The Art of Life in South Africa. Daniel Magaziner
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crafts featured in the apartheid government’s efforts to preserve the absolute distinction between African (or “Bantu”) and European education. In the years leading up to the adoption of the Bantu Education Act in 1953, apartheid bureaucrats and theorists considered how best to ensure that the syllabus promoted difference—and in the years that followed, qualified teachers went to Ndaleni to study the activities called for in the Bantu Education syllabus.
At Ndaleni, they studied grasswork, beadwork, bonework, painting, drawing, wood carving, and claywork, among other subjects; they also developed their own art practice and gained a working knowledge of art history. Paid for with government bursaries, the art program was a two-year course through the 1950s and was then reduced to a one-year program from the 1960s until the course’s end in 1981. In return for the government bursary and a pay increase upon completing the course, Ndaleni students agreed to teach art in the apartheid government’s African schools. Close to a thousand graduated, about one hundred failed to complete the course, and nearly two thousand more were turned away because of a lack of space.7
That only one-third of applicants were admitted to the Ndaleni program indicates its appeal. A year at Indaleni (the former mission station as opposed to the art school, which did not use the locative prefix) was a year nestled in the Midlands, painting, sculpting, drawing, learning. The vast majority of Ndaleni students were already working teachers, so a year at Ndaleni also meant time away from their typically underfunded and overcrowded schools; it also meant a year without pay, being confined to shabby mission accommodations, and for older students being away from their families. Many considered themselves artists, even if society did not recognize them as such, and although it was not an art school in the strictest sense, Ndaleni was one of a very few places where black South Africans could study and develop their art.8 Yet attaining an Ndaleni certificate did not promise a much easier life. The same problems awaited graduates—more and more students, dilapidated working conditions, a pervasive lack of materials, and an even more pervasive lack of appreciation.
Figure 1.2 Students carving, late 1960s, photographer unknown, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4, with the permission of the Campbell Collections of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (hereafter cited as CC)
For many, it was worth it. Teaching art in Bantu Education schools could be rewarding, as Elijah Zwane wrote in the early 1960s. “Wishing to see what I had in my class, I introduced modeling in clay and picture painting, and the work of the pupils struck me with wonder,” he gushed. It was marvelous to “see what talents remain buried in the nerves of an African child.”9 A decade later, Mercy Ghu was similarly enthusiastic: “[The students’] imagination is fairly wide when it comes to clay or paper mâché,” she reported, “they are not at all inhibited!”10 Listening to them chatter while they worked, she was transported back to her time at art school, to the joy that resounded in the “sound of the hammer and chisel in the free, open air.”11
“Their world was different from ours. We must start there.”12 So wrote Nathan Huggins about the Harlem Renaissance, to free himself and his readers from decades’ worth of knowledge of what that era and its personalities meant. Let us start there: is it possible to tell the story of Elijah Zwane’s “wonder” or to exult in the “free, open air” of such a place as twentieth-century South Africa? Between the 1950s and the 1980s, hundreds of black South Africans journeyed across their benighted land to a hillside school to paint, to carve, to model, to think. The evidence they left behind suggests that, for the most part, they enjoyed the experience. They held fast to it, treasuring the school, their talent, their vision, their changed selves, and the community they made there amid society’s storms.
We know a good deal about those storms. As a way of life, the “apartheid” for which these teachers worked is still little understood. As a concept, it is a term immediately grasped and then shelved with colonialism, racism, segregation, and the Holocaust—the litany of a century’s wrongs.13 Generations of activists, artists, scholars, and others have condemned apartheid’s violence and urged resistance. Yet the term apartheid itself continues to do tremendous violence to those who lived under that system: when we invoke the word—and especially when we append the categories black and South African to it—it becomes too easy to sit back, satisfied that we know the whole story.14
But even those who lived it and fought righteous struggles against the apartheid system can claim only an imperfect knowledge of what it meant to live in that time and place.15 Broad sociological claims produce similarly partial truths—about poverty, about oppression, about inferior education and corrupt and unresponsive bureaucracies. All are true—and all obscure other truths, about the decisions with which people were presented, about the opportunities they seized, and about their exertions for better and more meaningful lives. Life is multiple and contradictory, the political philosopher Richard Iton writes, and when seeking to grasp its various incarnations, “we cannot overlook those spaces that generate difficult data.”16 The Ndaleni art school was such a difficult place.
At a basic level of political and historical identification, the art teachers who passed through Ndaleni were cogs in the machinery of white supremacy. They taught a syllabus written by C. T. Loram’s children—bureaucrats charged with the maintenance of racial separation—and even when teachers could not teach that syllabus to the letter, their quest for materials reveals that they aspired to do so.17 They were also people open to the possibility of beauty, imbued with a confidence that if they could imagine something, they could materialize it; if they needed to say something, they could say it.18 They were thinking people in a time and place that did not necessarily reward their sorts of thoughts. They were relics of a bygone ideology, justly relegated to history’s scrap heap. Ndaleni generates difficult data precisely because it opens a window into the closed room of the past—through its archive, we can see the faces looking out at us, blind to the world of knowledge and hindsight that we inhabit. Twentieth-century South Africa was only one among many such rooms. Indeed, we live in another room today, a room whose boundaries we perceive dimly, if at all. What did it mean to dwell in that realm of perception?19 What comes of our “attempt to see through the looking glass of epistemological history”?20 The Art of Life in South Africa is the story of a community, a school, and the idea that people everywhere are creative beings, capable of making manifest their unique visions of the world.
Figure 1.3 The Hand of Destruction, by Fish Molepo, ARTTRA, no. 38, October 1979, 22
TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOUTH AFRICA
Imagine a kiln. By the early 1960s, it was evident that the art school’s infrastructure was not up to its task. The syllabus called for students to be trained in clay, which was one of the few raw materials abundant in African schools because in many places—although not everywhere—it could be freely gathered from streambeds and other watercourses. In other words, the material was free only in the sense that it was paid for with students’ labor, not cash. The production of clay at Ndaleni art school was a bone-wearying process, involving trips to nearby streams to dig raw clay; hauling buckets up and down steep hills; and spending hours grinding, sieving, and curing raw clay for use in their art classes. All of this was arduous enough without the additional task of gathering wood to fire the students’ creations.
The students had no potter’s wheel, and they had no modern kiln.21 The first iteration of the Ndaleni art school newsletter begged supporters for £150 to buy an electric kiln to ease that last, excessive labor. Funds were not forthcoming, however, and it was not until the early 1970s that the Department of Bantu Education relented and delivered a brand-new, state-of-the-art, electric kiln to Ndaleni’s hillside campus.22 There it sat, untouched and unused, for a decade, until the school closed.