South Africa: The Art of a Nation by John Giblin, Chris Spring (review)

The weight of South Africa’s turbulent and violent past often determines the narrative scope of present scholarship. South Africa: The Art of a Nation is a beautifully illustrated monograph published in conjunction with the British Museum’s 2016–2017 exhibition of the same title. Co-curators of the exhibition John Giblin (head of the Africa collection at the British Museum) and Chris Spring (curator of contemporary African art and the eastern and southern African collections at the British Museum) co-wrote the catalogue. The catalogue provides the breadth that is usually associated with textbooks, but also contributes to ongoing scholarly debates. The ambitious scope does not hinder the depth of analysis that extends through all seven chapters. This feat is accomplished by way of the effective and creatively structured chapters, which move chronologically, but also incorporate a thematic call-and-response between the earliest forms of South African art (ca. 3,000,000 BP) and modern and contemporary responses. This call-and-response structure establishes themes in which the past is put into conversation with the present and projects into the future of South Africa’s artistic culture, providing a coherent history that greatly enriches our understanding of an ongoing history of growth and development.

The catalogue is organized into seven chapters with a focused introduction that addresses the goals and limitations, as well as the sources on which the authors relied. Chapter 1, “Origins and Early Art,” examines objects grouped into in four ascending stages of human development. The first stage examines the Makapansgat Pebble, a manuport dated to 3 million years ago. The Kathu Pan hand-axe (ca. 1,000,000 BP) illustrates the second stage, in which objects were altered for nonutilitarian, aesthetic pleasure. The next stage marks South Africa as having “the earliest firm evidence for the existence of modern human behavior and a symbolic artistic culture” (p. 31) as evidenced by the Blombos Cave beads. The fourth and final stage begins 30,000 years ago with emergence of figurative rock art. The careful examination of these four stages celebrates the cultural and aesthetic advancements made by the earliest people of present-day South Africa, and it also lays bare the fallacy of a Eurocentric origin story. This is the great gift that the catalogue offers its readers—a continuous and coherent history of South African art traditions that refutes any claim of white supremacy. Giblin and Spring conclude chapter 1 by threading together an analysis of South Africa’s archaeological heritage with contemporary artist Karel Nel. Nel’s Taung/Piltdown (2011) is a clever and pointed redress to the now defunct Piltdown Man controversy (pp. 39–43).

Moving into the Iron Age, chapter 2 begins with the complex social histories revealed in figurative sculptures and concludes with mid-seventeenth century works. The chapter includes for analysis the often-illustrated Lydenburg Head and Mapungubwe Rhinoceros credited to the early Bantu-speaking people of South Africa. The naturalistic Kenilworth Head highlights the lesser discussed figurative work of the San | Bushman and/or Khoekhoen. In this chapter the authors discuss Shula Marks’s “The Myth of the Empty Land” (1980), stating that “the ‘myth’ of the title of Marks’s paper states that Bantu-speaking groups arrived in southern Africa only at the same time as Europeans, diminishing their land rights even further” (p. 58). The “myth” is also known as terra nullius (literally “no one’s land”) and is discussed in relationship to Jacob Hendrik Pieneef’s (intentionally or unintentionally) propagandistic landscape paintings (pp. 179–80).

Chapter 3, “European and Asian Arrivals,” begins with a brief chronology of European explorers in search of sea routes to Asia; this ultimately resulted in the 1652 European settlement at what is now Cape Town. The subsection “European Arrivals: Portuguese, Dutch and British” does a fine job of illustrating the various objects...