vision, their changed selves, and the community they made there amid society’s storms.
We know a good deal about those storms. As a way of life, the “apartheid” for which these teachers worked is still little understood. As a concept, it is a term immediately grasped and then shelved with colonialism, racism, segregation, and the Holocaust—the litany of a century’s wrongs.13 Generations of activists, artists, scholars, and others have condemned apartheid’s violence and urged resistance. Yet the term apartheid itself continues to do tremendous violence to those who lived under that system: when we invoke the word—and especially when we append the categories black and South African to it—it becomes too easy to sit back, satisfied that we know the whole story.14
But even those who lived it and fought righteous struggles against the apartheid system can claim only an imperfect knowledge of what it meant to live in that time and place.15 Broad sociological claims produce similarly partial truths—about poverty, about oppression, about inferior education and corrupt and unresponsive bureaucracies. All are true—and all obscure other truths, about the decisions with which people were presented, about the opportunities they seized, and about their exertions for better and more meaningful lives. Life is multiple and contradictory, the political philosopher Richard Iton writes, and when seeking to grasp its various incarnations, “we cannot overlook those spaces that generate difficult data.”16 The Ndaleni art school was such a difficult place.
At a basic level of political and historical identification, the art teachers who passed through Ndaleni were cogs in the machinery of white supremacy. They taught a syllabus written by C. T. Loram’s children—bureaucrats charged with the maintenance of racial separation—and even when teachers could not teach that syllabus to the letter, their quest for materials reveals that they aspired to do so.17 They were also people open to the possibility of beauty, imbued with a confidence that if they could imagine something, they could materialize it; if they needed to say something, they could say it.18 They were thinking people in a time and place that did not necessarily reward their sorts of thoughts. They were relics of a bygone ideology, justly relegated to history’s scrap heap. Ndaleni generates difficult data precisely because it opens a window into the closed room of the past—through its archive, we can see the faces looking out at us, blind to the world of knowledge and hindsight that we inhabit. Twentieth-century South Africa was only one among many such rooms. Indeed, we live in another room today, a room whose boundaries we perceive dimly, if at all. What did it mean to dwell in that realm of perception?19 What comes of our “attempt to see through the looking glass of epistemological history”?20 The Art of Life in South Africa is the story of a community, a school, and the idea that people everywhere are creative beings, capable of making manifest their unique visions of the world.
Figure 1.3 The Hand of Destruction, by Fish Molepo, ARTTRA, no. 38, October 1979, 22
TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOUTH AFRICA
Imagine a kiln. By the early 1960s, it was evident that the art school’s infrastructure was not up to its task. The syllabus called for students to be trained in clay, which was one of the few raw materials abundant in African schools because in many places—although not everywhere—it could be freely gathered from streambeds and other watercourses. In other words, the material was free only in the sense that it was paid for with students’ labor, not cash. The production of clay at Ndaleni art school was a bone-wearying process, involving trips to nearby streams to dig raw clay; hauling buckets up and down steep hills; and spending hours grinding, sieving, and curing raw clay for use in their art classes. All of this was arduous enough without the additional task of gathering wood to fire the students’ creations.
The students had no potter’s wheel, and they had no modern kiln.21 The first iteration of the Ndaleni art school newsletter begged supporters for £150 to buy an electric kiln to ease that last, excessive labor. Funds were not forthcoming, however, and it was not until the early 1970s that the Department of Bantu Education relented and delivered a brand-new, state-of-the-art, electric kiln to Ndaleni’s hillside campus.22 There it sat, untouched and unused, for a decade, until the school closed.
Figure 1.4 Stoking the kiln at Ndaleni, 1975, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4, with the permission of the CC
Ndaleni had electricity; the art school’s instructors might have plugged the thing in and made their students’ lives easier. Yet they understood too well the realities that would be faced by art teachers in the country beyond the campus. Bantu Education schools did not have electric kilns—many did not have electricity at all. It was better to continue to dig a hole in the ground, scrounge for bricks, and gather wood than to humor the department’s illusory modernity.23 The story of this cold electric kiln captures the reality of twentieth-century South Africa differently than do most history books. Both scholarship and popular memory typically capture the vastness of that time by focusing on a handful of well-told stories: the interwoven rise of the industrial state and political segregation, the maintenance of white supremacy and apartheid, and the “people’s” struggle for some sort of new political dispensation.24 Yet the tension between the possibility of the wood-fired kiln and the unreality of the electric kiln reveals an entirely different set of experiences.
Recently, scholars have begun to push against historiographical convention. Some have called for “post-anti-apartheid” historiography, a “history in chords” that can account for the past in ways less beholden to the politics of bygone times, more sensitive to the “complexity” of the past beyond the limits of the “struggle.”25 The metaphor is suggestive. People live their lives multiply, at times striking one note—that of protest, perhaps—and at times striking others—laughter, sorrow, satisfaction.26 Historians typically only register certain sounds as worthy of reproduction, especially those that continue to resonate into our present, even as we claim that our discipline celebrates the contingent, the alternative pasts that were lost along the way to today. As we all know from our own lives, there were always other notes, other ways of experiencing—and therefore capturing—time. What else was life in twentieth-century South Africa, beyond the well-worn keys?
Figure 1.5 The kiln at Ndaleni, 1975, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4, with the permission of the CC
The kiln sounds an important note. All of the technologies that marked modern life in the twentieth century were part of art students’ experiences, if differently than in more equitable spaces. Their experience of the kiln—the consciousness that its unplugged, unused instrumentality proposed—revealed a critical contour of their existence.27 Art students experienced South African modernity not only in poverty and wealth or exclusively in the denial of or vehement insistence on rights but also in muscles tired from digging clay and chopping wood for fire, all as a precondition for creating. They knew twentieth-century South Africa in their knowledge that they would never encounter amenities such as electric kilns in African schools.
But that was only one note the cold kiln played. Art teachers also knew twentieth-century South Africa in their own eagerness to embrace such challenges, to dig clay, to chop wood, and otherwise to work to create beauty under apartheid.28 It is incongruous to think of beauty under apartheid, given the common tendency to see that period of the South African past carried by the momentous tension between oppression and liberation, with scant moments to pause and consider the sensory experience of a single moment spent digging or chopping or waiting
