to consider the ongoing discussions about the nature of African creativity in the wake of urbanization, the supposed hegemony of European culture, and other epochal shifts. Other scholars have showed how white artists in particular responded to these changes by embracing a variant of the primitivism that had marked the advent of modernism in early twentieth-century Europe. I consider how, on the policy side, educationists and others shifted the justification for manual work in schools from industrial training to the preservation of “Africanness.” This conversation predated the election of the apartheid government and quickened in its wake, as the state attempted to resuscitate its version of African culture as part of separate development.79
I further consider the reasoning behind this in chapter 3, “Art.” Interwar and post–World War I South African educationists were not the only ones articulating an ideology of art in education. From the early twentieth century through the 1920s, theorists turned to African art to critique the mechanical excess of modernity.80 In the interwar years, thinkers animated this concept, to suggest that from African art might be drawn methods for projecting a new, more humane form of modernity than that which bedeviled industrialized societies.81 That “the modern” was both multiple and accessible through culture was a touchstone of ideological separate development in South Africa. The problem, however, was that South Africa’s African populations generally lacked the visual culture traditions that had so animated the primitivist imagination. The chapter explores how artists and educationists addressed this supposed shortcoming by concentrating on African craft practices—from basketry to indigenous architecture—to advocate for multiple ways to be artists. One of the driving forces behind what we might call “craft modernity” was Jack Grossert, who by the mid-1950s was the national organizer of arts and crafts under Bantu Education. As Natal regional inspector a decade earlier, Grossert had begun to advocate for a specialist arts and crafts teacher-training program to support the African schools. By the early 1950s, this program was open at the Indaleni Mission.
Chapter 4, “Journeys,” considers the initial decade of the program, under its first three teachers, and it begins to explore the lives and paths of the first students who enrolled in the art school. The archive deepens after 1963, when the program’s fourth teacher, Lorna Peirson, took over and established a new regime of both pedagogy and record keeping. The chapter thus moves forward to encompass the 1960s and 1970s as well, to ask who came to Ndaleni art school and why. Peirson brought remarkable stability during the nearly two decades that she taught at Ndaleni. There were important variations, but in general, her version of the Ndaleni education was consistent enough that I am able to draw broad conclusions across those years. Four factors were vital to this consistency: students’ common experiences of both journeying to and living at the art school, the physical experience of the campus, the unrelenting struggle for materials with which to work, and the theories and concepts to which the students were exposed.
I consider the confluence of these four experiences most explicitly in the book’s longest section, chapter 5, “Learning.” This chapter looks closely at both the learning and the labor that went into being trained as an art teacher. Here, we see most clearly the compromises that inhered in students’ experiences—from the grand ideological level of working for Bantu Education, especially in the wake of school and other protests, to the quotidian, gendered ground of exertion, accommodation, food, and community. If students’ lives were their art, during their year on campus they did the work necessary to embody thought in frequently beautiful material form.
And yet, each year ended by releasing students’ creative efforts into the wider, differently certain world—first through an annual sale of objects and then through students’ (re)encounters with South African reality beyond Richmond. Chapter 6, “Apartheid,” explores Ndaleni art students’ roles within the more celebrated political narratives of mid-twentieth-century South Africa, in three forms: protest and political violence, the apartheid education system, and the personal and bureaucratic politics of the Bantustans. In each case, Ndaleni art students-cum-teachers were forced to accommodate their ideas about art and education to prevailing conditions, just as artists’ unique visions always bend to the possibilities of context. Chaper 6 locates the Ndaleni art school itself within the unfolding—and eventual unraveling—of apartheid, and it closes with the school’s own demise in the early 1980s.
The work of art continued, however, even as conditions shifted. The book’s final chapter, “Artists,” considers the possibility of beauty as an organizing principle under apartheid, first by focusing on the trajectories of the small minority of Ndaleni student who actually found a living as visual artists after leaving the school. I supplement these few case studies with stories about others—teachers, parents, friends—who were not “artists” but nevertheless found beauty in their efforts to maintain their integrity and vision across the sweep of their lives. An epilogue, “The Art of the Past,” considers the legacy of Ndaleni in South African art history, in art education, and at the site of the school itself.
. . .
In 2012, I had the great fortune to learn of Cedric Nunn’s passion for the Ndaleni site. As the epilogue relates, the decades since the art school’s closure have not been kind to the campus or to Richmond. Some of the school’s buildings now house a provincial school for the deaf; others have been ruined and looted for different sorts of raw materials than those that artists sought—bricks and metal to build homes or to sell for scrap. But the art students’ works are still there—murals, cement reliefs, mosaics, statues—all the more incongruous for the disrepair of the landscape. Nunn lives nearby and has been visiting the Indaleni Mission for more than two decades, documenting the place and its art. It is a tremendous privilege to feature his photographs in this study. His elegiac work captures the sense of loss, absence, ruin and the stunning beauty that pervades a place where teachers and students once met and created. Although the mission still stands—and there have been moves to restore its former prominence as an educational center—the Ndaleni art school is gone and not coming back. It is a relic of apartheid, in its own way like the street and city names, monuments, and numerous social ills through which the past continues to haunt South Africa.82 Yet we must acknowledge that ghosts are often ancestors as well, with the fertility that the past’s continuing relationship with the present can yield.
There was once a community that came together to create, at an old mission station, on a hillside in South Africa.
Chapter 2
CRAFTWORK
IN THE late 1920s, black South Africa discovered that it had artists. In 1928, a Parktown gardener named Moses Tladi began to show his landscape paintings to aficionados around Johannesburg. The black press took note and hailed Tladi as “a Native genius.” Promoted by some of interwar Johannesburg’s leading liberals, Tladi exhibited across the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, and the Cape. He earned a special dispensation to show a “special exhibit by a Native artist” with the South African Academy of Art in 1929—the first African to do so—as well as to show at the South African National Gallery, where he was the only African included in the 1931 show that organizers intended to demonstrate South Africa’s emergence as a center of art production in its own right. Tladi was black South Africa’s first celebrated artist. By the end of the 1930s, names such as Gerard Bhengu, George Pemba, Ernest Mancoba, John Mohl, and Gerard Sekoto were being discussed by art lovers from Durban to Cape Town and Johannesburg.1 By the 1940s, Tladi had faded into obscurity, even as a South Africa primed to consider the implications of black artistic success brought the handful of his peers to greater renown. But Tladi was the first, a “Native genius” with pencil,
