The double agent: humanism, history, and allegory in the art of Durant Sihlali (1939-2004).

Respect for everyone's worldview, the cow's worldview, the squirrel's worldview, and so forth. In the end it leads to total intellectual paralysis. You spend so much time respecting that you don't have time to think.

J.M. Coetzee (1999:47)

Durant Sihlali died suddenly in May 2004. Born in 1935, he was, until his death, one of the few living South African artists whose career coincided with the entrenchment of formal apartheid (c. 1948), the formation of the "white" Republic of South Africa in 1961, the long years of apartheid repression (c. 1961-1990), and the remarkable achievement of democracy in 1994 (Figs. 1-2). This alone makes him an artist worth investigation. But there are other reasons, as compelling.

Sihlali is central to a founding generation of black South African modernists. He experienced first-hand many of the key institutions that informed the experience of modern black artists in the decades of apartheid and just before, including Polly Street Art Centre (c. 1953), the Thupelo Project (c. 1982), FUBA (The Federated Union of Black Artists (c. 1982), and the FUNDA center in Soweto. In the 1960s and '70s his work, like that of many of his compatriots, was branded pejoratively as "township art." The romantic sensibility and racist paternalism of this attribution closed his work off from a fuller appreciation of his engagement with different artistic media and modes, his sense of his artistic identity or agency, and his sophisticated responses to the conflicted world in which he lived. It blocked a more complex reading of his creative project, dealing as it does, for example, with the contending energies of recording history "directly" and an allegorical impulse under the sway of complicated human desires.

This makes Sihlali's contribution to the development of modernism in South Africa distinctive and important. Neither ahistorical formalism nor social history of art, which risks reducing art to an epiphenomenon of larger forces, is adequate for appreciating this distinctiveness. The relationship between art and the social domain, between specific art objects in their integrity and the larger world in which they are embedded, between an artist and his or her imagined audience, are vital to any real understanding the development of modernism in South Africa. The challenge is to affirm the specificity of individual works, their immediate and extended materiality, while acknowledging the decisive relationship between this specificity and the social world. Sihlali's work poses this challenge in a provocative way, and his creative project, I would argue, remains a fundamental but nuanced one of exploring African humanisms in a so-called post-humanist age. In Sihlali's case this exploration is tied up with what we might understand as a condition of internal exile, energized by a persistent spiritual restlessness.

Fossilized Ants

In 1968 Durant Sihlali painted a finely nuanced watercolor titled Fossilized Ants I (Fig. 3). The work was part of a larger series he began in 1964, and about which he wrote in rather melancholy vein:

   In the sixties a bleak period dawned
   with the tightening of apartheid
   laws. I reflected in my fossilized
   rock paintings of 1964 on the evil of
   this system which seemed impenetrable
   (Sihlali 1994:21).

Fossilized Ants I depicts a pair of ants, one light and one dark, frozen in a field of variegated amber. The dominant color is of soiled honey. Pictorially, the ants articulate opposing ideas of space; one is positive, the other negative. The balance between positive and negative is precarious and uneasy. A deep, pervasive, unresolved ambiguity seeps into the whole image.

The ants are reduced to silhouettes without internal detail or differentiation. They seem almost spectral, more pictograms than particularized objects of observation. The "figures" of the ants are not clearly distinguished from the golden "ground." Rather, they appear entangled in the fossilized foliage, the scratches and stains of decaying natural debris arrested in the amber. Some marks in the golden image-field suggest the debris of dismembered limbs and feelers of other ants not pictured. The burnished space of the work seems, paradoxically, at once infinite and pure surface without depth.

The work is assertively pictorial: a vignette-like fragment with edges fading artfully into a frame of almost nothing. Here, nacre becomes high artifice. Sihlali's visual language and chosen medium of watercolor draw on a long tradition of visual romanticism and picturesque visual rhetoric. Yet, insofar as this work moves towards abstraction, it also moves towards classical Western modernism's concern with pictorial flatness and form. The dialectic between surface and space (illusion), between figuration and abstraction, animates this particular image and gives it its internal formal and iconic tension.

Our inclination to read the mortified dark and light insects anthropomorphically is strong, and this calls for further consideration. Ants, like other creatures, carry the imprint of human history (Baker 1993, Ham and Senior 1997, Wolch and Emel 1998, Coetzee 1999, Wolfe 2003, Pollock et al. 2005). Ants in particular seem fertile in helping us picture salutary models for tireless work, relentless energy, and efficiency. They live in colonies, embracing structure, solidarity, and sacrifice, and they prevail and prosper in spite of poisons and predators, floods, famines, and fires. The systems they trace out in their comings and goings appear ordered and comfortingly homeostatic.

The South African author Eugene Marais (1871-1936) writes breathlessly of his ten-year stint of observation of the habits of termites ("white ants"), which revealed "new wonders every day" (Marais 1990:149). This is a world where everything knows its place, spatially and hierarchically, with a knowing that persists. Ants also trail--vehicles of irony, parody, community, contradiction--through Christopher Hope's Darkest England, where

   [t]he natives ... are less occupants
   than infestations ... If you were to
   slice through the center of a tall
   standing ant-heap in the Karoo and
   examine the writhing life inside,
   you might have some idea of their
   clustering, scurrying, teeming millions.
   So it is in England. There is
   hardly a place on the island they
   have not colonized, and what they
   call "remote places" are to us as
   crowded as a termites' nest (Hope
   1996:75).

