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Chapter 1

A HILLSIDE IN SOUTH AFRICA

FOR MOST, 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 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

Figure 1.1 A man in black and brown shoe polish, drawing by Winston Radebe, 1965, photograph by the author

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 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.

Figure 1.2 Students carving, late 1960s, photographer unknown, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4, with the permission of the Campbell Collections of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (hereafter cited as CC)

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 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.

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

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, 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.

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

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 “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?

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

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 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 Twentieth-century 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 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

Figure 1.6 “I Am Longing to Be One of Your Art Students,” Dominus Thembe, ARTTRA, no. 30, May 1975, 6

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 non-racialism 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 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 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.

Figure 1.7 Daphne Biyela (center) and classmates preparing wood for sculpture, 1978, photographer unknown, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4, with the permission of the CC

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 “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 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

Figure 1.8 Mercy Ghu, 1969, photographer unknown, Ndaleni Scrapbook 3, with the permission of the CC

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 “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 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 I 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-twentieth-century 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 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.