Within Loving Memory of the Century: An Autobiography.

Within Loving Memory of the Century: An Autobiography Azaria J.C. Mbatha Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005. 398 pp. 65 illustrations, 1 map, photos, bibliography. ZAR 280; US$89.95. Hardback.

Gerard Sekoto: 'I am an African' N. Chabani Manganyi Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Press, 2004. 304 pp. 16 color plates, 16 drawings, photos, index, sources. ZAR 190; US$39.95.

Two recent publications from South Africa, one a biography, the other an autobiography, blur the boundaries between history and memory, verity and fiction. Chabani Manganyi's biography of Gerard Sekoto and Azaria Mbatha's autobiography are not art historical texts per se, although both include artwork. Nonetheless, both texts can contribute to our understanding of artistic practice in South Africa, particularly in the early part of the twentieth century.

The practice of black South African artists is at times collapsed into segregated studies that legitimize and historicize the art through the rubric of the artist's blackness (see Miles 1997, de Jager 1992). Their contributions notwithstanding, such isolated studies often segregate the artists from the larger social and art historical landscape in which they work. Biographies and autobiographies offer the promise of personal, sustained life accounts that further our understanding of artists and their work. Manganyi's biography of Sekoto and Mbatha's autobiography are heavily indebted to how Sekoto and Mbatha first remembered and wrote about themselves. Readers interested in Sekoto and Mbatha as artists must unearth the relevant art historical information from these biographical constructions. But doing so exposes how much a construct art history itself is, emphasizing certain historical elements and submerging or dismissing others.

Manganyi's narrative is the more straightforward of the two, as it moves chronologically from Sekoto's birth to his death (1913-1993). It centers on Sekoto's life as an artist with references to exhibitions, reviews, and specific works of art, a number of which are illustrated in the text. Following most publications on Sekoto, including the first monograph on his work by Barbara Lindop (1988), Sekoto's life is broken into his formative years in South Africa and his years in exile, 1947 until his death.

The basic elements of Sekoto's life are well known. He was born at Botshabelo, a German Lutheran Mission Station in the Transvaal. At the age of seventeen he enrolled at Grace Dieu, a Diocesan Training College near Polokwane in Limpopo (formerly Pietersburg, Northern Transvaal), run by the Anglican Church, and thereafter took up a post teaching at Khaiso Secondary School. There, in 1937, he developed an important friendship with sculptor Ernest Mancoba, who encouraged Sekoto to pursue art full time. Mancoba too had trained at Grace Dieu and came to teach at Khaiso Secondary School a few years after Sekoto. As Manganyi tells it, it was Mancoba "that prompted Sekoto to develop his grand plan to move: first to Johannesburg, then to Cape Town, and finally to Paris. It was also through his close relationship with Mancoba at Khaiso that Sekoto took his first peep into the contemporary white art world" (pp. 23-4). Sekoto relinquished his teaching post in 1939 and moved to Sophiatown, Johannesburg (1939-1942), District Six, Cape Town (1942-1945), and Eastwood, Pretoria (1945-1947).

In September 1947 he left for Paris, never to return to South Africa. Sekoto considered Paris "the 'Mecca' of the art world" (p. 43). From Mancoba and his contacts in Johannesburg and Cape Town, Sekoto had learned about French modernist styles, which he came to favor. Sekoto had also met white South African artists who had been to France. Sekoto's relationships with other artists in Johannesburg and Cape Town indicate a professional acceptance of black artists by white artists--that is, a racially integrated artistic community. But professional acceptance hardly meant social, economic, or personal ease. "As Sekoto would soon find out, the racial discrimination that characterised the social life of the country extended to its artistic life" (pp. 29-30). Moreover, Sekoto seems to have lived between two worlds. "Sekoto lived and represented conditions of black life in his art, yet his relationships with the communities of Sophiatown and other black residential areas was somewhat distant .... It was difficult to live in relative ease in a country in which blacks and whites lived such racially segregated lives. Sekoto felt that he was being squeezed in the middle and often felt socially isolated" (pp. 35-6).

The first chapters of Manganyi's biography trace the early, formative years in South Africa; the greater part of the book, laid out in six more chapters, considers Sekoto's life as an artist and as a black South African in exile. The first three chapters provide details of South African history instructive for understanding the lives of Sekoto and his parents. As Pedi in an increasingly Christianized South Africa, "theirs was a life for God and church in defiance of more pervasive African traditions and customs ..." (p. 3). Manganyi introduces his readers to the complexities of the era, in which Christianity separated black South Africans from some of their ancestral traditions. "[T]he boy tried to fit together the pieces of the social jigsaw puzzle he observed most intently: differences between Christians and non-believers; between whites and blacks" (p. 13). Writing about the time he spent with his family in Eastwood prior to his departure for France, Sekoto wrote, "I wanted to dig into my ancestral roots, as I no longer believed that the tradition of my forefathers was evil. On the contrary, I felt that I would find certain elements to complement my present living" (p. 43).

