In the festival’s affiliated exhibition of South African art, held at the National Museum and Art Gallery of Botswana, Jantjes showed five works—including a print dedicated to Cabral alongside other images responding to the turmoil of apartheid. For Jantjes, these struggles were not unrelated, despite differing geopolitical conditions. Indeed, his early practice was clearly influenced by the ideas espoused by anti-colonial thinkers and leaders like Cabral—and Frantz Fanon, Eduardo Mondlane, and Kwame Nkrumah—whose writing, in turn, influenced the Black Consciousness movement and other anti-apartheid coalitions in South Africa. Exploring such connections through the artist’s work and writing, the present essay focuses on two screenprints that he created while in exile and presented in Gaborone—Freedom Hunters (1977; fig. 1) and It is our peoples (1974; fig. 2). The impact of Cabral’s theories on culture and revolution is evident in Jantjes’s multifaceted campaign in these years for what he termed “art for liberation’s sake.”⁵

Born in District Six, Cape Town in 1948, Jantjes was one of the only non-white students to attend the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, where he studied graphic design in the late 1960s. However, as a student, he was subjected to increased surveillance and threats of punitive action—not just by educational authorities but also by officials of the apartheid state—on account of his outspoken politics. In the last year of his studies, Jantjes began to urgently seek asylum outside of South Africa. Finally, in 1970, he received a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship and secured a spot at the prestigious Hochschule für Bildende Künst in Hamburg.

In Hamburg, Jantjes was mentored by artists such as Richard Hamilton (1922–2011), Joe Tilson (born 1928; fig. 3), and Joseph Beuys (1921–1986). Throughout the 1970s, he produced a prolific oeuvre of screenprints that combine archival and reportage photographs with quotations drawn from political theory, poetry, administrative records, and news articles. In each image, visual and textual passages are arranged as if torn from the pages of books or magazines and placed in dynamic juxtaposition to colorful Pop graphics. While reminiscent of the flatbed compositions common in much postwar art, Jantjes’s work departs from seemingly precedent works by Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) as well as Andy Warhol (1925–1987) in its expressly communicative purpose. Indeed, he wanted to make a tangible political impact, to educate viewers on the effects of colonization across the Global South. In his writing of the era, as in his art, Jantjes frequently argued that the times simply demanded that African artists directly engage with their political condition. He claimed in 1976, for instance, that “one cannot speak of form and colour when one’s environment speaks of poverty, hunger, and death.”⁶

These values were first demonstrated in A South African Colouring Book—his earliest, and still most celebrated series of screenprints. Created in 1974–75, the suite consists of eleven images that convey different facets of the history and brutality of apartheid. It was motivated by Jantjes’s astonishment at his German peers’ lack of knowledge about the situation in South Africa. Deploying a motif evoking children’s educational materials, the prints capitalize on multiple associations implied through the use of the term “colour”—a reference to the legislation of racial identity under apartheid, for instance, or to his own designation within this system as “Cape Coloured” (evidenced by the inclusion of his own identification card in one print; fig. 4).

While living abroad, Jantjes had new access to information about anti-colonial and Pan-Africanist movements beyond South Africa. (Any speeches, news, or publications affiliated with such campaigns would have been censored by the apartheid state—although materials were still exchanged covertly among Black activist networks). In 1971, during his first year in Europe, Jantjes visited London, where he attended a public rally for Cabral. The artist was previously unfamiliar with Cabral’s revolutionary activism, and the speech made an enormous impression on him. Jantjes recalled, in particular, Cabral’s comments on the importance of language, and his democratic approach to providing political education to rural communities in Guinea Bissau. Cabral addressed individuals on the level of their own experience, rather than relying on the often-alienating parlance of academic theory. “When we began to mobilise our people,” he explained, “we couldn’t mobilise them for the struggle against imperialism—nor even, in some areas of Guiné, for the struggle against colonialism—because the people didn’t know what the words meant. . . . We had to mobilise our people on the basis of the daily realities of suffering and exploitation.”⁷

Jantjes took to heart the importance of communicating, plainly and simply, the brutal daily realities of colonized people across the world. After Cabral was assassinated by a political rival in 1973, Jantjes produced a print dedicated to his visionary leadership. Entitled It is our peoples, the work’s collagelike composition draws quotations from Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts, a then-recent English-language publication of Cabral’s writing and speeches. The titular phrase, for instance, which appears in large type against a sky-blue banner, could have been lifted from any number of repeated incantations in a lecture that Cabral delivered in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: “[Our] fundamental strength is the strength of the people. It is our peoples who support our organisations, it is our peoples who are making sacrifices every day to supply all the needs of our struggle. It is our peoples who will guarantee the future and the certainty of our victory.”⁸

In the print, Jantjes has nestled this text alongside photographs of both daily life and military camps in Guinea. Among these images is a portrait of a PAIGC militant in uniform, screenprinted directly from the pages of Cabral’s publication Our People Are Our Mountains (1972)—in which an English translation of the London speech that Jantjes attended is reproduced.⁹ These fragments surround a larger, solarized double-portrait of Cabral wearing his signature beanie and sunglasses. According to Jantjes, this is a photograph that he himself took of the television screen during a broadcast feature on the Guinean revolution. As such, the work is not simply an homage to Cabral’s leadership, but also a testament to the circulation and intermedial re-translation of material related to African politics—filmic negatives, for instance, that traveled from West Africa to the British press, as well as televised images made static through photographic capture, or the circulation of printed translations of words originally spoken impromptu before a crowded gathering. At the same time, Jantjes’s double-portrait of a recently-assassinated public figure clearly resonates with Warhol’s use of repetition to signal matters of real and symbolic death (or adjacency thereto) in his homages to Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Elvis Presley (figs. 5 and 6), or to the victims of car accidents, penal execution, or riot police in America.¹⁰

In the spring of 1976, this screenprint was among several shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in what was Jantjes’s first major solo exhibition.¹¹ Included works drew content from a range of geopolitical contexts, from resistance efforts waged in Namibia to the American civil rights movement (fig. 7). But again, the artist cites Cabral. In his artist’s exhibition statement, Jantjes asserts that “we have to acknowledge through our creative expression that we are prepared to participate in the kenetic [sic] processes of culture and history,” before going on to quote Cabral, who once claimed: “The colonialists have a habit of telling us that when they arrived in Africa they put us into history. You are well aware that it’s the contrary—when they arrived in Africa they took us out of our own history.”¹²

Jantjes was in London when the shocking news of an event now known as the Soweto uprising was relayed across the world. For several weeks, students in the South-Western Townships near Johannesburg peacefully protested the enforcement of Afrikaans as the mandated language of instruction in South Africa—a law that further disenfranchised the country’s African populations. On June 16, 1976, demonstrators were met by a militarized police force who opened fire on the crowd, killing and wounding countless children. For weeks, the front pages of international newspapers circulated the horrific photograph of the uprising’s first victim: thirteen-year-old Hector Pieterson, carried in the arms of a frightened classmate. Captured by Black South African photojournalist Sam Nzima, the iconic image swiftly became a symbol of apartheid violence. In a matter of months, Jantjes produced several screenprints about the Soweto uprising, including No More (1977; fig. 8), City Late 26 June 1976 (1977), and Freedom Hunters (1977; fig. 1).

The latter is among the most impactful of these works. Featuring a cropped and doubled detail from one of journalist Peter Magubane’s photographs of the event, it depicts students fighting bullets with stones and wielding the lids of trash bins as shields. While conveying, in part, the futility of the students’ defense against police artillery, these photographs also demonstrate their resilience in protesting the discriminatory society into which they were born. Set against a bright red backdrop, with an image of barbed wire bisecting the composition, Freedom Hunters communicates a sense of urgency and pleads with audiences to recognize and protest the violence of apartheid.

Such works resonate with the media-critical Pop practices of Joe Tilson and Richard Hamilton, with whom Jantjes studied, while demonstrating the artist’s own belief in the political responsibility of post- and anti-colonial artists.¹³ As Cabral explained, the fight to reclaim one’s culture, history, and identity was as crucial to liberation struggles as the fight for legal rights. The students of Soweto demonstrated this same desire when they petitioned for an equal education. In fact, these protests were orchestrated by the South African Students’ Movement (SASM), an affiliate of Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness movement—and Biko is well documented as having been impacted by Cabral’s activism.¹⁴ Jantjes’s familiarity and alignment with such political and intellectual networks is evident in the boldly didactic style of his early practice, and in his attention to globalized circulations of political theory. In documenting the South African struggle in connection to other struggles being waged across the continent, Jantjes raised awareness and helped galvanize support for anti-colonial causes worldwide.

