From Country to City: The Development of an Urban Art
Steven Sack
… a fascinating exhibition, a feast which confirms one's sense of all the creative potential that has been lost, damaged or stunted by social inequality.
E. Heyns, editor
South African Journal of Cultural and Art History, July, 1989
This selection from a 1989 catalogue essay by Steven Sack, a lecturer in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of South Africa, highlights the stark difference between the social conditions out of which European modernism emerged and the situation for black South African artists under apartheid: the system of racism instituted by the federal parliament and legally enforced between 1948 and 1994. In every area of life, apartheid law strictly segregated Whites from non-Whites: Blacks (indigenous Africans), Indians (Asians), and Coloreds (mixed-race). The black African artists presented in this essay did not live in agricultural villages as southern Africans had done until the nineteen thirties when the growth of industrialized cities drew the rural population to them en masse as laborers. Sack tells of artists’ efforts to represent African identity in transition between country and city, tradition and modernity. He begins in the nineteen thirties and ‘forties and takes us through the apartheid era when non-White urban workers were forced to live in new townships created exclusively for them by the government. Located near White cities like Johannesburg (see map below), South African townships were underdeveloped shack ghettos that lackednormal social and cultural amenities. Soweto, for example, with a population of over a million in the nineteen seventies, had only one movie house, one nightclub, one hotel, and two sport stadiums. Artists were cut off from nearly every opportunity to develop their talents. How did theylearn Western art idioms andproduce authentically African modern art under such circumstances? The next reading in this volume, ”Nomfanekiso Who Paints at Night: The Art of Gladys Mgudlandlu” by Elza Miles, focuses on one of the township artists mentioned in this piece; and Okwui Enwezor’s “A Critical Presence: Drum Magazine in Context,” presents another point of view on township culture in the nineteen fifties and ‘sixties, one that stresses its vibrant richness.
Source: Steven Sack. “From Country to City: The Development of an Urban Art,” in Ten Years of Collecting, edited by Anitra Nettleton and David Hammond-Tooke, 54-57. Johannesburg: University of WitwatersrandArtGalleries, 1989.
Many of the most talented of the black artists (in South Africa) have either died young and tragic deaths or have chosen to live in exile. This adds innumerable difficulties in the writing of this history. Andrew Motjuoadi (1935-1968) died as the result of a stroke, Julian Motau (1948-1968) was murdered in Alex township, Ephraim Ngatane (1938-1971) died of TB, Cyprian Shilakoe (1946-1972) was killed in a motor accident, Ruben Xulu (1952-1965) was murdered, Thami Mnyele (1948-1985) was killed by the SADF in Gaborone, John Muafangejo (1943-1987) died from a heart attack, Nelson Mukhuba (1925-1987) committed suicide, Mandla Nkosi (1962-1987) fell to his death, Ernest Mancoba, Gerard Sekoto, Dumile, Louise Maqhubela and Azaria Mbhata - all chose exile. Dikobe Martins, who is primarily known as a poet, is currently in jail for political activities. It is remarkable that during the run of "The Neglected Tradition" exhibition at the JohannesburgArtGallery (November 1988 - January 1989) two of the participating artists died, Sidney Kumalo (1935-1988) from an abdominal hemorrhage and Stanley Nkosi (1945-1988) from a head injury.
Undoubtedly there have been many different contributing factors in the premature deaths of so many of the artists but the impact of apartheid and the inferior living conditions inflicted on black people are a major contributing factor.
During the 19th century most Africans in southern Africa lived in independent chiefdoms divided along ethnic lines. The vast majority of African people were dependent on the land for their survival; but with the discovery and harnessing of the mineral wealth of southern Africa "the very nature of work changed”[1] By the 1930s the forces of industrialization had led to widespread urbanization and the erosion of ethnic identities. Living conditions were transformedand many social and cultural practices underwent enormous changes. And so capitalism, largely in the hands of the white settlers, which transformed the nature of existence, also led to the development of new artistic practices. The activity of fine arts needs to be understood in terms of the newly evolving capitalist economy. The very fact that the greatest part of the wealth being generated was in the hands of the white community made it essential for the newly emerging black artists to look to the white middle class for their patronage.
