SHANNEN HILL

Black art is an important facet of Black Consciousness and Black artists are very conscious of their heritage

Fikile Magadlela, 1980,
quoted in Staffrider

Far too often, the South African black artists presented in this essay have been historicized as surrealists, an altogether ill-fitting label since it prizes the subconscious, the stuff of dreams.^{[1]E. J. De Jager, Images of Man: Contemporary South African Black Art and Artists (Alice: University of Fort Hare Press, 1992), 167; John Peffer, Art and the End of Apartheid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 53; Steven Sack, The Neglected Tradition: Towards a New Art History in South African Art, 1930-1988 (Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1988), 17; and Joyce Ozynski, Black Art Today (Jabulani, Soweto: Standard Bank, 1981), not paginated.} Time and again, we read translations of their work through the comfort of this familiar frame, and although several sources have printed statements like the epigraph cited above, until recently none has engaged what this meant for the speaker.^{[2]An exception is Ruth Simbao, “Self-Identification as Resistance: Visual Constructions of ‘Africanness’ and ‘Blackness’ during Apartheid,” in Visual Century: South African Art in Context, Vol. 3: 1973-1992, ed. Mario Pissarra (Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand, 2011), 38-59.} Most writers have understood art through a history written elsewhere, a view that limited their ability to listen locally. South African anti-apartheid activist Steven Biko (1946-77) predicted such limitations would change when, before a Pretoria court in May 1976, his description of Black Consciousness underscored its tricontinental reach, one that included oppressed people globally, the weight of which, he said, “inevitably … drives toward what we believe history also drives to: an attainment of a situation where Whites first have to listen. I don’t believe that Whites will be deaf all of the time.”^{[3]Millard Arnold, ed., Steve Biko: Black Consciousness in South Africa (New York: Random House, 1978), 40.} This essay is devoted to that effort and focuses on the professional lives of four South African men who were pointedly conscious in their politics and gave voice and vision to it.^{[4]For a larger, more detailed history of Black Consciousness’s South African legacy, see Shannen L. Hill, Biko’s Ghost: The Iconography of Black Consciousness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).} Their work is not, as E. J. de Jager once called it, the combination “of irrational and rational (common to) many surrealists.”^{[5]De Jager, Images of Man, 167.} The earliest Black Consciousness artists purposefully sought and created an aesthetic that saw liberation as more than a dream. They concretely visualized a politics of black being, the kernel of what Biko called “modern black culture; and the artists discussed here—Thamsanga Mnyele, Fikile Magadlela, Motlhabane Mashiangwako, and Lefifi Tladi—fully embraced it.^{[6]Steve Biko, “The Definition of Black Consciousness” and “Some African Cultural Concepts,” in I Write What I Like (London: Bowerdean, 1978), 49, 46.}

Let us start by taking Magadlela at his word and looking for Black Consciousness in his drawing Formation.

We see a contemplative man, eyes closed, lips pursed to draw in or expel air. He emerges from a hole in the land that constitutes part of his very being. His chest swells with breath, his collarbone and bicep drawn taut with effort. Look carefully. A hand grasps his shoulder, fingers splayed upward. Its contours match those of the lightly drawn verticals behind him that recall the bark of a well-established tree. The man has taken root from its base and rises from the soil that clumps onto his body, even as it shapes, or gives formation to, that very being. A favored Magadlela motif, ancestors’ heads and hands are discernible within the soil. A hole pierces the left side of the man’s skull. For me the void denotes Biko himself, for it was injury to his left temporal lobe that ultimately brought death. But action, the stuff of life, continues as the Formation emerging on this paper is like others Magadlela drew: It ultimately takes the shape of a fist raised high, face turned downward just as fingers would and into place. It embodies Black Consciousness itself.

