The Art of Life in South Africa. Daniel Magaziner
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1975, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4, with the permission of the CC
Ndaleni had electricity; the art school’s instructors might have plugged the thing in and made their students’ lives easier. Yet they understood too well the realities that would be faced by art teachers in the country beyond the campus. Bantu Education schools did not have electric kilns—many did not have electricity at all. It was better to continue to dig a hole in the ground, scrounge for bricks, and gather wood than to humor the department’s illusory modernity.23 The story of this cold electric kiln captures the reality of twentieth-century South Africa differently than do most history books. Both scholarship and popular memory typically capture the vastness of that time by focusing on a handful of well-told stories: the interwoven rise of the industrial state and political segregation, the maintenance of white supremacy and apartheid, and the “people’s” struggle for some sort of new political dispensation.24 Yet the tension between the possibility of the wood-fired kiln and the unreality of the electric kiln reveals an entirely different set of experiences.
Recently, scholars have begun to push against historiographical convention. Some have called for “post-anti-apartheid” historiography, a “history in chords” that can account for the past in ways less beholden to the politics of bygone times, more sensitive to the “complexity” of the past beyond the limits of the “struggle.”25 The metaphor is suggestive. People live their lives multiply, at times striking one note—that of protest, perhaps—and at times striking others—laughter, sorrow, satisfaction.26 Historians typically only register certain sounds as worthy of reproduction, especially those that continue to resonate into our present, even as we claim that our discipline celebrates the contingent, the alternative pasts that were lost along the way to today. As we all know from our own lives, there were always other notes, other ways of experiencing—and therefore capturing—time. What else was life in twentieth-century South Africa, beyond the well-worn keys?
Figure 1.5 The kiln at Ndaleni, 1975, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4, with the permission of the CC
The kiln sounds an important note. All of the technologies that marked modern life in the twentieth century were part of art students’ experiences, if differently than in more equitable spaces. Their experience of the kiln—the consciousness that its unplugged, unused instrumentality proposed—revealed a critical contour of their existence.27 Art students experienced South African modernity not only in poverty and wealth or exclusively in the denial of or vehement insistence on rights but also in muscles tired from digging clay and chopping wood for fire, all as a precondition for creating. They knew twentieth-century South Africa in their knowledge that they would never encounter amenities such as electric kilns in African schools.
But that was only one note the cold kiln played. Art teachers also knew twentieth-century South Africa in their own eagerness to embrace such challenges, to dig clay, to chop wood, and otherwise to work to create beauty under apartheid.28 It is incongruous to think of beauty under apartheid, given the common tendency to see that period of the South African past carried by the momentous tension between oppression and liberation, with scant moments to pause and consider the sensory experience of a single moment spent digging or chopping or waiting for the clay to fire. Yet such moments peppered and demarcated art students’ time, and they turned time’s passage into the stuff of historical experience. To live in twentieth-century South Africa was to know, as Arjun Appadurai counseled, that which we identify as “modernity” has always been “unevenly experienced.”29 Twentieth-century South Africa was as uneven and profoundly iniquitous a space as existed for much of the century; yet it was also, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, a “space of possibilities,” a place with limits defined by the “position taking” of those who lived there. Bourdieu assigned special authority to those who work within the possibility of time and space. History “presents itself to each agent as a space of possibilities, which is defined in the relationship between the structure of average chances of access to different positions . . . and the dispositions of each agent, the subjective basis of the perception and appreciation of objective chances.” Artists are Bourdieu’s exemplary agents. Through their “dispositions” and their choices, they work within, against, and through the possibility of their moment; creators create history, and in turn, they, as historical beings, are created by it.30
Bourdieu thus imagined the artist as someone who sifts through the possible, as time unfolds. This is reminiscent of Achille Mbembe’s clarification of African subjectivity “as time,” as unfolding and not complete.31 This is an interesting challenge to the intellectual historian. Most scholars of black South African intellectual history have tended to tell the stories of those great anticolonialists whose thoughts were always on the future. In this way, early nineteenth-century radical resistance is read as a rehearsal for the more rational, reasoned appeals that marked the early twentieth century, as well as the move toward revolution at the century’s midpoint.32 Put differently, if intellectual history is the history of “thinkers and concepts,” African intellectual history has long dwelled in histories of the future, not explications of a series of presents.33 My own work is notably guilty of this: in my first book, I studied dreams and strategies to promote changes yet to come, at the expense of a more finely tuned examination of creative responses for living then.34 The narrative of becoming predicted by the logic of colonial modernity is seductive, yet art students without supplies knew better. They knew that absent tempting narratives, they were living the uneven experience of contemporary life in an unequal world. By watching as they positioned themselves according to their dispositions, we might avoid the trap of “privileging the analytical over the lived.”35
This brings me back to Mbembe and the idea that subjectivities are fashioned from “everyday practices” in time, and thus that the strategies and conditions of a succession of presents are revealed through life histories. “African identity does not exist as a substance. It is constituted, in varying forms, through a series of practices,” Mbembe argues.36 Rarely were the quality and conditions of African identity more overdetermined than during juridical apartheid and the struggle against that system. Few places, therefore, might be as meaningfully explored for the practices that belied both a categorization of this sort and the conviction that art students’ lives were empty, mentally denuded existences. As with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Bengali bureaucrats, the circumstances of Ndaleni teachers’ lives were not of their own choosing, but these individuals still had “to find their livelihood” therein.37 In this way, the strategies of art students and teachers to maintain the integrity of their creative practice tell a story bigger than their relatively small community. Their kiln offers a story of existence-in-time that the art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu describes “not as a closed, historically and geographically situated phenomenon, but as a constellation of . . . strategies”—the potential multiplicity of life lived in moments.38 Time is not an inert medium through which trends and ideologies pass and are transmitted. Rather, time must be understood to be soil, always and everywhere awaiting an artist’s particular, unique seed.39
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It is necessary to extend the metaphor. No seed falls on neutral soil; atmospheric conditions always prevail. Artists always labor in dialogue—or contestation—with their surroundings, both material and intangible. South African art historians have long explored the ways in which black South African artists in particular practiced in conversation with their unfolding political realities. Art and politics were often one and were considered as such. Indeed, art history as a discipline has tended to wed black creativity to the story of protest and oppositional action. This was how some artists lived their lives and practiced their art, to be sure, yet it plays only that single, popular note.40 Art historians have tended to focus on art as necessarily oppositional even when it was not articulated as such. Under the art historical gaze, every meeting of white and black artists is recast as a “non-racial aesthetic practice,” each work displayed to a primarily white audience, “a firm line of communication across the iniquitously effective racial divide which kept South Africans apart.”41