Mancoba created works that stood out. Works of “distinctly” African culture were not in abundance, and painters such as Pemba and Sekoto regularly won after the initial iteration of the competition. Yet Mancoba’s victory meant more. The Department of Native Affairs took note and commissioned him to “present the soul of his people to the world through his little wooden statues” at the 1936 Empire Exhibition.47 (Other than an exhibition of school handicrafts and two landscapes by John Mohl, Mancoba’s work was to have been the only African art included in the exhibition.) Mancoba was perhaps the foremost modernist among the 1930s black South African artists, but his choice of medium made it easy for interested parties to see him as an African who was an artist, not an artist who was a genius.
Figure 2.2 Ernest Mancoba with a bust of himself, Grace Dieu Mission, late 1920s, photographer unknown, HP AB750 Gbc2.5, with the permission of the Anglican Church of South Africa
Mancoba never exhibited at the Empire Exhibition; he was apparently uninterested in creating the “tribal curios” that the Department of Native Affairs hoped to display. Instead, he made plans to leave South Africa to seek further training in France. He was the “first Bantu from the Union to be given such an opportunity,” an education journal from Fort Hare noted. But it was not really about him: rather, his example demonstrated that “the Bantu . . . possess special talent in art.”48 The unnamed writer hailed Mancoba’s genius and called for the government to promote a curriculum that encouraged African artistic practice.49
The pivot from celebrating artistic success to calling for a certain sort of curriculum was a familiar one; as noted earlier, reviewers had responded to Bhengu’s evident genius with a call for more training to be made available to Africans. Yet in a context in which so-called self-taught and natural genius was seductive enough to deny that training had actually taken place, the question of the content and form of art education was a fraught one. Mancoba’s Cape Town mentor Lippy Lipschitz, remained convinced that “African artists should be left to themselves to develop their own forms and not be influenced by European trends.”50 Like Pemba, Mancoba soon learned that many of the art world’s gatekeepers in mid-1930s South Africa worried whether it was even appropriate for a non-European to be trained as an artist.51
By World War I, primitivist discourse was an established element of art education. Europeans continued to “discover” African talent, as Pim had with Tladi and Oxley with Pemba, but they were anxious not to spoil their finds. In 1944, for example, a Pretoria art aficionado discovered a native draftsman. He showed the man’s work to an acquaintance at the Department of Native Affairs, who in turn shared it with Walter Battiss, the art master at Pretoria Boys High. Battiss was “impressed by the native’s work and considers that he has undoubted talent.” The bureaucrat reported that Battiss was going to give the African man some paints—but no more than that: “Battiss thinks that it would be a pity to give him too much tuition . . . as it would tend to destroy originality, as has happened in many cases of Bantu artists, who try to imitate European art. It would also lose its appeal to his own people, who have an entirely different conception [of art] from ours.”52 Art bounded and defined a community. It was okay to give an African artist material with which to express his or her vision; it was not okay to grant the sort of training that would risk diluting the artist’s African qualities.
Thus, as the 1940s progressed, an apologetic tone leached into discussions of African art education. Genius was still there to be discovered and cultivated through conventional art education, but Europeans—and some Africans—apparently wished it was not so. At the end of the 1940s, for instance, the city of Johannesburg’s Non-European Adult Education Committee organized art classes for Africans as part of its efforts to guide African leisure time in “productive” directions. Classes began at Polly Street in central Johannesburg in July 1949. A small group of white artists taught the weekly classes; all betrayed some discomfort with their task. One “wanted to leave [the Africans] uninfluenced as far as possible”—an odd position for a teacher to take, to be sure, and one that left her open to accusations that “the European was adverse to giving away knowledge.” Undeterred, she “started . . . with crafts, because the Bantu has a traditional aptitude for crafts and very little tradition, if any, of painting and drawing.”53 That did not go over well; within a few weeks, teachers at Polly Street reported that their students’ obvious enthusiasm for painting necessitated that they concentrate their instruction on that medium. Still, teachers approached the “task of teaching very tentatively . . . aware of all the criticisms on the subject of teaching Natives to paint ‘in the European style,’ instead of encouraging their own approach to art.” Another paper reassured the reading public that it was appropriate to teach painting because “these are all town natives.” Their purity was already spoiled by their residence in the great metropolis; it was too late for them to remain—or be made—truly African.54
Such sentiments were not exclusive to the gathering apartheid state, to fetishists of the exotic, or to race nationalists. Concerns over the decline of African artistic traditions and concomitant efforts to limit and constrain African artistic practices were increasingly liberal concerns, shared by black critics such as Nhlapo and white observers alike. In 1948, Edna Hagley, the secretary of the South African Association of Arts, appealed to the SAIIR for assistance in identifying facilities for African artistic development in the Transvaal. She could not help but pose a related question: “Should Non-Europeans be encouraged in the promotion of European techniques, or should a more indigenous application be followed, and if so what would be the best approach?”55 Quintin Whyte of the SAIRR agonized over his response. “This is very difficult to answer,” he admitted. “My own feeling is that African inspiration will take from European techniques what it requires and will produce something which may not be what one might call indigenous, but be the adaptation by African genius.” That said, Whyte cautioned that those were his feelings alone. He conceded that there was tremendous resistance to the idea of African artists working along what were assumed to be European lines.56
Some African artists were already sensitive to this. At the dawn of apartheid, Godfrey Thabang was a teacher and wood-carver who had exhibited at the by-then-defunct Gainsborough Gallery during the 1930s, when Tladi and Sekoto had done the same. The latter had subsequently left South Africa, to join Mancoba in European exile. At the turn of the 1950s, Thabang rejected that route, claiming that “he has no desire to study there . . . because the influences in Europe are so great and so completely in opposition to trends in African art that a young artist could quite easily lose his individuality and emerge as a poor European artist rather than an excellent African one.”57 It was hard enough to make a living as an African artist without resisting the tide.
No one demonstrated this more than the SAIRR’s old correspondent and grantee George Pemba. Pemba had continued to work and paint throughout the late 1930s and 1940s. In 1944, he applied for a grant from the Bantu Welfare Trust to travel across South Africa to improve his art. Granted £25, he went from the Eastern Cape to the Rand, Natal, and Lesotho before returning home. A few years later, a local dentist and art collector named Hans Cohn wrote a thinly fictionalized account of Pemba’s life, entitled The Magic Brush, which included Pemba’s first-person narrative of his 1944 journey.58 This “diary” is a remarkable document not so much for the story it tells, which is a rather conventional account of a boy who likes to draw in dirt and eventually discovers his ability to voice the genius of his people, but for the story that lurks behind the pages. Here was a Lovedale-educated schoolteacher, a town dweller born and bred, a trained painter, a burgeoning master of the quintessential modern medium. Yet in his diary, Pemba expressed nothing but contempt and disgust for urbanization and technological modernity; he described cities as places where “native originality did not exist . . . at all.”59 Real Africa, he explained, was rural Africa. Real African art was primitive tribal music, handicrafts, dances, and fetishes. To be “a Bantu artist” meant offering those “scenes to the