Magadlela (1952-2003) has frequently been cast as an “African surrealist” invested in “mystic” imagery, because a good deal of the art for which he is well known blends human figures with the sky and landscapes that surround them. In this way their subjects, like those of Mnyele, Harry Moyaga, and Mashiangwako (all of whom worked together in the Johannesburg-Pretoria region) are in transitory states that lend themselves to states in between being and becoming. But surrealism, born within early 1920s Paris in response to its own postwar dystopia, sits uncomfortably on the shoulders of these artists, and I urge us to shake it off. The historical context in which they worked was fueled by explicit political intent. While surrealists prize the subconscious mind, these artists were quite conscious of their purpose. They were intent to propel change within a nation that actively worked against their success.

Although Black Consciousness is usually described as a “movement” within South Africa, it is in fact an ideology, a lived practice not consigned to any single period. Some say its contributions are primarily cultural, since it has no home within any one political party. Given the suppression of anti-apartheid political parties in previous decades, Black Consciousness activists chose to operate above ground, without party ties. They worked on innumerable projects that positively changed the lives of millions nationwide, As enacting their own sense of black consciousness. Sometimes Black Consciousness’ founders are dismissed as elitist, stuck in philosophizing about change instead of realizing it, but history has proven otherwise. Mublele Vizikhungo Mzamane has argued that “activity, not activism as such, marked BC strategy.” As he, Bavusile Maaba, and Nkosinathi Biko put it, “The lasting legacy of BC then, was not only intellectual but it was organizational…. That is, in fact, what the 1980s owe to the 1970s.”^{[7]Mublele Vizikhungo Mzamane, Bavusile Maaba, and Nkosinathi Biko, “The Black Consciousness Movement,” in The Road to Democracy in South Africa, 1970-1980, vol. 2, ed. South African Democracy Trust (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2006), 136, 100. This source documents many community organizations associated with the Black Consciousness organs, especially 135-41. See also Mamphela Ramphele, “Empowerment and Symbols of Hope: Black Consciousness and Community Development,” in Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness, ed. N. Barney Pityana, et al. (1991; repr. London: Zed, 1992), 154-78.}

Such structural blindness regarding Black Consciousness’ lasting efficacy surfaces in art historical scholarship that uncritically absorbs the dominant nonracial liberation narrative, which necessarily casts Black Consciousness as fundamentally racial. As I have written elsewhere, these historians place too much emphasis on the colour that consciousness names.^{[8]Hill, Biko’s Ghost. Scholars I critique are Anthony W. Marx, Lessons of Struggle: South African Internal Opposition, 1960-1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 79; Petfer, Art and the End of Apartheid, 44, 50, 74, 85; Judy Seidman, Red on Black: The Story of the South African Poster Movement (Johannesburg: STE Publishers, 2007), 90.} White protagonists such as Bill Ainslie, Cecil Skotnes, or Walter Battiss are recognized for enabling the careers of black artists through their teaching and fundraising, yet very little attention is given to the conversations that took place among artists who worked alongside one another, either in the company of these men or, indeed, when they weren’t present. For the artists considered here, a patron named Geoff Mphakati was key (even though two of the artists also worked with Ainslie), but mainstream scholarship gives no substantive attention to the spaces offered by arts supporters who were not classified white by the state, nor to the considerable influence they bore. Another key patron was the South African Students’ Organisation’s Cultural Committee, a body devoted to visualizing Black Consciousness through the arts. This essay fills gaps and advocates a horizontal approach to its subject, one that is alert to nonnormative frames and atypical trajectories.

