Toit, Ndaleni Art School, 45. 4. O’Brien Nkasha to Peter Bell, July 5, 1961, KC—Ndaleni—SR, 1. 5. Cliff Molokoane, “This Is Indaleni!,” ARTTRA, no. 28, 33.? 6. Harrison, “What Is This Thing,” 11. 7. Leeb-du Toit, Ndaleni Art School, 8. 8. Harrison, “What Is This Thing,” 11. Through Harrison we can trace an alternative intellectual lineage for Ndaleni, not to South African primitivism and American theories about art education, but to Weimar Germany and the Bauhaus. So too were American art students increasingly encountering Bauhaus refugees during this time period; see Duberman, Black Mountain for more. A wonderful synthesis that contextualizes Bauhaus within the rich (and terrifying) cultural politics of the Weimar Republic is Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper and Row, 1968). Thanks to Jenni Allen for the latter recommendation. 9. J. W. Grossert, “Miss Ann Robinson (nee Harrison),” in KC–Ndaleni archives–“Ndaleni Art Teaching School,” yellow folder, no accession number, 1. 10. Harrison, “What Is This Thing,” 22. 11. Grossert, “Miss Ann Robinson,” 1. 12. Harrison, “What Is This Thing,” 49. 13. For more on Harrison and the notion of the art studio as “ring,” see my “A Song of Seeing: Art and Friendship under Apartheid,” in The Ties That Bind: Race and the Politics of Friendship in South Africa, ed. John Soske and Shannon Walsh (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, forthcoming). 14. Grossert, in Native Teachers’ Journal 29, no. 2 (January 1950): 40–44. 15. Harrison, “What Is This Thing,” 94–96. 16. Elizabeth Rankin, “The Role of the Mission Schools in Art Education,” undated ms., JAG—FUBA—Mission Schools file, 10. 17. Ibid., 10–11. 18. Grossert, “Training of Bantu Artists,” 1962, KC—JW Grossert—File 2— KCM 25568, 1–2. 19. “Art Course at Indaleni Training College,” Native Teachers’ Journal 30, no. 4 (July 1951): 575–76. 20. A. W. Ewan, “Indaleni Art School Specialist Teachers’ Course,” Native Teachers’ Journal 32, no. 1 (October 1952): 27–28, 44. 21. Bantu Education Journal, June 1962, 268; ARTTRA, no. 1, March 1961, 3.

22. Emmanuel Ngcobo, KC—Ndaleni—SR, undated. Ngcobo appears in the Leeb-du Toit catalog in the list of 1950s students. 23. Ewan, “Indaleni Art School,” 28. 24. For Mvusi’s biography, see Elza Miles, Current of Africa: The Art of Selby Mvusi (Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1996), 11–18; and Elza Miles, Selby Mvusi: To Fly with the North Bird South (Pretoria: UNISA, 2015), 1. 25. Eric Ngcobo, April 12, 1978, KC—Artists Questionnaire, 1. 26. Juliette Leeb-du Toit, “Ndaleni Art School,” in Leeb-du Toit, Ndaleni Art School, 10–11. 27. Grossert, interview by J. F. Duggan, May 23, 1978, KC—JW Grossert—uncategorized (blue) file, 9. 28. See “Georgina Hunt: Obituary,” Guardian, May 14, 2012, available at http:// www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/may/14/georgina-hunt, accessed on October 21, 2013. 29. Solomon Sedibane, “Early Memories,” undated ms., KC—Ndaleni—SR, 3. 30. Leeb-du Toit, “Ndaleni Art School,” 11. 31. Nieser, “Michael Zondi.” 32. Grossert, in Barrie Biermann, “The Art School at Indaleni,” South African Panorama, March 1960, KC—Ndaleni—Scrapbook 1, 24. 33. Sedibane, “Early Memories,” 1, 3. 34. Biermann, “Art School at Indaleni,” 24. 35. Bell, “Very Special Place,” 48. 36. O. T. P. Nkasha, “The Cultivation of Self-Expression through Art,” Bantu Education Journal, May 1962, 208–9. 37. Hamlet Hobe, “The Value and Meaning of Education through Art,” Bantu Education Journal, November 1962, 458–59. 38. Reported in Bantu Education Journal 5, no. 1 (February 1959): 33. 39. Biermann, “Art School at Indaleni,” 2[5]. 40. Bell to Brown, April 22, 1963, LOC—Harmon Foundation—MSS51615— Box 103—South Africa, 3. 41. Bell, “Very Special Place,” 47–48. See chapter 5 for a discussion of these works. 42. Ibid., 48, 51. 43. Bell to Ivan Mitford-Barbeton, April 21, 1961, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Samuel Hobyane), 1. 44. Bell, circular letter appended to ARTTRA, no. 1, March 1961. 45. Ibid. 46. Bell to Miss Dougall, March 21, 1961, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Samuel Hobyane), 2. 47. Bell in ARTTRA, no. 5, October 1961, 1, 3, 6. 48. Daniel Rakgoathe, “Our Father,” ARTTRA, no. 8, April 1964, 2–3. 49. Lorna Peirson, interview by the author, Howick, South Africa, December 13, 2011.

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Notes to Pages 94–103

Notes to Pages 103–115 318

50. Rakgoathe, “Our Father.” 51. Bell to Dougall, March 21, 1961, 2. 52. Lorna Peirson, interview by the author, Howick, South Africa, June 17, 2013. 53. Bell to Brown, July 29, 1963, LOC—MSS51615—Box 103—South Africa, 1. 54. On Bell in Canada, see http://www.heritage.nf.ca/arts/agnl/bell.html, accessed on April 23, 2014, and especially http://www.thetelegram.com/Blog-Article/b/11154/Photo-Feature-Peter-Bell, accessed on April 23, 2014, which details Bell’s escapades with the local National Party that caused him to seek employment away from South Africa. 55. Amelia Shishuba to Peirson, November 13, 1970, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Amelia Shishuba), 1. 56. Solomon Sedibane in ARTTRA, no. 10, May 1965, 3. 57. Gabriel Kuboni, KC—Artists Questionnaire, 1. 58. Patrick Nondikane, “Dux—1974,” ARTTRA, no. 30, May 1975, 4. 59. Philemon Moerane, “Dux—1973,” ARTTRA, no. 28, May 1974, 8. 60. Sophie Nsuza, April 26, 1978, KC—Artists Questionnaire, 1, 2, 5. 61. Bongani Mtshali, April 27, 1978, KC—Artists Questionnaire, 1, 3. 62. Patrick Mlambo, “Dux—1971,” ARTTRA, no. 24, April 1972, 7. 63. Mbekwa Tshabalala, KC—Artists Questionnaire, 3. 64. John Ndlovu, KC—Artists Questionnaire, 3. 65. Thatoeng Mompati, “Determination,” ARTTRA, no. 30, May 1975, 12. 66. Paul Sibisi, interview by the author, Durban, South Africa, December 15, 2011. 67. Mbekwa Tshabalala, KC—Artists Questionnaire, 3. 68. Esther Ratlou, August 10, 1978, University of Fort Hare—DeBeers Centennial Gallery—Archive—“Refund” file, 1. Evidence suggests that Ratlou eventually suffered a nervous episode while at Ndaleni and was unable to complete the course. 69. Edwin Nyatlo, “Dux—1972,” ARTTRA, no. 26, [April-May] 1973, 20. 70. Application, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Wilson Langa), 1. 71. Colben Mdleleni, “Dux—1977,” ARTTRA, no. 36, September 1978, 8. 72. Peirson to Renate Chosane, December 22, 1967, 1; Renate Chosane, “Report,” 1; Chosane to Peirson, April 17, 1969, 1, all in KC—Ndaleni—SR (Renate Chosane). 73. Solomon Baloyi, interview by the author, Alice, South Africa, June 24, 2013. 74. Christina Jikelo, interview by the author, Cape Town, South Africa, June 20, 2013. 75. Chosane paid her own way, as did a Catholic nun who was a student in 1969 (see the discussion in chap. 5). Others, such as Godfrey Ndaba, already a relatively well-known Soweto artist when he applied, said that they were willing to pay for themselves but received a bursary anyway (see chap. 7, below). A 1968 article noted three more students who had “scraped together enough money to pay their own

way,” but it did not name them. (Margaret Leefe, “Art on a Shoe-String,” South African Women’s Weekly, June 6, 1968, KC—Ndaleni—Scrapbook 3.) 76. Cited in Grossert, “The Indaleni Art and Craft Teachers’ Course,” 1953, KC—JW Grossert—KCM 25524, 2. 77. Lorna Peirson, “Notes on the Specialist Art Teachers’ Course,” in Leeb-du Toit, Ndaleni Art School, 58–59. 78. Lorna Peirson and Craig Lancaster, interview by Yvonne Winters, Richmond, South Africa, December 7, 1979, KC—Ndaleni—KCAV 200/201. 79. Jessie Muthige, “Misconception,” ARTTRA, no. 21, October 1970, 14. 80. “Application,” KC—Ndaleni—SR (Jessie Muthige), 1. 81. “Application,” KC—Ndaleni—SR (Mishack Raphalalani). 82. Leeb-du Toit, “Ndaleni Art School,” 5; excerpt from the Natal Daily News, December 5, 1974, KC—Ndaleni—Scrapbook 3, no page number. 83. Jikelo interview. 84. Asnath Ramere to Peirson, January 20, 1969, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Asnath Ramere), 1. 85. Baloyi interview. 86. Jikelo interview. 87. Mompati, “Determination,” 12. Chapter 5: Learning 1. Peter Bell to Ivan Mitford-Barbeton, April 21, 1961, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Samuel Hobyane), 1. 2. Marjorie Bruce-Milne, Christian Science Monitor, February 19, 1963, 8. 3. Lorna Peirson, interview by the author, December 13, 2011, Howick, South Africa. 4. Ibid. 5. Solomon Mabusela, “Foot steps,” ARTTRA, no. 13, October 1966, 14. 6. Mercy Ghu to Lorna Peirson, July 15, 1971, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Mercy Ghu), 1. 7. Jikelo interview. 8. Ernest Majova to Peirson, June 7, 1965, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Ernest Majova), 1–2. 9. Milicent Dzingwe, ARTTRA, no. 19, October 1969, 12. 10. Jikelo interview. 11. Lorna Peirson and Craig Lancaster, interview by Yvonne Winters, December 7, 1979, Pietermaritzburg and Richmond, South Africa, KC—Ndaleni—KCAV 200/201 (transcript in my possession) (hereafter cited as Peirson and Lancaster interview). 12. Excerpt from Margaret Leefe, “Art on a Shoestring,” South African Women’s Weekly, June 6, 1968, in KC—Ndaleni—Scrapbook 1, KCM 47706. 13. Peter Bell, ARTTRA, no. 5–6, June 1962, 2. 14. Rightwell Temba to Peirson, July 23, 1967, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Rightwell Temba), 1; Lorna Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 11, October 1965, 9.

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Notes to Pages 130–144 320

15. Bell, ARTTRA, no. 5–6, June 1962, 2. 16. There were numerous other statues, all done by building a wire frame, filling it with refuse—literally, garbage—and covering it with cement. Some of these unnamed statues still stand in various states of disrepair; others are gone without a trace. An example of the latter is what appears to be a dragon (?) on the field behind the swing set, which was already complete by 1966. (See image on the back cover of this book.) 17. ARTTRA, no. 18, May 1969, 3. 18. Reverend I. Njoloza to Peirson, January 2, 1964, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Linda Njoloza), 1; ARTTRA, no. 30, May 1975, 21. 19. Peirson and Lancaster interview. 20. Report, June 23, 1966, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Solomon Mabusela), 1. 21. Sidewell Thooe, ARTTRA, no. 25, September 1972, 20. 22. Craig Lancaster, personal communication, July 28, 2013 (file in author’s possession). 23. Peirson interview, 2011. 24. Peirson and Lancaster interview. 25. Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 21, October 1970, 12. 26. Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 19, October 1969, 11. 27. See, for example, ibid., 10. 28. Peirson and Lancaster interview. They note that local bees had a tendency to chew on the murals that Bell’s students had executed in oils and beeswax in the hall. 29. Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 36, September 1978, 36. Peirson was addressing Godfrey Dibetsoe, whose 1973 metal mobile had been a noise polluter. Students had taken it apart, and she repeatedly assured Dibetsoe that they would eventually replace the clattering metal wings with something quieter, and thus restore his creation. But it stood silent across the mid and late 1970s, a fact that led to Peirson to reflect on the school’s overall state of decline. 30. Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 37, May 1979, 37. 31. Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 14, April 1967, 8. 32. Peirson interview, 2011. 33. In June 2013, Peirson provided me with both her and Lancaster’s workbooks. These are essentially notebooks, printed by the government printer and distributed to teachers upon commencing their employment in a particular school. They were the property of the school; upon the art school’s closure in 1981, Peirson kept them for her records, before loaning them to me. They are still in my possession. These volumes have no page numbers or other accession information; I cite them as Peirson, Work Book and Lancaster, Work Book. 34. Peirson, Work Book. 35. Prospectus, “Department of Bantu Education—Specialist Arts Teachers Course, Arts and Crafts, 1975,” KC—Ndaleni—File 5, KCM 47762, 1.

36. Ibid. 37. Peirson, Work Book; Lancaster, Work Book; Peirson, Work Book. 38. Peirson, Work Book. 39. Report, June 22, 1964, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Silverman Jara), 1. 40. Marcus Lebethe, “Negro African Art,” ARTTRA, no. 15, October 1967, 13. 41. Peirson interview, 2011. 42. ARTTRA, no. 24, April 1972, 24. 43. Peirson and Lancaster interview. 44. ARTTRA, no. 25, September 1973, 16. 45. Patricia Khoza, interview by the author, June 18, 2013, Durban, South Africa. 46. ARTTRA, no. 17, September 1968, 27. 47. Paul Sibisi, interview by the author, December 15, 2011, Durban, South Africa. 48. Petrus Khumalo, ARTTRA, no. 26, April 1973, 27–28. 49. Rosette Sono, in ibid., 30. 50. Khumalo, in ibid., 30. 51. Others obviously learned from Van Gogh as well: the 1999 Tatham Gallery retrospective included one unsigned charcoal drawing of a village scene, with a sky resembling nothing so much as the firmament in Starry Night. 52. Sibisi interview. 53. Lorna Peirson, interview by the author, April 9, 2014, Howick, South Africa. 54. Daphne Biyela, interview by the author, June 26, 2013, Johannesburg. 55. David Mayindi, ARTTRA, no. 30, May 1975, 13. 56. Ratlou to Lancaster and Peirson, October 26, 1978, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Esther Ratlou), 1. 57. Peirson interview, 2011; all quotes from ARTTRA, no. 9, September 1964, 10. 58. ARTTRA, no. 10, May 1965, 9. 59. Peirson and Lancaster interview. 60. Peirson interview, 2011. 61. Peirson and Lancaster interview. Also, ARTTRA, no. 33, October 1976, 9–10. 62. ARTTRA, no. 10, May 1965, 9. 63. Peirson and Lancaster interview. 64. ARTTRA, no. 23, September 1971, 13. 65. Manasseh Nkole, ARTTRA, no. 38, October 1979, 3. 66. “A Trip to Durban,” ARTTRA, no. 11, October 1965, 3. 67. Patrick Nondikane, ARTTRA, no. 29, September 1974, 17. 68. Johnny Mazibuko, in ibid., 18. 69. Mbuso Mbele, “Lucky Sibiya,” ARTTRA, no. 35, October 1977, 6. 70. “A Trip to Durban,” ARTTRA, no. 11, October 1965, 3. 71. See, for example, ARTTRA, no. 29, September 1974, 13. 72. Lorna Peirson, ARRTRA, no. 28, October 1974, 24. 73. Peirson interview, 2013.