It is our peoples and Freedom Hunters were both on view in Gaborone during the 1982 Culture and Resistance Symposium and Festival—a gathering of cultural workers invested in parsing matters of art, education, and activism. The event drew delegates from every region of South Africa, and from exile across the world, to Botswana; leading voices such as Mongane Wally Serote, Hugh Masekela, Nadine Gordimer, David Goldblatt, and Keorapetse Kgositsile were among those who debated the role of culture in the ongoing struggle for liberation. Most participants, like Jantjes, believed strongly that art would remain intertwined with politics as long as the freedom struggle remained urgent. Gordimer declared, for instance, that “if you are a committed artist you are committed to using your talents to service the cause of justice,”¹⁵ while actor Zakes Mofokeng told peers that “trying to avoid politics in art is like trying to dodge raindrops on a rainy day.”¹⁶

While the symposium and festival lasted just a week, the event was accompanied by a two-month-long exhibition of South African art at the National Museum and Art Gallery of Botswana. Entitled Art Toward Social Development, and like the symposium and festival with which it coincided, it was one of the first and most significant occasions in which the work of both exiled and South African–based visual artists was displayed together in a “non-racial” exhibition—which, in the era’s parlance, meant it included work by South Africans classified as “black, coloured, or white” by the apartheid state. The organizers sought to represent the “entire spectrum of South African society” and to reflect a “panorama” of the nation’s creative activity.¹⁷ Significantly for Jantjes, who had not lived in his home country for more than a decade, the exhibition marked his inclusion within an emerging canon of anti-apartheid art, alongside compatriots Ezrom Legae (1938–1999), Lionel Davis (born 1936), David Koloane (1938–2019), Durant Sihlali (1935–2004), David Goldblatt (1930–2018), and Sue Williamson (born 1941), among others.

By the time of his participation in Art Toward Social Development, Jantjes was at the precipice of a major shift in style, artistic focus, and professional milieu. He moved to the United Kingdom in August 1982, and began to paint. His Korabra series, completed in 1986, comprised several large-scale acrylic paintings—texturized with sand embedded in pigment—that ruminate on the history of transatlantic slavery.¹⁸ Jantjes became increasingly interested in ancestral arts of Africa, including West African sculpture, Egyptian monuments, and Khoisan rock paintings (fig. 9). His interest in the latter, for instance, gave rise to a series of prints, paintings, and mixed-media works that overlay esoteric prehistoric imagery with indigo night skies shimmering with constellations and galactic haze. Mixed-media works such as Untitled (double canvas with sculptures) (1988; fig. 10) are remarkably enigmatic; the mystical imagery of stylized masks, natural materials including twigs, and abstracted ceramic ovoid and cubic forms make this piece virtually unrecognizable in relation to Jantjes’s polemical print practice of the 1980s. In an untitled painting from 1989 (fig. 11) , the artist paired the same mask motif—whose sharp, elongated contours are reminiscent of art produced by the Fang peoples of Gabon—with a female figure from Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). Such works aim to uplift the status of African art, which has so often been pushed to the peripheries while European modernists appropriated their forms.

The seeds of these later artistic inquiries are, indeed, detectable in the speech that Jantjes delivered in Gaborone, in which he made the case for centering African art in Western art education. In this presentation, he echoed Cabral’s reminder that the colonists in Africa “took us out of our own history” and honored the Soweto students’ aspirations for an Afrocentric pedagogy: “Visual art education must work to eradicate the interiorization of the western evaluation of our contemporary art. It should instil [sic] in our people a meaningful interest in their culture and art and move them to recognise these as an integral part of the nations [sic] struggle against racist domination.”¹⁹

In his practice both in and out of the studio, Jantjes fought for the decolonization of culture and education, so as to ensure that future generations would have access to African history and identity. Drawing from references to Cabral and Biko, Warhol and Tilson, he grounded this effort in his faith in the power of collectivity and global solidarity.

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Helen Lieros (1940–2021) consistently found opportunities in crises and taught multiple generations of artists in her orbit to do the same. To rural art teachers who did not have traditional art materials, she once said, “Let’s work on newspaper, with mud.”¹ Her dual Greek-Zimbabwean identity, which underpinned her practice, was foregrounded by crisis. Her father, a merchant navy man, was shipwrecked on the coast of Cape Town coming from Europe.² Instead of waiting for the arrival of a new ship, he accepted an invitation from a friend, trekked north, and settled in what is present-day Gweru, Zimbabwe, where Lieros was born.³ Even though her mother ensured that she was exposed to Greek theatre and music, Lieros found her birthplace “suffocating as a little girl.”⁴ At age fifteen, she specialized in piano compositional studies and claimed that she could “see notes in color,” and yet she yearned for more.⁵ She lamented, “I was brought up in the British colonial type of painting, which I deplored. I had to do the little butterflies, the little flowers, and the little this and the little that in watercolors.”⁶

A recipient of several awards and scholarships, Lieros studied art in Switzerland and Italy between 1958 and 1963. Her world opened up as she engaged with the work of Georges Braque (1882­–1963), Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), and Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980), which gave her a broader visual lexicon. Since returning to Zimbabwe (then called Rhodesia) was too expensive, study breaks brought about occasions to visit Greece and to trace her European heritage. But what Europe failed to give her were the rich ochers and brilliant blues that emanated from being immersed in the Zimbabwean landscape. These are the very hues that Lieros later reinserted in her work in retaliation against years of being instructed by Swiss professors to gray them out (see figs. 2, 3).⁷ “As I began to re-identify myself with the African environment, so my painting became broader and my color stronger, symbolic of the felt experience,” she noted in 1995.⁸

From her student days until her death, Lieros’s work was fraught by the complexities of belonging to multiple geographies, a situation she described as a constant “fight between who and what I am.”⁹ Her practice involved drawing out the similarities within Zimbabwean and Greek rituals, and depicting them repeatedly through sheep, goat, bull, and bird motifs (see figs. 4, 5). Such is the case of The Rise of the Jongwe I (1981), in which a cock is a veiled allegory for Zimbabwe’s ruling party. Ironically, she earned a President’s Award of Honour for this very serigraph soon after Zimbabwe achieved independence in 1980 (see fig. 6).

Moments of Kairos

Political crisis and personal tragedy had significant impact on Lieros’s practice. After her studies, the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) sparked the Second Chimurenga, which lasted from 1964 to 1979.¹⁰ Apart from grueling violence, this period of civil war was characterized by political isolation and shortages of basic commodities.¹¹ In an emerging Zimbabwe, art supplies were a luxury. Lieros’s contemporaries, such as Kingsley Sambo (1936–1979), coped by using paint so sparingly that bare canvas replaced white paint. Similarly, Lieros, like others, sought ways of making the most of a dire moment that “necessitated exploration and improvisation in creativity: making [one’s] own paint from pigments.”¹² Texture became much more evident in her work (see fig. 6).¹³ Lieros later recounted, “[19]74 was the time when I really started creating . . . as late as that . . . when I explored, and I improvised, and I got hooked on trying to make materials and work with the materials that [were alien to me].”¹⁴

Another defining period in Lieros’s practice involved the illness and death of her sister. She said, “There were two or three years when my work was based on the two sisters. It was very much against the doctors, a hatred, a bitterness that [my sister’s] life couldn’t be saved. She, for me, was the most precious thing in my life. The two of us were very close. [My work] became very expressionistic, although the media somehow, oil on paper, was quite soft, but the work was violent.”¹⁵

Solidarity in Times of Struggle

Turbulent times continued to spark innovation in Lieros and those around her. Hard times fostered resilience. Referring to political sanctions in Zimbabwe, Lieros once said, “We achieve much by this isolation because outside influences, movements, and trends do not affect us so much and yet we have to see them to balance where we are. This stimulus helps us to go forward on our own path and challenges us to dare.”¹⁶ With a greater sense of responsibility, she intentionally sought ways of forging solidarity within the arts community. By 1972 she had moved to what is present-day Harare and become a key part of the Circle, a radical multiracial artist collective that developed dynamic forms of creative articulation in a country and period rife with censorship and division.¹⁷ Not only were the diverse constitution of the group and their critical sensitivity considered renegade at the time, but also the objet trouvé, painterly, print and fabric mediums they used were in themselves forms of resistance. Members of the Circle refused to yield to market pressure that, at the time and at the expense of other mediums, favored stone sculpture, which was propagated by local gallery and museum directors.¹⁸

Prior to the formation of the Circle, fate had brought Lieros and British-born Derek Huggins (1940–2021) together at a local police station.¹⁹ In 1975, Huggins resigned from his position in the police force, enabling the couple to open an art space. Gallery Delta was birthed amid armed revolution and thus had a similar ethos to the Circle—to create solidarity among artists and to go against the status quo (see fig. 7). From then on, Lieros and Huggins were artworld conspirators, and Gallery Delta, was the command center from which they instigated change.²⁰ Huggins and Lieros stated that the gallery was “established in an endeavour to provide a venue for the painters and the graphic, textile, and ceramic artists, and those sculptors who were doing other than “Shona” sculpture.”²¹ But Gallery Delta achieved much more than that. From the outset, it defied definition. Not a commercial gallery, it promoted and developed the careers of several artists. Not a school, it nonetheless attracted students, who sprawled their portfolios across its verandas in search of Lieros’s support—an aspect lacking at both the polytechnics and the workshop schools. Not a concert hall, it hosted intimate gatherings, in which audiences could listen to Afro-jazz tunes and sit through experimental theater productions (see figs. 8–10).

Nurturing New Forms of Expression During Health and Economic Crises

Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980, and in the two decades that followed, Gallery Delta become an important vehicle for propagating a critical art pedagogy. During this era, Lieros continued to make and promote her own work (see figs. 11, 12), however, she also became more determined to create space for young artists of color given the complex history of the country.²² Though the eighties and nineties were marked by great sociopolitical and economic transformation, the HIV/AIDS epidemic had a dire effect on the burgeoning art industry. The epidemic stole the lives of many young artists, a number of whom were trained by Lieros—including one of Zimbabwe’s most promising Black painters Luis Meque (1966–1998).²³ Arts writer Plot Mhako has reiterated this: “[Meque’s] successful promotion was the catalyst for the beginning of an African contemporary painting movement around Gallery Delta from the late 1980s and which included his contemporaries George Churu [1964–2002] and Richard Witikani [born 1967],” both of whom were also trained by Lieros.²⁴ Meque was regarded as “both a catalyst and cataclysmic.”²⁵ He died of HIV/AIDS at age thirty-one, just after he painted a series called Journey’s End (1998) and his work was gaining more international prominence.²⁶ This work was featured on the cover of issue number 17 of The Gallery (see fig. 13).