Black Consciousness in South Africa: Influences, Origins, and Dissemination

Leading up to 1967, the men and women who first espoused Black Consciousness in South Africa exchanged banned material within the circuit of colleges in which they were enrolled, and they eagerly consumed news of successful liberation efforts elsewhere. Enrolled at the University of Fort Hare in Alice, University of Natal in Durban, and the University of the North in Turfloop, they frequently discussed anticolonial and anti-imperial struggles waged elsewhere in Africa, in the United States through the Black Power and civil rights movements, and in Vietnam, where American losses energized Biko and Barney Pityana, Harry Ranwedzi Nengwekhulu, Ben Ngubane, Mamphela Ramphele, and Abram Onkgopotse Tiro, among others. Tape recordings of the speeches of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were shared, as were their writings and those of other Pan-Africanists, including Chinua Achebe, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Amilcar Cabral, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure), Eldridge Cleaver, Ralph Ellison, Frantz Fanon, Charles Hamilton, Kenneth Kaunda, Patrice Lumumba, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Ahmed Sekou Touré, and Richard Wright. Banned Négritude writers such as Aime Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor were read, as were revolutionaries from other parts of the tricontinental world, including Fidel Castro, Ernesto Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, Mao Tse Tung, and Võ Nguyên Giáp. Of these, Fanon and Cabral were said to have been particularly influential to young Black Consciousness originators, and Carmichael and Hamilton’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America is called “a seminal work” to Black Consciousness’ evolution within South Africa. Indeed, these authors coined the term black consciousness.^{[9]Compiled from Mzamane, et. al., “The Black Consciousness Movement,” 126; C.R.D. Halisi, Black Political Thought in the Making of South African Democracy (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1999), 119-21; Kogila Moodley, “The Continued Inpact of Black Consciousness,” in Bounds of Possibility, 146-7.}

Black Consciousness found its first home in the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO), founded December 1968. SASO spread across the nation as local chapters were established within universities, and in this way it served as the primary vehicle through which Black Consciousness took root. Its founders later formed another vital body, the Black Peoples’ Convention (BPC) in 1972, which spread Black Consciousness through churches and labor unions, among other organizations. Since both SASO and BPC established self-help programs not unlike those of the Black Panthers in the United States, residents of townships (peri-urban communities bordering cities) soon enjoyed such things as crèches for children, refurbished homes and communal buildings, medical attention in newly established clinics, literacy programs, and financial aid for families of jailed activists. Thus, Black Consciousness became an active, energizing presence in the lives of millions. With SAS0 and BPC members setting a strong example, other Black Consciousness bodies were soon established, such as the South African Students’ Movement among secondary students in townships and the Black Parents’ Association, both of which proved vital to the uprisings of June 1976.^{[10]The uprisings that began June 16, 1976, in Soweto and continued for the next two weeks nationwide are amply historicized. Key elements salient to this essay are its foundation (Black Consciousness drove the students, teachers, and parents of that place and period; see Hill, Biko’s Ghost, 47-48), its core demand (that Afrikaans not be used as a medium of instruction within schools), and its method  (peaceful mass demonstration). The students who marched that day were fired on and killed by the police – a watershed moment in South African history that reinvigorated anti-apartheid activism worldwide and drove thousands of young black South Africans to leave home and take up military training with the African National Congress, among others, north of the border.} Black Consciousness spread further through such organs as the Black Workers’ Union, whose Durban-based strike of 1973 was theled by Black Consciousness’ sense of purpose. By 1978, more than eight and a half million South Africans identified with Black Consciousness.^{[11]Anthony W. Marx, Lessons of Struggle, 82; Biko, I Write What I Like, 89.}

The artists discussed here participated in SASO initiatives and even directed some of them. SAS0 vetted, funded, and promoted a variety of programs in the visual, literary, and performing arts and staged events in multiple locations nationwide throughout much of the early to mid-1970s. Mzamane recounts that moderately large crowds attended organized public events, and aristic expression of Black Consciousness was widespread:

At every conceivable occasion organized by advocates of Black Consciousness, poetry was performed in the manner of izibongo: at funerals and memorial services, at public performances and private houses, and at labour-union meetings. These public meetings grew in popularity after the June 1976 student and worker uprising.^{[12]Mzamane, “The Impact of Black Consciousness on Culture,” 184.}

In the visual arts, SASO both financed projects and critically engaged exhibitions in reviews printed within its newsletter, issued bimonthly between 1970 and 1977 (Steve Biko was founding editor). Its Cultural Committee (called CulCom) sought out artists who had developed their own projects and channels to realize them, thus evincing Black Consciousness. SASO sponsorship of a now well-known exhibition, New Day, which featured a trio of artists—Magadlela, Mnyele, and Ben Arnold—is less known for its content than it is for the very large number who attended the opening on September 15, 1977; reportedly thousands joined in. But as SASO’s founding president had died just three days before, presumably most were solace seekers who gathered to absorb the loss and, happily, could immerse themselves in art that testified to the ongoing life of Black Consciousness.

