The Art of Life in South Africa. Daniel Magaziner
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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