321

Notes to Pages 144–156

Notes to Pages 157–168 322

74. The idea of “practicing improvisation” comes across strongly in Julie Livingston, Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 75. Peirson, Work Book, 1967, course plan. 76. Sophie Nsuza, ARTTRA, no. 12, April 1966, 5. 77. Peirson interview, 2011. 78. Khoza interview. She eventually sold the chicken at the school’s end-of-year show in Pietermaritzburg; she told me that she had recently received a letter from the buyer, a German woman who related that the chicken still stood on the windowsill in her distant kitchen. This technique is frequently attributed to Michelangelo, who reputedly explained that he could see his figures in blocks of marble and had only to set them free. 79. Solomon Baloyi, interview by the author, Alice, South Africa, June 24, 2013. 80. Gilbert Nguza, ARTTRA, no. 18, May 1969, 10. 81. Baloyi interview. An aspiring poet who attended the course in 1974 offered a more humorous take on Peirson’s lessons: “Harder wood is really good / on the wet and busy axe / sometimes cause nasty cracks. / Verify the grain and kind / see some figure in your mind; / study well the wood: it’s all in there. / Take the axe and lay it bare. / If perhaps a horrible mistake you make / Courage do you take: / Change to abstract (all for culture’s sake!).” (ARTTRA, no. 29, September 1974, 11.) 82. Peirson interview, 2013. 83. Khoza interview. 84. Report, June 22, 1964, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Silverman Jara), 1. 85. Report, June 23, 1972, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Hosea Kgame), 1. 86. Report, June 23, 1972, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Maurice Huma), 1. 87. Report, June 1974, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Patrick Nondikane), 1. 88. Peter Bell, “Introduction to an Exhibition of Work Done by the Students of the Ndaleni Art School,” 1960, KC—Ndaleni—File 5, 1. 89. Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 8, April 1964, 8. 90. ARTTRA, no. 14, April 1967, 13. 91. Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 24, April 1972, 1; ARTTRA, no. 13, October 1966, 13. 92. ARTTRA, no. 26, April 1973, 4. 93. Excerpt from the Daily News, November 23, 1966, KC—Scrapbook 3. 94. Excerpt from South African Woman’s Weekly, June 6, 1968, KC—Scrapbook 3. 95. Petrus Khumalo, ARTTRA, no. 27, September 1973, 4. 96. Peirson interview, 2011. 97. ARTTRA, no. 9, September 1964, 11. 98. Craig Lancaster, “A Journey of Discovery and Fulfillment,” in Leeb-du Toit, Ndaleni Art School, 68. 99. Bell, ARTTRA, no. 1, March 1961, 1. 100. A point made so beautifully by the Bessie Head quote that serves as an epigraph for this book.

101. A. S. T. Zwana, “Clay Modelling,” Native Teachers’ Journal, April 1927, 170. 102. Lancaster, “Journey,” 68. 103. Khoza interview. 104. ARTTRA, no. 27, September 1973, 9. 105. Khoza interview. 106. Peirson and Lancaster interview. 107. Khoza, “The Days We Were Students,” in Leeb-du Toit, Ndaleni Art School, 64. 108. Khoza interview. 109. Biyela interview; Peirson interview, 2013. 110. Khoza interview. 111. Khoza, “Days We Were Students,” 64. 112. Khoza interview. 113. Peirson interview, 2011. 114. Lancaster, personal communication, July 28, 2013. 115. ARTTRA, no. 39, April 1980, 4. 116. Salphy Phoshoko to Peirson, March 20, 1969, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Salphy Phoshoko), 1. 117. Edgar Xaba, ARTTRA, no. 19, October 1969, 25. 118. Peirson interview, 2013. 119. Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 14, April 1967, 11. 120. Peirson to Solomon Mabusela, undated [1965], KC—Ndaleni—SR (Solomon Mabusela), 1. 121. Sedibane to Peirson, March 21, 1969, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Solomon Sedibane), 1. 122. Sedibane to Peirson, September 14, 1971, 1; Peirson to Sedibane, November 5, 1971, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Sedibane). 123. Thomas Moll, ARTTRA, no. 19, October 1969, 4. 124. Jikelo interview; Baloyi interview. 125. Peirson interview, 2013. 126. Report, June 1969, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Lindiwe Ntuli), 1. Ntuli went on to a celebrated career on the government’s Radio Zulu service, on which she was apparently known as itshitshi elingenaminyaka—the ageless virgin—among other handles. Jacob Dlamini, personal communication, November 5, 2013. Ntuli was inducted in South Africa’s MTN Radio Hall of Fame in 2012; see http://www.mtnradioawards.co.za/mtn_halloffame.html, accessed on May 2, 2014. 127. Peirson interview, 2011. 128. Ibid. 129. Khoza interview. 130. Except from “School for African Art Teachers,” Natal Daily News, December 5, 1975, n.p., KC—Ndaleni—Book 3 KCM 4770. 131. Sibisi interview. 132. Peirson interview, 2011; Peirson interview, 2013.

323

Notes to Pages 168–178

Notes to Pages 178–194 324

133. Peirson interview, 2011. 134. Milicent Dzingwe, “Student Life in My Forties,” ARTTRA, no. 19, October 1969, 12. 135. Lancaster, personal communication, July 28, 2013. 136. Khoza interview. 137. Jikelo interview. 138. Brenda Eckstein, personal communication, June 28, 2013, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. My thanks to Brenda Eckstein for granting me access to her collection of Ndaleni artworks. 139. Edwin Nyatlo, ARTTRA, no. 25, September 1972, 14. 140. Photograph in KC—Ndaleni—Scrapbook 3, KCM 47708. Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 38, October 1979, 22. 141. Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 21, October 1970, 2. 142. For a greatly anticipated study of the run-up to the Soweto uprising, which also provides an alternative history of the period under consideration here, see Julian Brown, The Road to Soweto: Resistance and the Uprising of 16 June 1976 (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2016). 143. Lancaster, personal communication; Baloyi interview; Peirson interview, 2011. 144. Jikelo interview. 145. John Peffer has written extensively about the trope of “becoming animal” in South African art; see Art and the End of Apartheid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 41–72. 146. Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 33, October 1976, 1. 147. Peirson and Lancaster interview. 148. Biyela interview. 149. Kulati, “’Tis Music to My Ear,” ARTTRA, no. 9 (1964), 2. 150. Ibid. 151. Isaac Morathane, “Dux—1976,” ARTTRA, no. 34, May 1977, 5. 152. Jessie Muthige to Peirson, June 30, 1970, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Jessie Muthige), 1, 2. 153. Nkhi to Peirson, KC—Ndaleni—SR—March 2, 1973, 1. 154. ARTTRA, no. 13, October 1966, 12. 155. Xaba to Lancaster, KC—Ndaleni—SR, March 14, 1978, 2. 156. Maimane to Peirson, KC—Ndaleni—SR, April 7, 1976, 1. 157. Samuel Mthembi, “Art and Myself,” ARTTRA, no. 20, May 1970, 23. 158. Biyela interview. 159. See the initial notice in Native Teachers’ Journal 33, no. 3 (April 1953): 209. 160. Bell, ARTTRA, no. 5–6, June 1962, 10. 161. Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 11, October 1965, 7; Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 17, October 1968, 12. 162. Peirson to Vincent Gitywa, December 8, 1969, UFH—Museum—Exhibitions, 2.

163. Peirson to Gitywa, August 12, 1974, UFH—Museum—Exhibitions, 1; Gitywa to Peirson, August 16, 1971, UFH—Museum—Exhibitions, 1; Peirson to Gitywa, August 20, 1971, UFG—Museum—Sculpture, 1. It is worth noting that Peirson was apparently a keen follower of the news, regardless of her stated intention to keep her head down and politics out of the school. Every time there was a protest at Fort Hare, Peirson invariably wrote to Gitywa to ask how things were going and to make sure that the exhibition was going on as planned. 164. Peirson to Gitywa, January 6, 1972, UFH—Museum—Sculpture, 1. 165. Gitywa to Peirson, November 10, 1970, UFH—Museum—Correspondence (Exhibitions), 1. 166. Daniel Rakgoathe, “Some Thoughts about My Colleagues,” ARTTRA, no. 11, October 1965, 5, 6. 167. Biyela interview; Khoza interview. 168. Peirson, ARRTRA, no. 8, April 1964, 8. 169. Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 14, April 1967, 12. 170. Excerpt from the Natal Witness, November 22, 1966, KC—Ndaleni— Scrapbook 3, KCM 47708. 171. Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 20, May 1970, 5. 172. Peirson interview, 2011. 173. Peirson to Gitywa, July 29, 1971, UFH—Museum—Sculpture, 1. 174. Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, 81. 175. Peirson to Gitywa, August 20, 1971; Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, 1. 176. Gitywa to Peirson, June 24, 1971, UFH—Museum—Correspondence (exhibitions), 1. 177. Peirson interview, 2013. 178. Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 18, May 1969, 2. 179. Christopher Burghard Steiner, African Art in Transit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 7. 180. For a complete list of exhibitions in which Ndaleni students took part, see Leeb-du Toit, Ndaleni Art School, 81–85. 181. Peirson, “Notes on the Specialist Art Teachers’ Course,” in ibid., 58. 182. Peirson to Sister Superior, Umtata, August 12, 1969, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Camilla Ndaba), 1. 183. Biyela interview. 184. Cited in ARTTRA, no. 30, May 1975, 17. 185. Baloyi interview. 186. Joseph Mabaso to Peirson, May 4, 1964, KC—Ndaleni—SR (J. Mabaso), 3. 187. The Eckstein collection includes two examples of this less popular medium. 188. Khoza interview; Jikelo interview. 189. Khoza interview. 190. Peirson interview, 2013.

325

Notes to Pages 194–203

Notes to Pages 204–215 326

Chapter 6: Apartheid 1. Jikelo interview. 2. Excerpt from the Natal Witness, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Silverman Jara). 3. Biyela interview. 4. A death cited in ARTTRA, no. 27, September 1973, 32. 5. Halala to Bell, March 12, 1963, KC—Ndaleni—SR (F. Halala), 1. 6. Ibid. 7. Malinga to Peirson, May 29, 1972, KC—Ndaleni—SR (F. Malinga), 2. 8. Biyela interview. 9. Zwane to Bell, March 20, 1961, 1. It is worth noting that Zwane wrote this letter on the first anniversary of Sharpeville. 10. J. M. Braithwaite to “To Whom It May Concern,” March 1, 1957, JAG— FUBA—Mvusi, 1. 11. Peirson interview, 2011. 12. Halala to Bell, February 2, 1963, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Halala), 1; Halala to Bell, January 21, 1963, Peirson interview, 2011, 1. 13. Bell to Halala, undated, ibid., 1. 14. Sedibane to Bell, undated, 1. 15. Khubeka to Bell, March 17, 1961, KC—Ndaleni—SR (G. Khubeka?), 1. 16. Khubeka to Peirson, September 14, 1970, 1. 17. Dlamini to Bell, undated, 1. 18. Dlamini to Bell, August 8, 1962, 1. 19. Dlamini to Bell, undated, 2. 20. Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 10, May 1965, 6, 7. 21. Rakgoathe, “Some Principles of Art,” ARTTRA, no. 9, September, 1964, 5. 22. Halala to Peirson, July 23, 1969, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Halala), 3. 23. Halala to Peirson, October 2, 1970, ibid., 1. 24. For statistics on the expansion of Bantu Education, see Bantu Education Journal, May 1973, 17–23, and October 1976, 31. 25. ARTTRA, no. 14, April 1967, 13. 26. Peirson to Keva, KC—Ndaleni—SR, February 15, 1966, 1. 27. Grossert, “The Inspection of Arts and Crafts,” June 7, 1960, KC—JW Grossert—KCM 25560, 2–3. 28. Grossert, “A Statement on Art and Crafts in Bantu Schools,” January 31, 1962, KC—JW Grossert—KCM 25569, 3. 29. Mabusela to Peirson, January 31, 1967, KC—Ndaleni—SR (S. Mabusela), 1; ibid., June 9, 1967, 1–2. 30. ARTTRA, no. 24, April 1972, 5. 31. Vilakazi to Peirson, February 5, 1964, KC—Ndaleni—SR (G. Vilakazi), 1–2. 32. ARTTRA, no. 8, April 1964, 3. 33. Kepu to Peirson, July 31, 1972, KC—Ndaleni—SR (A. Kepu), 1. 34. ARTTRA, no. 33, October 1976, 19.

35. Shimbambu to Peirson, February 11, 1974, KC—Ndaleni—SR (J. Shimbambu), 1. 36. ARTTRA, no. 26, May 1973, 16. 37. Cited in ARTTRA, no. 15, October 1967, 1–2. 38. Excerpt from the Daily News, “School for African Art Teachers,” December 5, 1974, KC—Ndaleni—Scrapbooks—Book 4, n.p. 39. Nguza, ARTTRA, no. 18, May 1969, 9. 40. Bopape to Peirson, undated, n.p. 41. Laura Phillips, “Principals, Chiefs and School Administration: The Localisation of Rural School Administration in Lebowa, 1972–1990,” Journal of Southern African Studies 42, no. 2 (2015): 299–314. 42. Ncamane to Peirson, June 1, 1965, KC—Ndaleni—SR (Ncamane), 1. 43. Nyatlo, ARTTRA, no. 25, September 1972, 14. 44. See, for example, Peirson in ARTTRA, no. 21, October 1970, 35. 45. Phoshoko to Peirson, May 18, 1969, KC—Ndaleni—SR (S. Phoshoko), 1. 46. Kepu to Peirson, KC—Ndaleni—SR, April 24, 1973, 1. 47. Huma to Peirson, May 26, 1973, KC—Ndaleni—SR (M. Huma), 1–2. 48. Ngcobo in ARTTRA, no. 29, September 1974, 4. 49. Malinga to Peirson, KC—Ndaleni—SR, March 29, 1967, 1. For more on pedagogy under apartheid, see Penny Enslin, “The Role of Fundamental Pedagogics in the Formulation of Educational Policy in South Africa,” in Kallaway, Apartheid and Education, 139–47. 50. Thulare, ARTTRA, no. 23, September 1971, 11. 51. Malinga to Peirson, KC—Ndaleni—SR, March 29, 1967, 1. 52. Cited in Jikelo interview. 53. Vilakazi to Peirson, February 5, 1964, 1. 54. Kgame to Peirson, June 3, 1974, KC—Ndaleni—SR (H. Kgame), 2. 55. ARTTRA, no. 30, May 1975, 15. 56. “T.E.D. Has Big Plans to Market Hand Work and Introduce Visual Education,” Bantu World, June 10, 1950, 11. 57. “A New Market for Works of Art,” ARTTRA, no. 12, April 1966, 7. The Bantu Investment Corporation eventually opened a depot, called Papatso, where it sold the “original art” of the Northern Transvaal to tourists. See World, February 28, 1967, 5. 58. This citation is from World, magazine supplement, September 23, 1961, 4–5. See representative examples going back to the 1930s and beyond in Bantu World, August 6, 1939, 20, November 26, 1949, 9, August 26, 1950, 1, September 2, 1950, 1. Notably, shows held in new townships and involving new schools received prominent coverage, as was the case with the show in Moroka. 59. Bantu World, December 11, 1954, 14–15. 60. ARTTRA, no. 23, September 1971, 11. 61. ARTTRA, no. 14, April 1967, 7.