It was at a SASO event that Magadlela met and befriended the famed Mnyele (1948-85).^{[13]Diana Wylie, Art + Revolution: The Life and Death of Thami Mnyele, South African Artist (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Prress, 2008), 77.} He also met Lefifi Tladi at a SASO event, in 1972, at Mofolo Hall in Soweto, where Tladi’s band Dashiki performed (Tladi on percussion). Their friendship easily sparked. So immediate was the creative charge that they left the festival and, after collecting Magadlela’s drawing materials from his home in Newclare, made their way to Tladi’s place in Ga-Rankuwa to create art that very night. Later, Tladi introduced Magadlela to Geoff and Maokaneng Mphakati of Mamelodi West, near Pretoria, and to the many artists who studied and practiced within their home, including Motlhabane Mashiangwako. Magadledla soon brought other artists from the Johannesburg region to work there (notably Ben Dikobé Martins and Mnyele), thus becoming the major link in the flowering of a Black Consciousness aesthetic that developed along the forty-two-mile corridor between Johannesburg and Pretoria in the early 1970s.^{[14]Ibid., 10; Sack, The Neglected Tradition, 112.}

Black Is Beautiful, Black Is Brilliance

Lefifi Tladi (b. 1949) makes art, writes and performs poetry, and drums so well that fans are inclined to shout “JO-MO! JO-MO! JO-MO!” since his energy recalls that of Jomo Kenyatta. He fondly recalled SASO Cultural Committee members who visited him in 1971 and 1972 at the Museum for African Art (1971-74), which he established in Ga-Rankuwa for the display of contemporary art and the preservation of his archive and books, which came to number more than eight hundred.^{[15]Lefifi Tladi, interview with author, Ga-Rankuwa, Pretoria, South Africa, January 20, 2011; and Frieda Hattingh, Oto La Dimo: Joint Retrospective Exhibition of Lefifi Tladi and Motlhabane Mashiangwako (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 1998), 53.} Unlike commercial dealers and collectors who had come knocking, SASO’s Cultural Committee team was not what Tladi called “vertical invaders” of this space. Instead, they had come to learn from him and his colleagues—people like Anthony Makou, Matsemela Isaac Nkoana, Winston Saoli, and Vukasihambe Mkhumbuza.^{[16]Hattingh, Oto, 53.} The last of these had painted a portrait of Che Guevara, a man whose name “was blue fire” in Ga-Rankuwa, and Tladi recalls that the likeness Mkhumbuza created “blew our minds.”^[17]Ibid.

SASO sought out Tladi because they were impressed by the array of projects he had developed locally to promote his vision of black art. These were acts of self-determination in themselves, replete with black consciousness even before Tladi came to call it such. Notably, SASO’s Cultural Committee was drawn to a cultural youth club he created called DeOlympia (1966-71), an amusing deconstruction of Édouard Manet’s famed 1863 painting Olympia.