Similarly, Charlotte Sleigh, who mentions both Hope and Marais, writes of the rich "analogue-myth" of ants, and some of what she observes speaks directly to human dreams of complete emancipation:

   [A]nts are ... the cleverest, most
   organized, hardest-working, most
   numerous. Most fecund, most dominant;
   they are older than humans,
   more bellicose, more cooperative,
   more communicative ... their existence
   is parallel to ours... According
   to Pliny, they are the only creatures
   besides us that bury their dead with
   funeral rights. More contemporary
   analogue-myths assert with equal
   confidence that ants, if magnified
   to the size of sheep, would rule the
   earth, and that in the event of a
   nuclear holocaust they would outlast
   humans (Sleigh 2003:7-8).

The temporality of the world of ants might be understood as more cyclical, eternal-returning than linear and "progressive."

Perhaps Sihlali's choice of subject was conditioned by these and other qualities of ants, both positive and negative, as a way to face or face off an ascendant white supremacy. The system was, as he put it, "impenetrable," therefore to render it visible is to some degree at least to assert its vulnerability to change. In other words, by offering us a magnified microcosm of a natural world, Sihlali offers us a mnemonic of our failed human world.

In its artifice, its sentimental poetics, its double-edged subject, Fossilized Ants I has a distinctly, if loosely, allegorical aspect. While allegory is a protean mode of representation and expression, it typically comprises at least two registers of reading, one literal, the other symbolic. The first is essentially a pretext for the other, which is a subtext of some significance. In postmodern allegory this double register is an imaginative response to a situation where the subtext cannot be directly declared or made public, and so is concealed or masked by a public pretext. The subtext usually involves some foundational value or truth which is at risk or dangerous for political or psychological reasons, or both (Richards 1997b:68-72). By being concealed, this truth or value is preserved, able to be disclosed in later readings or through particular hermeneutic strategies.

Allegory is quintessentially antimodernist in its narrativity and in its interest in symbol and iconography over pure, autonomous form. Even though a (Euro American) modernist reading, privileging aesthetic autonomy and form--expressed as a concern with edge, plane, and mark, suppressed representation, ambiguous space, and shifting figure-ground relations--could be made of this work, such a reading would run against the grain of its modernist "other," namely allegory. This work also seems to mine the difference or antagonism between two historical notions of allegory, one premodern (Honig 1959, Fletcher 1964), the other postmodern (Owens 1984) or postcolonial (Slemon 1988, Hillis Miller 1981). Essentially, this is the difference between a truth or significance which is understood as irrefutable by dint of divine and natural law, and one which is contingent and subject to change, in other words, historical. This work presents us with the paradox of keeping immutable truth and contingency in play simultaneously.

History took the force of nature in the early decades of apartheid, conceived as omnipotent, omniscient, and inevitable. But for many in South Africa, the 1960s were indeed dark years. The noose of ever-more-detailed control over the lives of the disenfranchised black majority--by law and by force--pulled tighter and tighter. Freedom of movement, habitation, association, of economic participation beyond raw labor and the inferior education for producing such labor were all radically curtailed. The slide towards ever more intricate and palpable repression, however, set in relief the 1950s, which became mythologized in later years as the "debonair decade for darkie South Africa!" (Heyns 1987:11). Thus the Treason Trial of activists arrested in 1956 led to acquittal of all those charged in 1961. (1) In 1960 Harold Macmillan made the historic and prophetic "winds of change" speech, and a year later, Albert Luthuli received the Nobel peace prize. For the artist Azaria Mbatha, the decade was characterized by

   harsh action and the beginning of
   equally violent reaction ... The attempted
   assassination of Verwoerd
   was followed by several massacres
   after peaceful demonstrations ...
   New hardships sprang from the implementation
   of harsher laws while
   the spread of poverty made life unbearable
   (Mbatha 2005:368).

The key event that set the tone for the decade was the massacre of 160 black demonstrators at Sharpeville on March 21, 1960 (Frankel 2001). This traumatic event was, for Sihlali, "so tragic that it led me to do two pen and ink drawings," one of which he gave to fellow artist Sydney Khumalo. (2) All forms of political opposition and organized resistance within the black majority were banned in that same year, forcing many South Africans into exile. The Rivonia trials ended on June 12, 1964, with the incarceration of the leadership of the liberation movements (Harker 1994:212). (3)

This was a long decade, with the forces of oppression only beginning to lose grip with the June 1976 uprising of children in Soweto (Brink et al. 2001, Hopkins and Grange 2001). Brian Lapping (1987) characterized the period 1966-1977 as the "police state," the following decade being the "reform" period. In any case, the intellectual climate amongst the black majority intensified in 1968 (the year Sihlali produced Fossilized Ants). Black Consciousness was becoming a significant social force, and it was during this year that the South African Students Organization was formed under the leadership of Bantu Steve Biko, who later became the leader of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), and was eventually murdered by the security police in September 1977 (Bernstein 1978). The young writer Njabulo Ndebele captured the tone of the time in a text titled "The Blacks and Art," which was included in a publication edited by Biko:

   Blacks can develop their own universal
   standards of artistic excellence.
   They must ignore the white
   critic, who reviewing a black art
   exhibition, says the black artist has
   not progressed beyond the township
   themes. Such critics do not
   appreciate the paradox in the fact
   that there is universality in parochiality
   ....The blacks must ignore
   the frustrated black journalist who
   says that South African blacks must
   win the political kingdom first before
   they begin to create artistic
   work of any meaning and merit. An
   imaginative exploration of the miserable
   human conditions in which
   people live, touches the fibre of revolt
   in them; the fibre that seeks to
   reassert human dignity (Ndebele
   1972:26).