327

Notes to Pages 215–221

Notes to Pages 221–232 328

62. Ncamane to Peirson, June 1, 1965, KC—Ndaleni—SR (M. Ncamane), 1; Ncamane to Peirson, September 10, 1965, 1. 63. Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 21, October 1970, 2. 64. Kgame to Peirson, June 3, 1974, 1. 65. World, March 18, 1961, 8. 66. E. Mabusela to Peirson, May 17, 1965, KC—Ndaleni—SR (E Mabusela), 1. 67. ARTTRA, no. 38, October 1979, 19. 68. Vapi to Peirson, undated, KC—Ndaleni—SR (V. Vapi), 1. 69. Mzondeka to Lancaster, March 19, 1974, KC—Ndaleni—SR (M. Mzondeka), 1. 70. Sedibane to Peirson, April 8, 1970, 1; Sedibane to Peirson, July 28, 1971, 3; Peirson to Sedibane, November 5, 1970, 1. 71. Sedibane to Peirson, July 28, 1971, 1; Sedibane to Peirson, February 24, 1972, 1; Sedibane to Peirson, May 18, 1973, 3. 72. ARTTRA, no. 26, May 1973, 8; Mabusela to Peirson, March 9, 1973, 1. 73. Mahosi to Peirson, March 29, 1973, 1. 74. Muthige to Peirson, February 8, 1971, 2; Muthige to Peirson, July 17, 1971, 1. 75. Muthige to Peirson, October 8, 1971, 1; Muthige to Peirson, July 17, 1971, 1. 76. Peirson to Muthige, July 27, 1971, 1. 77. Muthige to Peirson, October 8, 1971, 4; Peirson to Muthige, November 5, 1971, 1. 78. Muthige to Peirson, October 8, 1971, 1. 79. Mahosi to “Principal,” August 31, 1971, KC—Ndaleni—SR (A Mahosi), 1. 80. Louw to Peirson, undated, KC—Ndaleni—SR (A Mahosi), 1. 81. Mahosi to Peirson, January 9, 1973, 1. 82. Peirson to Mabusela, undated [March-April 1973], 1. 83. Mahosi to Peirson, August 16, 1973, 1. 84. Mahosi to Peirson, February 16, 1973, 1. 85. Mahosi to Peirson, June 18, 1974, 1. 86. Nomvula (Vie) Hadebe (née Xaba), interview by the author, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, June 13, 2013. 87. Baloyi interview. 88. Hadebe interview. 89. Mahosi to Peirson, September 21, 1973, 2. 90. Peirson interview, 2011; Peirson interview, 2013. 91. Sedibane to Peirson, June 7, 1974, 1. 92. Peirson to Sedibane, June 13, 1974, 1. 93. Peirson to Mahosi, February 6, 1973, 1. 94. Mahosi to Peirson, August 16, 1973, 2. 95. Ntilane to Peirson, August 2, 1976, KC—Ndaleni—SR (P Ntilane), 1–2. 96. Ghu to Peirson, October 5, 1970, 2–3. 97. Dibetsoe to Peirson, March 10, 1972, 1; Dibetsoe to Peirson, April 7, 1978, 1.

98. Lerata to Peirson, August 12, 1976, 1–2 99. Malolo to Peirson, January 19, 1974, 1–2. 100. Shabalala to Peirson, August 27, 1968, 1–2. 101. Sepato to Peirson, March 9, 1970, 1. 102. Malinga to Peirson, March 28, 1969, 1. 103. Zwane to Peirson, October 21, 1971, 1. 104. Sedibane to Bell, April 29, 1963, 1. 105. ARTTRA, no. 25, September 1972, 30. 106. Ghu to Peirson, KC—Ndaleni—Student records, September 20, 1976, 1–2. 107. ARTTRA, no. 33, October 1976, 7. 108. Gambu to Lancaster, June 18, 1978, 2. 109. Sedibane to Peirson, July 29, 1976, 1. 110. Peirson and Lancaster interview. 111. Peirson to Mabusela, September 13, 1974, 1–2. 112. Sedibane to Peirson, August 2, 1979, 1; Sedibane to Peirson, September 12, 1979, 1; Peirson to Mabusela, February 11, 1980, 1. 113. Peirson to Mahosi, May 28, 1975, 1. 114. Peirson to Mahosi, various; see also Peirson and Lancaster interview. 115. Peirson to Mahosi, May 2, 1980, 1. 116. ARTTRA, no. 40, October 1980, 18. 117. Sedibane to Peirson, November 19, 1980, 1. 118. Peirson and Lancaster interview. 119. Jara to Peirson, April 28, 1977, 1. 120. For BC in the region, see Leslie Hadfield, “Biko, Black Consciousness, and ‘the System’ eZinyoka: Oral History and Black Consciousness in Practice in a Rural Ciskei Village,” South African Historical Journal 62, no. 1 (March 2010): 78–99. 121. See http://sabctrc.saha.org.za/victims/jara_silverman_mzondeleli.htm, accessed December 16, 2013. 122. See Daniel Massey, Under Protest: The Rise of Student Resistance at the University of Fort Hare (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2010). 123. Jikelo interview. 124. ARTTRA, no. 34, May 1977, 12. 125. Peirson, “Mabopane: A Glimpse into the Future,” ARTTRA, no. 37, May 1979, 8–9. 126. Lancaster, personal communication, July 28, 2013. 127. Sedibane to Peirson, November 19, 1980, 1. 128. Peirson, “Mabopane,” 8. 129. Peirson interview, 2013. 130. David Moon, interview by the author, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, December14, 2011. 131. Peirson interview, 2011.

329

Notes to Pages 233–240

Notes to Pages 241–251 330

Chapter 7: Artists 1. “This Is Not Our Art,” World, October 28, 1966, 4, 5. 2. Ezekiel Mabusela, Mofolo Village, World, November 3, 1966, 4. 3. E. Mabusela to Peirson, June 9, 1970, 2. 4. E. Ngcobo to Peirson, April 9, 1965, 1. 5. Petrus Khumalo, “Arts and Crafts in Education,” ARTTRA, no. 27, September 1973, 4. 6. Peirson, “Stereotype,” ARTTRA, no. 36, September 1978, 22. 7. Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 40, October 1980, 12. 8. For more on Selby Mvusi beyond Indaleni and South Africa, see Elza Miles, Selby Mvusi; see also my article entitled “Designing Knowledge in Postcolonial Africa: A South African, Abroad,” Kronos: Southern African Histories, no. 41 (2015), 265 – 286. 9. Grossert, “Contemporary Bantu Artists,” January 12, 1962, KC—JW Grossert—File 2—KCM 25567, 1. 10. J. M. Braithwaite to “To Whom It May Concern,” March 1, 1957, JAG— FUBA—William Diamond Collection, 1. 11. Lily McAdam to Adult Education Committee, Durban, November 6, 1950, NAP—UOD, vol. 575, Ref x8/7/25, 1. 12. Regional Inspector to Secretary of Education, Art and Science, January 26, 1951, NAP—UOD, vol. 575, ref x8/7/25, 1. 13. Regional Organiser for Adult Education to Secretary of Education, Art and Science, July 17, 1953, UOD, vol. 575, ref x8/7/25, 1. 14. Bill Ainslie, interview by Steven Sack, Johannesburg, March 1988, JAG— Neglected Tradition—Binder 8—961—1255, File 1016, 1–2. 15. Mvusi, “The Arts: An Introduction to Appreciation,” August 1960[?], JAG— FUBA—Mvusi—Folder 9, 1. 16. Cited in Bill Ainslie, “We Are Overlooking Some of Our Most Talented Artists,” Bulawayo Weekend Chronicle, September 22, 1961, n.p., JAG—Archives— Bill Ainslie, Clippings. 17. Mvusi, “Toward a Contemporary Art in Africa,” International Conference of African Culture, August 9, 1962, JAG—FUBA—Mvusi Folder 9, 1–5. 18. Mvusi, “The Social Significance of African Art and Music,” October 1961, JAG—FUBA—Mvusi Folder 9, 1–2. 19. Ibid. 20. Mvusi, “Towards a Contemporary Art in Africa,” 4. 21. Mvusi, “Arts: An Introduction to Appreciation,” 3. 22. Mvusi, “Social Significance,” 2. 23. Mvusi, “Exhibition of Paintings by Selby Mvusi,” September 1959, JAG— FUBA—Mvusi Folder 5, 1–2. 24. Mvusi, “Towards a Contemporary Art in Africa,” 3. 25. Mvusi, “Current Revolution and Future Prospects,” 1966, JAG—FUBA— Mvusi Folder 9, 56.

26. Mvusi, “Design for Developing Countries,” ed. Nathan Shapira, 1964, JAG—FUBA—Folder 9, 2. 27. Mvusi, “The Arts: An Introduction to Appreciation,” 3. I have written about Mvusi’s move towards industrial design in “Designing Knowledge.”. 28. Mvusi, “Current Revolution and Future Prospects,” 53, 66. 29. Ibid., 74. 30. Eric Ngcobo, “Prize Giving Day, Ndaleni Art School,” November 22, 1974, KC—Ndaleni—E. Ngcobo, 2. 31. Ngcobo, “South African Bantu Arts and Crafts,” ARTTRA, no. 25, September 1972, 8–12. 32. Ngcobo, ARTTRA, no. 29, September 1974, 3. 33. Peirson, “Testimonial,” undated [mid-1960s], KC—Ndaleni—N. Ntombela, 1. 34. Radebe to Peirson, October 14, 1965, KC—Ndaleni—Radebe, 1, 2. 35. Radebe to Peirson, October 20, 1966, 1. 36. Radebe to Peirson, February 4, 1967, 1. 37. Radebe, ARTTRA, no. 14, April 1967, 9–10. 38. Rakgoathe, ARTTRA, no. 19, October 1969, 23. 39. Ndaba to Peirson, September 15, 1970, KC—Ndaleni—G. Ndaba, 2. 40. Godfrey Ndaba, interview by the author, Johannesburg, June 26, 2013.41. Ndaba to Peirson, undated [1972], 1. 42. Ndaba interview. 43. Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 25, September 1972, 31. 44. Ndaba interview. 45. Robert Komane to Peirson, March 16, 1971, KC—Ndaleni—R. Komane, 2–3. 46. Paul Sibisi to Peirson, September 9, 1972, KC—Ndaleni—P. Sibisi, 1–2. 47. Sibisi, ARTTRA, no. 40, October 1980, 47. 48. Sibisi interview. 49. Sibisi, ARTTRA, no. 40, 47; excerpt from Tribute, April [unclear], JAG— Neglected Tradition—Binder 2, File 207. 50. Biyela to Peirson and Lancaster, March 18, 1979, KC—Ndaleni—D. Biyela, 2. 51. Gertrude Ngubane to Peirson, February 23, 1972, KC—Ndaleni—N. Ngubane, 1. Ngubane’s father wrote the second page of the letter; he said that he had wanted to write the first but that Gertrude was too fast. 52. Nhlanhla Ngubane to Peirson, June 17, 1971, 1. 53. George Ramagaga to Peirson, undated [October 1975], KC—Ndaleni—G. Ramagaga, 1. 54. Ramagaga to Peirson, undated [1979?], 1. 55. Peirson to Dlamini, November 18, 1963, 1–3. 56. Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 13, October 1966, 10. 57. Agnes Ratshivbumo to “friend,” October 25, 1977, KC—Ndaleni—A. Ratshivbumo, 1. 58. ARTTRA, no. 11, October 1965, 8.

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Notes to Pages 259–263 332

59. Phanuel Pooe to Peirson, August 8, 1965, 1–2. 60. Peirson in ARTTRA, no. 8, April 1964, 7. Smart Gumede was among her students at Amanzimtoti; she tried to get him to attend Ndaleni in 1965, but he was too poor and went to teach instead. He eventually enrolled at Ndaleni in 1977 and went from there to Fort Hare and a subsequent career as an artist whose work is now held in galleries across KwaZulu-Natal. See Smart Gumede, “Autobiography,” JAG—Neglected Tradition—Binder 6, File 658, 1, as well as http://www. sahistory.org.za/people/g-s-smart-gumede, accessed January 16, 2014. 61. Sophie Nsuza to Peirson, July 1966, KC—Ndaleni—S. Nsuza, 2. 62. Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 13, October 1966, 12. 63. Nsuza to Peirson, May 5, 1967, 1. 64. Nsuza to Peirson, September 23, 1969, 1–2. 65. Nsuza to Peirson, August 22, 1976, 1. 66. Bell to Brown, July 29, 1963, 1, LOC—Harmon Foundation—MSS51615— Box 103—South Africa, 1. 67. “Invitation to a Child Arts and Crafts Exhibition and Carpentry Work Display,” Zakheni Bantu School, November 1963, LOC—Harmon Foundation— MSS51615—Box 90—S. Mahlobo. 68. See World, November 19, 1963, 2, for a discussion of a show of his and his students’ work. 69. Mahlobo to Nakasa, December 9, 1963, HP—A2696—Nat Nakasa—B1, 1–3. 70. Bell to Brown, July 29, 1963, 1. 71. Mahlobo to Brown, November 13, 1963, LOC—Harmon Foundation— MSS51615—Box 90—S. Mahlobo, 1. 72. Mahlobo to Brown, October 7, 1964, LOC—Harmon Foundation— MSS51615—Box 90—S. Mahlobo, 1. 73. Mahlobo to Brown, September 29, 1966, LOC—Harmon Foundation— MSS51615—Box 90—S. Mahlobo, 1. 74. Mahlobo to Brown, February 8, 1966, LOC—Harmon Foundation— MSS51615—Box 90—S. Mahlobo, 2. 75. ARTTRA, no. 15, October 1967, 1–2. 76. Clipping from Golden City Post, September 29, 1963, n.p., LOC—Harmon Foundation—MSS51615—Box 90—S. Mahlobo. 77. ARTTRA, no. 20, May 1970, 25. 78. Mohlopi, ARTTRA, no. 21, October 1970, 27. 79. George Khubeka to Peter Bell, March 17, 1961, 2. 80. Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 37, May 1979, 23. 81. Rakgoathe, ARTTRA No. 8, October 1964, 1. 82. Priestess Xego to Peirson, April 27, 1964, KC—Ndaleni—P. Xego, 1. 83. Richman Simelane to Peirson, February 19, 1974, KC—Ndaleni—R. Simelane, 1. The long-distance runner was Zwelitsha Gono, who began (unofficially) to run the Comrades Marathon as “Ndaleni Tiger” while at art school. Craig

Lancaster and his friends helped support his runs, since he was not eligible to enter the whites-only ultramarathon. Lancaster, personal communication. See also, http://www.iol.co.za/sport/athletics/tiger-going-for-30th-medal-in-the-comrades -1.525903?ot=inmsa.ArticlePrintPageLayout.ot. (accessed in May 2016). Gono ran the Comrades Marathon annually through at least 2012. 84. Peirson, ARTTRA, no. 21, October 1970, 1. 85. Nququ, ARTTRA, no. 13, October 1966, 11. 86. Bopape to Peirson, KC—Ndaleni—Student records, undated, 1. 87. Hobyane to Peirson, KC—Ndaleni—Student records, 18 Jan++ 72, 2. 88. ARTTRA, no. 28, April 1974, 6. 89. Moroka, ARTTRA, no. 34, May 1977, 23. 90. Ramadi to Peirson, November 25, 1969, KC—Ndaleni—A. Ramadi, 3. 91. Khoza to Peirson, July 28, 1976, 1. 92. Kutemela, ARTTRA, no. 32, May 1976, 11; also Kutemela to Peirson, undated [1976], KC—Ndaleni—P. Kutemela, 1. 93. Dlamini to Peirson, November 28, 1963, 3. 94. Dlamini to Peirson, November 18, 1964, 2. 95. His prize cited in Bantu Education Journal, February 1959, 33. 96. ARTTRA, no. 40, October 1980, 10. 97. Dlamini to Peirson, July 22, 1963, 2. 98. Dlamini to Peirson, January 14, 1964, 2. 99. Dlamini to Peirson, April 17, 1964, 2. 100. Dlamini to Peirson, November 18, 1964. 101. Ibid., 3. 102. Dlamini to Peirson, April 11, 1968, 3. 103. ARTTRA, no. 17, September 1968, 7, 9. 104. Dlamini to Peirson, February 20, 1970, 1. 105. Dlamini to Peirson, undated [1970?], 1–2. 106. Dlamini to Peirson, May 21, 1974, 3. 107. Dlamini to Peirson, March 1, 1975, 1. 108. Dlamini to Peirson, July 7, 1980, 1. 109. Cindi to Peirson, March 6, 1974, 1–2. Epilogue: The Art of the Past 1. Brown to Bell, February 19, 1963, LOC—MSS51615—Box 103—South Africa; Christian Science Monitor, February 19, 1963, 8. 2. For the Harmon Foundation, see http://blog.library.si.edu/2013/02/african -american-art-and-the-harmon-foundation/?utm_source=feedburner&utm _ m e di u m = f e e d & u t m _ c a m p a i g n = Fe e d % 3 A + S mi t h s o ni a n L i b r a r i e s + %28Smithsonian+Libraries%29#.U1kVj-ZdUeb, accessed on April 24, 2014; http:// artsedge.kennedy-center.org/interactives/harlem/faces/harmon_foundation.html, accessed on April 24, 2014; and Gary A. Reynolds and Beryl J. Wright, eds., Against