The Cultural Committee was also interested in the work Tladi and his colleagues had done curating numerous public art exhibitions at stadiums, bus and rail stations, parks and gardens, neighborhood entrances, and schools. They also took interest in Tladi’s two bands, the then defunct Malombo Jazz Messengers (1969-71) and the Dashiki Music and Poetry Ensemble (1971-76), which they contracted for SASO events.^{[18]Venues included Mofolo Hall in Soweto. See Hattingh, Oto, 53. As a Dashiki drummer, Tladi regularly accompanied poets at recitals.  See Mzamane, “The Impact of Black Consciousness,” 181, 184.} Hence, a partnership developed among Tladi, his colleagues, and SASO, whereafter exhibitions were featured at black universities and secondary schools, as were Tladi’s lectures on contemporary art. With the Cultural Committee’s sponsorship, Tladi energetically worked to fill a gap in Bantu education policy by sharing his peoples’ “creative genius” with younger generations. As he put it, “There is so much brilliance in our own things.”^{[19]Ibid., 55.}

This brilliance is resolutely an expression of Black Consciousness. It is in keeping with Magadlela’s view: “There’s one thing I believe in: If you draw a black man, he must be beautiful, handsome; the woman must be heavenly. Drape them with the most beautiful clothes.”^{[20]Fikile Magadlela, “Staffrider Profile: Fikile.” Staffrider 3. no. 2 (1980): 25.} Whether larger than life or small as a palm, the figures drawn by this talented draftsman were always self-possessed, determined, composed. In practidng an art that was in every way a vehicle to express personal conviction—recall that he said, “Black art is an important facet of Black Consciousness and Black artists are very conscious of their heritage”—Magadlela reinforced the African foundation of his practice.^[21]Ibid. Tladi and Mashiangwako similarly underscored their works’ origins and eschewed comparisons with surrealists of the North.^{[22]Ibid., 32, 53.} What arose in this time and place was not experimentation that lent itself to surrealist aesthetics, nor fruitful comparisons with modernist masters in Europe; rather, theirs was a rich exchange with transnational blackness at its core.

Stylistically, Magadlela’s Black Consciousness frequently united figure with landscape, site of ancestral might, and long-stemmed blossoms rising from fissures within it to connote ongoing life despite desperately dry conditions. Clouds churn to evoke change. Remind Me Not has these features, and it has something other works by this artist do not: a figure that directly confronts viewers.

His eyes beckon us back into the landscape, beyond the wall that he leans on, past the broken chain on the left and flowering tulips on the right. There, across a turbulent field, are rocky outcrops that contain more flowers and faces, one bearing a white beard of wisdom. Doors open. We might stride into the mountain itself at left or walk through the portico at center toward new horizons. Magadlela made this work in 1978, soon after the horrific string of detentions, deaths, and bannings of Black Consciousness activists and organs that filled newspapers in the last quarter of 1977. These were preceded by violent response to peaceful protest in June 1976. Taken together, these symbols combine to suggest that a specific history—one in which Dutch settlers (evoked by the tulips) violently claimed the land of Magadlela’s ancestors—awaits another re-bellion and, importantly, we are called to it. The figure rushed to the foreground looks to us with a determined focus. The piercing eyes of this unusual protagonist are not sorrowful; they’re expectant.

Conscious, Nonabstract, Concrete

Among the more brilliant artists of this story is Motlhabane Mashiangwako (1945-2010). His professional life was like others in the Johannesburg-Pretoria nexus in that it was fully inflected with decisions that reflected his own Black Consciousness. With Tladi, he ran art training workshops and infused budding artists with Black Consciousness objectives at black colleges and high schools; he worked with SASO’s Cultural Committee to organize a major event in Mamelodi in 1975, featuring the art of Malangatana Valente Ngwenya of Mozambique, who also attended the opening.^{[23]Tladi, interview, January 20, 2011.} He took up drawing at the Mphakati home in 1974 and spent years exchanging ideas and experimenting technically with others in the space the Mphakati family provided. Here he learned from Magadlela and Mnyele, among others, and he began to give visual form to Black Consciousness with ink and paper. In 1998, he explicitly described Black Consciousness as “the answer” that brought meaning to his life. He said, “It gave me direction. That was a time that I put everything into my art…. I now know who I am, I know where I came from and where I am heading.”^{[24]Hattingh, Oto, 18.}

Technical experimentation and abstraction are themselves indicative of Black Consciousness at work within Mashiangwako, Tladi, and others with whom they regularly worked. Three works reproduced here evidence a common technique that infuse the artists’ very being onto the paper: drawing a deep breath, they would blow ink and bleach across the page to effect varying depths, shapes, and degrees of colour. They would also press their fingers and hands into the ink. The bodily traces are thus both concrete and given to chance, and they infuse life into compositions that frequently respond to trauma, if not death. Magadlela’s Remind Me Not is one such work.

