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Chapter 2

CRAFTWORK

IN THE 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 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 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 self-expression 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.

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 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

Figure 2.1 USiko, by George Pemba, date unknown, mid-1930s(?), with the permission of the Historical Papers, Mayibuye Archive, University of the Western Cape

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, 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 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 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.

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

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 I, 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

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 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

Figure 2.3 Grass brooms and baskets, artists unknown, drawn by Jack Grossert, 1950s, File KCM 25598, with the permission of the CC

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 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 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 well-known 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, 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 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.

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