333

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Notes to Pages 270–276 334

the Odds: African-American Artists and the Harmon Foundation (Newark, NJ: Newark Museum, 1989). The Library of Congress, which holds a repository of Harmon records, has put a film of a 1930s Harmon exhibition and prize giving on YouTube, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJMDnkeL00k. 3. Evelyn Brown, Africa’s Contemporary Art and Artists (New York: Harmon Foundation,1966), 3–4; Brown to Peirson, July 16, 1964, LOC—MSS51615—Box 103—South Africa, 1. The résumé that Mvusi prepared for distribution by the foundation made no mention of his years at Ndaleni. See “Curriculum Vitae: Selbourne Charlton Mvusi,” undated, LOC—MSS51615—Box 91—Selby Mvusi. 4. Consignment, September 2, 1963, LOC—MSS51615—Box 103—South Africa, 1; Lorna Peirson interview by the author, Howick, South Africa, June 17, 2013; Peirson to Brown, July 30, 1964, LOC—MSS51615—Box 103—South Africa, 1. 5. Bell to Brown, April 22, 1963, LOC—MSS51615—Box 103—South Africa, 1. Recall Rakgoathe’s critique of Dlamini’s inability to sculpt or draw hands. 6. Brown, Africa’s Contemporary Art, 93; David Staniunas, Presbyterian Historical Society, personal communication, March 10, 2014. Some of the Harmon Foundation collection was taken up by the art galleries of the Hampton Institute and Fisk University; I am still attempting to determine whether these institutions hold any Ndaleni sculptures. 7. Brown, Africa’s Contemporary Art, 90–93. 8. Peirson to Brown, July 30, 1964, LOC—MSS51615—Box 103—South Africa, 1. 9. Ibid.; Peirson to Brown, March 25, 1965, LOC—MSS51615—Box 103—South Africa, 1. 10. Esmé Berman’s 1970 Art and Artists of South Africa was the first volume to include African artists. She did not include anyone associated with Ndaleni. 11. E. J. De Jager, Contemporary African Art in South Africa (Cape Town: Struik, 1973), 7, 24; De Jager, Images of Man: Contemporary South African Black Art and Artists (Alice, South Africa: Fort Hare University Press, 1992), 33. 12. See Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin, Rorke’s Drift: Empowering Prints (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2003). By comparison, the index in Visual Century, vol. 2, lists upwards of twenty references for Rorke’s Drift, compared to two for Ndaleni (and this only because the paragraphs discussing it are spread across two pages). 13. Grossert to Julia Meintjies, Johannesburg Art Gallery, August 22, 1988, JAG—Neglected Tradition—F909, 1. 14. Elizabeth Rankin, “Creating Communities,” in Visual Century, vol. 2, 69. 15. Ibid. 16. Brendan Bell, interview by the author, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, April 7, 2014. 17. See various loan agreements, Tatham Art Gallery—Records—Ndaleni Retrospective. 18. Stephen Coan, “Ndaleni Vibrancy Revived at Tatham,” Natal Witness, September 24, 1999; clippings file, Tatham Art Gallery—Records—Ndaleni

Retrospective. Lorna Peirson, interview by the author, Howick, South Africa, April 9, 2014. 19. Brendan Bell interview. 20. The exhibition catalogue has been published. I cannot recommend it enough. See Peter Delius, Laura Phillips, and Fiona Rankin-Smith, A Long Way Home: Migrant Worker Worlds, 1800–2014 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2014). 21. My thanks go to Anitra Nettleton for pointing out this visiting school group and explaining who they were. 22. Robert McCallum, Art Education for Bophuthatswana Schools (Mafeking: University of Bophuthatswana, 1986), 8, 17, 49. 23. Ibid., 42–47, 53, 18. 24. Ntombi Mdunge, personal communication, April 25, 2014. 25. Ibid. 26. Michael Gardiner, interview by the author, Johannesburg, April 11, 2014. For more on the transition and new curricular developments, see Vuyisile Msila, “From Apartheid Education to the National Curriculum Statement,” Nordic Journal of African Studies 16, no. 2 (2007): 146–60. For fundamental pedagogics under UNISA authority, see Penny Enslin, “The Role of Fundamental Pedagogics.” 27. Department of Education, Arts and Culture: Revised National Curriculum Statement Grades R-9 (Pretoria: Department of Education, 2002), 6. 28. Ibid., 26, 76, 84. 29. Gardiner interview. 30. Department of Basic Education, “Visual Arts: Guidelines for Practical Assessment Tasks” (Pretoria: Department of Basic Education, 2013), 4. Notably, one of the other aspects of the visual arts curriculum calls for learners to research the legacy of historic art centers and schools—Rorke’s Drift and Polly Street are choices; Ndaleni is not. 31. Bell interview. My thanks also to Christina Cappy, personal communication, March 30, 2014. 32. See http://www.witness.co.za/index.php?showcontent&global%5B_id%5D =110367, accessed on April 24, 2014. 33. See http://www.tatham.org.za/celebrating-creativity.html, accessed on April 24, 2014; Bell interview. 34. For Richmond since the end of apartheid, see Andrew Ragavaloo, Richmond: Living in the Shadow of Death (Johannesburg: STE Publishers, 2008). Ragavaloo was an ANC member and the mayor of Richmond, a position he held since the mid-1990s. His account is thus quite biased, a point that other Richmond residents wanted to make sure I understood. Given the political violence that continues to plague the area, they wished to remain anonymous. For more on Richmond, see http://mg.co.za/article/1999-06-11-police-deny-political-motive-for-killings, accessed on April 24, 2014, an article that details the cycle of violent reprisals that

335

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Notes to Page 284 336

marked Richmond’s civil war during the late 1990s. It is worth noting that the township in which most of the violence took place has taken the name Ndaleni (without the locative) from the mission station. 35. Miles, personal communication. 36. The violence in the area halted construction of much-needed schools in the late 1990s; today, there is talk of building a further education and training facility—a sort of vocational school—where the ruins of the girls’ hostel and other outbuildings now stand. People ranging from a local Methodist minister to the speaker of the Richmond’s city council were happy to assist my research, at least in part because they hoped that my input would help that project proceed. More recently still, much of the west side of the mission road has been bulldozed and clear-cut, in preparation for what many in the community hope will be the mission’s renewed life as an education center.

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index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures. Abrahams, Peter, 32 abstract art, 153–56, 164 abstract expressionism, 256, 257, 258 Adams College (Amanzimtoti): curriculum and pedagogical approach, xxiv, 35–36; Lismer’s visit to, 74; music program recommended for, 307–8n51; students of, 34–35, 94. See also Amanzimtoti Training College adapted education: concept and system, xxiv– xxvi, 81, 292n13; critic of, 35–36; renewed call for, 46–47, 49–50. See also craftwork admission policy and applications (Ndaleni): advertisements for, 78, 92–93; family support for, 110–11; gender and, 101; lack of early documents on, 94; Ndaleni graduates’ recommendations for, 106–8, 111, 114, 117–18, 174, 189, 230–31, 236, 237; politics of, 226–27; process of, 114–17; record keeping instituted for, 104. See also bursaries; journeys aesthetics: of craftwork, 55–58; of everyday life, 16; handwork shifted toward, xxvi–xxvii; infrastructure of, 19–21; Ndaleni’s emphasis on, 144–45; taste in, 69–72, 313n47. See also beauty; harmony and balance; rhythm; ways of being in the world Africa: agricultural production, xxvi, 47–48; elision of differences across, 55; nationalism in, 249; as rhythmic and open to future, 67; white imagination of, 64–65 African Americans, 5, 29, 270 African art and culture: “authentic,” 200; Bantu cultural genius vs. Afrikaner cultural “heritage,” 306n42, 307–8n51; call for maintaining, 33; categorization of, 248–52; current “Arts and Culture” learning area and, 278–82; debates about education and, 22; definitions, 273–75; Harmon Foundation’s

interest in, 269–70; lack of announced authorship in, 305–6n33. See also art; Bantu traditional arts and crafts; craftwork; cultural purity and preservation African genius: Afrikaner cultural “heritage” vs. Bantu cultural genius, 306n42, 307–8n51; collective nature established, 50–51; concept of “Native genius,” 25, 27–35, 38; ensuring cultural stability of, 44–45; individual achievement and, 29–30, 304–5n22, 304n15; opening for, 72; paradox in claims of, 35–36, 38; “protection” and “salvage” of, 38–39, 49, 307–8n51; “separate, collective Bantu genius” idea, 25–27, 32; in urban vs. rural areas, 41 Africanity, 65, 69–72, 313n47 African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, Wilberforce Institute, 210, 223–24, 234 African Music Society, 307–8n51 African National Congress (ANC), 282–83 Africanness: Africans as encoded with, 308n52; call to retain characteristics of, 35–36, 38; craftwork vs. preservation of, 22; objects viewed as predating claim to, 67; South African standards for, 249. See also cultural purity and preservation African personhood, defined, 247–50. See also identity formation Africans: concerns about leisure of, 39–40; craftwork programs critiqued by, 45–46, 47; cultivating creativity among, 211–12; definitions, 244–45; documentation needed by, 223; inherent taste of, 69–72, 313n47. See also artists; Bantu Education schools; graduates of Ndaleni; students; teachers African Studies Association, 249, 250 Africa’s Contemporary Art and Artists (Brown), 272–73

Index 362 Ainslie, Bill, 247–48, 254 Alder, Ken, 300n61 Allison, James, 82, 96 Amanzimtoti Training College, 260, 332n60 American African Studies Association, 249, 250 ANC (African National Congress), 282–83 apartheid: African society as undifferentiated collective in, 26–27, 32, 50–51; approach to experiences of, 5, 23–24; art as creative practice conditioned by, 11–13, 14; art education in context of, 5, 7, 80–81; artful living despite, 263–68; betterment programs in, 215; class trip challenges in, 152–53, 176; clay as metaphor for living under, 167–68; conditions depicted in art, 179–81, 181, 182, 183, 184; consolidation of, 25–26, 29; craftwork program as invention of, 46; current narrative about making art under, 272–73; effects of political unrest under, 234–39; friendship in, 302n76; institutional history needed, 292–93n13; negotiating realities of, 18–21, 114, 187–90, 204–7; non-European white modernity of, 306n42; requests to relocate in, 261–62; struggle and politics of, 177–79, 221–22. See also adapted education; Bantu Education schools; graduates of Ndaleni; historiography; National Party; politics; separate development Appadurai, Arjun, 10 art: as Art, 19, 124, 189; “becoming animals” (fangs) in, 184, 324n145; categorization of, 44, 248–52; as creative practice, 13–16, 298n40; as cultivation of self-expression in particular context, 19–21; definitions, 15–16, 55–56, 60–61, 157–58, 241, 243; as dialogue, 11–12, 41, 64, 154–56, 172, 180, 195, 240, 267; education via, 68–76; as fundamental for self and society, 59, 59–68, 144, 178, 206, 211–12, 248, 280; as language for living, 252–63; of life, 263–68; market for, 255–56; meaning for students, 124, 126; significance in South Africa’s future, 101–2; struggle inherent in, 221–22; vision and experience of, 187–90; work (function) of, 72, 74–75. See also art education; art history; art objects; Bantu traditional arts and crafts; craftwork Art and Crafts for Africans (Grossert), 54 Art as Experience ( Dewey), 60 Art Association (Transkei), 238 art education: craft markets as threat to ideals, 217–21; current “Arts and Culture” learning area, 278–82; empathy and personality development in, 72, 74; first task in, 213; Grossert’s vision for, 53–56, 76–78, 80; ideologies of art in, 22–23; material surroundings as basis for, 126, 128; in Model C and private schools, 278, 281–82;

primitivist discourse embedded in, 38–39; relaxed methods favored, 39–41, 75–77, 89, 98, 308n53, 314n64; scribbling tactic in, 99– 100; slow death of, 234–39; student-teacher relationship in, 72; study of (1980s), 277–78; whites’ view of subjects appropriate for Africans in, 30, 34, 36, 38. See also African genius; creativity; education; materials and equipment; self-expression; syllabus; teachers “art for art’s sake,” 60–61 “art for society’s sake,” 75 “Art Gospel” concept, 98 art history (discipline): basis for inclusion in, 243; black artists in, 12–13, 248–52, 258, 281–82, 298n40, 298–99n42; class trips connected to, 150, 150, 151, 152–54; current narrative in, 273–75; Ndaleni and South Africa’s place in, 155–56; Ndaleni forgotten in, 269–76; in Ndaleni’s coursework, 144–49, 146; Rakgoathe’s critique based in, 195. See also historiography artists: all people as, 74–75; art as language for, 252–63; art history’s categorization of, 12–13, 248–52, 258, 281–82, 298n40, 298– 99n42; art of life for, 263–68; call to retain racial characteristics, 35–36, 38; commercial positions for, 243, 258–60; definition of, 241, 243–44; dialogue and work of, 11–12, 41, 64, 154–56, 172, 180, 195, 240, 267; discord and harmony for, 61–63; family support for, 108, 110–11; meanings available to, 13–15; modernity’s isolation of, 62–63; multiracial community of, 246, 247–48; Native lands and, 245–52; opportunities for, 92–93, 96; percentage with genius, 304–5n22. See also creativity; materials and equipment; self-expression; and specific artists’ names and media art materials. See materials and equipment art objects: Africanity of, 65, 67; approach to studying, 23–24; collective critiques and dialogues on, 180, 194–96; dialogue in creation of, 11–12, 41, 64, 154–56, 172, 180, 195, 240, 267; “embodied meanings” of, 13–14; as lessons in creativity, 65, 67–68; loaned for Ndaleni retrospective, 275–76; political concerns evidenced in, 179–81, 181, 182, 183, 184; popularity of, 199–202; as works of self, 60–61. See also campus; exhibitions, competitions, and sales; and specific media Art of Africa, The (Battiss, Franz, Grossert, and Junod, eds.): arts and crafts treated similarly in, 76; context of publishing, 58; illustrations in, 55–56, 57; scope, 54–55; structure of, 55–56; students’ study of, 152 “art of life” concept, 21. See also ways of being in the world

art organizers: Grossert and, 53, 80, 225; limited authority of, 236; Ngcobo as, 252–53; politics for, 222, 224, 225–28, 230–32. See also Bantu Education schools arts and crafts: definitions, 216–17; justifications for mandating, 116; regional craft shows for, 70, 80, 108; as school subjects, 76–78, 80; undifferentiated in syllabus, 76–77, 88–89. See also Bantu traditional arts and crafts; craftwork Art South Africa (exhibit), 153–54, 155–56 ARTTRA (art teachers’ newsletter): activities noted, 141–42, 263; art history notes, 143; art works in, 6, 12, 125, 154, 158, 165, 184, 185; Bell’s role in, 101, 102–3; book reviews, 156; clay production described, 168; covers for, 165; English language in, 140; importance to graduates, 260, 262–63; materials and equipment discussed, 3, 7–8; Peirson’s role in, 106, 263, 270; Picasso’s obituary in, 147; poetry in, 125, 322n81; on role of the visual in education, 98; struggle against apartheid depicted in, 180–81, 184, 185; “tribal curios” juxtaposed to originality in, 220; West African art essay in, 145 Arttra Studio (Soweto), 254 Atkins, Peter, 97; admissions and applications handled, 101, 117; background, 96; noted, 95; Peirson compared with, 115; politics of, 177; sculptures of, 97; student noted, 208; teaching activities, 97–98, 99, 100 Atkinson, Kevin, 256 Balla, Giacomo (Futurist), 154–55, 164 Baloyi, Solomon, 113; church attendance of, 175; craftwork disliked by, 112, 114; on exhibition and sales, 202; on food supply, 172; journey to and arrival at Ndaleni, 114, 119–20, 121; Ndaleni retrospective and, 275; Soweto uprising and, 183, 184; teaching activities and artwork, 229, 275; on wood sculpting, 161 Bantu: inherent taste in clothing of, 70–71; use of term, 251–52 Bantu (government information service magazine), 155 Bantu Education Act (1953), 3. See also Bantu Education schools; Department of Bantu Education Bantu Education Journal, 98–99, 110–11 Bantu Education schools: Afrikaans taught in, 210; agendas and political context of, 80–81, 222–33; art as a “way of life” in, 77; art competitions and shows in, 192, 220–21, 327n58; art organizers in, 53, 80, 222, 224–28, 230–32, 236, 252–53; art teaching and limits in, 4–5, 211–17, 221–22; beauty in classroom and students of, 16, 18; conditions in, 8,