Mashiangwako’s Blood Sweat and Tears (1978) meditates on the struggle one endures to overcome a great obstacle, and its components compel us to both look and listen closely.^{[25]This common idiom has biblical origins: Luke 22:44 recalls Jesus’ expenditure of blood, sweat, and tears as he carried the cross to calvary. Winston Churchill is credited with advancing its popular use when, in 1930, he warned fellow Britons that their “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” would be needed to prevent Germany from claiming their land during the Second World War. In 1967, an American rock band called Blood Sweat and Tears formed and put out soul-funk music for ten years before disbanding. Mashiangwako may have heard their music at the Mphakati residence, since albums frequently turned while artists worked there.}

Reading the composition’s title from top to bottom, we find three colours with shapes that recall their source: brown bubbles on top evoke blood that would pool on a surface; orange brightens the left side in an orb that, like the sun, promotes sweat; a blue teardrop-shaped field fills two thirds of the composition. Within these coloured areas Mashiangwako drew figures that advance into and recede from view. Some move energetically upward, like the large brown hands that reach out from the top of the blue field to make an offering of sorts; others lay at rest, such as the small head and shoulders, prone and in profile, drawn in the lower right on blue ink. Spend time looking closely and you will locate many more, but take note of the male who looks straight at you, challenging your view, and the bifurcated forms that extend left of his head. These recall leaves or growth, but also eardrums and the need to listen well.

Citing Steve Biko, Julies Nyerere, and Ngũgĩ wa’ Thiong’o as motivators, Mashiangwako embraced a philosophy that puts humans at the centre of all considerations. His mother, Elisa, painted murals on the walls at home, and she taught her son the Northern Sotho colour theory that he used later in his own practice. In this system, colours are gendered and affect the space in which they appear in ways that cannot be seen. Mashiangwako would not have described his work as surrealist or abstract, but as efficacious. He once said, “I don’t believe in abstract work like Joan Miro’s. I don’t think I have roots in Abstraction. I deal with untouchable concepts and make [them] visible, unabstract, concrete.”^{[26]Hattingh, Oto, 18.} He created consciousness through colour and line; he rendered social justice poetically meaningful for an audience deeply invested in its realization.

Mashiangwako keenly followed current events and showed particular interest in anticolonial struggles worldwide. His global understanding of Black Consciousness comes alive in a work called Dedication to the People of Biafra: Four Meditations on the Biafran War (1980). He is said to have attended every trial of black activists at the Pretoria Central Magistrates’ Court during the 1970s and 1980s, including the 1976 SASO and Black People’s Convention trial at which Biko delivered a historic treatise on Black Consciousness over the course of four days in May, and the state’s inquest into Biko’s death that took place nineteen months later.^{[27]Ibid., 12. Billed as the “SASO Nine,” leaders within the South African Students’ Organisation and the Black Peoples’ Convention were arrested and charged with terrorism after they organised multiple, concurrent rallies for September September 25, 1974, to celebrate Samora Machel’s successful Mozambique Liberation Front, which announced it would become fully independent from Portugal exactly nine months later. Biko was banned at the time these rallies took place, a circumstance that safeguarded him from arrest alongside others and enabled him to testify in their defense at trial, a highly unusual opportunity for a banned person to publicly air his beliefs. Over the course of five days in early May 1976, just weeks before the historic uprisings began in Soweto, Biko’s daily treatise on Black Consciousness was everywhere in the news; the Rand Daily Mail published the proceedings verbatim. It became apparent that the actions of the SASO Nine did not matter—none had promoted violence of any kind—and that the real issue at hand was whether or not Black Consciousness constituted terrorism. In the end, all nine were found guilty and received sentences of three to nine years imprisonment. See Hill, Biko’s Ghost, 48-55, for discussion of the trial, and Arnold, Steve Biko: Black Consciousness for the full transcript.} Mashiangwako created Soul of a Dying Black Man in tribute to Solomon Mahlangu, also from Mamelodi, who was among the thousands of students who fled South Africa after the 1976 uprisings to undertake combat training with the African National Congress in Angola. Mahlangu was imprisoned and tried in Pretoria on charges of murder and terrorism for his work within the African National Congress, military branch, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). Beaten brutally during his detention, his brain damaged, he was dying well before his actual death by hanging on April 6, 1979.^{[28]Search “Solomon Mahlangu” at sahistory.org (accessed October 15, 2014).}