Two things are important here. The first is Ndebele's mention of "township" art, to which I will return. The second, more immediately relevant, is the recognition of the primary value of creative and intellectual work and a linkage between black consciousness and humanism. C.R.D. Halisi, for example, argues that Black Consciousness had "a humanist bent" from its inception (Halisi 1991:103-104), a humanism perhaps best expressed at the time in Biko's "Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity" (Biko 1978:96-108).4

On a personal level, Sihlali recounts an event that informed his attitude to the decade. On a visit to his family village in 1963 he discovered that his beloved grandfather had died. He found

   the rondavels of the maidens reduced
   to mounds overgrown with
   grass. All the people had migrated
   to the urban areas. The kraals were
   empty. Only grandma and a few
   grandchildren remained ... All were
   in dire poverty, and all the glory of
   the thirties and forties long since
   forgotten. On the corner post of the
   kraal hung the last remains of my
   rusted tricycle, a sight which sparked
   a lot of happy memories of the golden
   days of my early years. (5)

All these personal and public dimensions of lived experience and the values and beliefs that animate the life of the imagination mediate our reading Fossilized Ants. As the artist observed in a note, confronting the forces of oppression directly would be suicide. (6) Thus allegory becomes the response to a crisis--public and psychological--of figuration and address, for this was a time of emergency, characterized by the operation of brute force, administrative zeal, and a culture of censorship (Merret 1994).

There is a "truth" embedded in the allegorical subtext. Here, I would argue, the "truth" being conserved and maintained is the experience of "being human" in inhuman circumstances. Put differently, we might understand this experience in terms of indigenous discourses of "humanism." In Fossilized Ants this "humanness" is specifically engaged and expressed in terms of animality, for it is evidently true that the human and the animal, the cultural and the natural are mutually entailed (Baker 1993, 2002; Ham and Senior 1997; Fudge 2002). The struggle to articulate the relation between the animal and the human, between nature and culture, relates to power most clearly marked in matters of race and place in economic and political relations (Elder, Wolch, and Emel 1998).

The construct of "Africa" seems pervasively understood in terms of this condition of humanness and animality. Achille Mbembe, for example, speaks of a level of discourse on Africa that is "almost always deployed in the framework (or in the fringes) of a metatext about the animal ... about the beast" (Mbembe 2001:1). Similarly, in a key text on humanism and democracy, Edward Said, discussing aesthetics, references W.B. Yeats's poem "The Magi" and "the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor" (Said 2004:63). What is more, a discourse on humanness and animality has also surfaced in literature recently, especially in the work of renowned South African novelist J.M. Coetzee (Coetzee 1999; see also Pickover 2005). The key issue here is an argument, embodied in this work of Sihlali, about the foundational place of discourses of humanism in the development of contemporary South African art (Richards 2005).

Looking In

The relationship between allegory, history, and the human may be approached differently, this time through another picture by Sihlali titled Looking In: (Padda Wei) Kliptown (1975; Fig. 4). Like much of his work, Looking In fell into the genre of "township art," a label that negatively conditioned the way the modernist practices of especially black artists were, and in some measure still are, read and appreciated. As Njabulo Ndebele asserted, there is universality in parochiality, and acknowledging this opens the possibility that Sihlali's "township" practice may be better understood as a type of history painting. This allows us, in turn, to reconsider the power and configuration of artistic agency in times of emergency. In shifting to Looking In, there is a parallel move from the rather melancholic tone of Sihlali's Fossilized Ants to something more directly historical. But also this involves a shift from a paralyzed history, a change from history as frozen "nature" transfixed by trauma to history as agency, as changeable and contingent. In other words, the difference between the two works implies a shift that speaks, albeit fitfully, of "progress" and the possibility of connecting with a deeper, more metaphysical past. All these qualities remain in uneasy balance in much of Sihlali's early work, as does the impulse to allegorize on the one hand, and to document on the other. Or, put it differently, it signals an assertion of Sihlali's self-understood role as a creative artist and a witness to history.

Looking In: (Padda Vlei) Kliptown shows a woman sitting in a chair, reading. Framed by an arch, she seems lost in her book. Looking in, we see her reading privately, a personal and intimate act in which we ourselves are implicated.

Sihlali recalls that his early creative impulses were stimulated by, amongst other things, the possession of a prized book--a large, beautifully illustrated volume showing trains and the South African landscape. (7) He also remembers volumes on fauna and flora, snakes, spiders and, later, a book on the indigenous peoples of South Africa. These books, according to him, "helped me to draw, and also to learn about the danger of being bitten by button spiders and snakes." The illustrations also made him "aware of how good those artists were," motivating him to "work harder and be more discerning" about his own efforts. More important, the book--in a generic sense--was also a potent sign that we "arm ourselves in education." (8) Recalling the painful poverty of black education during apartheid, he writes bitterly of

   changing the education system of
   the masses to that of being nothing
   else but servers of the Baas and
   Missus. To rub the wounds with
   rough salt, we were turned faceless
   and stateless in our own mother
   country, and landless, removed
   to barren, dry, stony lands called
   Bantustans. Where rain is rare,
   hunger, starvation, tuberculosis and
   numerous diseases took a lot of
   lives, to lower the number of people.
   In urban areas lives were not
   better either. Poverty was our daily
   experience. (9)

The quality of pensive absorption Sihlali achieved in Looking In recalls two works by the elder artist of South African modernism, Gerhard Sekoto--the languorous Portrait of a Young Man Reading (1946-47) and the intense Young Boy Reading (c. 1939-47; Lindop 1988:145, 180). Sekoto also speaks of his "attachment" to a book written by Peter Abrahams titled Mine Boy (1963), a book that "aroused" his "inspiration and made [him] feel proud of the consciousness enkindled in the minds of our people" (see Lindop 1988:178).