Documenting the Times

In 1994 Gallery Delta launched Gallery, a critical art magazine, because Lieros and Huggins believed that “despite the problems, the fact remains that the arts in Zimbabwe, in Africa, need publications to record, review, criticize, and publicize the activities and work of creative individuals.”²⁷ The magazine highlighted debates around the value of the Thapong, Pachipamwe, and Mbile workshops in Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia;²⁸ it also featured commentary on international events, such as the Johannesburg Biennales; scathing reviews about local programs at the National Gallery and other spaces; impassioned letters from the public as well as important art listings; and features on the practices of acclaimed artists such as Marlene Dumas (born 1953), and the writing of young curators such as Riason Naidoo and Doreen Sibanda.²⁹ Lieros and Huggins, along with editors Barbara Murray and Murray McCartney, captured the art historical pulse of the time and aimed to share the publication widely. When distributed to local schools, it was accompanied by activity sheets. The publication was discontinued in 2002.³⁰

Art as Part of a Calling

Lieros never stopped working, even in her golden years, when she could barely see.³¹ Though she also produced sculptures, she often said, “Ah, I’m a painter. I mean I’ve always tried other mediums. I’ve loved etching. I’ve worked with relief. I love paper. I’ve been recycling, making paper.”³² The fact she was a devout Greek Orthodox Christian occasionally manifested thematically in her practice. Because of her faith, she felt a call to duty when she was commissioned to paint murals in the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Harare in 1967, and later, the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel in Maputo, Mozambique. She painted the latter in the periods from 1996 to 2002 and 2008 to 2009, and in 2013. She was seventy years old by the time she completed the commission (see figs. 14, 15). During this time, at points of exhaustion, she experienced “severe attacks by strong, demonic forces” but was also “lifted spiritually, and given the strength and courage to continue.”³³Art historian Tony Monda describes the frescoes, which are almost thirty-three feet across and more than twenty-six feet high, as “prayers in billowing infernal primaries; blues, reds, yellows and secondary ochres.”³⁴Just like Lieros’s life, the cathedral in Maputo is a testament to overcoming crisis since it was spared state nationalization.

Despite war, grief, and economic decline, Lieros refused to capitulate.³⁵ Through Gallery Delta, she pioneered a school of thought underpinned by the idea of inner struggle and resisted the futility of the market. Mentee Richard Mudariki (born 1985) has described her as “a master teacher, great artist, a great mother in the area of arts because she showed much passion and care and was very much about the artists and their work.”³⁶ At the same time, she propelled the careers of her peers through repeated solo and group exhibitions at Gallery Delta.³⁷ Lieros died on July 13, 2021. The last artwork that she made, Untitled (Nike of Samothrace) (2021), was inspired by the ancient winged Greek victory monument (see fig. 16). Like this final work and the sculpture it references, Lieros embodied victory as she overcame countless battles. Her legacy lives on through the numerous artists far and wide whose own practices have been impacted by her tenacity.

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On a good day, the work of an art historian and curator begins with a distinctive kind of quiet, slow, intense, haptic engagement that the medium of painting irrevocably invokes. One revels in the play of color, composition, and surface, which points, in a push and pull, to one’s locatedness as an outside observer. Such is the grip and enchantment of losing oneself in the powerful historical and pictorial folds of a gripping painting. The delirium of this love affair also calls for a certain amount of sobriety and analysis; turning the canvas around, looking for the clues, utterances, and telltale signs that whisper its life story—its time and location of making, title, travels, ownership, and perhaps, through a tear or droplet, some of its misfortunes.  

Executed by polyhedral and prolific Mozambican artist Bertina Lopes (1924–2012) in the watershed year of 1973,¹ the verso of Omenagem a Amílcar Cabral (Tribute to Amílcar Cabral; fig. 2) discloses an emotional outcry on the death of revolutionary leader Amílcar Cabral. Just a few months after his meeting in October 1972 with African American organizations in New York City, Cabral was killed by a group of armed men—Portuguese agents who, in the early hours of the morning of January 20, 1973, took his life at point-blank range.²

A founder of the Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (African Independence Party for Guinea and Cape Verde, or PAIGC) in 1956, and one of only four university graduates from Guinea-Bissau, Cabral traveled across the country between 1952 and 1954 as a young agronomist, gaining profound knowledge of the land and its people, which he prioritized in his intertwined, decolonially-minded political and cultural practice. Under his leadership, the people of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde galvanized into one fighting force against Portuguese colonialism. Cabral was aware of the large number of plots to assassinate him,³ but was firm in his belief that the anticolonial struggle would continue without him. As he stated in an interview in October 1971: “If I die tomorrow, nothing will change in the ineluctable evolution of the fight of my people and their victory. . . . We will have dozens, hundreds of Cabrals in our people. Our nation will find a militant to continue the work.”⁴

Expressed in the artist’s expansive and distinctive cursive handwriting, in an inimitable mélange of Portuguese and Italian (the two languages that Lopes made her own), one reads the following illuminating declaration: “Cabral has died physically, not only in Guinea, but in all of Africa, in all the world! But he lives on . . . forever!” Splayed across the wooden stretcher, Lopes also provided an explicit instruction to herself—as well as to her dealers, family, and stewards—that this work should not be sold. The different pens she used for her palimpsestic inscriptions along the wooden stretcher signal how she returned to this painting time and again, how meaningful it was to her—and how she wished to see it included in her historiography.⁵

Lopes had been living as an exile in Europe for approximately nine years when she painted Tribute. She had fled Mozambique in 1964 to accept a bursary offered to her by Lisbon’s Gulbenkian Foundation.⁶ Published in 1964, Luís Bernardo Honwana’s now-classic short story “Nós Matámos o Cão-Tinhoso!” (“We Killed Mangy-Dog”)—a trailblazer in anticolonial short stories from Southern Africa, which included fragments of drawings by Lopes and her actual  handprint⁷—had just been banned, and the two found themselves in the crosshairs of the colonial police.⁸ Prior to this, she was part of a group of artists who took an anticolonial stance, communicating their withdrawal from the 1963 Bienal de São Paulo, believing that she would be representing a Portuguese province, not Mozambique, in the “Ultramar”⁹ (fig. 5).¹⁰ Leaving behind the stability of a teaching post as well as her twin boys, Lopes left Mozambique in 1964 to study ceramics in Lisbon under Querubim Lapa (Portuguese, 1925–2016), until another opportunity emerged in Rome to study classical art.

Despite her work having been the object of two major exhibitions in Lisbon (in 1973 and 1979, respectively),¹¹ Lopes was never represented by a Portuguese (or, for that matter Italian) commercial gallery—a reality that begs further engagement and unpacking—bearing the brunt of building and maintaining a career as a Black, “third-world” visual artist and mother. Against the odds, she harnessed her innermost energies to produce a singular oeuvre that contributes to our understanding of the emergence of modernism in Mozambique as a nationalist aspiration. Arguably inspired by her first husband, poet Virgílio de Lemos (Mozambican, 1929–2013), Lopes significantly bent her European expressionist training to her African idiom, producing an initial body of works that exposed the depredations of Portuguese colonialism and fascism. Refusing social mores, aesthetic atomization, and capitalist tethers, she painted, sculpted, and contributed to the nationalist and pan-African cause and aesthetic, producing extraordinary abstract and geometric works in her later years, opening her home to the Mozambican cause, and giving her work away freely to the friends and causes she believed in most.

An instance of what Italian critic Claudio Crescentini has termed a “phenomenology of commitment,”¹² according to her Italian widower and founder of the Bertina Lopes Archive in Rome,¹³ Tribute is likely to have been executed during a stay in Lisbon,¹⁴ possibly to visit one of her sisters, Custódia Lopes, who in 1973, formed part of the 10th legislature of the Estado Novo (under António de Oliveira Salazar) as a congresswoman for Mozambique. Despite existing on opposite ends of the political spectrum—Bertina, a cautious socialist and nationalist, and her sister, Custódia, an incongruous representative of the colonial government—the siblings maintained close contact, and Custódia, who traveled the world, always kept her artist sister in mind. As a matter of fact, while residing in Paris, Custódia would, in a gesture denoting some ambivalence toward the colonial regime, send postcards and reproductions of Picasso’s work to Bertina, then in Lourenço Marques. Bertina in turn used these images in her revolutionary lessons at the General Machado all-girls school.¹⁵