218; craftwork markets and, 217–21, 327n58; cultural stability ensured in, 44–45; foundation of program for, 72, 74–75; Grossert’s role in, 22–23, 54, 78; hopes for work of art in, 206–7, 211–12; inefficiency and decline of, 234–39; interwar ideas still resonant, 98; natural development touted in, 43–44; Peirson’s work in context of, 104, 167; students trained to teach arts and crafts in, 123, 124, 128, 142, 171, 207, 212; syllabus for primary art students, 157; teachers’ choice to work for, 18–21. See also art education; training colleges Bantu Indian Coloured Artists (BICA) collective, 92, 245, 247 Bantu Investment Corporation, 220, 327n57 Bantu Men’s Social Centre, 26, 247 Bantustans: administrative politics in, 225–28; artists and, 245–52; community relocations in, 205–6; education ministries of, 177; ethnic grouping in, 224; fears of witchcraft in, 19–20; “independence” of, 86; realities of navigating life in, 206–7; understanding history of, 292–93n13. See also Bantu Education schools; and specific places Bantu traditional arts and crafts: clay use in, 28; concerns about decline of, 40, 47–49, 62–63; education authorities’ interests in, 217–21, 327n58; exhibitions of, 47–48, 214; history of production, 41, 43; maintaining contact with culture and society via, 74; Ngcobo’s view of, 252–53; optimism about resurgence, 49–50; references to, 245. See also African genius; craftwork; cultural purity and preservation Bantu Welfare Fund, 29, 40–41 Bantu World: on art among Bantu, 47; on black celebrity artists, 26; on competitions and shows, 220; competitions sponsored by, 33; Pemba’s correspondence with, 41; Philosopher (correspondent) in, 30; race and educational ideas in, 30, 32; on self-taught genius, 36 Barnes, Albert C., 60, 63–64, 65, 67 Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), 60, 64, 311–12n26 basketry, grass weaving, and broom making: class in, xxii, 214; East London as center of, 48–49; grass pig, 230, 231, 234; materials for, 1, 213; natural vs. artificial forms of, 69; objects made, 42, 68; students’ views on, xxii–xxiii; for tourist market, 221. See also textiles Basotho communities, depicted, 57 Battiss, Walter W., 39, 86, 195, 308n52. See also Art of Africa, The Bauhaus Vorkurs, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 316n8 beadwork, 48–49, 73, 220

363 index

Index 364 beauty: appreciation of, 72; approach to studying, 24; art as language for living in, 252–63; categorization of art and, 248–52; in everyday art practices, 7, 10; as infrastructure, 16, 18, 19; racial characteristics conveyed in, 36. See also aesthetics; harmony and balance; ways of being in the world beauty contests, 32–33 Bedford, May Esther, competition named for, 33, 38 being. See ways of being in the world Bell, Brendan, 275, 276 Bell, Peter, 97, 102; admissions and applications handled, 101, 117; on art education, 95–96, 126; on Atkins, 98; campus appearance under, 128, 172; on children at Indaleni, 84; departure of, 103; exhibition hopes of, 192; funding sought by, 115; Harmon Foundation and, 269, 270, 272; journal started by (see ARTTRA); materials and equipment concerns, 124, 164, 166, 167, 171, 284, 286; Ndaleni retrospective and, 276; Peirson compared with, 115; politics of, 101–2, 177, 178; student behavior under, 173; students’ correspondence with, 205, 206, 207–8, 210, 211; students noted, 108, 157, 236, 254, 259, 260, 265, 267; teaching activities, 99–100, 103, 122–24, 126, 139, 140, 159, 167 Benjamin, Walter, 58 Berger, John A., 13, 14–16, 21–22 Berman, Esme: Art and Artists of South Africa, 155 Bhengu, Gerard, 25, 34, 36, 38 BICA (Bantu Indian Coloured Artists) collective, 92, 245, 247 Biko, Steve, 186 Biyela, Daphne (later, Ntombi Mdunge), 15, 191; background, 148–49, 190; on clay material, 172; on exhibitions, 196, 201; on “grey reality,” 206; Ndaleni remembered by, 187, 204–5; Ndaleni retrospective and, 275; post-Ndaleni administrative position, 279–81; Soweto uprising’s impact on, 186; teaching activities and artwork, 258, 275, 278–79 Black Consciousness Movement, 184, 238 Blom Hansen, Thomas, 302n76 Boek vir Skema en Verslag van Werk (Scheme and Record of Workbook), 142–44, 156–57, 320n33 Boksombende, Die (“the hit him gang”), 96, 106, 208 Bopape, Vivian, 1, 215–16, 263, 267 Botshabelo Training College (Transvaal), 103 Bourdieu, Pierre, 10, 21–22, 41, 198, 304n15 Braddock, Jeremy, 311–12n26 Brady, Mary B., 270 Braithwaite, J. M., 245 British Museum (London), 312–13n36

bronze, 148, 149, 210 Brookes, Edgar Harry, 35 Brown, Evelyn, 269, 270, 272–73 Burns, Catherine, 18, 297n25 bursaries: challenges in finding, 114–15; personal politics influencing, 236, 237; reduced number available, 227; terms of, 3, 177–78, 223, 230–32, 254–55. See also admission policy and applications “Bushman” art, 55, 143, 145, 149 Buthelezi, Mangosuthu, 282 campus (Ndaleni): building exteriors, 102, 109, 128–29, 130, 131, 135, 137; current status of art and, 283, 283–90, 285, 286, 288, 289; expansion of facilities, 141; friezes for buildings (stucco), 124, 137, 142, 320n28; gates, 126, 128. See also legacy of Ndaleni; mosaics; murals —specific facilities: Allison Block, 96–97; boys’ hostel, 83; garden and courtyard, 133, 134; girls’ hostel, 83, 84, 89, 118, 129, 130, 172, 283, 283–84; Indaleni Chapel, 131; layout, 128; library, 145–47, 146; main hall, 130, 139; primary school, 83, 84; summerhouse, 141–42 —specific sculpture: birdbath, 188; Birdbath (Pooe), 130, 134, 196, 259, 289, 289–90; Christ (Ndwandwe), 129, 131, 175, 284; Garden Water Tap (Mbambo), 130, 133, 156; in general, 97–98, 100; Monster (Jara), 87, 120, 120–21, 129, 142, 196, 203, 205, 239, 284; Queen of Beauty (Majova), 127; seesaw, 143; Sower (Ramadi), 129–30, 132, 224, 264, 284; St. George and the Dragon (Zondi), 128–29, 272; sundial, 190 Cape Province Education Department, 45 Carnegie Corporation, 29 carving and wood working: absence of wood for primary schools, 215; abundance of wood for, 1, 102–3, 123, 159, 200; burned wood carving, 179–80, 181; classroom, 158; equipment and tools for, xxvi, 164, 166; forgetting of Ndaleni’s, 274–75; gathering material for, 84–85, 122, 123, 260; jacaranda wood, 181, 182; sleeper wood, 164, 165, 167, 180, 267–68, 282; sounds of, 187; students working on, 4, 136, 159, 160; teaching approach to, 159, 159, 161–62, 322n81; unknown artist’s work, 163 cement sculpture: color for, 266; commissions for, 206, 225; daily encounters with, 121, 130, 139; metal bases for, 123; process for, 84, 320n16; remaining on campus, 24, 284. See also campus: specific sculpture Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 11, 298n37 Chauke, Caxton, 114 children: as all artists, 77–78; art classes for, 59, 59–60, 312n29; art education recom-

mended for, 75–76; books for, 30, 31; broom handles made by, 68; craftwork for, xxi, xxv, 41, 43, 74–75; current “Arts and Culture” learning area for, 278–82; personality development and empathy of, 72, 74; world reordered in art by, 98 Chosane, Renate, 112, 318–19n75 Christian Science Monitor, 269 Church Times (periodical), 312–13n36 Cindi, Leslie, 267–68, 268, 275 Ciskei: Jara killed in, 238–39; riots in, 204; training college in, 237 Cižek, Franz, 61, 311n20 Clark, T. J., 302–3n80 Classic (journal), 261 clay and pottery: commercial work in, 259; electric vs. wood-fired kiln for, 7–10, 8, 9; experience of one’s self in, 229–30; gathering and preparing material for, 85, 168–69, 169, 170, 171–72; kilns for, 7–10, 8, 9, 85, 96–97, 167, 171; Ntuli’s figures, 27–28; primitivism encouraged in, 47–48; students’ relationship to, 167–68; viewed as natural expression of Africans, 43. See also sculpture clothing and dress: artistic exploration of, 93; female students, 172, 175, 190; inherent taste in, 69–71, 313n47; school code on, 174 Cohen, Joshua, 13 Cohn, Hans, 40–41 Coltrane, John, 19 Columbia University, Teachers’ College, xxiv–xxv commercial art: illustration and journal covers, 78, 79, 90, 91, 92, 95, 165, 250, 259; industrial design work, 251; pottery painting, 259; sign writers, 259; window dressers, 243, 258–59. See also illustration work Commission of Native Affairs (South Africa), xxiv Commission on Native Education (1949), 49–50 Comrades Marathon, 332–33n83 Contemporary Art in South Africa (De Jager), 156, 194, 274 Cooper, Frederick, 293n14, 295n17 copying, 175–76, 217, 245 “craft for culture’s sake,” 75 craft modernity: African art used in critique of, 22–23, 57–58; art against, 58–68; taste in encounter with, 69–72, 313n47 craftwork: aesthetic accomplishment highlighted, 55–58; approach to studying, 22; art teachers’ vs. education authorities’ views of, 218–21; critiques of programs, 45–46, 47; definitions, 216–17; emphasis on, 277; hopes to revive in Venda, 116; justifications for, 43–45, 46–47, 49–51, 74–75; mandated for

black students, 3; market for, xxvi, 217–21, 327n58; revitalization of, 71–72; as seeds of art, 77–78; shift in purpose for, xxvi–xxvii; students’ views on, xxii–xxiii; terminology for, 29; Washington’s model of, xxv. See also Bantu traditional arts and crafts; primitivism; and specific crafts Crais, Clifton, 296–97n24 creativity: act of living in, 7, 187–90, 252; African art objects as lessons in, 65, 67–68; craftwork market vs., 217–21; cultivation of, 211–12; failure to measure up to standards of, 162, 164; as ideal and practice, 13–16, 157–59, 181, 183, 298n40; integrity of, 11; protest assumed in African, 12–13; self-making in, 58–68, 72, 74–78, 80; struggle expressed in, 179–81, 181, 182, 183, 184; students’ discovery of, 115–16; time as context for, 13–14; training and improvising with materials in, 157, 164, 166–68, 221–22. See also identity formation; self-expression cultural purity and preservation: of African genius, 38–39, 49, 307–8n51; blacks’ and whites’ concerns about, 33–35, 39–41; call for, 62–63; competitions touted as, 220–21, 327n58; as justification for teaching craftwork to Africans, 43–45, 46–47, 49–51; separate development and ideas of, 47–48 curriculum: arts and crafts syllabus, 76–77, 88–89; Bantu Education, 157, 178; current “Arts and Culture” learning area, 278–82. See also syllabus Cyrene Mission (Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia), 71–72, 86, 89, 92, 254, 304–5n22 Dakar, école des arts, 308n54 Danto, Arthur, 13 Daumier, Honoré, 147 deaf school. See Indaleni School for the Deaf declensionist narrative, 49 Defiance Campaign, 95 De Haan, M. J., 315–16n1 De Jager, E. J.: Contemporary Art in South Africa, 156, 194, 274 Department of Bantu Education: adult education under, 247; art teacher training school of, 3–4; craftwork interests of, 217–21, 327n58; demise of, 277; electric kiln purchased for Ndaleni, 7–8, 171; funding for Ndaleni students from, 115; Indaleni controlled by, 99; library book funds from, 145; Ndaleni buildings rented by, 141; personality differences in, 216–17; Soweto uprising and, 141, 183–84; suspicious of Ndaleni graduates, 207–8; syllabus meeting of, 178; workbook for teachers in, 142–44, 156–57, 320n33. See also Bantu Education schools; bursaries; Transvaal Education Department

365 index

Index 366 Department of Basic Education and Training, 277 Department of Education, 280–81 Department of Native Affairs, 38, 39, 47–49 Desmond, Cosmos, 181 De Villiers, F. J., 220 Dewey, John: on art and creativity, 14, 19, 67; on art as dialogue, 154, 221–22; art as fundamental for, 144, 178, 248, 280; on artists, 41, 111, 251; on arts and crafts, 76; on art’s role, 60–63, 189, 256; as influence, 68–69, 78, 88, 98, 115; in Ndaleni’s story, 86; at NEF meetings in South Africa, 44; primitive society as model for, 64–65; as “reconstructionist,” 311n20; on student-teacher relationship, 72 Dhlomo, Bongi, 305–6n33 Diagne, Souleymane Bachir, 65 Dibetsoe, Geoffrey, 232 Dibetsoe, Godfrey, 320n29 Dlamini, Abednego, 100; artful living of, 267; art prize for, 192; murals by, 85, 139, 195, 223, 284; as Ndaleni student, 99, 103; post-Ndaleni artwork, 265, 266, 272; post-Ndaleni difficulties, 258–59, 265–66, 273; teaching activities and principalships, 221, 266–67 Drakensberg Mountains, Giant’s Castle, 149–50, 150, 151, 152 drawing: art prize for, 241, 242, 243; classroom for, 190, 191; depicted in murals, 146; shoe polish for, 1, 2, 3 Duberman, Martin, 297n28, 299n52, 316n8 Durban: beaches of, 153; Giacomo Balla exhibit in, 154–55, 164; high school students’ artwork in, 281–82; Mvusi’s teaching in, 78; Wolfson’s department store and exhibitions in, 192–93, 194 Durban Art Gallery: abstract expressionist exhibition at, 256; Art South Africa exhibit of, 153–54, 155–56; students’ visits to, 150, 152, 153, 245 Dzingwe, Milicent, 126, 128, 178–79 Eckstein, Brenda, 199, 275 Edgars department store (Johannesburg), window dressing, 243, 258–59, 265 education: African (“Bantu”) vs. European, 3; art’s role in, 68–76; “Christian National,” 213; colonial system, xxiii–xxiv; cultural relativism in, 45–46; cultural reproduction in, 49–50; current “Arts and Culture” learning area and standards in, 278–82; focus of missionary, xxi–xxii; as infrastructure, 19–21; learning, development, and change in, 14. See also art education educational theories: child-centered schools, 311n20; education for sake of “life,” xxi– xxiii; evaluation of education for African children, xxiii–xxiv; justifications for teach-

ing craftwork to Africans, 43–45, 46–47, 49– 51; Outcome-Based ideas, 279; race-blind education ideas in, 30, 32; race insinuated into, 29; relaxed methods for teaching art, 39–41, 75–77, 89, 98, 308n53, 314n64. See also adapted education; craftwork Efland, Arthur, 61–62, 311n20 Eichab, Absolom, 284 Eiselen, W. G., 47, 49–50, 69, 81 Eisteddfods (festivals), 305n29 emotion and affect, 21, 297n26. See also creativity; identity formation; self-expression Empire Exhibition (Johannesburg, 1936), 26, 38 Enwonwu, Ben, 270 equipment. See materials and equipment Eshowe Craft Show, 70 European art: avoiding self-righteousness of teachers of, 76; concerns about influence by, 29–30, 39–41, 308n53; ideas rejected in favor of students’ natural development, 43–44; as model, 33. See also Western culture and civilization everyday life: architecture as art in, 56–57, 57; art as language in, 252–63; art of, 263–68; art’s role in, 59, 59–60; art works in, 60–61, 289–90; beauty as infrastructure of, 16, 18, 19; Giant’s Castle as apart from, 150; Harrison’s observations of, 89–90; in memoir context, 293–94n15; as multiple and contradictory, 5, 9–11; politics of choice in, 18–21. See also learning and daily life; Ndaleni Art School Ewan, A. P. (Alfred): admission policy of, 101; journal cover design by, 90; resignation of, 95–96; students noted, 94, 104, 247; successors of, 99, 104, 115, 123; teaching activities, 92, 93–94, 96, 99, 100 exhibitions, competitions, and sales: dialogue and collective critiques of, 180, 194–96; Durban opportunity for, 192–93, 194; endof-year, 119, 191, 193, 195–202, 197, 198, 203, 252; Feni’s prize in, 241, 242, 243; at Fort Hare, 193–95, 198–99, 325n163; funds raised in, 196–98, 201–2; masters’ influence seen in, 321n51; May Esther Bedford art competition, 33, 38; merit demonstrated in, 32–33; at music festivals, 305n29; rejection of idea, 77; school events of, 220–21, 327n58; Teaspoon Tips Magic Paint competition, 260 Exquisite Crafts (company), 259 Feni, Dumile, 13, 254; Mother and Child, 241, 242, 243 Fisk University, 334n6 food and diet, 130, 172–73, 205–6 Fort Hare: African Studies Department and exhibitions in, 193–95, 198–99, 325n163;