The new art that was produced during the 1930s illustrated the competing forces that were molding the lives of urban Africans. Traditionalism, Christianity and the environment of the townships all influenced a new generation of artists who adopted western artmaking techniques and began to explore the iconography that arose from these contexts. Gerard Bhengu and Jabulani Ntuli produced innumerable studies of traditional life and custom; Ernest Mancoba undertook a number of ecclesiastical commissions; and John Koenakeefe Mohl and Gerard Sekoto began to portray the new urban environment.
At this early stage there were artists working in the Transvaal, Eastern Cape and Natal[2]. It is interesting to note that the Transvaal artists Koenakeefe Mohl, Ernest Mancoba and Gerard Sekoto, like their fellow artists from the Eastern Cape, George Pemba and Gladys Mgudlandlu, were all trained as teachers at mission colleges. There are distinctive differences between the work produced in Natal and that from the Transvaal, during the 1930s and 1940s. Natal/Zululand artists such as Simon Mnuguni, Jabulani Ntuli, Arthur Butelezi and Gerard Bhengu were almost exclusively producing images of traditional life. Some of these were historical recreations of cultural and social practices that were dying out (as the topographical and figurative work of Ntuli);others involved the portrayal of living people in traditional dress involved in traditional customsand practices (such as numerous studies of witchdoctors by Simon Mnguni). Apart fromBhengu, who appears to have received a certainamount of informal training, none of the other Natal artists mentioned received much art education. This contrasts quite dramatically with the Transvaal artists such as Mohl, Mancoba, and to a lesser extent Sekoto (as far as art training is concerned), who were all formally educated. Mohl remains one of the few African artists in the entire history of the South African fine art tradition to have received intense academic art training. His work differs from most of the Natal artists both in terms of subject matter and medium. However, there are a number of similarities between him and Bhengu, particularly in their choice oflandscape and their perspectival use of space. Mohl was one of the few artists who, at this early stage, had learnt oil painting technique and claims to have introduced both Sekoto and Pemba to oil painting.
The process of urbanization took place, differently in different parts of the country, particularly where the rural homestead was in closer proximity to the urban place of work. The 1913 Land Act, while greatly limiting the right of ownership to land on the part of black people, nonetheless ensured that the rural homestead remained the base of most black families. This dual existence of most Africans suited the needs of capitalism and the 1913 Land Act entrenched this. The notion and development of an art by black urban artists is informed by this constant interchange between rural and urban life. This phenomenon needs to be distinguished from the revivalist intentions of a number of artists working in the late 1950s and 1960s at the Polly Street Art Centre.[3] Their need to identify with traditional African culture had little to do with a personal connection with any rural homestead. They looked to the sculptural traditions of west and central Africa, as well as the modernist European translations of the same African sources (Figure 11).