Measuring 55 1/8 by 74 13/16 inches (140 x 190 cm), Tribute is dominated by a thick, deep impastoed crimson background and a central messianic, totemic figure with outstretched arms that reach across the painting, embracing an abstracted, flattened Black crowd that peoples the lower half of the canvas.¹⁶ In the periphery, four executioners in pith helmets, spread out in menacing pairs on each side, are rendered in profile with glaring eyes and snarling mouths. These figures recall the Portuguese secret police, or PIDE, who not only surveilled the artist while she was living in Mozambique, having considered her a person of interest, but also, and of direct import to this work, recruited Cabral’s assassins from its Tarrafal prison. A haunting presence in her life, these men populate several of Lopes’s anticolonial works from the period. Such is the case of the multiple soldiers in Senza Titolo (Rappresaglia) (Untitled [Retaliation], 1963; fig. 6) or Cantiga do Batelão (Boat Song, 1963; fig. 7), which is dedicated to her friend, nationalist poet José Craveirinha (Mozambican, 1922–2003), who was arrested by the PIDE briefly in 1964 and for a longer period in 1968. Boat Song portrays the arrested poet, his arms raised in the air, surrounded by a group of helmets. Around the captive poet’s neck, Lopes painted a large luminous tooth tied to a bright red string, arguably a reference to Craveirinha’s poem on the dilemma of vengeance: “Olho por olho / Eu ou tu / Beijo por beijo / Unha por unha / Milho por milho / Nós ou eles / Eles ou nós / Dente por dente / bala por bala / E . . . poetas cem por cento no exterior deste dilemma / ou Pátria ou Nada!”(“An eye for an eye / Me or you / A kiss for a kiss / A nail for a nail / Mealie meal for mealie meal / us or them / Them or us / A tooth for a tooth / A bullet for a bullet / And . . . poets beyond this dilemma / Homeland or Nothing!”¹⁷ In her later Omaggio per la morte di Picasso (Homage on the Death of Picasso, 1974; fig. 8), three of these signature figures of repression appear on the left, on the heels of a group of supplicating women.¹⁸ Their ominous presence also features in a painting by her peer Malangatana Valente Ngwenya (Mozambican, 1936–2011) entitled Grito de Liberdade (The Cry for Freedom, 1973), which, accessioned into the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in 2020, is also dedicated to Cabral.¹⁹ Ngwenya, unlike Lopes, has portrayed the soldiers not only as observers, but also as infiltrates, translating social life in Mozambique at the time when no one could be trusted.

With Tribute, Lopes transmutes the body of Cabral. No longer a man, he is risen, a forebear who looks down on us from a vantage point above. Cabral is the purveyor of an essential, vital force that we witness in the radiating, thick lines that surround the central auratic figure. Arguably, Lopes drank from the negritudinist cup in her homage,²⁰ imbibed via “Black Blood” by poet Noémia de Sousa (Mozambican, 1926–2002), who like Lopes, frequented the Associação Africana.²¹ Neither imitation nor representation, Lopes’s translation aimed to synthetically render Cabral as a syncretic ancestor, ultimately presentifying him as a messianic apparition. Masked, the totemic figure is a liminal performer, moving between spaces, between the community and its outskirts, the living and the dead. The threshold that is crossed and the fusion that is achieved allows for communion between the living onlookers and the deceased, between African and Christian iconography, bridging the chasm between the deceased and his people.

Like it was for her modernist, nationalist peers, poets José Craveirinha, Noémia de Sousa, and coconspirator Luís Bernardo Honwana (fig. 1), art for Lopes was part of identity formation, reconnecting the self to her antepassados, or those who came before us. In the battle between assimilation²² and re-africanization,²³ it would be Africa that would rise and take primacy—a resurrection embodied and communicated by Lopes in Tribute for coming generations.

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Medu Art Ensemble, a collective formed in 1978 in Gaborone, Botswana (in Sesotho, “medu” means “roots”), was “comprised of more than 60 visual artists, performers and writers, mainly South African exiles but with members from Botswana, Canada, Cuba, Sweden and North America.”¹ One of Medu’s notable legacies was organizing the Culture and Resistance Symposium and Festival of the Artsheld at the University of Botswana in Gaborone in 1982. More than nine hundred people from Europe, the United States, and Southern Africa attended.² The purpose of the symposium was to chart a way forward for the role of arts and culture in a new and free democratic South Africa. Medu was active from 1979 until June 14, 1985, when the South African Defence Force (SADF) launched a cross-border raid on African National Congress (ANC) targets in Gaborone, including several Medu members. Medu disbanded after the raid.

The collective consisted of six units: Publications and Research, Graphic Arts and Design, Music, Theatre, Photography, and Film. Apart from its focus on promoting resistance to apartheid in South Africa, Medu was active in training Botswana nationals and exiles as well as conducting workshops in various art disciplines and hosting live music and theatre events. Its “members adopted the appellation ‘cultural workers,’ choosing not to identify as artists because of the shared belief that as culture was of the people, it could not and should not be confined to the exclusionary art world of the apartheid era.”³ This idea is best expressed by Thami Mnyele (1948–1985), a Medu member and visual artist: “For me as craftsman, the act of creating art should complement he act of creating shelter for my family or liberating the country for my people. This is culture.”⁴ Medu drew inspiration from a variety of creative ideas and role models, including West Indian social philosopher Frantz Fanon and African writers such as Wole Soyinka and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, but also from more broadly categorized revolutionary thought and artists such as Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, German playwright Bertolt Brecht, and Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José Orozco, and David Siqueiros, and painter Frida Kahlo.⁵

Key members of the Graphic Arts and Design unit during different periods were Sergio-Albio González (Cuban, born 1931; active in Medu 1979–85), Phillip Segola (South African, born 1948), Miles Pelo (South African, date of birth unknown; active in Medu 1979–83), Judy Seidman (American, born 1951; active in Medu 1981–85), Thami Mnyele (South African, 1948–1985; active in Medu 1979–85), Heinz Klug (South African, born 1957; active in Medu 1979–85), Gordon Metz (South African, born 1955; active in Medu 1979–85), Lentswe Eric Mokgatle (South African, date of birth unknown; active in Medu 1982–85), Petra Röhr-Rouendaal (German, date of birth unknown; dates active in Medu unknown), Basil Jones (South African, date of birth unknown; active in Medu 1979–81), and Adrian Köhler (South African, born 1951; active in Medu 1978–80).⁶ The unit designed and produced posters, covers, and illustrations for Medu’s newsletters and pamphlets. Decisions on artwork designs were made collectively and at times themes were commissioned by a general meeting of Medu members.⁷ Members of the unit established a set of guiding principles for the production of artwork designs, including that the message of the art stem from the community and not be a result of individual artistic genius, that each formal and aesthetic component of the work contribute to the message, and that the art should elicit a response from the audience based upon their own history and experience.⁸ Medu’s posters have become icons of the liberation movement and more recently acknowledged for their aesthetic contribution within a larger canon of artistic creation.⁹ Between 1979 and 1985, the unit produced approximately ninety posters that were smuggled into South Africa.

The graphic poster You Have Struck a Rock (1981), in MoMA’s collection, was produced to commemorate the Women’s Anti-Pass March of August 9, 1956 (now commemorated annually on August 9 in post-apartheid South Africa as Women’s Day). The march was organized by the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) and led by Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Albertina Sisulu, and Sophia Williams-De Bruyn.¹⁰ The apartheid government had proposed amendments to the “pass” laws that would further restrict the movement of Black women and require them to carry a document that regulated their movement and hours of transit. Twenty thousand women of all races marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to submit a petition in protest. J. G. Strijdom, then prime minister, refused to accept their petition. The women responded with the song “Wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo” (“You strike the women, you strike a rock”), which has come to symbolize the courage and strength of South African women. According to the ANC,  the emancipation of women must be an integral part of national liberation. In response, at a monthly Medu meeting, it was decided that a poster be produced to commemorate the women’s march.

As a member of the Graphic Arts and Design unit, Judy Seidman, an American-born artist and activist who moved to Gaborone in 1980, proposed an ink drawing of a woman holding an AK-47 and the full text “You have touched a woman, you have struck a rock; you have dislodged a boulder, you will be crushed.” It was decided to replace the AK-47 with a clenched fist and a broken chain. This change was made due to concerns that Medu needed to be cautious about portraying support for the armed struggle and thereby creating problems for the Botswana authorities, who had to be diplomatic with regard to its neighbor South Africa and apartheid. The resulting poster, You Have Struck a Rock (1981), was produced as a silkscreen using a cut-knife stencil and a single pull process to generate approximately 200 copies.¹¹ You Have Struck a Rock (1981) has become an iconic symbol for women’s liberation and, in particular, the conviction and courage of Black women.

You Have Struck a Rock (1981) portrays an African image of solidarity against oppression that evokes a poster created in 1942 by J. Howard Miller (American, 1918–2004) titled We Can Do It! but later associated with Rosie the Riveter, an American feminist icon. Used as part of a campaign to recruit woman workers during World War II, the American poster became a symbol for women’s independence and equal rights. In a similar way, You Have Struck a Rock (1981) can be understood to function as a metonym for women’s rights and liberation against oppression. While stylistically the two images differ, with We Can Do It! embodying what would come to be seen as a Pop aesthetic, while You Have Struck a Rock (1981) reveals a cut-and-paste montage aesthetic, both posters pivot off the notion of an individual woman at the center of historical events and, therefore, shaping the course of history. In this way, there is a productive tension between the propaganda message of the poster medium linked to a collective social idea and the notion of the individual artistic identity behind the image. This tension is apparent in Medu as a collective formed around the idea of solidarity, utilizing the arts to stand against oppression, and yet comprised of individual artists and activists who have left an indelible mark on history.