Nadaleni graduates’ work in shows at, 260; show canceled, 235 Foucault, Michel, 20 Franz, G. H., 56–57, 65. See also Art of Africa, The Futurists, 97, 154–55, 164 Gainsborough Gallery (Johannesburg), 40 Gama, Simon, 90, 91 Gambu, Julius, 235 Gazankulu, art organizer in, 226, 232, 236 gender differences: admission policy and, 101; church’s sexual policing and, 174–76; in daily schedules, 176–77; in exhibition sales, 200–201; number of men vs. women students, 140–41, 172–73. See also men; women genius, fetishized, 62–63. See also African genius Ghu, Mercy, 17; art group of, 255; on beauty, 16, 18; exhibitions and prizes, 201, 232; on political unrest, 235; on smells and sounds, 126; teaching activities, 4–5, 16, 18, 232, 235 Giacometti, Alberto, 148 Giacomo Balla exhibit, 164 Giant’s Castle (Drakensberg Mountains), 149–50, 150, 151, 152 Gitywa, Vincent, 325n163 Glassman, Jonathon, 20 Golden City Post (periodical), 262 Goldstein, Jan, 300n61 Gono, Zwelitsha, 332–33n83 Goya, Francisco, 195 Grace Dieu Mission (training college): art training at, 28; carving tools and objects at, xxvi; handwork program organizer of, 304–5n22; as industrial center, 219; photographs of students, 37 graduates of Ndaleni: apartheid as experienced by, 23–24, 204–7; art of life for, 263–68; death of, 204, 207, 238–39, 251–52, 253, 262, 263; hopes of vs. realities for, 4, 16, 102–4; keeping in touch, 262–63; library books donated by, 145; materials challenges for, 213–19, 214, 227–29, 233; materials donated by, 106, 164; political unrest faced by, 234–39; realities of apartheid facing, 204–7, 222–33; students recommended by, 106–8, 111, 114, 117–18, 174, 189, 230–31, 236, 237. See also artists; art organizers; commercial art; legacy of Ndaleni; teachers graphic art, 78, 192–93, 214, 266, 273 grass. See basketry, grass weaving, and broom making Gropius, Walter, 88 Grossert, Jack (John Watt), 52; aesthetic influences on, 68–69; on African art, 58, 248; anxieties of, 244; applications handled

by, 93, 108; art as fundamental for, 144, 178; art education ideas of, 53–56, 116; artists-prophets-geniuses envisioned by, 78, 80; art organizers and, 54, 80, 225; on arts and crafts, 71–72, 76–78, 80, 200, 218–19; on art’s function, 62; craft modernity advocacy of, 22–23; on craftwork vs. mass production, 58, 253; crisis of faith for, 81, 94; drawings by, 42, 57, 66, 68, 70, 73; Harrison’s teaching and, 88–89, 92; hopes for harmony in Africa, 65; journal cover design contest of, 90, 91, 92; later career of, 80, 166; Lowenfeld’s influence on, 75–76, 78; on Mvusi, 315n79; Ndaleni graduates and, 211, 213; in Ndaleni’s story, 86; Ngcobo and, 80–81, 252; political authority of, 67–68; specialist program under, 92–93, 96, 104; students’ correspondence with, 208; taste concept of, 69–72, 313n47. See also Art of Africa, The; Native Teachers’ Journal Group Areas Act (1950), 223 Guillaume, Paul, 64–65, 67, 69, 81, 312–13n36 Gumede, Gcinisiwe, 70 Gumede, Smart, 332n60 Hadebe, Nomvula, 228–30 Hagley, Edna, 40 Halala, Francis, 137, 205–6, 207–8, 212, 272 Hampton Institute (Virginia), 75, 334n6 handwork. See craftwork Hanretta, Sean, 20 Harlem Renaissance, 5, 270 Harmon Foundation (New York), 269–70, 271, 272–73, 333–34n2, 334n6 harmony and balance: in African sculpture, 64–65, 312–13n36, 315n79; art’s role in, 98; as human values, 54, 56–58, 61–62; quest for, 63–64, 74; rhythmic movement and openness in, 67–68; in social life, 50 Harney, Elizabeth, 313n41 Harrison, Ann: art teacher training and, 78; curriculum development by, 92; departure of, 92; diary noted, 87–90, 92, 313–14n52; journal cover design by, 90; in Ndaleni’s story, 86; noted, 96, 104; teaching activities, 87–89, 92, 93, 316n8; travels of, 71–72 Hart, Bill, 254 Head, Bessie, 322n100 Healdtown training college (Eastern Cape), 210 Hebron Training School, 224 Hellbeck, Jochen, 300n61 “Heroic Africans” (exhibit theme), 305–6n33 Hertzog, Barry, 26 Herwitz, Daniel Alan, 306n42 hillside. See campus

367 index

Index 368 historiography: call for “post-anti-apartheid,” 8–9, 297n25; focus on conditions promoting white supremacy, 296–97n24; focus on histories of future, 10–11. See also art history; everyday life Hlatshwayo, Thomas, 190 Hlatshwayo, Zakhele, 276, 281 Hobe, Hamlet: on finding joy in art, 98–99; murals by, 139, 140, 284; painting based on mural by, xv; post-Ndaleni difficulties, 223; Rakgoathe’s critique of, 195 Hobyane, Samuel, 226, 232, 236, 263 homelands. See Bantustans; and specific places Horrax, O. J., 43–44, 314n64 hostels: boys’ hostel, 83; girls’ hostel, 83, 84, 89, 118, 129, 130, 172, 283, 283–84; rules for student behavior at, 173–76; schedule differences, 176–77. See also food and diet Huggins, Nathan Irvin, 5 Hughes, Langston, 270 Huma, Maurice, 162, 164, 216–17 human values of harmony and balance, 54, 56–58, 61–62. See also creativity; self-expression Hunt, Georgina, 96 Hyslop, Jonathan, 300n61 i- (prefix), 85 identity formation: acts of self-definition in black press, 32–33, 305n26; in apartheid context, 5, 293n14; art’s function in, 58–68, 72, 74–78, 80; call to retain racial characteristics, 35–36, 38; historical quality of agency and, 19; selves as dialogic in, 300n61; time and place in, 244–45. See also creativity; individuality; self-expression illustration work: for Bantu readers, 34; graphic art, 78, 192–93, 214, 266, 273; Grossert’s drawings, 42, 57, 66, 68, 70, 73; for isiXhosa readers, 30, 31; journal covers, 79, 91 Images of Man (De Jager), 274 Imingcangathelo Junior Secondary School, 238–39 imperial hegemony, 302–3n80 imperial universal, the, 43–44, 46–47 improvisation, 322n74 Indaleni Mission and Training College: aerial view, 83; art students’ vs. others’ schedules at, 172, 176–77; Bantu Education department control of, 99; creative destruction of, 24, 283–84; description of, 89; documentation and paperwork filtered through, 223; founding, 82; Methodists’ failure to care for campus and students, 172–73; origins of name, 315–16n1; rules for student behavior at, 172–77, 186; Soweto uprising’s impact on, 183–84, 186. See also campus; Indaleni

School for the Deaf; Ndaleni Art School; Richmond Indaleni School for the Deaf: art classes at, 282, 287–89, 288; sculpture on grounds of, 284, 285, 286, 289; students of, 286, 286–87; students’ views on sculpture, 288–90 individuality: belief in achievements of, 304– 5n22; emphasis on, 244–45; Mvusi’s art and Africa in, 247–50. See also African genius Indumiso training college, 240 industrial education. See craftwork Inkatha Freedom Party, 282 insanity, 111, 147 interwar years (South Africa): art theory in, 22, 98, 157–58; call to retain racial characteristics during, 35–36, 38; cultural purity concerns in, 33–35; imperial hegemony critiqued in, 302–3n80; newspapers as “technologies of self” during, 32–33, 305n26; white supremacy consolidated in, 25–26, 29 Isaac Wolfson’s department store (Durban), 192–93, 194 Iton, Richard, 5 Itten, Joseph, 88, 89 Jabavu, D. (Davidson) D. T., 74 Jack, Hampson, 34–35 Jam Jam, Muriel, 107 Jara, Silverman: artful living of, 267; art history studies of, 145; background, 129–30, 210; classmates noted, 253; on class trips, 150, 152, 153; death, 204, 207, 238–39; evaluation report for, 162; Monster, 87, 120, 120–21, 129, 142, 196, 203, 205, 239, 284; stalwart Ndaleni support from, 237–38; students of, 114, 117, 120; teacher of, 141; teaching activities, 237–38 Jikelo, Christina, 119; background, 114; on campus art works, 128–30, 139, 142; church attendance of, 175; on exhibition and sales, 202; Jara’s support for, 238–39; journey to and arrival at Ndaleni, 117–18, 120–21; meaning of Ndaleni for, 126; on politics, 179; Soweto uprising and, 184 Johannesburg: application for access to, 261–62; art galleries in, 253–54, 261, 276–77; open-air art market in, 255. See also Polly Street Johannesburg Art Gallery: black South African art exhibition at, 274, 275; craftwork exhibition and, 47–48; Lismer offered directorship, 74; Tladi’s entry to, 27, 41, 304n11 Johannesburg Bantu Music Festival, 305n29 Johannesburg Train Station, 26 journeys: approach to studying, 23; built environment encountered in, 149–50; class trips as, 149–54, 150, 151; clay’s role in, 167–68; Peirson’s greeting of students, 178; students’

experiences of, 106–21. See also admission policy and applications; campus; students Junod, H. P., 62. See also Art of Africa, The Kallaway, Peter, xxv Keiskammahoek: craftwork production in, 48–49; training college at, 114, 117, 210 Kepu, Alice, 215, 216 Keva, Ben, 213 Kgaffe, Bernard, 147 Kgame, Hosea, 162, 218, 222 Kgasi, A. R., 222 Khoza, Pat: on art research, 146; on clay, 168, 171–72; divorce, 264; on exhibition and sales, 196, 197, 202; Ndaleni retrospective and, 276; objects for sale by, 201; on Peirson’s teaching, 159, 161–62; on politics, 179; on student behavior, 175–76 Khubeka, George, 210, 211 Khuluse (student), 94 Khumalo, Petrus, 147, 244 Khumalo, S’mangaliso, 315–16n1 Khumalo, Sydney, 110, 155 King Shaka International Airport, 281–82 Kohler, Max, 34 Komane, Robert, 256 Kuboni, Gabriel, 107 Kubywana, Credo, 119 Kulati, George, 187–88, 188, 190 Kumalo, Sydney, 210, 281 Kutemela, Lorna, 265 Kutemela, Philemon, 264–65 KwaMashu: artwork in public spaces of, 243; Ngcobo in, 252 KwaZulu: art organizer in, 80; Indaleni staff under authority of, 239; waning power of, 282–83 KwaZulu-Natal: gallery’s outreach to schools in, 281; map of, xxviii. See also Indaleni Mission and Training College Lal, Priya, 313n41 Lancaster, Craig (“Hippy”): arrival of, 141; art history class of, 145–46, 147, 149, 155; class trips with, 152–53; end of each year for, 202; marathon runner supported by, 332–33n83; materials and equipment concerns of, 166, 167, 168, 171; Ndaleni retrospective and, 276; new training school and, 239; politics of, 179, 180; schedule of, 176–77; Soweto uprising and, 183; student’s correspondence with, 223; workbooks of, 143–44, 320n33 Landau, Paul Stuart, 20, 293n14 Langa, Fikile, 160 Langa, Wilson, 112 Laubser, Maggie, 155 learning and daily life (Ndaleni): act of seeing in, 142–56; approach to studying, 23;

becoming art students in, 140–41; book-reading aspects of, 162–63; class trips in, 149–54, 150, 151, 176; collective critiques in, 194–96; culmination and departures, 190, 191, 192–203, 193, 197, 198, 203; dialogue in, 11–12, 41, 64, 154–56, 172, 180, 195, 240, 267; discipline of minds and bodies in, 172–76; entertainment, 130, 139; library’s role in, 145–47, 146; noneducational physical task in, 141–42; political expression traded for, 178–80; rhythms of, 87; schedule and studio time in, 139, 141, 176–77; smaller projects preferred, 124, 128; struggle in, 177–86; subjects summarized, 3–4; typical class with Bell, 122–24, 126; typical class with Peirson, 124; vision and experience of, 187–90; workbook notes on, 142–44, 156–57, 320n33. See also art history; art objects; bursaries; campus; exhibitions, competitions, and sales; food and diet; materials and equipment; practical work; practice teaching and school; students; syllabus; ways of being in the world Leave Taking (unknown), 107 Lebethe, Marcus, 145 Leboso, Susan, 170 Lebowa: bursaries from, 230–31, 236, 237; training college in, 224–25, 230 Ledwaba, Mabel, 107, 108 Leeb-Dutoit, Juliette, 275, 276 Leefe, Margaret, 166 legacy of Ndaleni: approach to studying, 24; in art education, 276–82; art history and forgetting of, 269–76, 277, 278, 335n30; current hillside and campus, 282–90, 283, 285, 286, 288, 289 Legae, Ezrom, 155 Leigh, Alana, 282 Lemana Training School (Northern Transvaal), 96, 208 Lemba Cultural Association, 301n68 Lerata, Philemon, 233 liberalism (South African), 30, 40. See also genius; individuality Lienhardt, Godfrey, 19 Likhi, Michael, Railway Workers, 179–80, 181 Lipschitz, Lippy, 36, 38, 64 Lismer, Arthur: art as fundamental for, 144, 178; art education ideas of, 58–60, 62, 77, 78, 161, 288, 313n47, 314n64; foundational role of, 72, 74–75, 86; as influence, 65, 69, 71, 78, 115; primitive society as model for, 63–64, 65, 312n29 Livingston, Julie, 322n74 Lombard, Frieda, 141, 164, 210 Loram, Charles: adapted education system of, xxiv, xxv–xxvi, 81; background, xxiv–xxv; on education for black South African, 44; foundational role of, 72, 86; as influence, 5, 82, 98, 287; SAIRR position of, 27

