The Art of Life in South Africa. Daniel Magaziner
love, the only sort of friendship that of comrades in the struggle, and the only betrayals were those of confederate by confederate.75 But what of different sorts of confederacies, fashioned not in the racial enclave but by transgressing the boundaries between race and location?76 What of community born not in the choice of whether to conform, collaborate, or rebel but instead in the choice to subject oneself to the regime of the wholly different authority—in this case, art?77 Dan Rakgoathe was a black South African artist and teacher who studied at Ndaleni at the turn of the 1960s. His was a crowded world, but it was only hearing from his fellow Ndaleni students that convinced him he was “not utterly alone.”78 In the community gathered around art at Ndaleni, he found his self and mustered the courage to tease beauty from time and place.
This is not to deny that his was an ugly time and an ugly place, where human creativity and possibility were stifled by repression, violence, and pervasive lack. In many senses, South Africa still is such a place. But I do deny the prevailing conviction that in its ugliness it was somehow exempt from the possibilities of community, of transcendence, of earnest and faithful effort to see one’s vision embodied and tangible. I found this book’s title in a letter from an Ndaleni student to his teacher, written more than a decade after he left the school. He was not a particularly talented artist and was continuously frustrated in his efforts both to teach and to make art. But even as his frustrations with some aspects of his life mounted, he recognized that his labors were rewarded otherwise: with children, a marriage, a career, and above all the ability occasionally to stand at a distance from reality, to stop the flow of time and take in the vista. He winked in the letter to his teacher—surely, he wrote, this was the art of life. I do not name nor quote him here, so as not to risk imposing hindsight’s teleology over his life as he, an artist, worked. Better first to grasp his context, test its restraints, envision its opportunities, and watch as he and his classmates tend their kiln.
A WORK
What follows is an attempt to grasp the lives of the Ndaleni school and its artists. As Okeke-Agulu, Berger, and Bourdieu have suggested, every artist moves within and against the terrain of the possible in their own time and place. In twentieth-century South Africa, that meant issues both abstract and visceral, which by the early 1950s saw the apartheid South African government establish an art school for African art teachers. The specific story of the Ndaleni art school begins towards the end of chapter 3. But since my story privileges the concepts and experiences met there, we first must answer the obvious question: why did the government desire such a school?
The next chapter sets the stage for Ndaleni’s emergence by exploring its roots in local and global debates about African schooling, culture, and art in South African society, picking up where the prologue left off. “Craftwork” begins with the move from industrial to cultural concerns in African art education during the interwar period. It widens the scope and the chronology to consider the ongoing discussions about the nature of African creativity in the wake of urbanization, the supposed hegemony of European culture, and other epochal shifts. Other scholars have showed how white artists in particular responded to these changes by embracing a variant of the primitivism that had marked the advent of modernism in early twentieth-century Europe. I consider how, on the policy side, educationists and others shifted the justification for manual work in schools from industrial training to the preservation of “Africanness.” This conversation predated the election of the apartheid government and quickened in its wake, as the state attempted to resuscitate its version of African culture as part of separate development.79
I further consider the reasoning behind this in chapter 3, “Art.” Interwar and post–World War I South African educationists were not the only ones articulating an ideology of art in education. From the early twentieth century through the 1920s, theorists turned to African art to critique the mechanical excess of modernity.80 In the interwar years, thinkers animated this concept, to suggest that from African art might be drawn methods for projecting a new, more humane form of modernity than that which bedeviled industrialized societies.81 That “the modern” was both multiple and accessible through culture was a touchstone of ideological separate development in South Africa. The problem, however, was that South Africa’s African populations generally lacked the visual culture traditions that had so animated the primitivist imagination. The chapter explores how artists and educationists addressed this supposed shortcoming by concentrating on African craft practices—from basketry to indigenous architecture—to advocate for multiple ways to be artists. One of the driving forces behind what we might call “craft modernity” was Jack Grossert, who by the mid-1950s was the national organizer of arts and crafts under Bantu Education. As Natal regional inspector a decade earlier, Grossert had begun to advocate for a specialist arts and crafts teacher-training program to support the African schools. By the early 1950s, this program was open at the Indaleni Mission.
Chapter 4, “Journeys,” considers the initial decade of the program, under its first three teachers, and it begins to explore the lives and paths of the first students who enrolled in the art school. The archive deepens after 1963, when the program’s fourth teacher, Lorna Peirson, took over and established a new regime of both pedagogy and record keeping. The chapter thus moves forward to encompass the 1960s and 1970s as well, to ask who came to Ndaleni art school and why. Peirson brought remarkable stability during the nearly two decades that she taught at Ndaleni. There were important variations, but in general, her version of the Ndaleni education was consistent enough that I am able to draw broad conclusions across those years. Four factors were vital to this consistency: students’ common experiences of both journeying to and living at the art school, the physical experience of the campus, the unrelenting struggle for materials with which to work, and the theories and concepts to which the students were exposed.
I consider the confluence of these four experiences most explicitly in the book’s longest section, chapter 5, “Learning.” This chapter looks closely at both the learning and the labor that went into being trained as an art teacher. Here, we see most clearly the compromises that inhered in students’ experiences—from the grand ideological level of working for Bantu Education, especially in the wake of school and other protests, to the quotidian, gendered ground of exertion, accommodation, food, and community. If students’ lives were their art, during their year on campus they did the work necessary to embody thought in frequently beautiful material form.
And yet, each year ended by releasing students’ creative efforts into the wider, differently certain world—first through an annual sale of objects and then through students’ (re)encounters with South African reality beyond Richmond. Chapter 6, “Apartheid,” explores Ndaleni art students’ roles within the more celebrated political narratives of mid-twentieth-century South Africa, in three forms: protest and political violence, the apartheid education system, and the personal and bureaucratic politics of the Bantustans. In each case, Ndaleni art students-cum-teachers were forced to accommodate their ideas about art and education to prevailing conditions, just as artists’ unique visions always bend to the possibilities of context. Chaper 6 locates the Ndaleni art school itself within the unfolding—and eventual unraveling—of apartheid, and it closes with the school’s own demise in the early 1980s.
The work of art continued, however, even as conditions shifted. The book’s final chapter, “Artists,” considers the possibility of beauty as an organizing principle under apartheid, first by focusing on the trajectories of the small minority of Ndaleni student who actually found a living as visual artists after leaving the school. I supplement these few case studies with stories about others—teachers, parents, friends—who were not “artists” but nevertheless found beauty in their efforts to maintain their integrity and vision across the sweep of their lives. An epilogue, “The Art of the Past,” considers the legacy of Ndaleni in South African art history, in art education, and at the site of the school itself.