The Art of Life in South Africa. Daniel Magaziner
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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