The Art of Life in South Africa. Daniel Magaziner

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