The Art of Life in South Africa. Daniel Magaziner

       Chapter 2

       CRAFTWORK

      IN THE late 1920s, black South Africa discovered that it had artists. In 1928, a Parktown gardener named Moses Tladi began to show his landscape paintings to aficionados around Johannesburg. The black press took note and hailed Tladi as “a Native genius.” Promoted by some of interwar Johannesburg’s leading liberals, Tladi exhibited across the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, and the Cape. He earned a special dispensation to show a “special exhibit by a Native artist” with the South African Academy of Art in 1929—the first African to do so—as well as to show at the South African National Gallery, where he was the only African included in the 1931 show that organizers intended to demonstrate South Africa’s emergence as a center of art production in its own right. Tladi was black South Africa’s first celebrated artist. By the end of the 1930s, names such as Gerard Bhengu, George Pemba, Ernest Mancoba, John Mohl, and Gerard Sekoto were being discussed by art lovers from Durban to Cape Town and Johannesburg.¹ By the 1940s, Tladi had faded into obscurity, even as a South Africa primed to consider the implications of black artistic success brought the handful of his peers to greater renown. But Tladi was the first, a “Native genius” with pencil, color, and brush.

      Tladi’s success was part of a wider conversation about the position of African artists, musicians, writers, and intellectuals in interwar South Africa. The 1930s saw the consolidation of white supremacy in the country, as Prime Minister Barry Hertzog and the National Party government further restricted African political and land rights, culminating in the various bills passed in 1936. But even as those bills were being debated, black South Africans and others passed through the wondrous exhibits of Johannesburg’s Empire Exhibition and penned paeans to the “Bantu’s” contribution to the city’s cultural life. Writers attended lectures at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre and spent their evenings at the theater. They entertained one another and visitors from abroad at “delightfully” set tea tables.² Eager urbanites dressed up and gathered at the recently opened Johannesburg Train Station, “to look about, meet friends, show off dresses, admire and be admired,” passing beneath Jacobus Pierneef’s magnificent “station panels” that announced a distinctly South Africa modernity.³ Pierneef’s celebrity transcended the art world; so, too, in a much diminished way, would the celebrity of those few black artists who came to be known simply as such. “Moses Tladi is a well-known African artist,” the Bantu World noted on the occasion of the Tladi family’s “flying visit to Germiston” in April 1938.⁴ The black press eagerly covered his exploits, as it did those of his peers.⁵

      Each exhibition by a black artist was an event to be celebrated. Collectively, however, artists posed a problem, both to the black community and to those whites who thought themselves patrons of the arts and the legitimate rulers of the country. What was the nature of so-called native genius? Did Tladi’s success prove that “artistic ability is not affected by the colour of the colourer” as the editors at Umteteli wa Bantu hoped?⁶ Was he a genius who happened to be native? Or did his being black determine the extent and end of his genius, as racial and cultural theorists insisted? And as South African politicians of all stripes imagined the South African nation, what role would “native” artists play?

      To some, artists like Tladi demonstrated that the black community had its few and select geniuses, no different than any other community. Partisans of this point of view argued for the existence of talent and individual merit, in keeping with the animating spirit of Anglo-colonial modernity. For others, the community’s collective genius was what mattered—native genius, which became the genius of Bantus and eventually the genius of Africans. The latter point of view was, in many senses, a progressive claim against the homogenizing forces of empire, and as the 1930s became the 1940s, in South Africa and elsewhere the idea that natives or Bantu or Africans had their own unique, unrepeatable genius was often a truly radical concept, portending a new politics.⁷ But in South Africa, the idea of separate, distinct, collective Bantu genius—not a Bantu genius—evolved to become one of the ideological foundations of separate development.⁸

       NATIVE GENIUS

      Moses Tladi worked as a gardener in the years after World War 1. Among his employers was Herbert Read, whose property high on the Parktown Ridge faced north toward the open veld and the Magaliesberg beyond.⁹ Read family legend has it that Tladi started to experiment with making pictures by using the pencils and crayons that the children discarded; true or not, by the mid-1920s Read thought Tladi had accomplished enough to share his works with Howard Pim, a leading liberal who went on to become the president of the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) in the early 1930s (a position previously held by C. T. Loram) and who was credited with “discovering” and supporting Tladi’s talent.¹⁰

      The nature of Pim’s support indicated the terrain of genius in which Tladi emerged. In correspondence with colleagues and fellow art lovers, Pim noted that although he was careful “not to interfere with the current of Tladi’s talent,” he did “assist” him wherever possible. For instance, Pim arranged for Tladi to visit the Johannesburg Art Gallery, “where he was allowed to inspect the masterpieces that have sent him away tingling with joy of his art.”¹¹ Pim facilitated Tladi’s exhibition with the South African Academy and corresponded with specialists such as the professor Austin Winter-Moore at Rhodes University College–Grahamstown on Tladi’s behalf.¹² To be sure, part of Tladi’s appeal was that he was “quite untaught,” as one reviewer put it, but also that his work was recognizable as art, in the European tradition. Tladi “tells the . . . truth in a poetic way. The atmosphere of the Witwatersrand is in [his] pictures unmistakable to all who know the Transvaal.”¹³ His were well-executed pictures, not evidence of his native disposition.

      The emergence during the early 1930s of black visual artists such as Moses Tladi was thus about individual talent and genius. At the same time that Tladi was showing in Johannesburg, another gardener emerged on the Natal art scene. Hezekiel Ntuli modeled clay figures during his free time as an employee of Maritzburger Stanley Williams. As with Tladi, reviewers remarked on his lack of training and instinctive artistic skills. “Leading citizens of South Africa have inspected his work and without exception they proclaim him a natural genius,” the Natal Mercury reported in 1930. His models were strikingly realistic, so much so that a local European’s dog was reported to have reacted violently to one of Ntuli’s clay lionesses. He worked in a medium—clay—that was thought to be traditionally African, but the evident genius of his work transcended racial categorization and allowed him to be hailed as an artist, period. He was only seventeen in 1930 but “wonderfully well developed. His hands are those of an artist, with fingers of exceptional length.”¹⁴ The individuated unit that was he—manifest in his body—made him the artist that his talent