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Abstract
In this essay I explore the ambivalent subject positions manifest in South African black middle class visual culture of the early twentieth century. I contend that the way moderate assimilationism was articulated in public discourse (and particularly the black press), differed substantially from the way it was employed in individual black artists’ oeuvres. While advertisements in the black press advocated moderate assimilationism by appealing to the material and political aspirations of the upwardly mobile black working and middle classes; individual artists, in the more private and contemplative sphere of fine art, had the opportunity to articulate the full range of conflicting subjective modalities involved in being both bourgeois and black in the Union of South Africa. I propose that the modernity/tradition dialectic, which is strongly implicated in assimilation as strategy, is mobilized as a crude binary in the press, while it articulates a profoundly conflicted and ambivalent subjectivity in the art of black painters such as Milwa Pemba. In this regard, I explore some of the aporias that flow from the fact that the task of black national self-representation should ironically have befallen a literate minority of missionary-trained Africans, who, by the very nature of their education, were economically and culturally alienated from the oppressed majority they were representing. I demonstrate how one of the most essential mechanisms of national construction – the mobilization of naturalized myths of racial or cultural origin – constituted a fraught and problematic modality for the middle-class black artists, whose approach to tradition was characterized by a profoundly ambivalent blend of pride, nostalgia and shame. I also demonstrate, briefly, how different and overlapping African nationalist strategies in Pemba's art correspond to stages identified by Franz Fanon in the unfolding of African nationalism.
Notes
1. This material is based upon work supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa.
2. I have focussed, in this paper, on the two most widely circulated black newspapers of the early twentieth century –Umteteli wa Bantu, which was owned by the Chamber of Mines; and Bantu, which belonged to the Argus group of newspapers. For more information about those newspapers and the early black press in general, see Tomaselli and Louw (Citation1991).
3. I use the male pronoun advisedly in this context. As Anne McClintock demonstrated convincingly in Imperial Leather (1995), African nationalism developed historically as a singularly masculinist phenomenon.
4. The SANNC was formed to contest the racially exclusive definition of nation contained in the Act of Union. The Congress was thus conceived as a counter-project to a divided but exclusively white nationalism.
5. Major discriminatory acts included the Land Act of 1913 which deprived Africans of 87% of their land; the Urban Areas Act 1923 which enforced racial segregation in urban residential areas; the Colour Bar Act of 1927 that prevented Africans from practicing skilled trades; and the Native Administration Act of 1927 that deposed local chiefs by declaring the British crown supreme ruler over all black subjects.
6. Moderation was presented as the only ‘civilized’ option for the ‘educated native’, who, against all evidence to the contrary, continued to regard the white Union Government and the imperial metropole as susceptible to reason and persuasion. The moderate faction opposed overt political action such as strikes, and feared and despised the rising tide of a more militant African nationalism. During the 1918 strikes, for instance, Tengo Jabavu in an editorial of Imvo Zabantsundu warned ‘Native labourers’ not to heed the militant call of ‘certain white agitators’ and ‘when in trouble to come to the Government, their Father’ (Switzer Citation1991, p. 45). The Jabavu family, under the patriarch Tengo Jabavu who edited Imvo Zabantsundu, serve as extreme examples of the efficacy of the self-regulating mechanism of assimilation. Tengo Jabavu, as representative of the black Cape voters, not only refused to join the SANNC, but backed the Afrikaner Bond in Cape elections, and supported the 1913 Natives’ Land Act (Switzer Citation1991, p. 45). Likewise his sons, who succeeded him in the newspaper business, sustained a cripplingly moderate stance.
7. See, for instance, Anderson (Citation1983).
8. For the rural African traditionalist (for whom tradition is not ‘Tradition’ but a way of life), local cultural practices confer distinction and difference from other communities, and thus most certainly does not forge a common bond with Africans of other ethnic description.
9. It is pertinent here to consider that functional literacy among black South Africans was less than 5% during the colonial period (Switzer Citation1991, p. 38). The slow but steady increase of black literacy is illustrated by statistics provided by Johnson, who points out that the figure was 9.89% by 1921, and rose to 12.4% by 1931 (1991, p. 21). This small but steady increase presented a threat to white skilled labour, and partly explains the steady erosion of African rights under Union government.
10. Imvo Zabantsundu (which means African opinion) was established in 1884 by John Tengo Jabavu, and was the first independent newspaper to be produced for and by black South Africans. According to Shaun Johnson, the newspaper was ‘a political archetype for the period, accepting the principles of non-violence and the necessity of working together with “liberal” whites in trying to reform a white-dominated, multi-racial society’ (1991, p. 17).
