The Art of Life in South Africa. Daniel Magaziner
Abrahams, poet and graduate of Grace Dieu, cast his vote for merit in 1936. “That Peter is a genius is evident to whoever has read his poems,” the Bantu World editorial page gushed.25
Broadsheets did more than convey the news of the day to an eager readership. They also served as stages for acts of self-definition and attainment.26 The historian Lynn Thomas has written about how newspapers sponsored beauty contests to define the parameters of modern race-womenhood in interwar South Africa. Competitions—over beauty, over talent, over art—were hallmarks of black urban life.27 “Competitions reveal talent,” wrote A. Ramailane in June 1935. Africans needed to be confident enough to play their God-granted hand. “Competitions are a means whereby competent leaders in all African life are revealed. [They] produce and exult Bantu arts.”28 The point was to compete and to win to demonstrate one’s merit. Over the course of the 1930s and the 1940s, Bantu World sponsored competitions for gardeners, photographers, writers, musicians, and Christmas card decorators. It and other newspapers were careful to cover Africans’ triumphs wherever they took place, as far afield as Berlin and Jesse Owens’s victories in the Olympic Games and as close as the Transvaal, as when frequent contributor Walter Nhlapo won a short-story prize in the 1938 Eisteddfod.29 There were fewer visual art competitions than there were Eisteddfods and music competitions during the 1930s, but interested observers could read regular coverage of events such as the annual May Esther Bedford art competition at the Grahamstown city hall (where Professor Winter-Moore frequently judged the results). If they read closely enough, they would have caught the names Tladi, Sekoto, Mancoba, and Pemba among the winners.30
Competitions were about raising the quality of communal life, and critics thus had an important role to play. The prize-winning author Walter Nhlapo frequently appraised black theater and music across the 1930s and 1940s. Nhlapo was, above all, a proponent of good, socially productive taste.31 When a play was good, he praised it; when disappointing, his ire overflowed. “It had no story in it,” Nhlapo critiqued a short sketch performed in sePedi. Nhlapo typically preferred opera and classical music to such “native” fare, but his greatest frustration was with any work not done well. Indeed, although he rarely critiqued modern European-derived culture—the mastery of which he and many other Africans believed to be the lodestar of individual success—Nhlapo was also careful to remind his readers that Africans had a culture of their own. In the modern world, he said, “[our] customs—beautiful customs—are now despised . . . we must maintain a continuity of whatever creed we believe in, as well as grasp fast our racial traditions.”32 But what truly mattered to him was that when doing something, African performers needed to do it well. (Thus, his issue was not with the sePedi sketch itself but rather with the “ragged dressing of the cast.”) African actors and artists would not excel unless they creatively exploited the raw material of their African cultural background to the utmost.33
Some critics wondered whether African merits would best be expressed through works of unquestioned African origin and culture. Many shared concerns about cultural purity with their white counterparts. Recall that when Moses Tladi exhibited his highveld landscapes in the late 1920s, reviewers praised the native genius for having capturing the “truth” of the landscape. Yet when George Pemba emerged in the mid-1930s, his supporters imagined his role differently. Oxley’s reasons for introducing Pemba to Shepherd were not just financial—they were ideological as well. “I would like to see a boy, such as this, used to illustrate the Bantu readers and history books,” he wrote to the SAIRR. “I think that they should be encouraged, not only to illustrate, but [to] write their own text books. They would then be of much more interest to the Natives and would just give that necessary local interest in their own customs and folklore, which Europeans cannot possibly get.”34 Pemba’s training during the mid-1930s coincided with the Natal-based artist Gerard Bhengu’s own training, under the supervision of a German missionary and ethnographer named Max Kohler. Like Pemba, Bhengu worked in a European artistic idiom and, again like Pemba, his earliest works had depicted typical urban scenes (including at least one football match with white players). Kohler trained Bhengu and provided him with materials; he also urged Bhengu to start “drawing works with more of an African interest.”35 Bhengu did so, and he soon earned praise for illustrating “certain conceptions familiar to all of his people. . . . The best European artist could not have given anything half as good, for no European can draw what is in a native’s mind.”36 In these attempts to shape Pemba’s and Bhengu’s artistic education, we can see qualifiers creeping into the story of African art. The men were evident geniuses, but powerful gatekeepers wanted to make sure that their genius flowed from and to their racially delimited community.
Bhengu’s and Pemba’s white patrons were not alone in thinking that African artistic creativity needed to apply Western techniques to the exposition of African society. One could be an artist without uncritically accepting the superiority of Western culture, argued Hampson Jack, a student at Adams College in the early 1930s. Rather, social and cultural progress meant that Africans “should first all study the history and traditions of their race and all that was good in them.” Africa was where the artist began, regardless of technological modernity, education, or exposure to European civilization; “it does not matter what changes in life, [Africans need] to be themselves and to retain their racial characteristics.”37 Jack was a student at a mission school outside Durban, but his ideas accorded with those of the greatest celebrity of the interwar African diaspora, Paul Robeson. Robeson harshly judged diasporic black culture’s overreliance on white artistic norms. He reported that in the United States, “[black] artists attempt pale copies of Western Art,” yet “no Negro will leave a permanent mark on the world till he learns to be true to himself.”38 This was the case especially since even white artists were beginning to derive inspiration from African sculpture. Black artists needed to recognize that “it is not as imitation Europeans but as Africans . . . that we have a value.”39
UNION PRIMITIVE
Black intellectuals were caught in a bind. If they insisted that the race progressed best through the extraordinary striving and success of individual geniuses, they risked dissolving their Africanness in the stew of colonial modernity. But if they argued that Africans’ genius emerged from the traditions, trials, and tribulations of their race, they risked allowing race to determine not only the content but also the form and limits of African artistic success. Robeson noted with disgust that black artists were aping the white man at a time when white artists were using African sculptural inspiration to great critical success. This was not lost on many South African art lovers, who rejected the idea that cross-cultural artistic invention was a positive force and instead worried that South Africa was losing the “pure” artistic potential of the Union’s very own “primitives.” Whereas editorialists urged artists to fill their canvases and stage their dramas with accounts of the community’s progress through the modern world, local primitivists contended that black artists’ first obligation was to preserve African aesthetic traditions—the authentic genius of natives, which was widely imagined to be under threat.
Hampson Jack was a student at Adams College when he called for Africans to retain their racial characteristics. This was an important intervention at Adams, a venerable mission institution whose principal, Edgar Brookes, was both a prominent liberal on native affairs and an ardent critic of adapted education. An Adams education was based on the classics, down to art classes that focused on aesthetic appreciation, drawing, and painting, especially of the landscape around the campus.40 Still, prevailing primitivism in Europe and elsewhere gave teachers pause. “After the Great War some people in Europe were so disgusted with European culture that they suddenly discovered ‘primitive Negro art,’” taught K. H. Wilker, an art instructor at Adams. With that in mind, he cautioned his students not to overvalue Western inspiration. Much Western art practice was, in his opinion, “rubbish,” whereas “there is in your genuine art real beauty . . . you should not make the mistake of throwing it away, or of forgetting or of overlooking it and not seeing it all.”41 Wilker flattened geographic and cultural difference—“primitive Negro art” of the type celebrated by Europeans was hardly abundant in South Africa—to make an ideological claim: his African students,