Mahlangu was raised by his mother, Martha. She fills the frame of Soul of a Dying Black Man and acts as a vessel for her son’s transported soul. Hands reach urgently from her womb, echoing upward along her right arm and shoulder. With her left arm, she grasps the end of a horn that wraps around her neck as it bursts from her right breast. The instrument has blood-filled veins that match those on her forearm, and one feels the urgency of the message it will blare. Martha’s neck is taut, and she rises to give voice to her son’s words, spoken in response to her tears when they saw one another after his arrest: “Why are you crying in front of these dogs. . . . I don’t care what they do to me. And if they spill my blood, maybe it will give birth to other Solomons.”^[29]Ibid,. His words are realized here as other freedom fighters do indeed rise in this composition. We see them emerge from her shoulders and from a swirl of hatched lines along the drawing, lower left edge.

Bringing Black Consciousness to Botswana

Like Mahlangu, Mashiangwako and Tladi also left South Africa to train, although they chose to fight with the pen and brush rather than with firearms. Tladi chose exile in Gaborone, Botswana, soon after the June 1976 uprisings, as the state’s violent response to Black Consciousness activism left one hundred thirty protesters dead in the first week alone. By the time Biko died on September 12, 1977, a thousand more had been killed and twenty-one thousand detained.^{[30]Marx, Lessons, 69.}. Read Tladi’s Portrait, a closely cropped, urgently drawn face defined as much by line as by the colorful ink staining the paper beneath it, in this context.

The person seen here certainly looks jolted, caught in a tight spot, and hurriedly weighing what to say or do next. For those who know Tladi’s work, this drawing stops us short for another reason: its formal and psychological intimacy—closely cropped, jarring forms, and energetic streaks—are unusual. The high gestural quality here is another departure from the norm, since the artist increasingly favored fine-lined figures in black ink against white fields. This work’s pink and ivory air-blown ink base gives shape to a face that the artist reinforced in black line. Dark hair, red eyes, and blue lips heighten the impact.

Tladi made Portrait while living in Gaborone. He was there to welcome other Black Consciousness-minded artists such as Mandla Langa, Mongane Wally Serote, Pethu Serote, and Tim Williams, who founded the important Medu Art Ensemble in 1978.^{[31]Elizabeth Gron (née Morton) reports that Medu was founded by Mandla Langa, Mongane Wally Serote, Pethu Serote, and Tim Williams. Gron, “Exchange and Impact of South African Exiles in Botswana through the Medu Art Ensemble from 1976 to 1985” (master’s thesis, University of Botswana, 1992), 14.} Mashiangwako and Bra Geoff Mphakati visited Tladi there two years later, and again, two years after that. Here they were reunited with Mnyele, who had moved to Gaborone in 1979 and would eventually become best known for his work with Medu, itself modeled on the many other SASO-supported grassroots initiatives founded by black artists in South Africa before the state banned SASO and other Black Consciousness bodies in October 1977. While in residence in Gaborone, Tladi made the beautiful For Batswana and Botswana (1979).