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Gladys Mgudlandlu’s Xhosa name, given to her at birth was Nomfanekiso, which in English, extraordinarily, means a picture of a person. Her name suggests that her path into the world of image-making was preordained through Xhosa naming practices. Gladys Mgudlandlu (1917–1979) was born in rural Peddie, South Africa.¹ Her mother died at an early age, and she was subsequently raised by her maternal grandmother. Like other Black artists of her generation, Gladys Mgudlandlu is considered a self-taught artist, a designation that fails to acknowledge the ancestral and indigenous knowledge passed down to her by way of her grandmother. Through her forebear, Mgudlandlu was initiated into the tradition of Mfengu and Xhosa mural painting. By instilling knowledge of the regional landscape, her grandmother also shared ways of creating that would not typically have been offered in a Western-style art curriculum—such as the use of local stones, which could be sharpened to make pencils. She exposed Mgudlandlu to the different regions of the Eastern Cape, which at the time was called Ciskei, where she could source natural clays in a variety of raw hues, and she taught her how to carve yellowwood (uMcheya, a tree native to South Africa) into everyday objects, such as needles for knitting and crocheting. In 1961, a year after the bloodshed of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960,² Gladys Mgudlandlu staged her first solo exhibition in South Africa. There is little doubt that racial tensions were running high as the exhibition benevolently took place in the offices of the Liberal Party in Cape Town. For a white South African audience evading culpability, Mgudlandlu’s rural Peddie landscapes could be subsumed into an apolitical and  palatable form of artistic expression. In 1963, the South African writer Bessie Head, would become one of Gladys Mgudlandlu’s prominent interlocuters. In her review “Gladys Mgudlandlu: The Exuberant Innocent”, Head identified a mood of escapism surrounding the consumption of the artist’s work, stating, “Who wants to be reminded of the terrors of township living? It is ugly, horrible and sordid.”³ Unbeknownst to some of her critics including Bessie Head, Gladys Mgudlandlu did in fact paint township imagery, perhaps not as frequently as her natural landscapes, but she did indeed undertake township scenes, which I will discuss in this essay. Although her natural landscapes could be dismissed as escapist, this is partially because of the commonly held assumption that the landscape genre is a safe, apolitical subject. But the question of land cuts deep into the inner core of all modern settler-colonial formations because it illuminates the ongoing condition of native and indigenous peoples’ dispossession.

Painting landscapes for those “displaced in place,” inhabiting a “house arrest kind of existence”

Described as an expressionist, Gladys Mgudlandlu evaded modernist classifications of her practice. In her own words, she preferred to be called a “dreamer imaginist.”⁴ The loaded act of creating her own terms was a reach toward a new idiom, one outside of the modernist framework. This experimentation with agency evinces the way that she saw herself as operating beyond South Africa’s Eurocentric conventions of modernist painting. Gladys Mgudlandlu’s kinship to birds is echoed in her technical use of a bird’s-eye view, a perspective that often configures the pictorial space of her work. Moreover, her aerial views are likened to motion, which Bessie Head associated with escapism. In her review Head accuses Mgudlandlu of performing “a kindly service” for those who may prefer to forget and turn their backs to the ongoing terrors of township life. While paying attention to Head’s trenchant observation, there remains a way in which to think about Mgudlandlu’s “escapism” politically. Could it be that Mgudlandlu was heeding the call to those who have been “displaced in place,” to those who are “relegated to a homeland that is not home at home.”⁵

Gladys Mgudlandlu’s escapist brush strokes perhaps respond to the nervous tension that comes with inhabiting a “home-arrest kind of existence” that is incisively described by Thabo Jijana in Rented Grave: Looking Beyond The Rural-Urban Dichotomy.⁶ Significantly, even her critic Bessie Head left South Africa in 1964.⁷ As a matter of fact, Head arrived in Botswana as a stateless refugee having to report to the police on a weekly basis.

This condition of being “displaced in place” is visually encoded in her township scenes, which barely display a semblance of human presence. Take, for instance, her eerie depictions of the empty four-room matchbox houses in the township of Gugulethu, where she lived as an adult. In Gugulethu (1963; fig. 1), Mgudlandlu’s houses slant and slope with kinetic energy, as if they are reeling in the aftermath of a natural disaster. Some of them are on the verge of toppling, precariously half buried in the ground, with the sand dunes rising up to the windows. Packed closely together as they disappear into the earth, they appear to be caught in quicksand, which is swallowing them whole. The void of human presence contrasts sharply with the crowded township scenes by Mgudlandlu’s contemporary George Pemba (1912–2001). A fine example of Pemba’s township scenes, his painting New Brighton jostles and overflows with Black social life.

If landlessness is another condition that transforms Africans into wretched wanderers with nothing but their labor to sell for a pittance, then the genre of landscape painting represents a space-time of possession and dispossession. Implicit in Gladys Mgudlandlu’s landscapes is the reminder that the ownership of land has historically epitomized South African citizenship. Contextually, land ownership is not only apparent in the lines of the South African national anthem,⁸ it is also emblazoned within the genre of landscape painting itself. Such is the case of the Afrikaner nationalist painter Jakob Hendrik Pierneef (1886–1957), who declared that “art has to walk with the nation and grow with it.”⁹ Pierneef’s views on landscape painting flourished alongside the influence of Hendrick Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid. In the effort to bolster and naturalize white appropriation of indigenous land, Verwoerd strategically reclassified Black African “Natives” as “Bantus,” affirming the idea that white people were now also natives of Africa.¹⁰ Pierneef is known for paintings such as An Extensive View of the Farmlands (1926), in which the South African landscape is rendered in a flattening, rigid geometric style devoid of emotion. More notably, his paintings of indigenous land are emptied of Black Africans, reproducing in visual terms, a Verwoedian political order. Within a settler-colonial context, landscape painting performs the dual labor of deterritorializing Africans while perpetuating a deadening form of visuality. This is a self-serving, imperial-masculinist fantasy that imagines Africa as an empty, virgin interior ready to be broken, owned, and put to work. Moreover, in this instance, it becomes crucial to discern and distinguish Mgudlandlu’s insistence on painting the land within the context of a genre that operated to nullify her ancestral and indigenous connections to it. Mgudlandlu’s energetic brushstrokes do not flow from an imperialist fantasy of dominion over nature.

By contrast, for her, the land resonates as a site of restorative ancestral refuge away from the immediate terrors of urbanized enclosures. However, there is a nostalgic ring to this, because rural Peddie was a part of the Ciskei was, in fact, a Bantustan homeland reserve. The Apartheid Bantustan reserves were modeled on the American reservation system,¹¹ which had been established in North America more than fifty years before. In the words of Mahmood Mamdani, “The American ‘reservation’ became the South African ‘reserve.’”¹² As we start to contextualize Mgudlandlu’s rural landscapes of Peddie within the broader apparatus of a global settler colonial technology called ‘the reserve’, her work begins to signify ambivalently. From this perspective, the rural Bantustan is a simulation of refuge and a space devoid of national presence.¹³

In Two Girls Running Through a Forest (1962; fig. 2), for instance, Mgudlandlu blended her figures into a natural treescape, her quick pointillist brushstrokes resonate with a desire to blend into the wilderness and break free. Within the image, on either side of the two girls running, there are three dark trees with unusually curved trunks uncannily leaning toward each other. She bends them to shield the two figures blending in and disappearing from sight. Painted in the opaque medium of gouache, Honey Birds (1961; fig. 3) marks a breakthrough in Mgudlandlu’s career, while denoting her first taste of critical success. Displayed in 1961 at her first exhibition, Honey Birds is painted in meandering elegant lines and harmonious warm and golden sunlit tones. The painting is likely to have been inspired by scenic views of the Amathole, which is close to where Mgudlandlu grew up. The mountain range forming the northern boundary of the district has an escarpment with slopes covered in lush forests of yellowwood, Cape chestnuts, and other indigenous trees. Red clays and yellow soils dominate the region. In Honey Birds, Mgudlandlu vividly depicts a mother bird who, perched atop a high mountainous landscape, tends to her hatchlings. Mother and Chicks (1961), drawn with lines of deep blues and greens, is a similarly tender scene of a black mother bird nesting and nurturing her young upon a dense grassy patch.

Mgudlandlu’s evocation of the maternal immediately points to her role as a single mother to her children, Malvern and Linda, and it perhaps can also be read as a homage to her grandmother, who died in 1957. More implicitly, it points to the way she primarily made a living through gendered professions such as nursing and teaching—occupations historically associated with care and women’s work. Gladys loved teaching and taught in several primary schools in Gugulethu. According to Elza Miles (born 1938), Mgudlandlu was known to have gone out of her way to nurture her pupils’ talents. Her landscapes of Peddie are an extension of this maternal cord of significance. In Xhosa Homestead (1966; fig. 4) and Huts (1966; fig. 5), Mgudlandlu draws mountains and hills in rounded shapes and lines that suggest “the nurturing aspects of the earth, resembling women’s breasts.”¹⁴

When they are not nestled on the ground, evoking maternal refuge, her birds fly above dotted trees and rustic highlands, such as in Two white birds flying over mountains and trees (1962; fig. 6). Their feet hang in a hovering motion, as though they are about to land. Mgudlandlu paints her feathered friends with an endearing charm, endowing them with an uncanny familiarity. This      renders an impression of a human presence passing in animal form. Such is the case of the black Oystercatchers (1964; fig. 7), who glide across the page, meeting our gaze, eye to eye, their legs curved backward into the sky like lanky human arms. This quality of blending the human into the animal and into nature is a loaded artistic gesture that is not exclusive to this painting, as it can also be detected in Flowers (1962; fig. 8). Here, Mgudlandlu directs our gaze to the ground, to a grassroots level. What at first glance looks like a lively congregation of black figures clad in stripy pink and orange gowns dwelling under leafy sheaths or huddled together, turns out to be a bunch of daisies. Their petals droop downward, recurved so that their black stigmas resemble Black heads. Enveloped by the leaves above them as if to protect them from the elements, the flowers appear to pulsate side by side, evoking the warm charisma of a choral movement. Away from the realities of apartheid urban life, this composition is a remarkable yet ambivalent statement that evokes visual metaphors of marronage and Black cohabitation with nature, even in the rural, a space of “the reserve.” Once more, this aesthetic is depicted in an earlier composition of Flowers (1960; fig. 9). In this painting, the long stalks extend from the body of the plant, suggesting the limbs of a protective maternal figure. The stalks cocoon the human-shaped flowers below them in a manner that belies immediate recognition.

