to ask them to submit student work for the arts and crafts exhibition. The responses were almost universally negative—the letters went out in January, soon after the schools had reopened and long after most had trashed the work that their students had produced during the previous school year—but the motive behind the correspondence was telling.90 When searching for evidence of the continued vitality of African cultural traditions in midcentury South Africa, the logics of the curriculum necessitated that one start with the schools. National educational investigations through the late 1930s and into the 1940s confirmed the conviction that education was about cultural reproduction, first and foremost. The perceived need to preserve the genius of natives had displaced the potential to discover native geniuses. The logic of cultural preservation and transmission having been set in place, students continued to work with their hands in schools, weaving grass, modeling clay, and stringing beads. The 1949 Commission on Native Education, under the leadership of W. G. Eiselen, was the farthest-reaching of these national education commissions. W. G. Eiselen had attended the NEF conference while teaching at Stellenbosch in the early 1930s. Then, he had been a loud proponent of the declensionist narrative, blaming “the rapid and uncontrolled influx of European civilization” for the sad state of African cultural practices. Social change had been too abrupt and too jarring, he argued, with the advent of migrant labor and the move to cities having resulted in the “absence of the men and reliance upon cash wages lead[ing] to neglect of the gardens and the homes and to made goods supplanting the work of the artisan.”91
Nearly two decades later, with the advent of apartheid, he saw reason for optimism: over and against European hegemony, Eiselen’s commission took as a given “the virility, adaptiveness and pervasiveness of Bantu traditional culture.” True, African societies had been buffeted by change, but “even where complete substitution of the indigenous culture by Western culture has been striven after the indigenous culture has in no case disappeared completely.” His commission asserted that “the general function of education is to transmit the culture of a society from its more mature to its immature members and in so doing to develop their powers.” African society was unique, was it not? Who could critique its advancement as such? That Eiselen was an Afrikaner, trained in the tradition of German Volkekunde anthropology, and a member of the National Party was essential to this renewed call for an adapted education; still, those labels were also incidental, accidents of language and electoral politics. More apposite was that Eiselen and his commission worked within a South African intellectual tradition that believed African students and African society benefited from handling grass and clay.92
Eiselen’s progression from warning of decay to promoting “adaptiveness” and “virility” was telling. Ideas about African creativity had shifted dramatically in the preceding decades. Where once African geniuses were notably few and far between, now the genius of the collective was well established, if threatened. Where once artistic attainment was measured by the mastery of European artistic forms, now the critique of the imperial universal validated the perfection of indigenous technique in indigenous mediums. Recall how, in 1937, “Ethnologist” called for the government to take an active role in preserving African-made objects as remnants of a lost society. As the apartheid government consolidated its hold over South Africa, its bureaucracies promised to do better than that. The time was ripe to reanimate tradition as the basis of what the Eiselen’s commission referred to as“a modern progressive culture, with social institutions which will be in harmony with one another and with the evolving conditions of life to be met in South Africa.”93 Not stasis, not regress: progress. Native genius, cradled in the apartheid schools, would grow into an African modernity in South Africa, coherent, consistent, and stronger for having survived its tangle with imperial hegemony—or so the state’s theory went. Members of the Eiselen Commission had few kind words for their predecessors in the Union’s provincial education ministries, but they did laud the previous government for laying the foundation for such progress. “It is true that they have, in the face of the most open opposition of Bantu parents, insisted on the retention of Bantu handicrafts in the school syllabi,” the report noted.94 Now, under the National Party, passive, contested retention would become energetic, enthusiastic development.
As we have seen, the apartheid government’s initial surveys about craftwork yielded few results. But Natal, ever a leader in matters of African education, promised that it could deliver. “We understand that Organizer Mr. Grossert who deals with Arts and Crafts in the Natal Native Schools, is putting up a comprehensive memorandum on the subject and feel that this will be far more precise and useful than any information we could give on the subject.”95 Natal’s inspector of native education begged Pretoria for patience. Grossert was a busy man, traveling the province, collecting and critiquing student craft. He was also increasingly spending time in the Midlands, near Richmond, supervising the teacher-training course in art that he had started at Indaleni.
Figure 3.1 Jack Grossert in Durban, 1978, with the permission of the CC
Chapter 3
ART
JOHN WATT GROSSERT—Jack, to those who knew him—was born in Tweedie, Natal, in 1913. He trained in fine arts at the University of Natal, studying with O. J. P. Oxley. After graduation, he qualified as an art teacher, one of only two in African schools in the mid-1930s. He moved quickly into native education administration, serving first as a regional inspector and eventually, after the advent of apartheid, as the organizer of arts and crafts for the entire Natal Province. (He assumed the same position on a national level after 1955.) The organizer was a relatively recently defined position; Grossert traveled the length and the breadth of the province—he spoke of traversing tens of thousands of kilometers per year—visiting with principals and instructors, attending school shows, and overseeing the implementation of the arts and crafts program in government-supported schools.1 He was also an impassioned public intellectual. He published frequently on matters ranging from the development of the Bantu Education syllabus to the need to establish a collection of African craft in his home province. He lectured both at home and abroad; he gave talks on African art on Radio Bantu; and beginning in the early 1950s, he spoke frequently about the specialist art teachers’ training course that he opened at the Indaleni Mission, outside Richmond in the Midlands.
The specialist art teachers’ course was Grossert’s brainchild. The program embodied the aspirations and promise of his wide-ranging reading about the role of art and education to promote what he repeatedly described as “harmonious relationships” among people. For Grossert, art education was not only about economic stability and the need to preserve cultural traditions from the overwhelming power of industrial modernity—although those were issues about which he cared deeply. Art was also “educative in the profoundest sense of the word”—it trained people to think, to create, to be, and to be better members of a community.2 Art was foundational and essential, and after 1955, the apartheid government’s support for his program ensured that South Africa would remain on the cutting edge of progressive pedagogical practice.
Grossert was undoubtedly a primitivist; he was among the many white South Africans who worried about the loss of black South Africa’s cultural traditions and who fretted about whether the institutional training of African artists risked seeding a dangerous cultural schizophrenia. Yet Grossert’s faith in art education emerged simultaneously from a deeply held critique of white, Western, industrial modernity. He was not concerned that some vague “Africanness” was being lost to urbanization and social change; rather, like John Ruskin and others associated with the nineteenth-century arts and crafts movement, he was concerned that essential human values such as harmony and balance were at stake in the struggle to retain crafts on the curriculum.3
In addition to his duties as organizer and founder of the art-training course, Grossert published two books during