The book is a complex icon that calls for further examination. Isabel Hofmeyr, for example, mentions the idea of the book as the "white man's fetish" (Hofmeyr 2004:17-18); the printed word can be also understood as a kind of magic (Kaplan 2003), and a spiritual instrument (Cohen and Rothenberg 1996). For these last authors, human beings "are at their most genuinely innocent and unselfconsciously beautiful when ... [reading]." A book and and the act of reading create "a fragile dwelling [which] allows readers to enjoy a kind of sovereignty over their lives and their worlds" (Cohen and Rothenberg 1996:62).

The power of books is legendary, their incendiary effects so powerful that only burning will destroy them. Thus the hated government-issued dompas (pass book) was burned en masse during the 1952 Defiance Campaign (Harker 1994:59) and at various anti-apartheid campaigns thereafter. There were also state-sanctioned book burnings in South Africa between 1955 and 1971, which have been compared to the Nazi book burnings of May 1933 (Dick 2004:35). Book burning of this order is a violation of the human right to knowledge.

In Looking In a burning brazier warms the woman. Like the book, the brazier itself has become a significant icon in recent South African art, representing, according to Kagiso Pat Mautloa, "the life of the townships--an instant fire, a point of warmth where passers-by can gather for a moment to talk and laugh" (Williamson and Jamal 1996:40). But in Looking In the tone is of solitary warmth, not unlike Sihlali's earlier Kitchen Interior (1966; Borman and Siebrits 2001:25). A decaying wall frames the woman. We might read this decay of the wall as natural attrition or neglect, rendering this work, as in Fossilized Ants, a rather melancholic meditation on ruins and the depredations of time. But giving ourselves wholly over to such romantic reading fails to recognize the historically specific human violence almost literally written into this work.

Careful scrutiny of the picture reveals the numbers 9/211 chalked or painted on the surface where the curve of the arch springs from the wall. This home, apparently, is condemned by the authority of the Group Areas Act of 1950 and other legislation associated with forced removals (Unterhalter 1987:151-55). It points directly to the brutal social engineering that destroyed and dispersed so many black communities over the last century.

This solitary woman, in solidarity with the afflicted multitudes we do not see, is thus exiled in her own land. According to Sihlali:

   Most of the families there were
   already displaced ... They were
   moved out of here to somewhere
   within the mining compounds and
   later shifted again to the Meadowlands
   hostels, where, during
   1976-1977 they were massacred by
   the Zulus. These people were very
   dear to me, I lived and worked
   amongst them for many years (Richards
   1997a:87).

Sihlali's conventionally descriptive-picturesque visual language here articulates a split moment of intimacy and impending violence, the first figured in the act reading--depicted and experienced--and the second in the writing on the wall. Reading the work in this double register is to see it as a document of history and as art, and by extension, as an art of "resistance." The writing on the wall in Looking In takes up, in suppressed form, Sihlali's early involvement with walls as powerful and dynamic visual fields, an involvement to which he later returned with great commitment and intensity.

The reading of Looking In as social augury of forced removal occurs against the grain of the ordinary intimacy suggested by the woman and the scene she inhabits. The "looking in" of the title also establishes an active relationship between the artist, the viewer, and this woman, implicating human sociality in the act of looking itself. "Looking in" on someone is, in colloquial English, an informal form of visiting. The everyday sociality and intimacy of looking in on someone seems to be underscored by the picture on the wall behind the woman. Also framed by the arch, the composition tractions like a mise en abyme--a picture within a picture--introducing further reflexivity into our act of looking and reading.

It is precisely these qualities of human intimacy and interaction that the forced removals destroyed. Thus we can read the work as a critique of inhumanity and an affirmation of human continuity and "human-ness" in harsh, wounded times. Such critique and continuity in Sihlali is invariably humane in scale, and not the "spectacle" Ndebele attempted to describe in his The Rediscovery of the Ordinary in 19913o

The relatively conventional form or artistic language Sihlali uses also speaks to this human key. His medium--watercolor-is itself worth remarking on in this context. Watercolor is not often considered a serious medium, lacking the gravitas of, say, oil paint. But this was not Sihlali's view, and the way he used this medium bore this out. He painted his scenes with patient haste; they were quickly executed. Watercolor is particularly fitting for the rapid arrest of a transient, temporary world. The "truth" (in the modernist sense) of this medium is that it allows a directness, spontaneity, and speed in transcribing a three-dimensional world onto flat pictorial surface.

In Sihlali's hands watercolor often achieved an exceptionally fluid grace. He typically laid down and fixed a scene in films of liquid color, with more precise strokes and dabs differentiating and anchoring the swathes of color and defining recognizable visual structures: bricks, form-defining shadows, the shifts and shapes of a manmade social world, the world of nature. It is thus noteworthy, one might argue, that in some works Sihlali chose conditions close to the material qualities of watercolor, indicating again his modernist sensibility to the medium specificity. A good example here is his Fog in Soweto (1972).

In Looking In, however, this sensitivity to medium takes on a special force, with the temporality of the medium echoing that of the subject it seeks to capture. The transience of the scene--what Looking In depicts will soon disappear--refers not only to the fleeting impression of the artist on the move, but also to the shadow of violence hanging over both scene and artist by dint of the same legal (but not moral) authority that produced the writing on the wall. Sihlali's sensitivity to his media continues in his later papier mache works, where color is part of the structure of the support and the medium. Such intense involvement with his medium speaks to, amongst other things, is his notions of artistic agency.

Artistic Agency

In the many conversations we had over the years before his death in 2004, Sihlali insisted on being recognized as an artist before anything else. I think this was part of the reason he felt so offended by labels such as "township artist" and "black artist," which for him diluted this recognition. He was happy, with some ambivalence nevertheless, to be thought of as a scribe of the history through which he lived, but that scribe was no a simple recorder or chronicler, but an artist.

