The Art of Life in South Africa. Daniel Magaziner
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that art education in apartheid South Africa began where South African society was—that is, with primary school students and the crafts black children were made to do there, simply because they were black. Grossert traveled tens of thousands of miles through apartheid South Africa, visiting craft shows and witnessing the development of Bantu Education. He knew that his was not the only vision and that there were others, more authoritative than he, with their own agendas for the schools. Still, he believed in human perfectibility, through the work of art. On occasion, he even went so far as to declare that the poverty and want that stalked Africans’ school were actually advantages, in that they would promote more of the initiative and critical thinking that was the raw material of art.81
Grossert left Bantu Education in the mid-1960s to found the Fine Arts Department at the University of Durban–Westville, the apartheid era tertiary institution for South Africans of Asian ancestry. It was a homecoming of sorts for him, as his Oxley-supervised master’s thesis had been on Hindu architecture in Natal—touching on another community’s story about the unfolding of tradition. At the end of the turbulent 1970s, Grossert left South Africa for Ireland. He returned to Natal in 1988 and gave an interview about the Bantu Education art program that he had once so enthusiastically promoted. In his account, he reflected especially on a visit he had had in 1982 from one of Mvusi’s classmates, Eric Ngcobo, an accomplished artist and theorist in his own right. Ngcobo had succeeded Mvusi as an art teacher at Loram High School in Durban; he eventually became the organizer of arts and crafts in the KwaZulu Bantustan. Like Grossert, Ngcobo had been a true believer in the work of art. The former had even sponsored Ngcobo’s overseas trip to attend an international conference of art educators during the mid-1970s, at which Ngcobo had extolled the virtues of the South African art education system.82 And yet, Grossert told his interviewers, during Ngcobo’s visit to the United Kingdom in the early 1980s, he had toured a number of schools to assess what resources students had available there—and the discrepancy between British and Zulu schools had “overwhelmed” him. Ngcobo’s reaction forced Grossert to acknowledge that South Africa’s material limitations and politics had conspired to undermine even the best-intentioned theories. That confession was only part of Grossert’s burgeoning crisis of faith; he was more troubled still by the fact that when he returned to South Africa in the late 1980s, he heard many collectors and others extol his art program for sustaining the curio trade in South Africa. To someone whose younger self had so vilified that sordid business, those words must have stung with painful venom.83
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