A small work in ink on paper, For Batswana and Botswana celebrates the joy Tladi experienced living in peace for a time with his compatriots in a place where democracy had held strong since 1966, when Botswana shed British protectorate status and became a nation of its own. The plains zebra is the nation’s symbolic animal, since there are so many, particularly during one of the two annual migrations they make along Botswana’s northern waterways. It appears on the nation’s coat of arms, where its black-and-white stripes, also prominent on the Botswana flag, connote a harmonious existence among people with different skin colors. It is thus not unusual that Tladi would choose to draw a herd of this majestic animal in a work named for his host nation and the people who constitute its majority, Batswana, or “the Tswana.”^{[32]South Africa is also home to many Batswana, most of whom live in its western region; indeed, Tswana is one of the nation’s eleven official languages.}

The patterns of zebras are entirely unique; individual patterns are akin to human fingerprints in that no two are alike. In For Batswatta and Botswana, they gallop rightward, each muscle and mane finely detailed, a collective bent towards a goal: reaching the Makgadikgadi Pans after the rainy season. They tread upon red earth, which marks the location of their annual trek, and the sky above is a mottled mass of azure and cream, created by blowing air over ink already applied to paper.

Tladi used his breath and his fingers—individuated marks of being—to send the color skittering across the two-dimensional plain.

One senses many elements harmonizing here: nature’s glorious stampede and its serenity; our own small place in a large world; the flow of seasons rife with dryness and thunderous skies; and the qualities of air as it is drawn in and out of the body, shaping figural forms in the ivory and black register that fills two thirds of this composition.

Tladi left Botswana for Sweden in 1980 on a scholarship with the Gerlesborg School of Fine Art and returned to Ga-Rankuwa, South Africa, in 1994.^{[33]Hattingh, Oto, 54.} Mashiangwako’s time in Gaborone was brief; he returned to Mamelodi the same year and used lessons learned at the Black Consciousness-inspired Medu Art Ensemble in his teaching at the Mamelodi Association for the Advancement of Creative Artists, another Black Consciousness-derived initiative.^{[34]Hattingh, Oto, 13.}

Mnyele stayed in Gaborone and ran Medu’s graphics unit, training hundreds of pupils and designing countless anti-apartheid posters that made their way back into South Africa through underground networks. He died for this work, murdered in his bed by South African agents in an early morning raid on Medu’s campus on June 14, 1985. Magadlela never made the journey beyond South Africa’s borders.

In Perspective

South Africa’s repressive realities required Black Consciousness artists to establish their own networks in which ideas and techniques could be traded, artists could be trained, and audiences could be realized: The styles that developed among the collective who shared studio space at the Mphakati family home in Mamelodi West and mixed with others at cultural events hosted by the SASO in the 1970s may appear “mystical” or “surreal”, since the forms take shape from uncertain terrain. But the shifting surfaces of their compositions cannot usefully define their styles because their shared common vantage and purpose was frequently stated:

They were committed to creating works that united their chosen audience; recalled African people, histories, and customs; and pushed these toward social justice.

To cast Magadlela, Mnyele, Mashiangwako, and Tladi within the comfortable enclosure of a European-derived history is to deny their own sense of being as progenitors of modern black culture as they chose to visualize and voice it. As Magadlela makes clear in the epigraph, he was intent on creating black art, which is to say a political, liberating art steeped in the self-defining momentum of Black Consciousness.^{[35]Magadlela, “Staffrider Profile” 25.}

This article was first published in the Journal of Contemporary African Art, 42-43, November 2018. Publication in herri with kind permission of the author. The publisher have been trying to find the rights holders to the images of Fikile Magadlela’s artworks with no success to date. The article is re-published in good faith and if the rights holder to these images does see it please would s/he contact us at kaganof@mweb.co.za.