This consciousness of being an artist seemed slow in coming and was rarely without ambiguity. In 1974, for example, Sihlali made a statement apparently contradictory to this view: "I don't think I paint artistically. What I have been interested in doing is recording what is around" (Siebrits 2004:np). Whatever the internal tensions and contradictions he might have confronted, Sihlali quite likely understood creative agency as a deeply felt part of being human. To be an artist for him, therefore, seemed to be a way of performing as fully as possible an unalienated humanity in a largely hostile world.

A sense of his self-conception as a person and an artist is prefigured by his maternal grandmother baptizing him "Basie." According to the matriarch, this child "will never be owned by any white employer as he will be a man, his own boss, independent and self assured."n Thus, as an adult Sihlali expressed his attitude to autonomy and his chosen work very directly. To be an "independent" person, he recounted,

   I had to apply for a special stamp
   on my dompas termed "daily labour."
   This was given only to people
   running private business ... I
   was the first to apply as an artist
   to own my daily labor ... I had obtained
   my own freedom from being
   a labourer. (12)

This freedom was important to him, not only because it involved his work as an artist, but because he asserted ownership over the labor energy of his own body, despite the systematic effort by the South African state at controlling black bodies.

Another crucial dimension of artistic agency involves the challenge presented to artists by more straightforwardly political commitments. While Sihlali's emphasis was on his sense of agency as an artist, and not on something else more "political," this was not a negation of the political. Thus, he proudly mentioned, for example, his attendance at the National Convention of the Congress Alliance at Kliptown, Soweto, in 1955. This was the "great afternoon" when the Freedom Charter was adopted. He also recalls "moving speeches" by Robert Sobukwe during these years. (13)

Sihlali also spoke of times he was questioned by police, and his involvement in political activities. In 1960 when meeting a friend and former classmate from the Chiawelo Community Centre, the friend challenged him to join the Pan African Congress (PAC). On that occasion he responded that he did not "by nature follow mob psychology," and that a "better course" was

   that we all arm ourselves in education
   in whatever profession, to the
   point of achieving recognition in the
   world. Which in turn would arm
   you with a platform to challenge the
   state. As it would not be easy to
   silence you or kill you, because of
   your international standing. In response
   to my views, he called me a
   quisling [sellout]. (14)

In later years, between 1977 and 1989, he "lived a traumatic life" because his home was a "base where young lions used to sleep, make arrangements about venues to meet. I had to transport them to those venues, but would be asked to drop them four streets from where they had their cells." (15)

His identity as an artist was also linked to a more transcendental impulse, adding a metaphysical dimension to his sense of being human. For Sihlali, being an artist was a special gift, a mission, a medium linked with "dreams and premonitions" (Sihlali 1989:v). Visiting a faith healer in the mid-1950s, he was told his father had "never slaughtered a cow at my birth ... according to the custom" for the firstborn;

   I soon set this matter to rights and
   appeased the spirits. The faith healer
   instructed me to visit the graves
   of my grandparents. At the cemetery
   I chanced to meet a cousin who
   was also a faith healer. I learned
   from him that I was a white child--umtwana
   omhlope. At last my dreams
   and premonitions were made clear
   to me; I was a medium through
   which the spirits spoke. All the
   while my contact with the Idlozi
   had found expression in my art.
   But I did not show these paintings
   to the gallery owners. While I was
   being dictated to by my ancestors
   the gallery owners being governed
   by commercial whims and white
   people's perceptions of black art
   (Sihlali 1987:v-vi).

The move between allegory and history is thus obviously a complex one. Here the double register is not art and politics, but art and the market. There are in fact a number of moments of doubleness, that is "secrecy" and taboo, in Sihlali's life, which in turn validate the argument for allegory as a narrative device in some of his important works.

The first of these moments occur in those works made by him as a "white child" (umtwana omhlophe), which he did not show to the gallery owners (Sihlali 1989:vi). He also speaks about having "to suppress for almost thirty years" his "love of traditional mural painting and floor decorations" (Sihlali 1994:12). When he was five, he was introduced "to the murals and floor paintings carried out by young Xhosa women," and observing "very closely the young married women showing their skills at colour and design when they decorated the family homestead" (ibid., 13). At ten, he "encountered the more elaborate mural paintings and intricate clay cupboards of Sotho women," which also left "an indelible impression" on him; "I badly wanted to participate but I was prohibited to do so because it was taboo for men to engage in the work of women" (ibid., 14). This prohibition forced him to meet his desire and practice his wall and floor works in secret, away from the judgment of his grandfather or his male friends. (16)

With the onset of the "bleak period" of the 1960s and the "socio-economic and political climate as well as the artistic dictates of country," Sihlali "had to shelve the wall impressions" (Fig. 5; Sihali 1994:15). Yet, close scrutiny of Looking In and its writing on the wall suggests that his interest in walls and murals continued, if only obliquely. Sihlali indicates that he was a sometimes-reluctant documenter of the "environment dealing with the socio-economic living standards of my people" and that he "had to keep producing these scenes for which I was best known." For him, interestingly, "this corresponds with the plight of our traditional artists who, unless they submitted to the teachings of the missionaries, were regarded as heathens" (ibid.). What works he had in mind here is unclear, but they may have come from his experience of the Polly Street Art Centre and must therefore include his formalist, faceted, and analytical Zulu Mother and Child (1966; Miles 2004:fig.157), Ndebele Homestead (1960) and Ndebele Village I and II (1960; Sihlali 1994:17-19).

