Ernest Mancoba: An Appreciation

AN APPRECIATION Elza Miles T he doyen of the visual artists of South Africa, died on October 25, 2002 in a hospital at Clamart (near Paris, France) at the age of 98. In the day of the eclipse, his son Wonga returned Mancoba's ashes to the country of his birth. These were laid to rest in the Actonville Cemetery at Dunswart, where both Mancoba's parents were buried. Mancoba spent his childhood on the East Rand. Encouraged by the sculptors Lippy Lipschitz and Elza Dziomba, Mancoba left South Africa in 1938 to further his art studies in Paris. At the time of his departure he had already established himself as a sculptor. His sculptures consisted of ecclesiastical and secular pieces. In both these genres he had Africanised the prevailing Western n o r m s of iconography and aesthetics. In Europe his focus would gradually shift from sculpture to painting, drawing and printmaking. If we take into account his first oil painting, Composition (1940), which was last year included in Okwui Enwezor's exhibition The Short Century, one realises that his artistic exploration was beyond the prevalent aesthetics of South Africa's avant garde, which manifested itself in the New G r o u p and that being barred from returning to South Africa after World War II was rather a blessing in disguise. During the war, while interned by the Germans at St Denis near Paris, he married the Danish sculptress Sonja Ferlov. At the time of his departure to France his African Madonna (also k n o w n as Bantu Madonna) carved in 1929 and held by the Johannesburg Art Gallery, seems the earliest South African interpretation of the Holy Virgin not being European. Unlike most church sculptures for which imported oak or teak was favoured, Mancoba carved his Madonna of indigenous yellow wood. Moreover, this piece was later to play a role similar to that of the classical African pieces of Central and West Africa, which Mancoba admired in the British M u s e u m . Of those pieces he once observed that they were carved for the preservation of group-life. In 1936 the Madonna similarly served the people of the community of Polokwane in Limpopo when she was brought from the h u m ble chapel where she was kept at Grace Dieu to St Mary's Cathedral in Johannesburg. She was displayed in the cathedral to raise funds for those in need in the drought-stricken Limpopo. A sum of £27 and 300 rations were collected. Mancoba was undoubtedly - until further research shows - the first urban-born South African artist to break the tyranny of representative imitation and the Western canons of proportion. Faith (1936), a unique interpretation of a mother and a child, radically differs in its rendering of proportion from other contemporary pieces on the theme. Faith is one of the m a n y works by Mancoba of which the whereabouts are u n k n o w n . The only documentation we have of it is a photograph that appeared in The Star (June 8 1936). Of this piece Mancoba explained that the b o n d between a mother and her child is one of "life and death". This is a theme that he kept on exploring in his work. Mancoba's mother, Florence Bandezwa (born Mangqangwana), instilled in her children respect for their tradition. She also left an indelible impression concerning life and death on the artist. It is Florence who told Mancoba of the pathos when a mother arrives with her sick child at the doctor's surgery to learn that the child is dead. Her narrative, vividly imprinted on his mind, made sense when m a n y years later he was confronted with Cimabue's Crucifixion at Assisi (Italy) and he understood not only Mary's grief but also Christ's consolation from the Cross when he said to her and John, his disciple: "This is your mother ... This is your son." In Faith and in m a n y of his later paintings and drawings he explores the interaction between a mother and child and the almost instinctive dependence of the...