11. Qualified Africans could theoretically run for political office in the Cape, but J.T. Jabavu, who represented the interests of the Cape enfranchised Africans, rejected this possibility because he feared antagonizing the settler population. Instead he opted for indirect parliamentary representation by backing sympathetic white candidates (Switzer Citation1991, p. 38). The tactic failed, and Africans were finally scrapped from the voter's role in 1936, under the leadership of Herzog.
12. At the conference that led to the formation of the SANNC, Dr P. Ka Seme emphasized that: ‘… the aberrations of the Xosa-Fingo feud, the animosity that exists between Zulus and the Tongans, between Basutos and every other Native must be buried and forgotten; it has shed among us sufficient blood! We are one people. These divisions, these jealousies, are the cause of all our woes and of all our backwardness and ignorance today’.
13. It may seem problematic to consider images from Umteteli Wa Bantu as articulations of African nationalist subjectivity if one considers that the newspaper was launched by the Chamber of Mines to regulate and control black political opinion after the 1920 mine strike, but, in fact, this newspaper significantly demonstrates the ambiguities and compromising collaborative stance that may be regarded as typical of early African nationalism. Both Johnson (Citation1991) and Switzer (Citation1991) discuss the willingness of moderate members of the SANNC to contribute (as editors and feature writers) to Umteteli.
14. Johnson suggests that Bantu World, first published in 1932, represents the emergence of a mass black press, largely owned by the Argus company, and that this newspaper typifies the ambiguities of the black press at this time. According to Johnson, one of the stated aims of the publication was to elevate the black population to the ‘civilized standards’ of the white man (1991, p. 21).
15. Wole Soyinka expressed a similar sentiment:
We black Africans have been blandly invited to submit ourselves to a second epoch of colonisation – this time by a universal-humanoid abstraction defined and conducted by individuals whose theories and prescriptions are derived from the apprehension of their world and their history, their social neuroses and their value systems.
(quoted in van Niekerk Citation1998, p. 85, original emphasis)
16. Pemba was educated at missionary schools and obtained tertiary education.
17. See van Robbroeck (Citation2005).
18. The influential British Modernist art critic, Roger Fry, distinguished between the abstraction of European Modernist art and African art by describing European abstraction as the end result of a long and sophisticated process of artistic evolution; while African abstraction was the product of an innately primitive sense of rhythm and design (Citation1957).
19. Korsten, where Pemba lived most of his life, had no running water or sewerage removal, and suffered two outbreaks of the bubonic plague in his lifetime (1918 and 1938).
20. Sekoto's paintings of Sophiatown in Johannesburg and District Six in Cape Town, where he worked and lived for part of his career, provide rare glimpses of the vibrant multiculturalism of the pre-Apartheid freehold suburbs. Both Sophiatown and District Six were demolished by the Apartheid state because of their multi-racial communities and their proximity to city centres. Sophiatown was razed to the ground to make way for a lower socio-economic white suburb named ‘Triomf’ (Triumph). District Six is now in the process of being restored to its former communities.
21. This interpretation assumes, of course, that Pemba and Sekoto intended their art for the middle-class white art consumer. This is not an unreasonable assumption, given the poor support from a black community largely unfamiliar with modern art, and economically incapable of affording such luxuries. A look at any book on Pemba's art reveals that almost all the extant paintings are in private white collections.
22. It is significant that, while his nationalist concerns remain couched in the indirect language of Christian humanism in scenes close to home, they emerge more emphatically and unambiguously in a portrait he made, in 1936, of an Abyssinian, to protest the Italian invasion of Ethiopia.
23. It is thus perhaps not coincidence that Pan-Africanism, which corresponds to Fanon's second phase, first took root in South Africa in the 1940s, when Pemba launched his quest to reawaken pride in his African heritage.
24. In this regard it is significant that contemporary white artists such as Irma Stern (under the influence of European primitivist movements such as German Expressionism), actively pursued a South African brand of primitivism in which an idyllic pre-modern Africa is evoked.
25. This shift was partly occasioned by the fact that Pemba met and befriended the famous and highly respected Xhosa poet, Samuel Mqhayi, in the late 1930s. Mqhayi's poetry extolled pride in Xhosa heritage and culture.
26. It is interesting to note, however, that block prints Pemba produced of traditional leaders sold quite well to the local community. According to Miles, Pemba discontinued this range in the 1970s, when tribalism and ethnicity were rejected in favour of a militant Pan-Africanism in the townships.
27. When the artist Moses Tladi submitted work for the annual exhibition of the South African Academy in 1929, a new category ‘Special exhibit by native artist’ had to be created to accommodate his entry (Miles Citation1997, p. 63).