He refers to the years between 1977 and 1989 as being "like a nightmare trauma." During this time he maintained his stance of using "my art as my cannons against the enemy in the most subtle manner that could be detected only by those who had hawk eyes to see through the work in front of them to the hidden messages," (17) again signaling the aptness of what I am suggesting is the allegorical impulse manifested in his works.

Sihlali actually links Fossilized Ants directly to his aesthetic emancipation in 1984, traced through his Shield series to the Mapoga wall series, which, he says, "celebrates freedom of expression" (Sihlali 1994:15). A key work here is his Fragments of the Ancient Wall (1991; Fig. 6), in which he inked a fragment of flooring linoleum taken from the Afrikaaner Museum when it was being refurbished to become Museum Africa. He then made a color reduction lino print, and so created the terminal point in an indexical work embodying the destruction and resurrection of this institutional space. Sihlali engaged a similar idea for his contribution to the first Johannesburg Biennial in an exhibition in the Johannesburg Art Gallery organized by Julia Charlton (see Charlton 1995:90-91).

Finally, another important and complex part of Sihlali's attitude to agency relates to the experience of exile. The assumption here is that he was an insider, a township artist, someone who never went in to exile. In conversation with me and in his own notes, Sihlali often touched on exile as we ordinarily understand the term, but also in the more unusual sense of internal exile. In many of his works of the early 1970s in which he bore witness to forced removals or the destruction of dwellings--Mvabasa Street, Old Pimville (1973) and Race Against Time (1973) for example--he was an observer, precariously balanced on the edge of the outsider-insider divide in the sense that when setting up his easel, he was chased some times by the police, and sometimes by the nervous inhabitants who did not know him and could not understand what he was doing.

This feeling of precariousness seemed present in his early works, including, for instance, Slums, Zondi Township (1957; Miles 2004:fig.45). In an interview in 1974, Sihlali made a number of important observations about his past and his artistic practice until then:

   What really used to influence my
   childhood was the fact that we
   used to live a nomadic life, moving
   from one area to another, and the
   memory of past places used to
   haunt me. The only time I used to
   find satisfaction was when I record
   ed the area in a drawing. Up to this
   very day I am concentrating mainly
   on that, not now recording for myself
   but for the whole African population
   (Siebrits 2004:np).

Clearly the preservation in one form or another of something at risk of disappearing--a primary function of allegory--is marked here. Further, Sihlali's nomadism had something of the quality of exile Said has articulated so well. For Said, exile "exists in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old, beset with half-involvements and half-detachments, nostalgic and sentimental on one level, an adept mimic or secret outcast on the other" (Said 1994:36).

Sihlali also speaks of his parents John and Tjentjie migrating from place to place, "seeking to improve the lives of their families." (18) At the age of eight he traveled to Elsburg to stay with his mother, a housekeeper for a farmer. This was an unhappy time that inaugurated the uprooted life he lived from then on, literally and psychologically. This experience, perhaps, allowed him to feel such identification with fellow artists who went into exile outside South Africa. While in France in 1986, he mentions meeting

   exiled South African artists who I
   had known many years ago. They
   lived in England ... In England I
   spent many precious and memorable
   days with my old friends and
   fellow artists. We spoke at length
   about our country's turbulent and
   tragic times and expressed our
   hopes for the future of our land.
   But the most profound experience
   for me was to learn about the deep
   and painful wounds inflicted by a
   life spent far away from the land of
   one's birth (Sihlali 1989:vii).

Writing about education in exile, Morrow, Maaba, and Pulumani give a compelling account of exile experience. Exile politics, they argue,

   exist in a world of subterfuge, deception,
   and secrecy ... [Political
   exiles] are cerebral emigrants, living
   in a world constructed from
   ideas, longing, and imagination....
   It is a world of pseudonyms, spies,
   agents provocateurs, loyalty, treachery,
   and intrigue. In this context the
   motherland is recreated from memory
   and exile is endowed with
   tragedy and nobility of suffering
   bravely endured, exiles need constantly
   to reaffirm the existence and
   importance of an ideal that could
   easily be lost in the receding past or
   buried under the weight of day-today
   to existence ... The world of the
   political exile mirrors the often
   phantasmagoric imaginings of the
   state's security operatives, the two
   locked in a dans macabre [sic]
   (2002:155-56).

Steven Sack, for his part, has noted Sihlali's description "of his constant desire to capture the changing environment in which he had lived as a temporary sojourner ... because of the uncertainty attached to black urban existence" (1988:16). This experience of internal wandering and exile provides fertile creative ground for allegory as an aesthetic mode as well as a desire to record what is fleeting and at risk. On his return home from his trip to France, his work took on an added dimension, engaging the "sad exile of my brothers and sisters as well as the tragedy and tenacity of our country and its people. And the spirits agree that these issues must be addressed in my work" (Fig. 7; Sihlali 1989:vii).

Township Art

At least two significant factors bear on the reception of the works I have discussed in this essay. The first is the genre category of "township art," which was applied rather indiscriminately to work produced by urban black modernists, resulting in a severely limited reception of their work. The second involves the mediation of Euro-American modernist values in workshops and schools, especially the preeminent Polly Street Art Centre led by Cecil Skotnes. These factors are beyond the scope of this essay, but some brief observations are appropriate.