In all these paintings, Mgudlandlu’s brushwork is consistent. Evading precision, or the lingering over minor details, the haste of her brushwork endows her images with a moving, restless energy. Her choice of subject matter sheds light on her inner world and her upbringing in rural Peddie. Her reverence for the wilderness is effused with maternal metaphors, which evoke the fervor of a burgeoning African ecofeminist aesthetic.

Mgudlandlu’s work enjoyed a remarkably positive reception, and it was a commercial success in her lifetime. Her second exhibition, in 1962 at Rodin Gallery, was described as “the most enthusiastic exhibition ever held in Cape Town.”¹⁵ Despite her success, both sides of the apartheid divide were not short on criticism. From the white media, by way of newspapers such as the Cape Argus, Die Burger,and the Evening Post,criticism was primarily directed at her lack of formal training. Neville Dubow, former professor at the University of Cape Town, commented that her figure compositions are “unconvincing” and “lacking in development.”¹⁶ By contrast, Black critics, such as Bessie Head and George T. Kulati, who in their own ways were reckoning with the political turbulence of the time, focused their acerbic criticism on her preference for painting natural landscapes, which to them signified an apolitical stance. Mgudlandlu created for herself a unique place in South African art history. She experimented with bending and breaking the conventions of the settler-colonial landscape genre, evoking an unsettling fugitive moment. She achieved this by rendering the natural environment in ways that recall indigenously African conceptions of the wilderness as animated places with intrinsic presence—not as an absent space awaiting settler-colonial occupation and development.

Despite the criticism of Mgudlandlu’s being an escapist, her real life was far from it. She suffered her fair share of the tragedy and poverty that typified Black life in her time. In 1969, an earthquake destroyed her work, and at some point, her shack burned down, taking all of her possessions with it.¹⁷ In 1971, she was hit by a car. She never fully recovered from her injuries and died penniless. There is a cold and gray monochrome photograph of Gladys Mgudlandlu’s friend Sheila Sontange standing at Gugulethu cemetery. Sontange is bending over, pointing at the unkempt grassy patch where Gladys Mgudlandlu was buried in 1979. Aside from the caption, there is no visible tombstone; indeed, nothing in the picture signifies that this is Gladys Mgudlandlu’s final resting place. From the viewer’s point of view, there could be anybody or nobody buried under the overgrown spot to which Sontange directs our gaze. Once again, as Mgudlandu’s paintings make salient, in this photograph taken after her death, the subject of the wilderness continues to reassert its enveloping presence. Moreover, as the demand for land restitution continues to seethe under the gloss of South Africa’s “rainbowist”¹⁸ politics, Mgudlandlu’s “wayward”¹⁹ ways with the colonial landscape genre show us the necessity of breaking away from formalities in order to create a space for reclamation and recovery.

In reproducing the images contained in this text, the Museum obtained the permission of the rights holders, whenever possible. If the Museum could not locate the rights holders, notwithstanding good-faith efforts, it requests that any contact information concerning such rights holders be forwarded so that they may be contacted for future editions.

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South Africa’s history is abundantly captured as institutional memory in the form of museums, state archives, and historical sites. Because of this ubiquity, it is easy to reach a point of “apartheid fatigue,”¹a disturbing mental state in which one feels as though they have reached their capacity for considering apartheid and its effects. Sometimes driven by apathy, this condition is characterized by a belief that history is either irrelevant and of no practical value or otherwise resolved. But, of course, as South Africa is one of the most unequal and unjust societies in the world, its history of institutionalized racism and oppression is nowhere near resolved. It is very much alive, continually unfolding and opening itself up to the horrifying potential of repeating itself.

What remain absent within this context of profuse institutionalized recollection and remembrance are objects and sites that accurately and sufficiently hold the collective memory of the majority. A large number of South Africans do not see themselves or their narratives presented in their country’s institutions. This reality is largely reflected through movements organized by a younger generation of South Africans, such as #rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall, in which students took to the streets in protest, calling for free, quality, and decolonized education; an end to outsourcing practices within universities; and the removal of colonial monuments and artifacts, among other demands.

Often, institutionalized sites of memory embody a singular and easily digestible narrative, one of forgiveness and reconciliation within a “rainbow nation” based on the ideal of an equal, multiracial, and reconciled South Africa. This is the legacy Nelson Mandela wished to leave behind. As he declared in 1994, “We enter into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity—a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.”²The promise of a “rainbow nation” has remained largely unfulfilled as the narrative of a “nation at peace with itself” systematically overlooks economic and social injustices, and moreover, further incites violence through exclusion and alienation.

Through a participatory approach to documenting and accounting for the past, Sue Williamson works against the limits of this narrative, creating a potential for bridging the gap between historicized memory and embodied memory. Her practice recalls the past through the act of remembrance and recollects it through the work of archiving.

Having trained as both a journalist and a printmaker, Williamson coalesces installation, video, and photography within her practice. She works closely with and intimately engages her subjects as collaborators, as is demonstrated in projects such as There’s something I must tell you (2013), in which she recorded conversations between veteran women activists and their granddaughters, and Last Supper at Manley Villa (1981), in which she documented the District Six forced removals through the story of the Ebrahim family on the eve of their removal. The forced removals were a result of the Group Areas Act of 1950, which declared District Six a “whites-only” area. People not classified as “white” or European under the apartheid regime were relocated to places such as Langa township (designated for Africans) and the Cape Flats (designated for “coloured” people). The process of forced removals by the apartheid nationalist government spanned sixteen years, beginning in 1966, and saw more than sixty thousand residents removed from District Six alone. Williamson notes: “On August 2, 1981, Naz and Harry Ebrahim had celebrated Eid with their family and friends at Manley Villa for the last time. The first ten photographs in this portfolio were taken on and around that day. A few months after that, the comfortable family home was demolished. The last photograph in the portfolio was taken in 2008 and records the empty spot where Manley Villa once stood.”

Williamson often speaks of her practice as not merely documenting but also bearing witness. As a witness, she’s not offering up moral lessons or sketching out an ethical position, she is simply telling the story as it is. Speaking in relation to Williamson’s practice, Professor Ciraj Rassool posits that “the position of the artist who works with historical experience is necessarily a difficult one.”³For Thirty Years Next to His Heart (1990) emerges from this difficult position. It is not an easy work to engage.

In For Thirty Years Next to His Heart, Williamson turns her attention to an emblem of white supremacy and oppression: the passbook. The work documents forty-nine pages from the passbook of a Black man named John Ngesi. Produced from a Canon color laser printer (a new and rare technology at the time) arranged in a seven-by-seven grid (a narrative sequence of forty-nine images read left to right and top to bottom), the photocopies are enclosed in artist-made frames. The choice of framing materials—copies of old currency and images of soft drink cans—is significant. This decision takes its inspiration from the common local practice in South African township homes of using colored paper and packaging from ordinary consumer goods to make frames for photographs as well as, in some cases, wallpaper. For Thirty Years Next to His Heart is the artist’s most well-traveled piece, and editions are currently held in the collection of the Museum Africa in Johannesburg and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

A document required by law, the passbook embodies the complexities of (im)mobility for Black people in South Africa, who under apartheid, could not work or move freely between different parts of the country without proper documentation. The history of so-called pass laws can be traced to the practice of slavery in the Cape colony, from as early as the 1700s. The Khoikhoi people, who had lost their land to colonial landowners, were forced into labor and required to carry “permission documents,” which regulated their movement to and from the farms on which they worked.“⁴The evolution of passes and laws culminated in the Native (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 and later the Native Laws Amendment Act, 1952, which relegated Black people (particularly Black men) to the status of “temporary sojourners” within urban areas, a condition that persists to this day. The passbook underpinned a system of cheap migrant labor rendered under very difficult and unfair conditions. Based on figures supplied in the Annual Report of the Commissioner of South African Police (1917–20, 1925–33, 1935–39, 1941–79/80), University of Cape Town professor Michael Savage estimates that more than seventeen million Africans were arrested and prosecuted under various pass laws and influx control regulations in South Africa between 1916 and 1984.⁵

When I visited her studio, Williamson showed me Ngesi’s passbook. Secured between the hard flesh of the cover, pages detailing his life are yellowed and aged —Signature. Date. “Report to the local labour bureau at Langa.” Signature. Date. Permitted to remain in the prescribed area. Signature. Date. Influx control registration. Signature. Date. Kensington Inn Hotel. Signature. Date. Rural reserve. Signature. Date. Discharged. Commenting on why Ngesi had still carried this document years after the law had been repealed, the artist explained, “I realized that although it was a hated instrument of control, it was also his security and habit of years.” When, after completing her artwork, she attempted to return it to the old man, he refused to accept it. It was as if a huge burden had been lifted from his shoulders.