369 index

Index 370 Loram High School (Durban): industrial center context of, 219; teachers at, 80, 106–7, 207, 211, 217, 245, 247, 252 Louw, Dan, 224, 226–27 Lovedale Press, 30 Lovedale school (Alice), xxiv, 41, 48 Lowenfeld, Viktor: art as fundamental for, 144; on educational psychology, 143; as influence, 78, 88, 97–98, 99, 124; relaxed art teaching methods of, 75–76, 77, 98; students noted, 245, 248 Lurani Government School (Bulwer, Natal Province), xxi–xxiii, xxv, xxvi Lutheran Church: art center of (Evangelical), 152–53; Mapumulo under, 177–78 Mabaso, Reuben, 259 Mabusela, Ezekiel, 223, 243, 244, 254, 259 Mabusela, Solomon: accepted for Ndaleni, 174; as art organizer, 225, 227, 232; Foot Prints, 125, 126, 236; language challenges for, 140, 162; sculpture of, 284; students recommended by, 236, 237; teaching activities, 213, 214, 215 Macleish, Kenneth T., 20 Mahaye, Astrea, 158 Mahlobo, Samson: death, 262, 263; Harmon Foundation and, 272, 273; murals by, 123, 260, 284; Ndaleni retrospective and, 275, 276; teaching activities and artwork, 260–62, 275, 276 Mahosi, Andrew M., 225, 226–28, 230, 232, 237 Mail and Guardian, 276 Maimane, Joseph, 189 Majova, Ernest, Queen of Beauty, 126, 127 Malaza, Boniface, 117 Malherbe, E. G., 74 Malinga, Francis, 217, 218, 233 Malinowski, Bronislav, 44, 46 Malolo, Enoch, 233 Mancoba, Ernest: art competition entries and awards, 33, 38; art history place of, 13, 281; art lovers’ interests in, 25; art training of, 28, 36, 38; bust of himself, 37; Euroepan exile of, 40; trajectory of style, 64, 65, 312–13n36 Mangope, Lucas, 222 manual work. See craftwork Mapumulo Training College, 90, 92, 99, 104, 177–78, 265 marathon runner, 332–33n83 markets: art, 255–56; craftwork, xxvi, 217–21, 327n58. See also tourist market Marks, Barbara Penrose, 47 Marshall, Ruth, 20 Masike, Jacob, Bible frieze by, 137 Masinamela, Nathaniel, 215 masks, 66, 218, 219 Masuku, Kenneth, 90, 91

materials and equipment: abundance of clay and wood, 7, 102–3, 159; appeals for, 164, 166; art organizers on, 227–28; in Bantu schools, 213–16, 218, 221, 266; for bronze-like papier-mâché, 148, 149; exhibition sales to assist in, 197–98; gallery access and, 262; graduates as conduits for, 106, 164; graduates’ challenges with, 213–19, 214, 227–29, 233; lack of, 1, 2, 3, 81, 96, 166–68, 287–88, 297n28; professional artists as conduits for, 110; students’ free reign in choosing, 123–24; training and improvising with, 157, 164, 166–68, 221–22; types linked to African artists, 36, 38; waste materials as, 166, 215–16, 221, 244, 282, 287–88, 288. See also specific media Matlebjane, Lucas, 149, 150, 152 Matlejoane, Lucas, 259 Mauwane, Alex, 203 Mavuso, Angel, 169 Mavuso, Horatio, 269 Mavuso, Mbele, 108, 110 Mavuso, Reynold, 228–30 Mayindi, David, 149 Mazibuko, Johnny, 155 Mbambo, Wiseman: Garden Water Tap, 130, 133, 156; view of woodworking room by, 158 Mbele, David, 110 Mbele, Mbuso, 155 Mbembe, Achille, 10, 11 Mbuli, Leonard, Man with Stone, 148 Mbuthu, Amos, 205, 206 Mda, Zakes, 293–94n15 Mdleleni, Colben, 112 Mdunge, Ntombi. See Biyela, Daphne “mellowness” concept, 301n71 memoirs, the ordinary and struggle in, 293–94n15 Memorial University of Newfoundland (Canada), 103 men: dining hall of, 130; length of day, 139; objects for sale by, 200–201. See also gender differences Methodist Church: behavioral regime under, 173–76; failure to care for campus and students, 172–73; Indaleni School for the Deaf support from, 287. See also Indaleni Mission and Training College Metropolitan Methodist Hall, 192, 197, 198, 199, 200 Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), 305–6n33 Michaelis School of Fine Art (Cape Town), 95, 101 Michelangelo, 322n78 migrant labor, 277, 335n20 Mitford-Barbeton, Ivan, 101 Mkhize, Busi, 287–88

Mkize, E. E. E., journal cover design, 91 Mlambo, Patrick, 110 Mngadi, Lydia, 287 Mnguni, Isaiah, 174 Mnyele, Thami, 298n40 mobile scultpure, 320n29 modeling, emphasized, 157. See also clay and pottery modernity and modernism: admiration for, 26; African art used in critique of, 22–23, 57–58; African craftwork viewed as resistance to, 45; Afrikaner cultural “heritage” in, 306n42; art against, 58–68; Harmon Foundation’s interest in, 270; taste in encounter with, 69–72, 313n47; threat of mechanical reproduction and, 58; traditional crafts linked to, 219–20; uneven experiences of, 9–11; waste byproducts of, 215–16; white critique of, 54. See also craft modernity Moerane, Philemon, 107–8, 110 Mohl, John, 25, 38 Mohlopi, Hilda, 262; journal cover design by, 165 Mokoena, Alois, journal cover design by, 91 Molatana, Kenneth, 275 Molepo, Fish: Crab, 154; The Hand of Destruction, 6 Moll, Thomas, 139, 175, 183 Molokoane, Cliff, 87 Molotana, Kenneth, 230 Mompati, Thatoeng, 110–11, 117, 121 Monroe, Paul, xxiv Monson, Ingrid T., 19 Moolman, M. M. K., 211, 224 Moon, David, 239–40 Moore, Henry, 96, 97 Morathane, Thabo, 119 Moroka, Eve, 264 Moruthane, Cecil, 264 mosaics: details of, 86, 109; on girls’ hostel, 172; material for, 84, 123–24; Vilakazi’s, 129, 138, 269 Motau, Julian, 155 Motjale, Enid, 105 Motsomane, Alphey, Why?, 184, 185 Mpulu, Godfrey, 218, 219 Mswati (king), 82 Mtshali, Bongani, 108 Mudau, Lusani, 118–19 Munch, Edvard, 97 Munro, Thomas, 64–65, 67, 69, 81, 312–13n36 murals: at Cyrene Mission, 71; details, 109, 123, 131; deterioration of, 284; diversity of subjects, 85, 130, 139, 140, 146; exterior, Indaleni, 135; library depicted in, 146; oil paints and beeswax to color, 124, 142, 284, 286, 320n28; painting based on, xv

museums: high vs. low art and, 63; objects isolated in, 60; organization and universalist theory of art in, 311–12n26 music: Africans’ supposed aptitude for, 307–8n51; festivals and competitions in, 33, 305n29; moment of eruption of, 16; sounds of wood mallets as, 187 Muthambi, Kenneth, 205, 231–32 Muthige, Jessie: artful living of, 267; as art organizer, 225–26; background, 115–16; journey to and arrival at Ndaleni, 121; political context of, 226–27; transformed by art training, 188–89 Mvemve, Louise, 18, 19, 301n62 Mvusi, Selbourne (Selby), 246; on art, 248–50, 256, 263; artful living of, 267; as artist, 245, 247–51; background, 94–95; death, 251–52; Harmon Foundation and, 270, 273, 334n3; industrial design work of, 251; journey to and arrival at Ndaleni, 121; mural attributed to, 284; Ngcobo compared with, 252–53; teaching activities by, 80, 106–7, 207, 211, 217, 245; travels, 245, 248, 250 —works: Adam and Eve, 246; Family, 315n79; Native Teachers’ Journal cover, 78, 79, 250; “The Nightwatchman from Zululand,” 249 Mzileni, Joseph, 106, 146 Mzondeka, Michael, 223 Nakasa, Nat, 261 Natal Education Department, xxi, xxiv–xxv, 50–51, 75, 314n64 Natal Mercury, 28 Natal Museum (Pietermaritzburg), 67–68, 152 Natal Society of Artists, 247 Natal Witness, 164, 197, 275, 276 National Party: African art fitted to separate development by, 47–48, 76; African education controlled by, 177; consolidation of apartheid by, 26; members noted, 50; Ndaleni’s story in context of, 86–87; teacher’s protest of policies, 102, 103. See also apartheid; separate development native education system. See Bantu Education schools; Department of Bantu Education “Native genius.” See African genius Native Teachers’ Journal: on art teacher training, 78; changes in, 98; cover design contest of, 90, 91, 92; covers for, 78, 79, 95, 250; manual work discussed, xxiii; on Ndaleni students, 94 Ncamane, Michael, 216, 221–22 Ndaba, Caleb, 108 Ndaba, Camilla, 201 Ndaba, Godfrey, 254–56, 258, 267, 275, 318–19n75

371 index

Index 372 Ndaleni art school (earlier part of Indaleni Training College): approach to studying, 21–24; archive of, 23, 94, 104, 195, 239, 262; certificate from, 223; demise of, 24, 239–40; ethic of consciousness at, 176, 181, 183; expulsion from, 175–76, 217, 234–35; exterior views, 102; first class at, 94–95; forgetting of, 269–76, 277, 278, 335n30; goals in early vs. later years, 115, 123, 142, 178; Grossert’s role in, 51, 53–54; as national, specialist art program, 108, 115, 120; origins of, 53–54, 80–81, 87–104; outsiders clueless about context, 200–201; paintings at, xv; postgraduate-like function of, 94–95; as refuge, 186; reputation of, 238; retrospective exhibit and catalog on, 275–76; significance of, 4–5, 7; sounds of, 84–86, 187; Soweto uprising’s impact on, 183–84, 186; teaching staff at, 86, 87–89, 97. See also admission policy and applications; ARTTRA; campus; exhibitions, competitions, and sales; graduates of Ndaleni; Indaleni Mission and Training College; journeys; learning and daily life; legacy of Ndaleni; Native Teachers’ Journal; practice teaching and school; Richmond; students Ndebele, Njabulo, 293–94n15, 301n71 Ndebele women, 217, 220 N’Diaye, Iba, 308n54 Ndlazi, Jacob, Dimbaza Family, 181, 182 Ndlovu, John, 110 Ndwandwe, Phillip, Christ, 129, 131, 175, 284 NEF. See New Education Fellowship Neglected Tradition, The (exhibition), 274, 275 Nettleton, Anitra C. E., 13 “New African” movement, 30, 32 New Education Fellowship (NEF): Dewey’s ideas and, 60–61; educational theories in, 44–46; Lismer’s art education ideas discussed, 58–60, 72, 74–75, 313n47; participants, 49 newspapers, as “technologies of self,” 32–33, 305n26. See also specific papers Ngcobo, Emmanuel, 94 Ngcobo, Eric: on art as language, 256, 267; in art history, 274; as art organizer, 252–53; background, 94, 95; death, 253; journey to and arrival at Ndaleni, 121; students of, 107; students’ study of, 156; teaching activities and artwork, 207, 217, 243, 252, 253; travels, 80–81 Ngcobo, John, 1, 190 Ngongoma, Artwell, 117 Ngubane, Gertrude, 258, 331n51 Ngubane, Nhlanhla, 258, 331n51 Nguza, Gilbert, 215 Nhlapo, Walter, 33, 40 Niehaus, Isak, 19–20

Njoloza, Linda, 139–40 Nkasha, O’Brien, 98, 101 Nkhi, Benedict, 174, 189, 263 Nkole, Manasseh, 153 Nondikane, Patrick, 107, 154–55, 164 Non-European Adult Education Committee, 39–40 Nopece, Esther, 167 Nququ, Cecilia, 263 Nsuza, Sophie: artful living of, 267; art theory question of, 157–58; journey to and arrival at Ndaleni, 121; murals and details, 109, 130, 131, 135, 259, 284; Ndaleni’s importance to, 262; personal drive of, 108, 111; teaching activities and artwork, 260 Ntlabati, Viola, 218 Ntombela, Nathaniel, 193, 253 Ntuli, Hezekiel, 27–28 Ntuli, Lindiwe, 175–76, 186, 217, 323n126 Nunn, Cedric: care for Ndaleni, 24; photographs by, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 283, 285, 286, 289; visit with, 287 Nyatlo, Edwin, 111–12, 180–81, 216 Nyawo, Elliot, seesaw, 143 Nyerere, Julius, 313n41 Okeke-Agulu, Chika, 11, 21–22 Olympic Games, coverage of, 33 originality, emphasized, 175–76, 217. See also creativity; individuality; self-expression Orlando West (Soweto), 232, 235 Owens, Jesse, 33 Oxley, O. J. P. (Oswald John Philip), 29–30, 34, 39, 53, 80 painting: classes depicted in murals, 140, 146; emphasis on, 157; lack of or limited materials, 1, 166, 227–29; materials used in, 167; pros and cons of oils, 102; students’ enthusiasm for, 39–40 Panorama (government information service magazine), 155 papier-mâché, 144, 148, 148, 215, 218, 219 Patterson, Edward, 71, 72, 89, 254, 304–5n22 Payneville, craftwork exhibition in, 47–48 Peddie, as beadwork production center, 48–49 Pedi people, 224 Peffer, John, 13, 299n47, 304n15, 324n145 Peirson, Lorna, 105, 159, 231; admissions and applications handled, 114–17, 139, 189, 226–27, 231, 236–37; on African art, 248; Art concept of, 157–58; artful living of, 267; art history class of, 147, 155, 156; art works purchased by, 181, 182; assistants for, 141; on Bantu Education failures, 278; on Bell, 103; Biyela (Mdunge) defended by, 186; book review by, 156; carving and wood working classes of, 159, 159, 161–62, 322n81; class

trips with, 149–50, 152, 153; clay classes of, 168, 171–72; on curios and tourist market, 220–21, 226, 255; educational regime of, 23; end of each year for, 202–3; evaluation reports by, 162, 164; on exhibitions, 192–99, 201; on food and accommodation, 173; goals of Ndaleni for, 142, 157; graduates and, 211–13, 215, 225–26, 230, 253, 258–59; on handwork, 216, 218, 221; Harmon Foundation and, 269, 270, 272, 273; as ideal and as person, 265; individuality touted by, 244; journey to and arrival at Ndaleni, 104, 106, 129; later years and retirement, 239–40, 276; library of, 145; materials and equipment concerns of, 164, 166, 171; Ndaleni papers found on arrival, 94, 97; Ndaleni retrospective and, 275–76; papier-mâché taught by, 148; politics of, 177–78, 180; record-keeping instituted by, 104; Richmond home of, 141; schedule of, 176; on school’s decline, 320n29; smaller projects preferred by, 124, 128; Soweto uprising and, 183, 184, 186; on struggle in art, 221–22; student behavior under, 173–76; students’ correspondence with, 222, 223, 224, 233, 254, 258, 260, 262, 265–66, 267; students under, 112, 114; teaching approach of, 124, 159, 164, 166, 167; workbooks of, 142–44, 156–57, 320n33 Pemba, George: art competition entries and awards, 33, 38; art history place of, 281; art lovers’ interests in, 25; attitudes of supporters of, 34, 304–5n22; exhibitions, 28; Mancoba compared with, 36; as “Native genius,” 28–29, 39; sense of his own talent, 30; travel across South Africa, 40–41; USiko, 31 Pennsylvania State University, 75 Pentecostal Christians, 20 Phelps-Stoles Commission, xxiv Phoshoko, Salphy, 145, 173, 216 physical environment. See campus Picasso, Pablo: Guernica, 148–49; students’ study of, 145, 147, 156, 180; students’ work in relation to, 97, 177 Pierneef, Jacobus, 26, 145, 155 Pietermaritzburg: built environment of, 149; high school students’ artwork from, 281–82; museum in, 67–68, 152; Ndaleni exhibitions and sales at, 87, 192, 196–98, 198, 199–202, 274–75; objects from, loaned for Ndaleni retrospective, 275–76; Tatham Art Gallery in, 94, 275–76, 281, 321n51; travel to Richmond through, 117, 118, 119, 121, 149; visits to galleries in, 150; wood for sculpture from, 1 Pietersburg. See Grace Dieu Mission Pim, Howard, 27, 30, 36, 38–39, 41, 304n11 Pinsky, Anatoly, 300n61 Pissarro, Camille, 147

