African Arts at 50: Teaching African Art in the Face of Apartheid

In 1967 the first issue of African Arts was published. In 1967 I first enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (Wits), for a BA degree, majoring in English Literature, History of Art, and Fine Art, in a class entirely of white students. This was eight years after the English medium universities in South Africa had been closed to black students under the system of apartheid.¹ Nationalist party rule had, in 1959, legislated this final educational discrimination in which black, white, “coloured,”² and Indian people were separated into their own highly unequal educational systems. The mid-1960s nevertheless saw a generation of accomplished black artists (Sidney Kumalo, Ezrom Legae, Dumile Feni, among many others) emerge as powerful presences on the contemporary art scene.³ Despite the lack of access to tertiary education for these black artists, they had acquired formal art training at the men’s recreation centre in Polly Street (Johannesburg) (Miles 2004), as others such as Azaria Mbatha and Cyprian Shilakoe had done at the Evangelical Lutheran Church art school at Rorke’s Drift (Natal) (Hobbs and Rankin 2003). In this environment, the appearance of the first issues of African Arts probably did not have a wide impact in South Africa, although, by the early 1970s, the journal’s art competition was a space through which Louis Maqhubela, Tito Zungu, Dumile Feni, and Cyprian Shilakoe were introduced to a wider international market (Anon. 1970, 1973). Inclusion in these issues of short pieces on the winners provided a beacon of recognition for those attempting to work against the overwhelming negation of African cultural achievement inherent in apartheid’s separatism.

Under apartheid, objects made by African peoples were all placed in ethnographic museums, reflecting the Euro-American hierarchies of culture which apartheid strove to maintain. But while in Europe and the US the acknowledgement of the aesthetic value of African objects allowed them to be appropriated into the category of “art,” under apartheid ideology no such appropriation was possible in the public domain. When contemporary black artists made paintings or sculptures, they were classified in Afrikaans and at official institutions as “Bantoekuns” (Bantu-art) and thus placed on the same footing as the supposedly “primitive” forms of historical African art.

The art-history syllabi of all the Fine Arts Departments in South African “white” universities were, at that time, entirely Eurocentric, with some attention paid to white South African artists working within accepted European modernist modes (Nettleton 2006). In the three years of my undergraduate degree and the subsequent two of Honors courses, I, like most other students in these privileged and exclusively white spaces, had absolutely no formal exposure to any form of indigenous African art. Yet, in that predigital age, there lurked in the periodicals section of the art and architecture library at Wits two issues of African Arts, at which hardly anyone ever looked. These, the issues of 1967 and 1968, were to be my introduction to a world of images, aesthetics and knowledge unavailable elsewhere in Johannesburg, except, surprisingly, the Michaelis Art Library in Johannesburg’s Public Library, which had a complete run of volumes from 1967 onwards. Starting an MA (by dissertation) on African art, I took out a personal subscription in 1973, but the Wits library only started subscribing from 1974. Prior to 1977, there were no academics in South Africa who had specialized in this area, so African Arts was to be a fundamental resource for me. That I was in a position of enormous advantage within the wider educational landscape of South Africa, having access to libraries in which these journals were housed and the means to buy my own subscription, was something of which I was constantly aware.

I introduced African art courses at Wits in 1977, first at postgraduate level, but then increasingly as part of the undergraduate curriculum. For many years, Wits was the only South African university with an Art History syllabus that included African art. While we were able to import books for the library, the availability of the many articles based in deep and sustained...