As its title suggests, For Thirty Years Next to His Heart is personal. There’s a kind of paradox suggested, the intimacy of having this abhorred document stored next to its owner’s heart, in the pocket of his suit jacket, against its function as a register of gross violations of human rights. The everydayness contained in the gesture of repeatedly removing the passbook from his pocket reveals the weird intimacy of violence and the banality of evil. Reflecting on these past injustices, Williamson notes, “I also had to sign a pass for a man who worked as a gardener for me, Lennox Cengani. I had to pretend that he worked for me full time and pretend that I was paying him a very low salary. I didn’t want to be complicit but if I hadn’t signed, Lennox would not have been able to work.”

If For Thirty Years Next to His Heart is meaningful, it is because it offers the opportunity to deeply interrogate the effects of how memory is recorded. The work presents us with the agonizing problem of what to do with the pages of history. As members of a society that is still plagued by injustice and deep inequality, we are all affected by this problem. The question of which memory is being memorialized is raised. Is it Ngesi we are remembering? Is it the brutality of the system? If we consider historical amnesia as repression of not only the past but also an imaginable future, what do we do with this remembering in a society that is anxious to forget?⁶ If the future is where healing and reconciliation lie, how do we fashion a smooth passage between the past and the future when the past lingers while the future remains unreachable, and thus more and more elusive?

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The question of how to read art produced in Africa during and following colonization continues to be a major challenge for art historians, critics, and theorists. The field of contemporary African art was named in the 1960s, although its roots extend back to the 1920s, and perhaps even earlier.¹ The initial discourse—emerging as it did in the years following independence for most African countries—focused on questions of continuity and change, and on the encounter between tradition and modernity, with tradition frequently signifying ideas of a timeless Africa and modernity being code for Western influence.

Art from Portuguese-speaking Africa has arguably remained peripheral within these broader developments and art historical discussions, although the work of one figure, the Mozambican painter Malangatana Valente Ngwenya (1936–2011), commonly known as Malangatana, stands as an exception. My scholarship on Malangatana seeks to position the artist as a decolonial subject within the national and transnational contexts preceding and following political independence in Mozambique.²

To this effect, I have proposed that the naming of the period preceding independence needs to embody the competing forces and balance of power between anti-colonial resistance and colonial rule, and that referring to this historical phase as anti/colonial is one way of articulating this conflict.³ More recently, I have begun to consider the anti/colonial as not just a historical epoch, but also a form of subjectivity. This has proven to be a highly fecund way to read Malangatana’s early art, particularly because it foregrounds the ambivalence and spirit of provocation that I consider to be critical elements in the artist’s most compelling works.

Reading the anti/colonial in Portuguese-speaking Africa—and in Malangatana’s art in particular—requires an understanding of the specific mode of colonial rule: assimilation. The Portuguese claimed that discrimination was not on the basis of race, but rather of civilization and culture. Indigens could legally acquire the status of assimilated persons (assimilados) with the promise of being accepted as full citizens. Few attained this status given Mozambique’s endemic racism, however, which meant that even assimilados failed to acquire any semblance of equal rights. Nonetheless, the assimilation narrative was a powerful force in forging a third space in which acculturated indigens, along with people of mixed settler and native origins (commonly referred to at the time as mulattos), inhabited a sociopolitical terrain characterized by an ambivalence to both native and settler populations. 

Signs of assimilation are evident in many of the artist’s early works. They are particularly visible in his abundant references to Christianity, which was central to the process of becoming an assimilado. They are also apparent in the obsession with Western notions of feminine beauty. This is most prominent in the light-skinned femme fatale–type figures with long, straight hair. There is a potent convergence of these two streams, of the Christian and the Western, that is manifest in highly provocative, intrinsically ambiguous images—suggesting an ambivalence on the part of the artist, who was neither an aspiring assimilado nor a militant nativist. In fact, traditional African themes or motifs are also often entangled in complex, hybrid, and frequently unsettling scenarios.

These early works, which manifest an anti/colonial subjectivity by way of ambivalence, contrast with works produced (mostly) around the mid-1960s, where a more overt political content suggests an explicitly anti-colonial perspective. These later works, in which the pluralistic diversity of the earlier works has given way to a more generic figuration—and one more autochthonous in appearance—coincide with the artist’s increased politicization. Along with a shift toward what I term a “homogenizing aesthetic,” the earlier assimilationist signs have been increasingly replaced by themes, symbols, metaphors, and allegories that can be interpreted as comparatively literal or even didactic expressions of an anti-colonial position. However, many of these expressly anti-colonial works also reflect an ambivalence. In particular, there is a notable resistance to heroic conventions and to the romanticization of anti-colonial struggle. Instead, there are lucid depictions of suffering, death, and intense conflict, as well as, critically, a lack of differentiation between protagonists. The persistence of ambivalence, even in images ostensibly propagandistic in purpose, provides an extension of the idea of anti/colonial subjectivity as manifesting a deeply unsettled, even traumatic, existential state of being.  

It was only in the early 1970s, when the military conflict escalated, that Malangatana began to introduce signs that arguably correspond with an emerging postcolonial consciousness.⁴ Notably, undulating solar and lunar forms (sometimes evocative of nurturing, maternal breasts) began to appear along the upper perimeter of many of his compositions. Formally, they serve to rupture the shallow pictorial space that is typically claustrophobic in its congestion. Interestingly, the artist persisted in incorporating such composite signs, which I read as emblematic of hope on the distant horizon, throughout the most depraved moments of the civil war.

Malangatana was an artist who wanted to transcend his context and to reach a wider audience, but he was also profoundly influenced by his immediate sociopolitical environment. It is historically apt to consider him as part of a canonical group of pan-African modernists, and to theorize accordingly. But it is equally necessary to consider his specific socialization. Through this dual approach, the character of his early work as the mediated production of an anti/colonial subject becomes evident. It is in considering the interface between colonial and anti-colonial subjectivity that his originality, complexity, and indeed significance comes to the fore. Furthermore, rather than treat him as an argument for exceptionalism, his example introduces the question of whether the concept of anti/colonial subjectivity could prove to be a productive lens through which to view other pioneering African modernists, notably those whose work manifests the dualities and tensions of navigating their encounters with colonialism and nationalism.

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Nene Aïssatou Diallo: As a response to Zeitz MOCAA closing due to the pandemic, you have organized “Head-to-Head”, a series of conversations with other cultural organizers and producers in the African context. These conversations between institutions are practices of collaboration, do you see this carrying on when museums reopen? What else has this pause allowed you to do as a museum?

Storm Janse van Rensburg: Our series pre-dates the pandemic, when we initiated it as a platform to engage with art world trailblazers, as part of our talks programming taking place at the museum. We migrated it online at the onset of the pandemic, and maintained it as a weekly forum. To date we’ve hosted Kate Fowle (Director MoMA PS1), Merriem Berrada (Artistic Director Museum of  Contemporary African Art Al Maaden, Morroco), Sonia Lawson (Director of Palais de Lomé, Togo), Mandla Sibeko (Founding Director, Owner FNB Art Joburg), Aïda Muluneh (Artist, Founding Director Addis Foto Fest, Addis Ababa), Raphael Chikukwa (Acting Executive Director & Chief Curator, National Gallery of Zimbabwe), Daudi Karungi (Founder of Kampala Biennale, artist, curator and gallerist, Uganda), Tracey Rose (Artist), Michael Armitage (Artist and Founder of Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute), Paula Nascimento (Independent Curator and Architect, Angola), Wangechi Mutu (Artist and Zeitz MOCAA Advisory Board Member), Senzeni Marasela (artist) and Nana Oforiatta-Ayim (Curator, writer, historian).

We will certainly continue the series when we re-open, and are exploring how it can become a hybrid of engagement both online and in-person. 

In addition to this programme, we have also offered other online programming, including a relook at relevant material from previous exhibitions and programming, the introduction of online educational activities initiated by our Centre for Art Education as well as our monthly entertainment event moving online as “WOZA at home”. 

We have also used the pause as a research recess, for intensive thinking, discussion, and planning. As a nascent institution, we see this as an important and necessary moment to establish the foundations of the institution we want and need to be.

NAD: This collective moment is forcing us to think radically to reimagine the museum on digital platforms and it has also allowed room to rethink museum structures. How do we define a museum that can only take place online?

SJVR: The possibility to radically rethink or re-imagine the museum is harder for some institutions than others, especially from a structural perspective. As a nascent institution we are taking this task seriously, to rigorously interrogate ourselves, and to respond to and reflect our context, in a process of critical institution-making.  

We have been investing much work and thinking into our digital spaces, and creating a more visible presence on-line and through social media. That said, we are not thinking of ourselves as an institution that can only live online. We remain committed to the experience of art as an in-person engagement, and an experience that involves others through gathering.  

NAD: How important is the notion of community right now?

SJVR: Community should be the cornerstone of our museums. Or let us say communities – we do not function in a homogenous society. We at Zeitz MOCAA understand our audiences or communities as multi-faceted and complex and we relate to and serve these audiences in various ways, striving towards access for all. 

For example, we are planning to re-open the museum later this year with a project that will celebrate our home city, Cape Town, its artists, and art, in a project that will be a major departure from how we previously engaged with the ‘local’ and accessibility. It is essential that we connect with, and serve those in our immediate vicinity, whilst continuing to build on our work as a home for contemporary art and artists from Africa and its diaspora. 

NAD: How do you imagine the post-COVID-19 cultural landscape for museums and artists in South Africa?

