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ABSTRACT
In this article, the author addresses the problematic mythologising of certain institutional “opportunities” negotiated by black artists during apartheid—notably those associated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church (ELC) Art and Craft Centre, Rorke’s Drift—and the inscription of such “opportunities” within South African art historical discourse as originary narratives of white beneficence, at the expense of black subjective agency and self-authorship. The refusal of bestowal (or “measured thanks”) articulated by artists such as Cyprian Shilakoe and Azaria Mbatha calls for, as the author argues, something more than a diligent programme of historical revision—rather, it warrants another form of appreciation altogether. This involves a relational and imaginative stepping in to what Olu Oguibe calls a “terrain of difficulty” (The Culture Game, 2004. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 11) and an acknowledgement there of the multiple transactions by which black artists have navigated an institutionalised art economy of non-opportunity. Turning to recent curatorial projects by Thembinkosi Goniwe, Gabi Ngcobo, Yvette Mutumba, and Same Mdluli, the author considers ways in which their various (and alternative) approaches to “black art histories” enable the possibility of a more open, inhabited and less historically fixed appreciation.
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Notes
1 References to this premonition are recalled by Dan Rakgoathe (Citation1973), as well as Shilakoe’s Johannesburg-based gallerist Linda Givon (Citation1990).
2 Building on earlier measures of segregation and white self-advancement, such as the 1913 Land Act, the establishment of apartheid in South Africa (1948) reinforced a rigorous policy of protected labour. A significant development in this regard was the 1953 Bantu Education Act, in which schools open to black students were centralised under the Bantu Education Department, a body dedicated to keeping education for “non-whites” separate and inferior. These and other measures were deployed so as to preserve opportunities associated with skilled labour for “poor whites”, and to manufacture a cheap and available source of black menial labour. See SAHO (Citation2011).
3 See also Zakes Mda (Citation2019, ix) on the white art “mainstream” in apartheid South Africa and the associated “othering” of black artists.
4 “Rorke’s Drift” is commonly deployed as shorthand for the ELC Art and Craft Centre at Rorke’s Drift, in rural Natal (as it was then known), 175 km from Durban and 420 km from Johannesburg.
5 For an authoritative account of the ELC Art and Craft Centre, see Hobbs and Rankin (Citation1997).
6 For information on the Keleketla! Library and Media Art Project, see www.keleketla.org.
7 Linda Givon (then director of the Goodman Gallery) recounts:
Cyprian Mpho Shilakoe walked into my life in the seventies … put his work down in front of me and told me he had selected me to be his gallerist in South Africa. He informed me that he had a gallery abroad and did not need international promotion. (Citation2006, 27)
8 The Community Arts Project (CAP) was an influential non-racial community art centre established in Cape Town in 1977. See Grunebaum and Maurice (Citation2012).
9 The Polly Street Art Centre in Johannesburg was established in 1949 as a recreational centre offering art classes to black students. Key figures such as Sydney Kumalo and Ezrom Legae studied and later taught there. See Miles (Citation2004).
10 In a similar vein, Brenda Danilowitz (Citation1998, 25) observes how “the histories of South Africa’s black artists who came of age in the period before the 1980s have primarily been told through the lenses of the institutions and individuals which enabled their recognition.”
11 The ELC Art and Craft Centre is situated in close proximity to the historic battlefields of Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift, both battles fought between the Zulu and the British. The former was a decisive Zulu victory and the latter a defeat, followed by the formal institution of Imperial British rule.
12 As Mbatha (Citation2005) observes, these reductive views were ultimately rejected by an increasingly politicised black student cohort.
13 In Zulu the term “Kholwa” (“amakholwa”) translates as “believer in God”, referring to Zulu converts to Christianity. Danilowitz describes the Kholwa social and cultural context as that of “a new class of Christian African intelligentsia made up of more prosperous landowners and peasants as well as clergy, clerks, interpreters and teachers” (Citation1998, 25). Mbatha’s reflections on his Kholwa upbringing can be found in his autobiography (Mbatha Citation2005).
14 Mbatha notes, “Every artist strives to discover a personal style. I found mine in the early 1960s, but it never flowered at Sandlwane” (Citation2005, 308).
15 Designed for educators, the Ndaleni Teachers’ Training College in Richmond, in what was then Natal, offered full-time art training to black students already qualified as teachers (Rankin Citation2011, 67).
16 Rakgoathe, for example, went on to obtain a degree from Fort Hare University as well as a master’s degree in African studies from the University of California. His frustrations with the level of education offered at Rorke’s Drift are documented in a chapter of his biography dedicated to his experiences at the centre. See Langhan (Citation2000). For Davis’s reflections, see Davis (Citation2015).
17 Campt’s deployment of “fugitive” or “fugitivity” is most instructive in this regard—as defined not by overt strategies of escape or resistance, but by so many practices “of refusing the terms of negation and dispossession” (Citation2017, 97).
18 Also helpful in this regard are Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu’s reflections on an “evolving aesthetic politics of the contemporary” (Citation2009, 24).
19 See Impressions of Rorke’s Drift exhibition (2013); Charlton-Perkins (Citation2014); Contemporary& (Citation2014).
20 Dhlomo was one of just a few women artists represented in the exhibition. The gender bias in the Jumuna collection (and thus the exhibition) speaks to the gender roles reinforced by the programming and structure of Rorke’s Drift itself. Dhlomo reflects, “When I got to art school there were all these male students. Art was not a women’s domain” (quoted in Hobbs and Rankin Citation2003, 181). Hobbs and Rankin outline the gendered structure of the centre, noting, in contrast to the male-dominated dynamic of the art school, the association of weaving at Rorke’s Drift with “women’s work” (Citation2003, 180–85). Even the ceramic department was split along gender lines, with men working with the wheel and women using the more traditional coiling technique (a situation observed and to some extent reinforced by ceramics curator Corine Meyer [Meyer Citation2019]). Pointing to these alternative channels through which women engaged at Rorke’s Drift, Goniwe included a range of ceramic works in the exhibition, including those of noted ceramicist Elizabeth Mbatha.
21 For information on A Labour of Love, and the curatorial approaches taken by Ngcobo and Mutumba, see Mutumba and Ngcobo (Citation2016).
22 See: Mdluli (Citation2019b) and Joja (Citation2019a; Citation2019b).
23 Black Modernisms in South Africa (1940–1990) was curated by Anitra Nettleton, ostensibly with the assistance of Same Mdluli and Bongani Mahlangu. Critique around the exhibition gained traction when Mdluli and later Mahlangu expressed their discontent with what they described as a situation of “white gate-keeping”, and their concerns around the conditions through which black art histories were being scripted (or erased). In response to the exhibition, the Black Mark Collective (of which Mdluli is a member) staged a public panel discussion entitled Black Artists/White Labels, and made available on their website a bibliography pertaining to the exhibition’s critique. See Black Mark Collective (Citation2016).
24 See van Robbroeck (Citation2011) and Joja (Citation2019b).
25 In contrast, that is, to approaches that challenge the authorial custodianship associated with the “discipline” of curating, and its historic application in the ethnographic and raciogenic arrangement of marginalised bodies. This involves an ethical recourse to curatorial care, where contemporary practices linked to traditional understandings of curating, as a “caring for objects”, are reconstituted in relation to re-acknowledged subjectivities. See VIAD (Citation2018).
26 Worth noting in this respect was the proliferation of positive posts on social media (such as Instagram), many of which expressed deep appreciation not only for the exhibition but for the walkabouts themselves, as granting audiences a measure of access not usually associated with the rarefied environment of art exhibitions.