In the context of South African art historical discourse, "township art" and the Polly Street Art Centre have been linked; on the other hand, a formally elaborate quasi-abstraction seems to characterize much of South African modernism, and for the latter, we need only consider the works published in Esme Berman's The Story of South African Painting (1975). "Township art," in other words, constitutes an "other" of this modernist formal idiom. Berman mentions "township" as almost having had the coherence of a movement "characterized by descriptive scenes of animated street activity amid the shanties of sprawling peri-urban African townships" (Berman 1975:243). She speaks dismissively of "visual reportage" (ibid.) but does not mention Durant Sihlali who, however, makes a brief appearance in her later Painting in South Africa (1993). E.J. de Jager, in his Images of Man: Contemporary South African Black Art and Artists (1992), on the other hand, includes a significant section on Sihlali. According to de Jager,

   The subject matter of most of his
   early paintings relate to township
   life. However, initially he did not
   use it [presumably the township[
   in any overt critical or acrimonious
   way, but as a source for the
   imagery of his pictures. He painted
   what he knew best, township life,
   and this was responsible for the
   confidence radiating from these
   works. He recorded township life
   and scenes in great detail and with
   insight and sensitive attunement.
   His interest was primarily in recording
   these township scenes as
   faithfully as possible, yet giving
   them his own aesthetic interpretation
   and artistic rendering. As
   such he is one of the most successful
   painters of the township genre
   (1992:52).

Yet, despite the fact that this is a fuller consideration of Sihlali's work, the one-dimensional emphasis on "faithful recording," as with Berman, fails to meaningfully appreciate both the work and artistic agency on the part of the artist. Similarly, even the relatively more rigorous discussion of this subject by Frances Verstraete still fails to fully engage with the implications of the work and tactics adopted by black artists in the 1950s and 1960s (Verstraete 1989:52).

Steven Sack has suggested that the art produced at Polly Street falls into two broadly distinct categories: a "township style" and a "neo-African style" (Sack 1988:16). What Sack calls describes as "neo-African" is what I have called a formally exorbitant quasi-abstraction in which the influence of Cecil Skotnes and Larry Scully was perhaps decisive. Sack further divides "township style" into two subtypes: first, "accurate recordings of specific places in the township"--and here he includes Sihlali--and second, "township scenes of a more generalized nature, leading to a repetitious stylization of picturesque 'shantytowns'" (1988:16; see also Stevenson and Rosholt 2003:89).

Indeed, many of Sihlali's peers developed the more exhortatory, rhetorical visual style Sack might consider neo-African, a style that tends to fit, for the most part, Njabulo Ndebele's notion of spectacle or "obscene social exhibitionism," which is "other" in the sense that it offers a distorted perspective to the ordinary lived experience. Certainly a good deal of the work of this period (19) was formally florid, exaggerated, and emotionally tortured, yet the earlier generation of modernists--Gerard Sekoto (b. 1913; see Lindop 1988, Manganyi 1996 and 2004), Ernest Mancoba (b. 1904; see Miles 1994), George Pemba (b. 1912; see Hudleston 1996), and perhaps Gladys Mgudlandlu (b. 1925; see Miles 2002)--tended to be more formally austere and less mannered in their formal repertoire than the later generation to which Sihlali belongs.

The notion of a neo-African or "Africanesque" formalism also raises the question of "kitsch" and its relationship to the work of South African modernists like Sihlali. Like many other artists of his generation, Sihlali took other work to support himself in his chosen career. In his early years he was subcontracted to different companies dealing in curios and crafts. He was proud of this work and felt he was creating objects of quality, which included, amongst other things, lampshades, jewellery, and greeting cards. (20) Very little significant research has been done on these practices in early South African modernism, and the critical tendency is to pass over, in silence, the implications of these dimensions of aesthetic experience on the part of the artists. Yet, one cannot help feeling that Western modernism's hostility to kitsch and popular mass culture conditioned the way artists, their teachers and critical audiences see "township art" and the work of the Polly Street artists. (21)

Conclusion

The interrelations between modernity and modernism are forbiddingly complex. For David Attwell (2005:4), modernity refers (put simply) to "what it means to be a subject in history." It not only includes technology, industrialization, urbanization, and the "emergence of an administered" society, but also "that fluid but powerful system of ideas that we inherit from the bourgeois revolutions of Europe in the late eighteenth century--such ideas as autonomy, personhood rights, and citizenship." Attwell is quick to acknowledge that such notions occur in many cultures independently of this Western paradigm, but he argues that the "force with which the post-Enlightenment idioscape has been imposed on the world over the last 300 years ... has ensured that most societies have now come to define themselves in relation to it." For South Africa (as with most of Africa), modernity and colonialism are inextricably connected:

   [Their] promises were offered selectively
   to settler-colonials and their
   heirs and to a handful of indigenous
   people trained as an elite. Under
   apartheid, this history was exacerbated,
   with masses of people being
   proletarianised and (in a contradictory
   move) confined to pre-modern,
   and less than fully human forms of
   social life and identity. For most
   black South Africans, therefore, modernity's
   promises have been fraudulent
   and inherently contradictory.
   And yet it would seem that those
   promises, at least in their ideal
   forms, are so desirable that people
   cannot do without them (ibid.).

Such are the contradictions and double-binds out of which South African modernism has grown. The contribution of Sihlali, in particular, and other black artists of his generation to shaping and giving direction to modernism--the aesthetic dimension of this complex cultural experience--may be better understood and appreciated once these entanglements and contradictions are more fully acknowledged. This essay is the beginning of one such attempt.

Commentary

by Sandra Klopper

University of Stellenbosch

Colin Richards's richly textured reading of Durant Sihlali's "doubleness" touches repeatedly on the artist's complex relationship to a sense of history. While, at one level, this involves an evocation of the destruction wrought through the apartheid government's implementation of draconian racist laws, at another level it requires a careful excavation of personal experience, childhood nostalgia, and memories connected to a quasi-mythical past. It is in this latter context--the rural landscape of his childhood memories--that Sihlali was first exposed to the magic of art. Witnessing the production of murals and other decorative art forms by Xhosa-speaking women at a very early age, he later encountered the equally vibrant wall paintings of Sotho-speaking women. But, as we learn from Richards, Sihlali had "to suppress for almost thirty years" his "love of traditional mural painting and floor decorations." In Sihlali's own words, though he "badly wanted to participate" in the production of these art forms, he "was prohibited from doing so because it was taboo for men to engage in the work of women." Unlike South African artist Helen Sibidi, who remembers her grandmother actively nurturing her interest in producing murals, Sihlali was therefore forced to experiment with these forms in secret.