P. J. Simelane High School (Dobsonville, Soweto), 278–79, 279 politics: art education in context of, 80–81; art objects as evidence of, 179–81, 181, 182, 183, 184; in art organizer positions, 225–28, 230–32; of Bantustans and ethnicity, 222–24; of choice in daily life, 18–21; creativity vs., 178–80; decentralized, 227–28; of Ndaleni admissions, 226–27; in Soweto uprising, 141, 183–84, 186; struggle and, 177–79, 221–22; student unrest and, 234–39. See also apartheid Polly Street (Johannesburg): art education ideas at, 39–40; artists trained at, 110, 308nn53–54; closed, 254; night classes at, 92, 272; remembered, 335n30; teacher at, 273 Pooe, Phanuel, Birdbath, 130, 134, 196, 259, 289, 289–90 Port Elizabeth, 28 pottery. See clay and pottery practical work: of carving and wood working classes, 159, 159, 161–62, 322n81; clay material and modeling in, 167–69, 169, 170, 171–72; collective critiques and dialogues on, 180, 194–96; examinations and critiques of, 190, 192; expectations for creativity in, 162, 164; schedule and labor in, 176–77; skills learned in, 156–59; training and improvising with materials in, 157, 164, 166–68, 221–22 practice teaching and school, 208; art works around building, 129–30; primary school for, 83, 84; terminology needed in, 140; timing of, 144–45 Presley, Elvis, 187, 190 Pretoria, new school near, 239–40 Pretoria Boys High school, 39 Pretoria Zoo, 217, 221 Pridwin Preparatory School, 277 Primitive Negro Sculpture (Guillaume and Munro), 64, 65, 67, 312–13n36 primitivism: call to retain racial characteristics linked to, 35–36, 38; Mvusi’s rejection of, 249–50; “protection” and “salvage” of, 38–39, 306n42, 307–8n51; rhythmic movement and openness in, 67–68; simplicity touted in, 56–58, 63–64; urgency in promoting, 47–48; viewed as natural expression of Africans, 43–44; white artists’ embrace of, 22. See also African genius; cultural purity and preservation Radebe, Thelma, 253–55 Radebe, Winston, 1, 2, 3 Radio Bantu, 54 Radio Zulu, 323n126 Ragavaloo, Andrew, 335–36n34

373 index

Index 374 Rakgoathe, Daniel: art community of, 21, 254; in art history, 274; on Bell, 103; correspondence’s importance to, 262; exhibitions, 156; graduates encouraged by, 212; on students’ work, 195; teaching activities and artwork, 256, 264 Ramadi, Abiah: marriage, 264; post-Ndaleni difficulties, 224; reworking material from work by, 166; Sower, 129–30, 132, 224, 264, 284 Ramagaga, George, 258 Ramailane, A., 32 Ramere, Asnath, 118 Ramosime, Cyprian, Atomic Sausages, 270, 271, 272 Rampa, Selmina, 32 Rand, East Show (1954), 49 Rankin, Elizabeth, 92 Raphalalani, Mishack, 116 Rassool, Ciraj, 300n61, 301n62 Ratlou, Esther, 111, 112, 149, 318n68 Ratshivumbo, Agnes, 259 Read, Herbert (Tladi’s patron), 27 Read, Herbert Edward: art as fundamental for, 62–63, 144, 178; art teacher training and, 78; as influence, 68–69, 71, 78, 88, 97, 115, 124; primitive society as model for, 65 Rehlahliwe Training Institution (Lebowa), 224–25, 230, 236 rhythm, 67, 315n79 Richmond: description of, 83–84; gallery’s outreach to schools in, 281; hopes for future, 336n36; journeying to, 106, 117–18; limits of, 288; political violence in, 282–83, 335–36n34; settlement of, 82; struggles of, 24. See also Indaleni Mission and Training College; Indaleni School for the Deaf; Ndaleni Art School Ridge (timber farmer), 122, 123 Robeson, Paul, 34–35 Robinson, Ann. See Harrison, Ann Rodin, Auguste, 148 Rorke’s Drift art center, 152–53, 256, 274, 334n12, 335n30 Ruskin, John, 54, 63 Russell High School (Pietermaritzburg), 281–82 SAIRR (South African Institute of Race Relations), 27, 29, 30, 34, 40, 47, 153–54 Salt River, as craftwork production center, 49 Saunders, Frances Stonor, 304n15 Scott, Joan Wallach, 19, 293n14 sculpture: bronze, 148, 149, 210; cracks in, 198–99; emphasis on, 157, 194; figures by students, 36, 38, 100, 113; gathering material for, 84–85, 122, 123; harmony and balance in, 64–65, 312–13n36, 315n79; modernist

influence on, 96, 97; outsiders clueless about context, 200–201; popularity of, 199–202; rhinoceros, 281–82, 284; rhythmic movement and openness in, 67–68; untitled and unknown artist, 163. See also campus: specific sculpture; carving and wood working; cement sculpture; clay and pottery; papier-mâché Sebe, Lennox, 204, 239 Sedibane, Solomon, 136, 209; artful living of, 267; in art history, 274; dilemma faced by, 106; Harmon Foundation and, 272, 273; journey to and arrival at Ndaleni, 121; on political unrest, 234, 235–36; post-Ndaleni difficulties, 208, 210; pottery class of, 96–97; sculpture commission for, 224–25; stalwart Ndaleni support from, 236–38, 240; students recommended by, 174, 189, 230–31, 236; students’ study of, 156; teaching activities, 210, 223–24, 230 Sekoto, Gerard, 25, 28, 33, 38, 40, 180, 281 self-expression: encouragement of natural, 29, 43, 59–63, 65, 68, 71–72, 74; frustrations and, 103; practicing and refining, 157–59; real vs. abstract art in context of, 154–55; as refuge, 186–87; relaxed teaching methods to encourage, 39–41, 75–77, 89, 98, 308n53, 314n64; role in South African society, 19, 69, 101–2; of struggle under apartheid, 179–81, 181, 182, 183, 184; student’s experience of, 229–30. See also creativity; identity formation Senegal: intellectual and artistic development in, 67; openness as ideology in, 313n41 Senghor, Leopold, 65, 67, 71, 313n41, 315n79 separate development: African art fitted to needs of, 47–48; art classes based on ideas of, 247; collective Bantu genius idea in foundation of, 26–27, 32, 50–51; promoted in school syllabus, 3, 5, 7. See also apartheid; National Party Sepato, Philemon, 233 Shabalala, Stephen, 233 Sharpeville massacre (1960), 99, 103, 245, 326n9 Shepherd, R. H. W., 30, 34 Shimbambu, John, 116 Shimbambu, Joseph, 215 Shishuba, Amelia, 106, 214 shoe polish, 1, 2, 3 Sibisi, Paul: application of, 111; art history and, 146–47, 274; Introspection I, 256, 257, 258; Ndaleni retrospective and, 275–76; on studio time, 177; teaching activities and artwork, 256, 258, 275 Sibiya, Lucky, 155 Simelane, Richard, 263 Sithole, Fred, xxi–xxiii, xxv, xxvi

Sithole, Lucas, 110 Skotnes, Cecil, 110, 254, 273 Slade School of Art (London), 71, 87–88, 96, 310n3 Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.), 269, 273 South Africa: beauty contests in, 32–33; challenges for deaf people in, 286–87; colonial education system in, xxiii–xxiv; current art history narrative in, 273–75; ideology of African education in, xxiii; map of, xxviii; residency requirements and ethnic grouping in, 223–24, 261–62; as “space of possibilities,” 10–11. See also historiography; interwar years; Soweto uprising; and entries under Department . . . South African Academy of Art, 25, 27 South African art: invention of, 76–80; Ndaleni’s wood sculpture and, 200–201. See also African art and culture South African Association of Arts, 40 South African Breweries, 241, 242 South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR), 27, 29, 30, 34, 40, 47, 153–54 South African National Gallery, 25 South African Railways, 164, 267–68 South Africans of Asian ancestry, 80 South African Women’s Weekly, 166 Soweto: art teaching in, 278–79, 279; black creative life in, 254, 255; bursary from, 254–55; children’s art lessons in, 264 Soweto uprising (1976): Ndaleni during, 183–84, 186; school applications and, 141; spread of unrest, 235, 237–38 Stern, Irma, 155 St. Matthews Training College (Keiskammahoek), 114, 117, 210 students (black): apartheid-era attitudes toward, 280; evaluating education for, xxiii– xxiv; food and diet of, 130, 172–73, 205–6; Jara killed by, 204, 207, 238–39; Ndaleni art teachers for, 228–30; political unrest among, 186, 234–35 students (Ndaleni): age of, 112; art privileged over politics for, 178–80; Art’s meaning for, 124, 126; changing profile of, 103; construction work by, 129, 141–42; discipline of minds and bodies, 172–77, 186; diversity of, 139–40; evaluation reports for, 162, 195–96, 202; intellectual life of, 16, 18; journeys to and living at school, 106–21, 149; language requirements of, 140; leaving depicted by, 107; length of stay, 123, 126, 128; number of, 117; number of men vs. women as, 140–41, 172–73; schedule and studio time of, 176–77; tasks in exhibitions, 201–2; trust in taste and capability of, 72. See also admission policy and applications;

art objects; bursaries; campus; clothing and dress; learning and daily life; materials and equipment subjectivation concept, 20 subjectivities: art as vital to making, 18–21; as time, unfolding and incomplete, 10–11. See also identity formation; ways of being in the world syllabus (Ndaleni): appropriate subjects for African artists, 30, 34, 36, 38; arts and crafts treated similarly in, 76–77; Atkins’s contribution to, 97–98; book-reading aspects of, 162, 164; exhibitions and collective critiques in, 196; painting materials in, 167; Peirson’s development of, 124; primary school focus in, 211; racial separation promoted via, 3, 5, 7. See also art history; curriculum; learning and daily life; practical work Tamarkin, Noah, 301n68 taste, racialization of, 69–72, 313n47 Tatham Art Gallery (Pietermaritzburg), 94, 275–76, 281, 321n51 Taussig, Michael T., 16 teachers: art assignments remembered by students, 228–30; certificate requirements for, 3–4; as conduits for students for Ndaleni, 106–8, 111, 114, 117–18, 174, 189, 230–31, 236, 237; craftwork programs critiqued by, 45–46, 47; finding time for own art as, 102, 110; graduates of Ndaleni as art teachers, 80–81, 106–7, 204, 206–7, 210, 212, 221–22, 228–30, 232–33, 234–36; kiln and students’ experience of, 9–10; politics of choice, 18–21; positions of, 5, 7, 93, 207–22; relaxed methods for art classes, 39–41, 75–77, 89, 98, 308n53, 314n64; shortage of, 280–81. See also artists; ARTTRA; materials and equipment; teacher training Teachers’ College (Columbia University), xxiv–xxv teacher training: children’s self-knowledge emphasized, 144; educational psychology in, 143; need for, 78, 80; as students’ primary desire, 116–17; workbook notes on, 142–44, 156–57, 320n33. See also art education; educational theories; Indaleni Mission and Training College; Ndaleni Art School; practical work; practice teaching and school; training colleges Teaspoon Tips Magic Paint Company, 260 Temba, Rightwell, 193 textiles: recycled wool weaving, 215; Urban Landscape (batik), 275 Thabang, Godfrey, 40 Thembe, Dominus, “I Am Longing to Be One of Your Art Students,” 12 Thomas, Lynn, 32

375 index

Index 376 Thulare, Stuurman, 217–18 Tladi, Moses: art competition entries, 33; background, 24; exhibitions, 25, 27, 40; gallery visits, 41, 304–5n22; homestead of, 303n9; media coverage of, 25, 26; as “Native genius,” 25, 28, 33–34, 36, 39 Toronto Art Gallery (Canada), 58–60, 59, 312n29 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri, 195 tourist market: curios for, 77–78, 81, 200, 217; dismissed as not art, 226; hopes to gather objects for, 48–49, 220–21; painted pottery for, 259; Papatso as (Northern Transvaal), 327n57; production centers of, 48–49. See also markets township art, use of term, 194, 255 Tracey, Hugh, 38–39, 307–8n51 training colleges: art teaching at, 88, 260, 332n60; church-founded schools converted to, 210; closure of, 279–80; demand for and opening of, 224–25; goals of, 43–44, 77; resettled, 239–40; students’ backgrounds and, 28, 36, 41, 90; whites’ concerns about, 54. See also Grace Dieu Mission; Indaleni Mission and Training College; Mapumulo Training College; Ndaleni Art School; St. Matthews Training College Transkei: Art Association of, 238; craftwork program opposed in, 45–46, 47; training college in, 237 Transvaal Education Department, 219, 277 Transvaal Eisteddfod (festivals), 33, 305n29 Trowell, Margaret, 308n53 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 238 Tsebe, Herman, 215 Tshabalala, Mbekwa, 110, 111 Tswana people, 224 Umlazi, 111 Umteteli wa Bantu, 26, 307–8n51 Union of South Africa. See South Africa United Democratic Movement, 282 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 249, 270 United Presbyterian Church (New York), 272 United States: art educator’s tour in, 29; educational theories in, xxiii–xxvi; foreign policy of, 304n15; Mvusi’s travels in, 248, 249–50. See also African Americans University of Bophuthatswana, 277 University of Durban–Westville, 80, 166 University of Johannesburg–Soweto (was Vista University), 279–80 University of Natal, 150, 166, 247, 266 University of South Africa (UNISA), 262, 266, 280

Van Der Leeuw, J. J., 58 Van Gogh, Vincent, 147, 195, 321n51 Van Robbroeck, Lize, 36, 41, 308n52 Vapi, Virginia, 223 Vendaland: art education decline in, 237; art organizer position in, 225–28, 230; bursaries from, 231–32; school principal in, 115–16; students from, 118–19, 188 Vilakazi, Gabriel: commission for, 172; giraffe mosaic by, 138; on materials for teaching, 214; materials used by, 166; mosaics by, 129, 269; teaching activities, 234–35 Villa, Eduardo, 155 Visual Century (multivolume series), 13, 274–75, 298–99n42, 334n12 Washington, Booker T., xxiv, xxv ways of being in the world: as African and artist, 247–51; in apartheid context, 293n14; art as creative practice in, 13–16, 298n40; art as language in, 252–63; art of life in, 263–68; creativity and being alive in, 187–90; earlier artists’ influence on, 147–49. See also identity formation; learning and daily life weaving, recycled wool, 215. See also basketry, grass weaving, and broom making Weimar Germany. See Bauhaus Vorkurs Welch, G. H., 44, 45, 46 West Africa, art objects of, 55–56, 152, 248–49 Western culture and civilization, 49, 69–71, 101. See also aesthetics; European art white supremacy. See apartheid; National Party; separate development Whyte, Quintin, 40 Wilberforce Institute (Evaton), 210, 223–24, 234 Wilder, Gary, 302–3n80 Wilker, K. H., 35–36 Williams, Stanley, 27 Winter-Moore, Austin, 27, 30, 33 witchcraft, 19–20 Wits Art Museum (Johannesburg), 276–77 Wolfson, Isaac, 192–93, 194 women: changing hairstyles of, 186; clothing of, 172, 175, 190; dining of, 139; hostility toward art students, 172, 196; mission-mandated restrictions on, 112, 173–76; objects for sale by, 200–201. See also gender differences wood working. See carving and wood working World (periodical), 241, 242, 244 World War II period: art education in, 39–41; primitivist discourse in, 38–39 writing, 18–19, 33 Wylie, Diana, 298n40 Xaba, Edgar, 173, 177 Xaba, Powell, 86 Xego, Priestess, 263

Youth League, 95 Zondi, Michael, 96 Zondi, Samuel: Prayer, 272; small sculpture by, 269; St. George and the Dragon, 128–29, 272 Zululand: arts organizer in, 252–53

Zulu people: clothing of, 70–71; as dynamic entity, 253; as Ndaleni students, 120; of Richmond area, 119 Zwana, A. S. T., 43, 309n75 Zwane, Elijah: Harmon Foundation and, 272; students of, 234; teaching activities, 4, 5, 206, 214–15, 233

377 index