From his base in Pietermaritzburg, Oxley was a leading figure in South African art education in the 1920s and 1930s. He was open to the idea that African artistic geniuses might emerge, but also somewhat wary of the prospect. The Carnegie Corporation took him to the United States for a two-month tour of the Northeast in 1929, giving him an opportunity to survey the terrain of art education in that country. Like previous South African educationist visitors to America, Oxley was particularly interested in African American education and its possible inspiration for native education in South Africa. Oxley’s studies in the United States led him to propose a course of art appreciation for Africans, which would in turn “give way to craft work, which should form a great part of the instruction given.” He used the terms craftwork and handwork interchangeably, indicating that “the work would tend to be more vocational than that of the European schools.” If black artists did emerge from such a program, Oxley cautioned, “every care must be taken not to force European ideas upon the natives too early in their development, for by so doing we may be preventing means of self-expression from asserting themselves.”19 In thinking about pedagogy, in other words, care ought to be taken not to ruin native talent. Rather than “force European ideas upon the natives,” interested parties needed to cultivate the field and allow genius slowly to take root in its own, racially determined way. Oxley’s views thus contrasted with Pemba’s reviewer. As the logic of race entrenched across South African society, so to by the mid-1930s did race begin to insinuate itself into discussions about the best way to teach art.
Seeking tuition, George Pemba initially tried to find a way around the realities of race. He could not register as a regular student at Rhodes, the closest art school to his home, but Oxley and the SAIRR provided him with the means to relocate to Grahamstown to receive training as an external student with the aforementioned Professor Winter-Moore.20 They introduced Pemba to R. H. W. Shepherd, the director of the Lovedale Press in nearby Alice, who commissioned him to illustrate an isiXhosa children’s book. Pemba continued to draw and to paint in a naturalist, recognizably “European” style, and he thought himself improved immeasurably by his training. Oxley’s concerns were heard—“I have tried my best to be typically African,” Pemba wrote to Shepherd early in 1937, yet in the quality and style of his drawings, he felt that “some of my best work . . . is influenced by European Art.”21 European influence or not, while training at Rhodes Pemba proudly noted that he was “in the prime of my artistic career.”22
Pemba’s sense of his own unique talent accorded with the classic ideals of South African liberalism, which were always more vital in theory than in actual political fact. Whites extolled its virtues (even as they continued, like Pim, to support segregation), and black intellectuals commonly rallied around the thoroughly liberal idea of individual genius and accomplishment. “Be what nature made you,” advised a correspondent known as “Philosopher” in 1937, “whatever you are from nature, keep to it, never desert . . . your own line of inclination and talent.” Writers such as Philosopher took to the Bantu World and other media to argue that only by being “what nature intended you to be” would personal and social success follow. “Everyone is a genius at something,” Philosopher reassured the wary.23
“New African” thinkers like Philosopher returned again and again to the idea of race-blind education, which would allow true talent to emerge from the African community. Philosopher urged the black community to “understand that, although men are born equal, they are not mentally, morally and physically equal. There are men and women whose ability places them above their fellow-men.” Excellence was the way forward. “If we, as a race, can appreciate that fact, we would make rapid progress along the path of civilization.” To hear this writer tell it, jealousy impeded appreciation for the few individuals whose genius bloomed amid the weeds. “Why should we be jealous of a musician or poet who interprets our spiritual yearnings?” he asked, and why be jealous “of a sculptor or an artist who reveals the soul of our race?” By the mid-1930s, African intellectuals knew that white nationalists wanted to view African society as an undifferentiated collective and to deny whatever individual rights had managed to survive conquest and decades of white supremacy. Over and against generalization, they invested in accounts of individual attainment and talent. “[Our] talents are the weapons through which our race shall win the war of freedom,” by compelling the “‘trustees’ of the race”—for example, South Africa’s white masters—“to recognize our work,” the editors of the Bantu World insisted.24
Figure 2.1 USiko, by George Pemba, date unknown, mid-1930s(?), with the permission of the Historical Papers, Mayibuye Archive, University of the Western Cape
To page through Bantu World and other media during this era is to watch a community pool its collective intellectual resources in the name of individual attainment and, so they believed, the political recognition that would result. Coverage ranged from the light and airy—“Selmina Rampa, artiste . . . is one of our best dressed young women and is an able cook and all around hand-work expert”—to the dry and earnest:
No matter what your colour is
nor even your creed,
but if true merit in you is
then you are of the seed
the seed that every man respects
he may be white, he may be black
it makes no difference to this fact
that you are one of life’s elect
for merit is the greatest thing the world has ever known.
Peter Abrahams, poet and graduate of Grace Dieu, cast his vote for merit in 1936. “That Peter is a genius is evident to whoever has read his poems,” the Bantu World editorial page gushed.25
Broadsheets did more than convey the news of the day to an eager readership. They also served as stages for acts of self-definition and attainment.26 The historian Lynn Thomas has written about how newspapers sponsored beauty contests to define the parameters of modern race-womenhood in interwar South Africa. Competitions—over beauty, over talent, over art—were hallmarks of black urban life.27 “Competitions reveal talent,” wrote A. Ramailane in June 1935. Africans needed to be confident enough to play their God-granted hand. “Competitions are a means whereby competent leaders in all African life are revealed. [They] produce and exult Bantu arts.”28 The point was to compete and to win to demonstrate one’s merit. Over the course of the 1930s and the 1940s, Bantu World sponsored competitions for gardeners, photographers, writers, musicians, and Christmas card decorators. It and other newspapers were careful to cover Africans’ triumphs wherever they took place, as far afield as Berlin and Jesse Owens’s victories in the Olympic Games and as close as the Transvaal, as when frequent contributor Walter Nhlapo won a short-story prize in the 1938 Eisteddfod.29 There were fewer visual art competitions than there were Eisteddfods and music competitions during the 1930s, but interested observers could read regular coverage of events such as the annual May Esther Bedford art competition at the Grahamstown city hall (where Professor Winter-Moore frequently judged the results). If they read closely enough, they would have caught the names Tladi, Sekoto, Mancoba, and Pemba among the winners.30
Competitions were about raising the quality of communal life, and critics thus had an important role to play. The prize-winning author Walter Nhlapo frequently appraised black theater and music across the 1930s and 1940s. Nhlapo was, above all, a proponent of good, socially productive taste.31 When a play was good, he praised it; when disappointing, his ire overflowed. “It had no story in it,” Nhlapo critiqued a