Since he grew up in the 1940s, the landscape of Sihlali's youth predated both the radical transformation of rural South Africa through the Nationalist government's subsequent policy of forced removals and the increasing pressure on adequate access to land that followed the decision by white farmers to dump black farm workers in already overpopulated "reserves" once farming methods became more mechanized in the 1960s and 1970s. To a large extent, his early experiences of rural South Africa were consequently shaped by a struggle to defy deeply embedded cultural definitions of work and labor, rather than the politics of race that was to dominate his adult life. Effectively embracing the feminine domain of art, from childhood Sihlali must have grappled with the complex relationship between form and symbol underlying the visual language of homestead murals and floor decorations. This early experience of art in South Africa's rural landscape is surely crucial to an understanding of the tension in Sihlali's work between narrativity--what Richards characterizes as an antimodemist impulse to allegory--and the privileging of aesthetic autonomy that is now commonly associated with the rise of modernism.

In a further important excavation of Sihlali's early life experiences, Richards alludes to the idea of the artist as nomad. Seeking to reveal the relevance to his artistic identity of a childhood characterized by repeated displacement--Sihlali moved "from one area to another, and the memory of past places" used to haunt him--Richards invokes Edward Said's notion of exile as a median state. Elsewhere, he suggests that, as an artistic witness to the apartheid state's human rights abuses, Sihlali was viewed with suspicion by both the police and the communities he sought to document. These experiences bring to mind novelist Jamal Mahjoub's exploration of the increasingly common reality of relocation--national, cultural, physical--"not only through departure, but also through the passage of time" (2004:54). It is surely in part because they are forced to accept the ultimate impossibility of return, that artists like Sihlali repeatedly grapple with the past.

Mahjoub, Jamal. 2004. "Displacing the Centre: The Pros and Cons of Writing Between Worlds." Special Issue on Asylum and Migration. Prince Claus Fund Journal 11 (December):54-7.

Durant Sihali's archive is currently tied up in his estate, which has yet to be settled. The information on the works discussed here is as accurate as the author could manage through notes, interviews, and published documentation. It is possible that certain details might change once the archive becomes accessible again. The "wall" works were collectively (some retrospectively) part of more general sequences called "wall series," and these included the Magopa wall series and the Rhini wall series. The artist was not always consistent in his titling, dating, and collections or, alternatively, details were transcribed differently from different documents and interviews. In some cases, works may have been sold but the collections not recorded. The author has made every effort to provide accurate acknowledgments and information, and apologizes for any errors that may not have been picked up. These will be corrected if and when information becomes available.

I would like to thank Carmen Jerrard (research) and Natalie Fiandeiro (adminstration) for their assistance in the writing of this paper, l would also like to thank the Arts and Culture Trust for the financial support that made this research possible.

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(1.) The Freedom Charter launched at Kliptown was the focus of the Treason Trial, which opened in 1957 at the Drill Hall in Johannesburg. One hundred and fifty-six activists were arrested in December 1956 and incarcerated in the Fort Prison in Johannesburg. The process was very drawn out. Most of those charged were eventually freed without going to trial, while Mr. Justice Rumpff acquitted the remaining thirty in March 1961. According to Brian Lapping "it was the longest and largest trial in South Africa's history and laid claim to being the world's longest. For the government, it was a fiasco" (Lapping 1987:172).

(2.) Durant Sihlali, interview with author, 2000. I combine, throughout this essay information from an interview I conducted with the artist in Johannesburg in the year 2000 and information from his unpublished notes. All this information is here cited as "Sihali, interview."

(3.) Named after a suburb of Johannesburg, the Rivonia Trial, in which ten leaders of the African National Congress were prosecuted for acts of sabotage with the intention to cause revolution in South Africa, began in 1963.

(4.) The importance of Biko was reflected in the works of a number of artists in later years (see Koloane 1996:143-57, Oliphant 1996:257-69).

(5.) Siblah, interview. He subsequently documented his family homestead in two watercolors.

(6.) Sihlali, interview.

(7.) Ibid.

(8.) Ibid.

(9.) Ibid.

(10.) It is especially fitting that another of Sihlali's images of ordinary life adorned the cover of the first edition of Ndebele's book.

(11.) Sahlali, interview.

(12.) Ibid.

(13.) Ibid.

(14.) Ibid.

(15.) Ibid.

(16.) Ibid.

(17.) Ibid.

(18.) Ibid.

(19.) We might generally include here artists Louis Maqhubela (b. 1939), Sydney Khumalo (b. 1935), Alpheus Kubeka (b. 1927), Lucas Sithole (b. 1931), Leonard Matsoso (b. 1949), Tshidiso Motjuoadi (b. 1935), Dumile Mslaba Zwelidumile Feni (b. 1942), David Mogano (b. 1932), Ezrom Legae (b. 1937), Ephraim Ngatane (b. 1938), Ben Macala (b. 1937), and Dan Rakgoathe (b. 1937).

(20.) Sihlali, interview.

(21.) Joachim Schonfeldt's work Untitled (Tribute to Durant) (1994) expresses a concern with this relation and begins the process of serious engagement with Sihlali's creative consciousness and contribution to South African modernism (see Charlton 1997:114-15).