SJVR: As we are living through the initial phase of the pandemic, we are not sure yet how public space will look or feel going forward. It might be a constant flux and adaption, as infection hotspots ebb and flow. We also don’t know how long this will be our reality. We will need to adapt and phase our engagement with art objects within the environment of the museum, as well as the idea of the museum as a space of gathering and a site for engagement. However, there are concerns that the ‘after’ of this pandemic will be very different from the ‘before’.

We have adapted a modus operandi of not making quick or rash decisions, to evaluate and monitor, and to be as adaptive and flexible as possible. It has changed our understanding of mobility and exchange. Whilst making us take a hard look inward, it also has increased acts of solidarity and mutual support.

We have adjusted our medium term programming to be more ‘generous’ – exhibition runs to be extended, more time between exhibitions, and also to re-think and re-do the way in which exhibitions flow. We have also simply given ourselves more time for research and planning than before.  

For many artists, most who operate outside of the safety net of the few established commercial galleries, the challenge of survival is real. Our economy is taking a severe strain, and the impact thereof on the livelihoods of artists will be harsh. 

It is thus essential that we continue these acts of solidarity and support. 

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To stay alive—psychologically, creatively—the black South African sculptor and painter Ernest Mancoba (1904–2002) managed to leave home.¹ On September 2, 1938, he boarded the SS Balmoral Castle in Cape Town, destined for Southampton, England.² Mancoba’s berth on the steamship, and his concomitant personal and artistic rebirth, resulted from protracted negotiations with liberal patrons who finally agreed to fund a year of study in Paris.³ Many South African artists had already traveled to Paris and other European capitals since the nineteenth century,⁴ but Mancoba was the first black artist to do so. He would not revisit South Africa until after the end of apartheid, and would never live there again.⁵

Arriving in Southampton on September 19, Mancoba went directly to London, where he spent a week before continuing on to Paris.⁶ Aside from meeting a few contacts,⁷ he made use of his time in London by visiting the African collections at the British Museum. Some two years earlier, Mancoba had first encountered canonical West and Central African sculpture in a library in Cape Town, in the pages of a lavishly illustrated book entitled Primitive Negro Sculpture.⁸ Despite its unfortunate title, the book’s discovery in Cape Town marked a turning point for the young artist because it catalyzed his embrace of modernism, which to him meant a rough geometric aesthetic modeled on African sculpture.⁹ Mancoba would see a full African art collection for the first time in London.

To the fortuitous benefit of art history, Mancoba happened to tour the British Museum with an inquisitive writer who published an anonymously bylined article the next month (as “Our Special Representative”) relating the following: 

The rest of the story of Ernest Mancoba’s work was told me [sic] in the African room of the British Museum. For a time he was what I can only call passionately absorbed in the primitive art of his people, the carved stools, the figures of fighters, of great tribe-leaders, of women and children. “Look,” he said to me, “they are all serene. Do you know why? My carvings are made to show Africa to the white man. That is why they are sad. These primitive artists were working for the preservation of the group-life. The artists, with the chiefs and priests, are the great leaders of the world. In Africa they carved figures strong and beautiful and free because they wished to lead the people of their tribe to strength, to beauty and to freedom. ¹⁰

As recounted by the writer, Mancoba remembered his earlier “carvings” as compromised products of the colonial order. Conceived under church and liberal patronage, those sculptures were “sad”; they aimed only “to show Africa to the white man.” The “sad” designation probably did not apply to Mancoba’s recent modernism, but rather to his early production commissioned through the Diocesan Training College at Grace Dieu, an Anglican training college for black schoolteachers in the northern Transvaal Province (now Limpopo), where he had learned wood carving starting around 1925.¹¹

On first glance, Mancoba’s early sculptures do not seem so despairing as he later believed. Future Africa (1934), for example, is ostensibly cheery, figuring two African youths as torchbearers for the continent’s bright future. The sculpture’s reassuring representation of Africans garnered endorsements from liberal critics and patrons.¹² It is nonetheless pertinent that Future Africabecame “sad” once Mancoba stood appreciating African art in the British Museum in 1938. Quitting South Africa must have yielded a new perspective, and Future Africa betrays desolation upon closer inspection: the boys’ heads are bowed, their eyes downcast, their postures resigned. On a formal level, too, Future Africa arguably undermines its own emancipatory message by failing to break free of colonially imposed academicism.¹³

Mancoba’s contrasting, redemptive reading of African art at the British Museum—“all serene,” “strong and beautiful and free”—suggests a certain penchant for idealism and dreamed-up nostalgia. Still, the artist’s oeuvre would come nowhere close to replicating the romantic “primitivism” of, say, Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) in the South Pacific, or Irma Stern (1894–1966) in Southern Africa.¹⁴ Soon after arriving in Paris on September 27, Mancoba began attending classes at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, where he befriended several artists associated with the Danish Abstract Surrealist group Linien: Christian Poulsen (1911–1991), Ejler Bille (1910–2004), and Sonja Ferlov (1911–1984).¹⁵ Communicating in English, Mancoba and the Danes shared an outsider status in Paris, as well as common interests in modernism and African sculpture.

Although canonical African sculpture had initially informed Mancoba’s modernism, and would inform it subsequently, his practice took a different turn in 1939 after his experience in London and at the start of his relationship with the Danes. Not only did he stop making three-dimensional work, but he also jettisoned any ambition toward representation. To cease production of “sad” images, the artist fully—if momentarily—embraced abstraction. Two surviving watercolors from this period adopt an elementary visual grammar: straight lines and pure color. In one composition, pale swaths of blue, red, and orange-brown make up a shallow plane overlaid with black rosettes. The other composition suggests a spherical space, with crosshatched grids permeating a cloud of soft hues. Given the artist’s particular trajectory, his abstractions hint at something personal and political mapped onto a new formal horizon. Abstraction, for Mancoba, meant turning his back on South African patrons’ demands for sanguine images of “native” life.

Instantiating those demands—and setting the stage for the abstract turn—was a job offer Mancoba received from the South African government’s Department of Native Affairs in the spring of 1936.¹⁶ Dr. N. J. van Warmelo, a Native Affairs ethnologist, hoped to hire Mancoba to craft saleable souvenirs for the Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg, scheduled for that fall.¹⁷ Echoing Warmelo’s aims, press coverage from this period reinforced common colonialist conceptions of black artists as instinct-driven traditionalists and representatives of their “race.”¹⁸ Mancoba initially accepted the offer, which carried a certain privilege and would guarantee steady work. But he subsequently reconsidered the position and refused it, pivoting instead toward Paris.¹⁹

Mancoba’s challenge to art history partly involves learning to interpret his circa 1939 abstraction—and “black” abstraction more broadly. Whereas Euro-American art genealogies tend to be discussed in terms of ideas and imagination, tout court, art from outside that realm still often gets pegged to artists’ identities, and framed as the product of experiences marked as “other.” Some black artists historically have responded to such formulas by seeking to evade them, notably by way of abstraction. In noting that Mancoba’s 1939 watercolors anticipated abstract art among African-descended modernists elsewhere, the lesson is not one of establishing precedence but rather of seeing parallels across contexts—including a perennial insistence on pigeonholing artists of color, irrespective of the nature of their work. Wherever the artist seeks to escape compartmentalization, the critic or scholar works at cross-purposes by qualifying his/her abstraction as “African” or “black.”

Art historian Darby English, researching the painter Ed Clark (born 1926) and other postwar African-American abstractionists, has found “the urge for symmetry between biography and picture-effects [to be] so strong in black art history that the turbulent color work in the art is impotent next to the sureness that it, or something in the picture, reflects back all the unassailable epistemological stability of [. . .] racial blackness.”²⁰ Surveying the South African context, historian Daniel Magaziner has similarly charged that art history may “share with the apartheid state the conviction that as black artists, individual creators approached their canvas, wood, or stone with a set of predictable concerns born of their supposed racial identity—to be political or not, to be ‘modern’ or ‘traditional.’ Who they were thought to be determines how we understand their work.”²¹ These statements, and the important recent studies from which they are drawn, grapple with complications and difficulties involved in reconciling “black” and “art.” Racial and political dimensions to art-making cannot be expunged with the will to abstraction. But neither can they be taken as all determining. As Mancoba’s work reveals, abstraction could itself be a form of retaliation against racialist orthodoxies, executed with freedom in mind. Such moves are nuanced and complex even as they relate back to a basic question: how might it look to be simply human, yet extraordinarily alive?

In the event, Mancoba’s signature style required one more decisive move. Rather than stay with nonobjective painting, the artist reintegrated the human form in a radically new configuration devised by appropriating figural and design elements from the African canon.²² Mancoba’s Composition (1940)—his first effort in this vein and his first-ever painting on canvas—imaginatively “modernizes” a Congolese Kuba mask (as art historian Elza Miles has convincingly proposed)²³ by integrating flat chevrons, geometric shapes, and grids. Did Mancoba stray from nonobjectivity for the reason that hypothetically, once emptied of all signs of identity, his art could appear to have been made by anyone? Since authors of abstract art around this time were presumptively European descended, the resultant confusion would hardly suit an African modernist intent on overturning assimilationist doctrines underpinning imperial “civilizing missions.” For Mancoba and others of his generation, complete abstraction carried a danger of signaling alienation, in the sense of posing or passing as something foreign. Perhaps to preempt any such misreading while retaining key lessons from abstraction, Mancoba reintroduced elements from African material culture and abstracted them, resulting in a deep amalgamation of indigenous African and modernist European formal aesthetics. This tactic would continue to animate Mancoba’s production in the decades to come.

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