The Art of Life in South Africa. Daniel Magaziner

European culture, metropolitan educationists and their far-flung missionary networks were cultural imperialists, trampling on African traditions in the name of progress and neglecting what Monroe called the “unique genius” of African societies.⁷ Monroe condemned this. South Africa had been exemplary here, at schools such as Adams College and Lovedale, where those who devised the curriculum learned from the best practices of metropolitan society and foreswore any adaptation to African economic and social circumstances.

      The situation changed dramatically during the years bracketing World War I, under the influence of one of adapted education’s most strident proponents, the South African and Natal-born Charles Loram. Loram was a graduate of Teachers College, where he had studied with Paul Monroe and completed a PhD on the “education of the South African Native.” Upon returning to Natal to serve as the chief inspector of native education in 1918, he quickly ascended to the highest echelons of the native administration. In 1920, he left the Natal Education Department to serve on the Union’s Commission of Native Affairs; in 1921, he joined the Phelps-Stokes Commission on its educational survey of the region.⁸ Loram’s reputation was built on his efforts in Natal, where he worked assiduously to reshape the province’s approach to African education. As historian of South African education Peter Kallaway explained, Loram had left the United States “deeply wedded” to the adapted education model. The desire of Natal’s African population for schooling and the provincial government’s interest in a more scientific approach gave him a suitable laboratory for his experiments.⁹ It was Loram who organized the Lurani Government School and Loram whose insights and authority provided the context for Fred Sithole’s confident assertion that the best education began with the hands.

      Loram had reviewed the education systems of the US South while studying at Teachers College; he had traveled both to Tuskegee and to Hampton, and not surprisingly, he found a worthy model in Washington’s adaptation of the white school form. Washington had done more to advance the Negro than any white American, he claimed, “and so will it be with the Native peoples of South Africa.”¹⁰ Washington had valorized the image of the African American farmer and craftsman, tilling the land and producing useful goods. Loram’s syllabus similarly demanded that manual training take up an increasingly significant proportion of the learning week. “The course in industrial training should have taught him the simpler Native crafts, the useful European art of sewing and the elements of practical agriculture,” Loram contended, “while proving that there is nothing lowering in manual work.”¹¹

      Loram’s tenure as chief inspector of native education in Natal was short but evidently long enough to enact much of his program. Within a year, 73 percent of the African schools were doing manual work; by the mid-1920s, that number had risen to 86 percent.¹² Historians have noted his success; more and more, Loram’s tenure in Natal is seen as a rehearsal for the apartheid government’s efforts in favor of “own lines,” or adapted education. Such teleologies aside, the fundamental fact is that over the 1920s, more and more African students entered schools like Sithole’s, there to work with their hands.¹³ Carpentry and woodworking; basketry and sewing by children in schools—this was to be the foundation of a future African society’s economy in their villages and native reserves.

      This separate future was, of course, an illusion. White artisans looked jealously at African vocational training. Indeed, previous efforts to promote African industry had foundered because of outspoken white opposition, and it was far from certain that handwork would save Africans “from going up and down the streets looking for jobs.”¹⁴ Even more fundamentally, “adapted education assumed that Africa would continue to consist of exclusively rural societies”—small in scale, cheaply supported by domestic agricultural production—but the 1920s instead saw the dramatic decline of independent African farming and the beginning of a still-ongoing tide of urbanization. Industrial education was premised on the faith that African students could sell the things they made in school, yet by the end of the 1920s—and especially with the onset of the Depression in the 1930s—the market for African industrial work seemed to have dried up.¹⁵

      Figure Pro.2 Carving tools and carved objects at Grace Dieu Mission, late 1920s, photographer unknown, Historical Papers Research Library, University of the Witwatersrand, File AB750Ga8.36, with the permission of the Anglican Church of South Africa

      Loram and Sithole’s own department took note of this. In 1929, a regional inspector named Dent surveyed his schools and concluded that the market value of their crafts was uncertain. In fact, “in most cases there is no visible market, and the articles accumulate to become mere lumber,” he informed the provincial authorities. But he did not call for students to stop working with their hands; rather, he suggested that the department cease to emphasize the “market value” of student work “to the exclusion of other aspects of Native crafts.” Dent proposed a shift “in the purpose” of handwork, away from “inculcating industry to aesthetic appreciation.”¹⁶ If not industry, then why not art? The last was an intriguing idea, and other educationists developed it over the course of the next decades. All the while, African students in South African schools continued to work with their hands—to build, weave, model, and carve—sometimes for an hour per day and sometimes more.

      Map 1.1 Southern Africa. Map by Jennie Miller, www.jennie-miller.com

       Chapter 1

       A HILLSIDE IN SOUTH AFRICA

      FOR MOST, the greatest challenge was the lack of materials. The syllabus called for students to weave with grass, but in many areas, no suitable grass existed; teachers reported using wool instead. When the lack of paint demanded similar improvisation, “we are using wet chalk and crayons.”¹ The syllabus was unrelenting, no matter whether teachers taught in rural schools with ample stone and wood or in denuded urban areas where “there is no wood because the school is right in the Location.”² Teachers were forced to find creative solutions to their particular experiences of material want, and they eagerly exchanged advice and suggestions. “Wood for sculpture can often be obtained free of charge from municipalities when trees such as Jacaranda, Silver Oak or Syringa have to be pruned or cut down,” one teacher reported, “John Ngcobo succeeded in getting some wood in this way in Pietermaritzburg.”³ Vivian Bopape frequented waste yards outside factories and in industrial areas; her quests were often rewarded with spoiled newsprint, broken glass, and torn sponges—all of which proved useful in her lessons.⁴ Material want affected teachers’ own art practices as well. Winston Radebe was a talented draftsman, but he lacked the money to buy conté crayons or charcoals. So he drew with shoe polish—Nugget brand, black and brown—and proudly enclosed a sample for his art teacher.⁵ Correspondence about materials dominated the pages of the art teachers’ newsletter from its initial publication in 1961. Lack was the “major enemy” of Ndaleni graduates, and its defeat drew the community of teachers, students, and artists together.⁶

      Figure 1.1 A man in black and brown shoe polish, drawing by Winston Radebe, 1965, photograph by the author

      Between the early 1950s and the early 1980s, South Africa’s Department of Bantu Education ran a school for the training of specialist arts and crafts teachers at Indaleni, outside Richmond in the Natal Midlands. Over those decades, nearly a thousand students attended the course, which qualified them to teach the department’s arts and crafts syllabus in apartheid South Africa’s schools. As we have seen, long before the advent of the policy of Bantu Education, syllabi for Africans had mandated that black students engage in what was variously called art, handwork, industrial education, craftwork, or arts and