The Art of Life in South Africa. Daniel Magaziner
of the time. There was nothing uniquely South African about this in a postwar era when individual genius, absent sociology, was a cliché of artistic success.15 Yet South Africa did pose specific challenges to the emergent group of black artists in that it lacked the infrastructure to provide them with the education to cultivate this natural genius. Some artists benefited from their proximity to Johannesburg and its galleries; others, among them Ernest Mancoba and Gerard Sekoto, benefited from their training at missionary institutions such as Grace Dieu, an Anglican training college near Pietersburg that boasted an established program in handwork and artisanal industry by the turn of the 1930s.16 (See map 1.1.) Hailing from near Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape, George Pemba lacked these advantages. In the early 1930s, he was training to be a schoolteacher when he began to sketch images from newspapers and to paint location scenes, such as funerals and soccer matches. He was twenty when he showed his first works in Port Elizabeth in 1932. Reviewers saluted him as a genius. “The art exhibited in Port Elizabeth . . . could, in terms of approach to form and vision, not be distinguished from the work of white men,” one wrote. This reviewer knew that some wanted a “pure” African art, but he ridiculed such calls as “pathetic.” Pemba’s work showed that in the clash of cultures, “there are but two alternatives, affiliation or seclusion, and the latter is seldom thought about.” Art lovers were urged to celebrate Pemba for his “obvious” gifts. “It will not come as a surprise if he one day assumes a prominent place in our artist ranks.”17
It is worth pausing on this language for a moment. Like Ntuli and Tladi, Pemba was an acknowledged genius. His race was notable—there were not many Africans like him—but his work announced especially that a new artist had come to join, in the words of this white reviewer, “our artist ranks.” Geniuses were there; the greatest challenge was to figure out how to train and cultivate their talents. Education was thus the terrain on which the politics of race and art were to be contested.
Like many other aspirant Africans, Pemba appealed to the South African Institute of Race Relations and the Bantu Welfare Trust to support his endeavors. By the mid-1930s, his work had found its way into the hands of O. J. P. Oxley, an art professor at the University of Natal. “I have shown the drawings to all the members of the staff of the school and they are very impressed,” Oxley told an SAIRR representative. He regretted that there were not more Pembas out there. “If there were likely to be many such boys, a class might be started for them, but I think, at present, we shall only find isolated cases.”18
From his base in Pietermaritzburg, Oxley was a leading figure in South African art education in the 1920s and 1930s. He was open to the idea that African artistic geniuses might emerge, but also somewhat wary of the prospect. The Carnegie Corporation took him to the United States for a two-month tour of the Northeast in 1929, giving him an opportunity to survey the terrain of art education in that country. Like previous South African educationist visitors to America, Oxley was particularly interested in African American education and its possible inspiration for native education in South Africa. Oxley’s studies in the United States led him to propose a course of art appreciation for Africans, which would in turn “give way to craft work, which should form a great part of the instruction given.” He used the terms craftwork and handwork interchangeably, indicating that “the work would tend to be more vocational than that of the European schools.” If black artists did emerge from such a program, Oxley cautioned, “every care must be taken not to force European ideas upon the natives too early in their development, for by so doing we may be preventing means of self-expression from asserting themselves.”19 In thinking about pedagogy, in other words, care ought to be taken not to ruin native talent. Rather than “force European ideas upon the natives,” interested parties needed to cultivate the field and allow genius slowly to take root in its own, racially determined way. Oxley’s views thus contrasted with Pemba’s reviewer. As the logic of race entrenched across South African society, so to by the mid-1930s did race begin to insinuate itself into discussions about the best way to teach art.
Seeking tuition, George Pemba initially tried to find a way around the realities of race. He could not register as a regular student at Rhodes, the closest art school to his home, but Oxley and the SAIRR provided him with the means to relocate to Grahamstown to receive training as an external student with the aforementioned Professor Winter-Moore.20 They introduced Pemba to R. H. W. Shepherd, the director of the Lovedale Press in nearby Alice, who commissioned him to illustrate an isiXhosa children’s book. Pemba continued to draw and to paint in a naturalist, recognizably “European” style, and he thought himself improved immeasurably by his training. Oxley’s concerns were heard—“I have tried my best to be typically African,” Pemba wrote to Shepherd early in 1937, yet in the quality and style of his drawings, he felt that “some of my best work . . . is influenced by European Art.”21 European influence or not, while training at Rhodes Pemba proudly noted that he was “in the prime of my artistic career.”22
Pemba’s sense of his own unique talent accorded with the classic ideals of South African liberalism, which were always more vital in theory than in actual political fact. Whites extolled its virtues (even as they continued, like Pim, to support segregation), and black intellectuals commonly rallied around the thoroughly liberal idea of individual genius and accomplishment. “Be what nature made you,” advised a correspondent known as “Philosopher” in 1937, “whatever you are from nature, keep to it, never desert . . . your own line of inclination and talent.” Writers such as Philosopher took to the Bantu World and other media to argue that only by being “what nature intended you to be” would personal and social success follow. “Everyone is a genius at something,” Philosopher reassured the wary.23
“New African” thinkers like Philosopher returned again and again to the idea of race-blind education, which would allow true talent to emerge from the African community. Philosopher urged the black community to “understand that, although men are born equal, they are not mentally, morally and physically equal. There are men and women whose ability places them above their fellow-men.” Excellence was the way forward. “If we, as a race, can appreciate that fact, we would make rapid progress along the path of civilization.” To hear this writer tell it, jealousy impeded appreciation for the few individuals whose genius bloomed amid the weeds. “Why should we be jealous of a musician or poet who interprets our spiritual yearnings?” he asked, and why be jealous “of a sculptor or an artist who reveals the soul of our race?” By the mid-1930s, African intellectuals knew that white nationalists wanted to view African society as an undifferentiated collective and to deny whatever individual rights had managed to survive conquest and decades of white supremacy. Over and against generalization, they invested in accounts of individual attainment and talent. “[Our] talents are the weapons through which our race shall win the war of freedom,” by compelling the “‘trustees’ of the race”—for example, South Africa’s white masters—“to recognize our work,” the editors of the Bantu World insisted.24
Figure 2.1 USiko, by George Pemba, date unknown, mid-1930s(?), with the permission of the Historical Papers, Mayibuye Archive, University of the Western Cape
To page through Bantu World and other media during this era is to watch a community pool its collective intellectual resources in the name of individual attainment and, so they believed, the political recognition that would result. Coverage ranged from the light and airy—“Selmina Rampa, artiste . . . is one of our best dressed young women and is an able cook and all around hand-work expert”—to the dry and earnest:
No matter what your colour is
nor even your creed,
but if true merit in you is
then you are of the seed
the seed that every man respects
he may be white, he may be black
it makes no difference to this fact
that