market for African industrial work seemed to have dried up.15
Figure Pro.2 Carving tools and carved objects at Grace Dieu Mission, late 1920s, photographer unknown, Historical Papers Research Library, University of the Witwatersrand, File AB750Ga8.36, with the permission of the Anglican Church of South Africa
Loram and Sithole’s own department took note of this. In 1929, a regional inspector named Dent surveyed his schools and concluded that the market value of their crafts was uncertain. In fact, “in most cases there is no visible market, and the articles accumulate to become mere lumber,” he informed the provincial authorities. But he did not call for students to stop working with their hands; rather, he suggested that the department cease to emphasize the “market value” of student work “to the exclusion of other aspects of Native crafts.” Dent proposed a shift “in the purpose” of handwork, away from “inculcating industry to aesthetic appreciation.”16 If not industry, then why not art? The last was an intriguing idea, and other educationists developed it over the course of the next decades. All the while, African students in South African schools continued to work with their hands—to build, weave, model, and carve—sometimes for an hour per day and sometimes more.
Map 1.1 Southern Africa. Map by Jennie Miller, www.jennie-miller.com
Chapter 1
A HILLSIDE IN SOUTH AFRICA
FOR MOST, the greatest challenge was the lack of materials. The syllabus called for students to weave with grass, but in many areas, no suitable grass existed; teachers reported using wool instead. When the lack of paint demanded similar improvisation, “we are using wet chalk and crayons.”1 The syllabus was unrelenting, no matter whether teachers taught in rural schools with ample stone and wood or in denuded urban areas where “there is no wood because the school is right in the Location.”2 Teachers were forced to find creative solutions to their particular experiences of material want, and they eagerly exchanged advice and suggestions. “Wood for sculpture can often be obtained free of charge from municipalities when trees such as Jacaranda, Silver Oak or Syringa have to be pruned or cut down,” one teacher reported, “John Ngcobo succeeded in getting some wood in this way in Pietermaritzburg.”3 Vivian Bopape frequented waste yards outside factories and in industrial areas; her quests were often rewarded with spoiled newsprint, broken glass, and torn sponges—all of which proved useful in her lessons.4 Material want affected teachers’ own art practices as well. Winston Radebe was a talented draftsman, but he lacked the money to buy conté crayons or charcoals. So he drew with shoe polish—Nugget brand, black and brown—and proudly enclosed a sample for his art teacher.5 Correspondence about materials dominated the pages of the art teachers’ newsletter from its initial publication in 1961. Lack was the “major enemy” of Ndaleni graduates, and its defeat drew the community of teachers, students, and artists together.6
Figure 1.1 A man in black and brown shoe polish, drawing by Winston Radebe, 1965, photograph by the author
Between the early 1950s and the early 1980s, South Africa’s Department of Bantu Education ran a school for the training of specialist arts and crafts teachers at Indaleni, outside Richmond in the Natal Midlands. Over those decades, nearly a thousand students attended the course, which qualified them to teach the department’s arts and crafts syllabus in apartheid South Africa’s schools. As we have seen, long before the advent of the policy of Bantu Education, syllabi for Africans had mandated that black students engage in what was variously called art, handwork, industrial education, craftwork, or arts and crafts while enrolled in government-funded schools. This took on a new urgency in the 1950s, when arts and crafts featured in the apartheid government’s efforts to preserve the absolute distinction between African (or “Bantu”) and European education. In the years leading up to the adoption of the Bantu Education Act in 1953, apartheid bureaucrats and theorists considered how best to ensure that the syllabus promoted difference—and in the years that followed, qualified teachers went to Ndaleni to study the activities called for in the Bantu Education syllabus.
At Ndaleni, they studied grasswork, beadwork, bonework, painting, drawing, wood carving, and claywork, among other subjects; they also developed their own art practice and gained a working knowledge of art history. Paid for with government bursaries, the art program was a two-year course through the 1950s and was then reduced to a one-year program from the 1960s until the course’s end in 1981. In return for the government bursary and a pay increase upon completing the course, Ndaleni students agreed to teach art in the apartheid government’s African schools. Close to a thousand graduated, about one hundred failed to complete the course, and nearly two thousand more were turned away because of a lack of space.7
That only one-third of applicants were admitted to the Ndaleni program indicates its appeal. A year at Indaleni (the former mission station as opposed to the art school, which did not use the locative prefix) was a year nestled in the Midlands, painting, sculpting, drawing, learning. The vast majority of Ndaleni students were already working teachers, so a year at Ndaleni also meant time away from their typically underfunded and overcrowded schools; it also meant a year without pay, being confined to shabby mission accommodations, and for older students being away from their families. Many considered themselves artists, even if society did not recognize them as such, and although it was not an art school in the strictest sense, Ndaleni was one of a very few places where black South Africans could study and develop their art.8 Yet attaining an Ndaleni certificate did not promise a much easier life. The same problems awaited graduates—more and more students, dilapidated working conditions, a pervasive lack of materials, and an even more pervasive lack of appreciation.
Figure 1.2 Students carving, late 1960s, photographer unknown, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4, with the permission of the Campbell Collections of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (hereafter cited as CC)
For many, it was worth it. Teaching art in Bantu Education schools could be rewarding, as Elijah Zwane wrote in the early 1960s. “Wishing to see what I had in my class, I introduced modeling in clay and picture painting, and the work of the pupils struck me with wonder,” he gushed. It was marvelous to “see what talents remain buried in the nerves of an African child.”9 A decade later, Mercy Ghu was similarly enthusiastic: “[The students’] imagination is fairly wide when it comes to clay or paper mâché,” she reported, “they are not at all inhibited!”10 Listening to them chatter while they worked, she was transported back to her time at art school, to the joy that resounded in the “sound of the hammer and chisel in the free, open air.”11
“Their world was different from ours. We must start there.”12 So wrote Nathan Huggins about the Harlem Renaissance, to free himself and his readers from decades’ worth of knowledge of what that era and its personalities meant. Let us start there: is it possible to tell the story of Elijah Zwane’s “wonder” or to exult in the “free, open air” of such a place as twentieth-century South Africa? Between the 1950s and the 1980s, hundreds of black South Africans journeyed across their benighted land to a hillside school to paint, to carve, to model, to think. The evidence they left behind suggests that, for the most
