Hunt for SA's 'lost' township art
25 August 2003
The hunt is on for South Africa’s "lost" township and resistance art, taken out of the country by diplomats and art collectors in the 1970s and '80s, as the Pretoria Art Museum embarks on a global retrieval campaign.
Fine art by black artists - considered "too political" during the days of apartheid, or not valuable enough by white art collectors - makes up a crucial part of South Africa's art heritage. However, most of this art, reflecting the dawning era of Black Consciousness and the realities of life under apartheid for black South Africans, is scattered around the globe.
Now the Pretoria Art Museum is on a mission to retrieve the art for a groundbreaking "Homecoming" exhibition scheduled for October 2004.
Already, the campaign has resulted in the return of about 75 artworks and sculptures by artists who lived in the townships of Mamelodi, Soweto and Sofiatown and who studied at the artist's community at Rorke’s Drift during the most repressive era in South Africa’s history.
The Homecoming project, spearheaded by Pretoria Art Museum curator Dirkie Offringa and journalist Tom Nevin, was recently launched by Tshwane Mayor Smangaliso Mkhatshwa, who described the project as "a cultural and historical breakthrough in rebuilding a vital part of South Africa’s heritage".
Mkhatshwa said the project would "alert the world to this country’s rich heritage, its talent and remarkable history. It is also of vital historical and educational importance".
'Lost' art comes home
"In reality, it is our 'lost' art come home", Offringa says "Most of it will be seen by South Africans for the first time. The exhibition is expected to move from Pretoria Art Museum to galleries around the country, and thereafter to SA embassies around the world.
"We are still tracing more works",
Offringa adds, "but the response to date has been so encouraging that we're now assured of more than enough of the best work of that era to hold one of the biggest and most culturally significant exhibitions of black fine art in South Africa's history."
Few of the artists were formally trained, but their works are highly regarded by art experts. Many of the artists - including Lucky Sibiya, David Mbele, Johnny Ribeiro, Michael Maapola, Harry Mayoga and Ezekial Fikile - are now well known, and their works are collected both in South Africa and internationally.
Not all 'struggle' art
The Homecoming project began when Australian diplomat Diane Johnstone returned a 17-piece portfolio of township art that she had collected during her posting in Pretoria between 1974 and 1976.
While much of the work of the time was "struggle" art protesting against apartheid, some of the artworks in Johnstone’s collection were acquired for "the sheer
quality of the pieces, not because of their politics, although some in the collection are highly political ... But it was the political nature of some works that incensed the white administration at large, and the police in particular", Johnstone says.
Intrigued by the prospect of a vast amount of valuable art of the era dispersed around the globe, and alarmed at the void it might have created in South Africa’s heritage, journalist Tom Nevin began tracing foreign diplomats, business people and journalists who had spent time in South Africa during that period and who might have acquired works of township art.
One of the first to offer to return his large and highly valuable collection was another Australian diplomat, Bruce Haigh, who was posted in Pretoria after Johnstone.
A personal friend of Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko, and involved in the escape from South Africa of activist newspaper editor Donald Woods, Haigh has also returned a collection of
historically important documents and manuscripts accumulated in the politically charged environment of the time.
Tip of the iceberg
"The response by the international diplomatic community involved has been wholehearted and heart-warming, allowing the project to progress at a cracking pace, although we have only uncovered the tip of the iceberg", says Nevin.
"We still have a long way to go, and each day brings to light the name of another collector and his or her location somewhere on the globe. We have no idea how many such collectors there are, but their numbers could be significant, bearing in mind the diplomatic traffic of the times."
Johnstone, who is now a senior diplomat with Australia’s department of foreign affairs and trade in Canberra, comments: "Under apartheid, 'township art' was a cultural and very public expression of the Black Consciousness movement in the townships, and most commercial galleries and public
institutions did not collect or exhibit such work."
"Collecting the art was not an act of plunder by the diplomats, but rather one of altruism and opportunism", Nevin says.
"It was altruistic because it was a way in which diplomats could help artists to survive. Individual white South African collectors were not buying such work, and neither were South African institutional collectors such as the banks, big corporations, universities or most galleries, largely because 'township art' tended to be scorned."
Ticket into the townships
Making contact with black artists was also, Nevin notes, "a plausible way for diplomats to enter townships and find out at first hand the mood of the people there, and to make contact with Black Consciousness leaders and other political figures."
"Those artists were considered to be radical political revolutionaries", says Johnstone. "With or without diplomatic contact with them, they were being
followed, put under pressure, and some were arrested. Some went into exile because of it.
"They understood that they were at the forefront of the Black Consciousness movement in the townships", says Johnstone. "They were the people who were giving explicit and graphic meaning to that repression in a way that was not possible for others to express. In those times, black novelists or poets had no voice because they were not published. At least the artists could paint or draw and express their views."
There is still plenty to be done before the exhibition but, come October 2004, says Offringa, "we will unveil one of the most significant collections of black fine art in South African cultural history".
SouthAfrica.info reporter
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