The Art of Life in South Africa. Daniel Magaziner
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there was a precedent here for using the text in this way. One of Africa’s paramount aesthetic theorists was the poet and politician Leopold Senghor, who, according to Souleymane Bachir Diagne, encountered Primitive Negro Sculpture while a student in Paris in the 1930s.37 Over the next three decades, Senghor adapted the text’s conviction about African artistic accomplishments to his own political program for the continent’s engagement with modernity. In the 1950s and 1960s, Senghor frequently returned to Primitive Negro Sculpture’s claim that African creative objects represented an Africanity avant la lettre—something so African that they even predated the need to claim Africanness, whether as a deracinated captive or as an anticolonial revolutionary. Senghor closely followed existentialist and phenomenologist debates about the nature of African identity and rebutted them with the art object, “an Africanity as real as the material objects it has produced, which are, before all else, its works of art.”38 Like Grossert, Senghor believed that works of African invention rehearsed great African achievements still to come.
Figure 3.4 Mask (Senegalese), artist unknown, Mask, Senegal, District Leo, drawn by Jack Grossert, 1956, with the permission of the CC
It is unclear whether Senghor read Dewey, but it seems possible that both he and the American generated much of their philosophy in dialogue with Guillaume and Munro’s account of African artistry. Senghor and Dewey both cited rhythm as the element that united the traditional and the new. For Dewey, rhythm was seen in art’s accumulating narratives, each “having its particular rhythmic movement; each with its own unrepeated quality throughout.”39 Every statue was different, but each reflected a unique experience and effort to overcome discord with harmony. Guillaume and Munro’s anonymous artists worked like all “great original artists [who] take a tradition into themselves. They have not shunned it, but digested it.” Dewey was a theorist; Senghor was also a politician, and he drew a powerful political lesson from the art object. He rejected Guillaume and Munro’s contention that African art was dead and claimed instead that the rhythm of the individual statues revealed that African art by definition always moved, always progressed—as would African societies, grounded in tradition but open to the future. His négritude was a “principle of movement,” an experience of openness. He called for Africans, artists and otherwise, to claim this rhythmic approach to life as their African identity: “an open question to be ceaselessly explored.”40
Senghor developed his aesthetic theories while also pursuing national self-determination and Senegal’s intellectual and artistic development.41 Unlike Dewey, Barnes, Guillaume, and Munro, he had authority outside the narrow world of art (no matter how much the four of them might regret the art world’s narrowness). Jack Grossert also had a certain degree of political authority. Like Senghor, he believed in the aesthetic accomplishments of the African created object. As The Art of Africa so eloquently expressed, he, too, rejected the notion that African artistry was lost with the political and other practices that had been battered by European occupation. Grossert’s sketchbook revealed this. In pencil and crayon, he captured the Natal Museum’s collection of West African sculpture and, sometimes on consecutive pages, a learner’s pot, beaded bracelet, or grass broom.42 In African schools across the Union throughout the 1940s and 1950s, he witnessed what he described as an unbroken lineage of African creativity. Using what authority he had, Grossert worked to develop an education system based on the self-expressive work of art and the grounded openness that made art African.
Figure 3.5 Broom handles by Natal schoolchildren, drawn by Jack Grossert, 1950s, with the permission of the CC
EDUCATION THROUGH ART
In his writings and speeches, Grossert frequently acknowledged his debt to the “revolution of art” and the aesthetic theory of the 1920s and 1930s.43 He returned again and again to concepts familiar from Dewey, Herbert Read, Arthur Lismer, Guillaume, Munro, and others. But there were many concepts that were South Africa’s alone and represented his attempt to thread the various needles of his brief—as a proponent of the beautiful and an apartheid bureaucrat; as an African art aficionado, in a country without celebrated indigenous artistic traditions; as a modernist teacher who believed that self-expression led to social harmony and that Africans as Africans best expressed themselves in certain ways. He began to solve these issues by introducing the concept of taste.
Grossert wanted to argue that black South Africans had inherited the continent’s artistic traditions, yet, as we have seen, his own bureaucracy could report only scattered findings of African artistry. Eiselen had argued that European manufactures were responsible for the decline of African artisanship, and Grossert agreed that the flood of industrial goods threatened to usurp the African society’s creative outlet.44 But he added a new element—the concept of inherent, racialized taste—that allowed him to suggest that something intangible had survived the African craftsperson’s encounter with industrial modernity. He bemoaned the “devastation which had been wrought in Bantu taste by the flooding of Native stores with shoddy European trash to take the place of traditional crafts of great beauty and sincerity.”45 In response to this discussion, he proposed a pedagogical solution. Writing of basketwork, Grossert despaired how “under white guidance these naturally formed objects arising out of the simple use of materials, have been distorted into pretty, useless objects that are completely subversive of character and traditional taste.”46 Note how easily Grossert slipped into Deweyesque language in describing this situation. African production had been “natural,” not artificial. It was what the people did and what, we might presume, rendered their society harmonious and tranquil. But Europeans had ruined that, and in Grossert’s own time both art and society were flirting with a tragic loss.47
By focusing on taste, Grossert criticized the ways in which Africans were taught, and he proposed a bureaucratic intervention.48 Yes, government surveys had revealed a lack of craftwork, but Grossert circumvented such findings by insisting that Africans’ inherent taste still survived. He drew his audience’s attention to how well Africans dressed. “In choosing clothes, one notices that most Africans . . . have an infallible taste for what is best,” he observed on one occasion. “Cannot this gift be extended to crafts in general?”49 Dress was a tempting subject; it was less overdetermined than the production of aesthetic items, and yet it reflected artistry as Dewey would have understood it—conscious selection and awareness, the human need to organize material to tell a story. Dress was taste unsullied, an aesthetic practice that transcended time. He credited all Bantu and especially the Zulu, with whom he was most familiar, for “their taste in dress, both when they dress in a traditional manner and when [they] adopt European styles.”50 The last clause was critical: Grossert had no problem with Africans dressing in European styles. The clothes were not what made the African; it was the Africans’ tasteful manner of dressing that defined Africanity. As Africans, taste came naturally from within, as they engaged their present.
Figure 3.6 Design in blue and purple, by Gcinisiwe Gumede, displayed at the Eshowe Craft Show, drawn by Jack Grossert, 1950s, with the permission of the CC
The question, then, was how to promote aesthetic progress without destroying African taste. Grossert’s goal was always to return the lost vitality to African craft, in which he saw shining examples of the work of art. For inspiration, he turned to education theorists such as Lismer and Read, whose own work in wildly different settings confirmed that the art teacher’s greatest challenge was not to teach too much and risk stifling students’ creativity. He looked closer to home as well, especially to Canon Edward Patterson’s Cyrene Mission in Southern Rhodesia.51 (See map 1.1, and note 22 in chap. 2, above.) Patterson, a