we might understand art as apartheid in one of its manifest operations. This is not to say that we understand art according to our received knowledge of what apartheid was—a set of laws and economic relationships, an oppressive system—but instead, that we focus on art as creative practice conditioned by what was possible then and there.
This is the perspective assumed in The Art of Life in South Africa—that we need to move forward in time with historical subjects, to survey the terrain of the possible and watch the work that went into creating. What Berger wrote of painters is true of all artists: “When a painter is working he is aware of the means which are available to him—these include his materials, the style he inherits, the conventions he must obey, his prescribed or freely chosen subject manner.”51 By concentrating intently on one school and one set of practitioners, I am able to access that fleeting awareness and watch as creative beings pick and choose from the possible.52
Even under apartheid, education was not simple indoctrination: to learn was to develop, to change. This was especially so if the subject was art. Ndaleni’s teachers worked for the apartheid state, but their frame of reference was global, stretching back to early twentieth-century debates about the nature of the creative human subject. Art objects are the outcomes of processes of analysis, selection, and embodiment, in material form. Art is the work of consciousness made manifest; creation is an act that crosses the threshold between the mind and the world. The artist creates by not merely inhabiting convention and context but also moving within it. Context is both “opportunity and restraint,” Berger writes, “by working and using the opportunity [the artist] becomes conscious of some of its limits [and] pushes against one or several of them. According to [the artist’s] character and historical situation, the result of his pushing varies from a barely discernible variation of a convention . . . to a more fully original discovery, a breakthrough.”53 To see artists working through and with time is to open up new vistas about both art and thought in African history.
Much self-conscious Africanist intellectual history has long centered on the concerns of the anticolonial imagination and the nation. But a significant substratum has considered the same issues that Berger assigned to the artist: what it means to inhabit and move in a particular time and place and how thinking beings manifest their thoughts in the physical, social world.54 Recent Africanist scholarship from southern Africa to the Great Lakes and West Africa depicts thinkers as those charged with imagining and making real the community. This sort of thought is often about the fundamental task of getting by, whether in the maintenance and unfolding of political communities in precolonial Buganda; the bringing of rain to parched fields in Tanzania or highveld South Africa; or the maintenance of expansive, beloved families under a sheikh’s authority in colonial French West Africa.55 Beyond the box of the nation, African intellectual history abounds with thinkers’ efforts to make life better by making the imagined real.
Figure 1.7 Daphne Biyela (center) and classmates preparing wood for sculpture, 1978, photographer unknown, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4, with the permission of the CC
To make the imagined real, through discipline and practice, is the regular work of art.56 Asked to define the nature of art, Berger reflects on “the moment at which a piece of music begins.” Art emerges in the “incongruity of that moment, compared to the uncounted, unperceived silence which preceded it.”57 Before the music starts, there was only time, undifferentiated and indistinguishable; then, suddenly, human invention crossed the threshold from the mind into history. The eruption of music lays bare the “distinction between the actual and the desirable.” It makes apparent the constant, invisible thinking that is always in the world. Art is thus not an isolated, esoteric concern but social practice, just as Africanist scholars have suggested that intellectual history is concerned not with esoterica but with the real historical demands of life.
But art is not merely a part of history. To capture in form the style of an era is no superficial task; rather, artists tend a delicate crop, that of beauty and its cognates—related terms such as happiness, contentedness, reflection, and satisfaction. “Aesthetics prime the pump of life,” Michael Taussig argues. Ndaleni artists worked hard without adequate materials because they were convinced, as were many others both in South Africa and elsewhere, that “beauty is as much infrastructure as are highways and bridges.”58 They understood that to create was to argue for beauty in the everyday, even under apartheid, even with cast-off paper or shoe polish. For them, to be an artist was not to revel in the distinction between thought and the rest of life; it was to attempt again and again “to define and make unnatural this distinction.”59 We venerate works of art to the degree that we raise temples to their glory and charge admission merely to stand in their presence. But the social purpose of the work that comes before the works reveals that we have it backward. Art is not beauty shut off from the world—it is the faithful conviction that the world is worth beautifying.
Or at least, that was how Mercy Ghu saw it in the late 1970s when she taught her Soweto students to work with what was at hand and celebrated their happy chatter from deep within apartheid. Hers is an instructive case. Ghu was talented and interested in creating, which is what took her to Ndaleni. She never made it as an artist in the conventional sense: she did not sell her works and instead made her living teaching in government schools. In this, she was like the vast majority of Ndaleni graduates who came to art school for a year, studied and practiced, then returned to their lives as teachers or bureaucrats. Yet for Mercy Ghu, there was beauty in her classroom and her students; she yearned for them to live through art as she did, to create in their own lives as she did in hers through her teaching in a Bantu Education school. Experiences like Ghu’s are what make the Ndaleni story something other than “art history.” The history of their art school was inscribed in the intellectual life of its students rather than through the sum total of their works. Together they wrote the story of a place that generated a shared vision of human possibility and that then came up against the limits of context. In their intense attention to their time, Ndaleni students reach into ours to speak of the ongoing challenge and potential of life.60
Figure 1.8 Mercy Ghu, 1969, photographer unknown, Ndaleni Scrapbook 3, with the permission of the CC
LIFE
And what of life? If creating is a constant, necessary human task, how does each artist—each person—pursue it? As art historians have shown, some South African artists did this directly by engaging the state and the system, whereas others did so through relationships that belied the country’s social segregation. But what did it mean that these Ndaleni artists did so as teachers, in apartheid government schools, and that most eagerly embraced the opportunity? As a historian, I am able to put their social position—teacher—into conversation with other aspects of what I think was important about their identities—male, female, black, South African, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s—and to draw conclusions about the politics of the choice each made to go to work for Bantu Education. Yet art’s insights give me pause, as does the impossibility of knowing a person’s mind other than through their speech, creations, and ability to cross that threshold of consciousness in the world. We need a new politics to grasp the implications of their historically conditioned maneuvers.61
The work of self-making was ongoing under apartheid, in ways that were beholden neither to the state nor to its opposition yet were nevertheless deeply implicated in the structures of their time and place. That is precisely the point. In her study of the self-making correspondence of the early twentieth-century healer Louise Mvemve, Catherine Burns discussed Mvemve’s letters as a sort of microinfrastructure, as “girders” laid between a self and others. Previously, scholars had shown the hegemonic effects of
