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 . .