From the 1930s until the 1980s the dualities of the city and the country, the traditional and the modern, were evident in the work of many artists. The works of John Koenakeefe Mohl, Andrew Motjuoadi and Helen Sebidi serve to illustrate this point. Unlike Gerard Sekoto, who concentrated virtually exclusively on township scenes,[4] Mohl painted rural and urban scenes. Mohl's work, more than that of any other artist, illustrates the conditions of life in the townships of the 1930s and the interplay between city and countryside. Mohl's paintings document his life in these two environments between which he regularly traveled, and capture the duality that was characteristic of the lives of migrant workers.Mohl maintained a close attachment to nature (he attempted to create a feeling of the wild in his garden in Soweto by planting indigenous cacti). He believed in the need to return to the rural homestead and encouraged his pupil, Helen Sebidi, to return to her rural home in order to rediscover her roots. However, Mohl was also involved in the township milieu and painted innumerable township scenes, often choosing dramatic moments such as thunderstorms and always making use of strong light and shadow contrasts. (…)
In a much later period of fine art produced by African artists, Helen Sebidi has produced works that, in terms of different artistic languages, address the dual experience of town and country. In her case the focus is far more on the figure itself, whereas Mohl gives greater attention to specific details that define locality. In fact, Mohl differs markedly from Sebidi in his treatment of the figure. The dichotomy between urban and rural, which in Mohl's work has been indicated in literal reproductions of locality, is no longer conveyed through depiction of specific place, but through an attitude of mind (resulting from the exposure to modernism in art). Although both of Sebidi's paintings illustrated here (Figures 1 and 10) talk of womanhood, they do so in quite different ways. The one talks of woman's labour in a fairly literal way, using perspectival conventions that serve to create a real world, and women's labour in the lands is portrayed. The world portrayed in Mother Africahowever, is more symbolic and the title suggests a metaphoric and mythologizing intent. It is not clear where these figures are. Sebidi completely eliminates locality in her works produced in the 1980s, resulting in images that are wholly constructed out of human figures and fragments of figures. (…)
The paintings of township scenes that both Mohl and Sekoto were producing in the 1930s and 1940s were often a form of documentary reportage portrayals of the mundane daily lives of the black inhabitants of the townships. Mohl's work was more attentive to particularized details, whereas Sekoto worked in an impressionistic style with a strong emphasis on painterly technique. There were no professional black photographers working at this time, and the earliest street photographerswere engaged in "snapping away at pedestrians in couples,"[5]a practice that appears to have begun in the late 1940s. It was only in the 1950s that black photographers such as Bob Gosani and Peter Magubane began to document the township environment. It was left to the paintings of Mohl and Sekoto to capture in visual form some of the quality of township life in the 1930s and 1940s. Another interesting dimension to the phenomenon of township depictions had to do with the fact that the townships became less and less accessible to white South Africans. Whereas Sophiatown was, for a time, a place where all people could meet, the new townships built in the 1950s could only be entered by whites with a permit. Hence the scenes of townships painted by black artists, to be sold almost exclusively to a white audience, take on anotherkind of significance. These paintings conveyed images of an environment unknown to the white audience, and they therefore carried an enormous responsibility in communicating the nature and quality of life in the townships. It was simply not possible for the artists of the townships to paint quaint and picturesque broken-down houses. The environment in which they lived contained far too much violence. It has been suggested that the harsh reality of township life was largely ignored by the township artists. Undoubtedly many self-pitying and sentimental images were produced, to satisfy the demands of the commercial fine art market, and it is this kind of work that was to draw harsh criticism from the proponents of Black Consciousness. But the work of artists such as Dumile and Motau[6] attest to the enormous anguish and torment and the need to talk of the violence that surrounded them and that, in many instances, destroyed them. (…)
[1]J. Callinicos,Working Life 1886-1940: A People's History of South Africa, Volume 2 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987), p. 7.
[2]Rural Transvaal, Eastern Cape, and Natal were provinces of South Africa until the end of the apartheid regime in 1994 when provinces and homelands were reorganized. The Transvaal, which no longer exists as a province, was located between the Vaal River in the south, and the Limpopo River in the north. Natal, bordering it, is KwaZulu-Natal.
[3] The Polly Street Art Centre in Johannesburg was an urban community center and the first art school where black artists, excluded from all white art institutions, could get an education, exhibitions, and career assistance. Cecil Skotnes (English, b. 1926) one of the leading artists in South Africa, became its director in 1952 and had over 40 students by the end of 1954.
[4] B. Lindop, Gerard Sekoto (Randburg: Dictum Publishing, 1988), p. 20.
[5]J. Schadenberg, The Finest Photos from the Old Drum: A Bailey's African Photo Archives, Penguin Books, 1987), p. 50.
[6] Dumile Feni (1942-1991), brilliant “Goya of the Townships” whose large expressionist drawings revealed the dark truths of Township life, immigrated to the US in 1968. The fierce expressionism of Julian Motau (1948-1968) was strongly influenced by Dumile in the few years he lived to produce art before his violent death.