Realism, Rurality and Modernity: Samuel Makoanyane, Julius Mfete, Zolani Mapente

The idea of modernity as an ontological status or experiential reality that is exclusive to the West has been contested by a number of authors, theorists, and art historians over the past twenty years. This paper tackles the particular ways in which the modern has been constituted for and about black South African artists, particularly those who have lived most of their lives in "rural" areas as opposed to those living in large cities. What constitutes "rural" as an identity or status opposite to "urban" is contested today more than it was in the 1980s. This is partly because labeling an artist as rural participates in the conflation of distance between people in time with distance between people in space that Johannes Fabian (1983) pointed to as characteristic of the West's engagement with the so-called primitive. It also calls up the specters of the categories of "folk" and/or "outsider" art in the ways it functions to separate these artists and their works from the "mainstream" art world of the contemporary urban metropole.

In the South African context of the 1980s, when many of the "rural" artists first came to the attention of the South African art world, the "rural" came to be associated particularly with artists from the apartheid-engineered homelands, especially Limpopo and Mpumalanga. Not only were these "reservations" deliberately distanced from major urban centers, they were specifically engineered to remain rural and traditional. This distinction was not new. From the start of white settler- and colonialist-led occupation of the land in South Africa, white rural dwellers had set themselves apart from and in control of indigenous black occupants. The towns established by settlers had followed European models, and black people had been largely excluded from urban developments except in their capacity as laborers. The urban/rural divide was, however, largely constructed as a racialized binary, especially with the mass urbanization of white peoples in the 1920s. From the late 1940s, the distinction was constructed as one between white farmers and white urban dwellers on one hand, and black laborers and tradionalist, rural dwellers on the other. It was brought into very sharp focus under Nationalist Party rule and apartheid. In the black "homelands," initially called "reserves," then "Bantustans" by the Apartheid state, black people were expected to maintain their own traditions, living off subsistence farming and some income from migrant labor. The inextricable coupling of the "traditional" and the "rural" was entrenched in apartheid ideology but was equally evident in colonial structures. I use the terms somewhat interchangeably throughout this essay.

While Western-style education had been available to a small minority of black people under the pre-apartheid Union government, this often ended after a few years of primary school. Art education was not generally part of the curriculum under the so-called Bantu Education system: Visual arts were generally taught only in the framework of craft. In mission teacher training and vocational training centers, drawing was taught as part of other subjects and painting not at all. Some artists who were to become professional were trained only in the context of teachers' training institutions such as Grace Dieu in the Transvaal (Rankin 1989, 2011b) and Ndaleni in Natal (Magaziner 2016), others in workshop models at the Polly Street Recreation Centre in Johannesburg (Miles 2004) or at the Lutheran Evangelical Mission at Rorke's Drift (Hobbs and Rankin 2003, Rankin 2011b).

However, throughout the colonial and apartheid periods, there were men and women living in the rural black homelands who produced objects, often representations of people and animals, in a variety of media, for a variety of purposes, but often simply for their own sakes, i.e., as artworks. Some were based in forms that could be considered "traditional" in that they were passed down from one generation to another, sometimes for ceremonies that owed nothing to colonial or settler influence. Others, however transcended any "traditional" or historical connections to a

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Samuel Makoanyane (1909–1944)

Warrior (1960)

Clay, paint, leather, wood; 15.5 cm x 5.4 cm x...