individuals embraced the opportunities history presented to them, in the service of their “complex, situational and unfolding sense of self.”62 Similarly, later generations of black South Africans embraced the opportunities presented to them under apartheid, such as enrolling at Ndaleni, where they sought to build a community of like-minded selves—artists, capable of expressing something unique to their being-in-the-world.
In what follows, I offer few arguments about their art. Still, Ndaleni was an art school, and its archive reveals that students were convinced that art—or often Art, capitalized—was vital to the construction of their durable selves. “Agency,” observes Joan Scott, “is not the innate property of an abstract individual” but a historical quality, “the attribute of subjects who are defined by—subjected to—discourses that bring them into being as both subordinate and capable of action.”63 So it is with art. For Godfrey Lienhardt, art is the voice of a soloist within the choir; for Ingrid Monson, it is a John Coltrane riff against the backdrop of the rhythm section.64 For Ndaleni graduates, art was the cultivation of self-expression with, within, through, and against the manifold limitations of Bantu Education and apartheid. Like Mvemve’s letters, art, education, and beauty were art teachers’ girders, the infrastructure that connected their selves to the rest of the community and, through that connection, made both more secure. Their lives were profoundly limited by apartheid, but through the social experience of art, they found a way to live.
John Dewey thought art tremendously important because the act of creating is a discrete experience—it has a beginning and an end, it involves individuals’ creative faculties and their material realities, and it engages the perceptive powers of the audience. Art is an experience, set apart from the ongoing, undifferentiated experience of regular life, and as an experience, art provokes an aesthetic response—an appraisal, a quest for meaning, an assessment.65 We are all historical subjects who are subject to various regimes beyond our control, and we each lay girders to help us navigate the terrain of our experiences. Apartheid was such an experience. The system existed in abstract political fact, but it was also known aesthetically, intuited in the senses through sound, image, and language. The aesthetics of state power and popular resistance are well known.66 The aesthetics of interpersonal infrastructure, by contrast, are elusive, hidden, and often strange to see. Take, for example, the infrastructure of suspicion that prompted fears of witchcraft and the sense of danger, which thrived in Bantustan communities, as Isak Niehaus has shown. Niehaus demonstrates the ways in which witchcraft beliefs were wholly logical within the Bantustan experience—with the blight, poverty, co-opted authority, and overdetermined cultural distinctiveness that the system implied. These conditions prompted what Niehaus calls an “encapsulating effect,” which helped to shape the sense rural South Africans could make of their lives.67 Other scholars have advanced similar arguments that draw our attention not to apartheid as struggled against but to apartheid as a distinct, limited historical experience with which people lived, the terrain on which they struggled to build their selves.68
In this, they were co-opted, not in the sense of selling out but rather opting in, to exploit what advantages they perceived. Scholars such as Jonathon Glassman and Sean Hanretta have effectively demonstrated the historical contingency of community through the sometimes head-scratching moves of slaves and others to find comfort in being more tightly held.69 Channeling Michel Foucault, Ruth Marshall describes as “subjectivation” the process through which Pentecostal Christians gain a sort of freedom by completely subjecting themselves to the stringent demands of their faith.70 We know that South Africans “freed” themselves in protest marches, uprisings, and votes. Yet new studies have begun to undermine the rosy picture of “the long walk to freedom,” just as older accounts predicted.71 If we take a step back from the nation, we see that whether called self-satisfaction, fulfillment, comfort, or even happiness, “freedom” has often been the by-product of subjecting the self to regimes of control, as scholars on subjects ranging from sexuality to religion, ethnicity, scouting, the military, consumerism, and, indeed, nationalism have argued. By conditioning themselves to the rules and regulations of the art school community, Ndaleni art students insulated themselves from the tremors afflicting their society. Theirs was a small school with few students, yet the social satisfaction developed there speaks to a story bigger than that of art under Bantu Education.72 In his brilliant ethnography of the American military, Kenneth Macleish reveals how “free” human lives frequently depend on society’s intense and corrosive coercions.73 In what follows, I suggest that by subjecting themselves more completely to coercive ideological regimes—both apartheid and art education—some South Africans were able to transcend what we know of their history to find beauty, solace, and community within the ugliness of their times.
The scholarship on sociability in South African history has been enriched by the work of Paul Landau and others, who have demonstrated how a widespread insistence on strategic and mutable relationships allowed polities, ethnicities, families, and political philosophies the flexibility to weather momentous social change.74 Yet scholars who consider the later twentieth century have too commonly relegated satisfaction, happiness, and intimacy to the zone of the overtly and explicitly political, as if the only kind of love possible was revolutionary love, the only sort of friendship that of comrades in the struggle, and the only betrayals were those of confederate by confederate.75 But what of different sorts of confederacies, fashioned not in the racial enclave but by transgressing the boundaries between race and location?76 What of community born not in the choice of whether to conform, collaborate, or rebel but instead in the choice to subject oneself to the regime of the wholly different authority—in this case, art?77 Dan Rakgoathe was a black South African artist and teacher who studied at Ndaleni at the turn of the 1960s. His was a crowded world, but it was only hearing from his fellow Ndaleni students that convinced him he was “not utterly alone.”78 In the community gathered around art at Ndaleni, he found his self and mustered the courage to tease beauty from time and place.
This is not to deny that his was an ugly time and an ugly place, where human creativity and possibility were stifled by repression, violence, and pervasive lack. In many senses, South Africa still is such a place. But I do deny the prevailing conviction that in its ugliness it was somehow exempt from the possibilities of community, of transcendence, of earnest and faithful effort to see one’s vision embodied and tangible. I found this book’s title in a letter from an Ndaleni student to his teacher, written more than a decade after he left the school. He was not a particularly talented artist and was continuously frustrated in his efforts both to teach and to make art. But even as his frustrations with some aspects of his life mounted, he recognized that his labors were rewarded otherwise: with children, a marriage, a career, and above all the ability occasionally to stand at a distance from reality, to stop the flow of time and take in the vista. He winked in the letter to his teacher—surely, he wrote, this was the art of life. I do not name nor quote him here, so as not to risk imposing hindsight’s teleology over his life as he, an artist, worked. Better first to grasp his context, test its restraints, envision its opportunities, and watch as he and his classmates tend their kiln.
A WORK
What follows is an attempt to grasp the lives of the Ndaleni school and its artists. As Okeke-Agulu, Berger, and Bourdieu have suggested, every artist moves within and against the terrain of the possible in their own time and place. In twentieth-century South Africa, that meant issues both abstract and visceral, which by the early 1950s saw the apartheid South African government establish an art school for African art teachers. The specific story of the Ndaleni art school begins towards the end of chapter 3. But since my story privileges the concepts and experiences met there, we first must answer the obvious question: why did the government desire such a school?
The next chapter sets the stage for Ndaleni’s emergence by exploring its roots in local and global debates about African schooling, culture, and art in South African society, picking up where the prologue left off. “Craftwork” begins with the move