Eastwood was a black settlement area where Sekoto lived with his mother, stepfather, and brother. His Eastwood period artwork is perhaps the most beloved work, as it represents the last body of work he completed on South African soil. These works have been nostalgically read as "golden years of his art" (Lindop 1995:15) or the "pinnacle of Sekoto's artistic achievement" (Spiro 1989:42). They have become a measure by which Sekoto's later works are read, especially those works with South African subjects created outside of South Africa. Manganyi quotes at length from Lesley Spiro's catalogue essay on Sekoto (Spiro 1989:42) in which she discusses the Eastwood period work: "Ironically, as he evoked more and more powerfully the soul of Africa, his work echoed increasingly the artistic sensibilities of Europe" (p. 47). This epitomizes the dilemma Sekoto poses for those who write about him. There is a tendency to essentialize both subject matter and stylistic leanings in relationship to the ethnicity or nationality of the artist. Sekoto's style, influenced by impressionism and post-impressionism, is presented as distinct from his subject matter: black life in Eastwood. The African soul seems to exist in the visibility of the black subject, in such paintings as Song of the Pick (c. 1946-47) or Sixpence a Door (c. 1946-47), but not the equally visible modernist (European) style. Hence, discussions of Sekoto's European-made work often include reference to the degree of its European or African identity. Sekoto the man is likewise analyzed in terms of his struggles with identity, African and European. This proves to be an especially compelling area of investigation for Manganyi, who uses a 1949 statement by Sekoto, "I Am an African" for the title of this biography. (1) According to Manganyi, "Sekoto never achieved the necessary liberation from the world of Wonderhoek, Sophiatown, District Six, and Eastwood to enter the mood and movements of his adopted country. This inability to cut his ties would be Sekoto's dilemma until the day he died" (p. 47). To demonstrate this, Manganyi considers Sekoto's artistic and psychological attachments to South Africa. For example: "What Sekoto's critics did not seem to appreciate was that he made a deliberate choice to remain an African artist in the world" (p. 105) or, "The choice he had made to remain 'an African' must have kept him awake on some nights" (p. 115).

The emphasis on Sekoto's relationship to Africa is conditioned both by history and Manganyi's genuine desire to consider the psychosocial aspects of exile on Sekoto's self-formation. One might ask whether Sekoto could have been then anything but a South African artist in the world. Frequently cited as one of the "pioneers" of South African black art or the "father figure of contemporary black art," he was among the few "pioneers" to permanently leave South Africa. For De Jager, "Sekoto's emigration to France was a big loss to South African art. Had he remained he would have made an even more significant contribution" (1992:9). The focus on Sekoto's South African legacy can be related to both the government that established apartheid in his absence and stripped him of his citizenship in the 1960s and an art discourse that for years ignored or devalued black artistic practice. By all accounts now Sekoto is, and rightly so, a recuperated and favored son of both South African and art history. But his work has yet to be fully integrated or discussed relative to that of modernism and his contemporaries in South Africa or France.

Manganyi's biography is a revised and augmented version of his earlier book, A Black Man Called Sekoto (1996). Manganyi, currently Vice-Principal at the University of Pretoria, is, according the the book's back cover, "a clinical psychologist, biographer, and non-fiction writer." Some chapters are more substantially rewritten than others; a few have new chapter headings. The new book includes illustrations of Sekoto's work and a different selection of documentary photographs. A Black Man Called Sekoto was developed in 1985 while Manganyi was a visiting scholar at Yale University and was greatly influenced by Manganyi's friend and colleague, psychologist Daniel Levinson. Levinson's methods of "biographical interviewing" and his theories on adult development are credited and discussed by Manganyi in the preface to the first version (not included in the revision) and influence both texts. Manganyi's resources included formal interviews he conducted with Sekoto in Paris between 1984 and 1986, personal contact with the artist through December 1992, Sekoto's personal correspondence and published writings, exhibition reviews, and art historical accounts of Sekoto's work. The revised biography also draws on new research in Paris and, according to Manganyi, "a greater reliance on Sekoto's private documents," many in a suitcase that belonged to Sekoto, in which he kept private papers, presently on loan to the South African National Gallery (p. vii). The revised biography includes details about Sekoto's funeral and estate settlements, including protracted negotiations with French courts that would facilitate repatriation of his artwork. One of the outcomes was the establishment of the Gerard Sekoto Foundation, which oversees Sekoto's work and its rights and reproduction. The Foundation loaned the Sekoto art collection, including the suitcase, to the South African National Gallery. (2) This new biography concludes with Sekoto's 1959 address to the Second Conference of Negro Writers and Artists in Rome, "Responsibility and Solidarity in African Culture," as a postscript.

Information about Sekoto's life has been significantly shaped by his own writings, most notably his correspondence with Barbara Lindop pursuant to the first publication on his work. Lindop's 1988 work included 289 color illustrations and Sekoto's "autobiographical letter," consisting of some seventy pages of their correspondence in 1985-1986. This book became the primary source for all subsequent research and publication on Sekoto. Manganyi writes in detail of Lindop's persistence and determination to publish a monograph on Sekoto. Their private exchanges are excerpted by Manganyi in both Sekoto biographies (see also Lindop 1988 and 1995). Sekoto clearly seemed to delight in narrating the details of his life. In addition to the autobiography he wrote for Lindop, Sekoto sent letters containing autobiographical material to David Koloane and gave Manganyi a document called "Sekoto's Biography of the Parisian Period" (Manganyi 1996:144, 190, nn. 28-9). Sekoto appears to have treasured correspondence in general, as more than 1000 saved letters were found in his possession after his death.

However, reliance on Sekoto's memory is no measure of accuracy. Manganyi's biography is not invested in securing the precision of Sekoto's memory or untangling discrepancies but rather in making sense of what was there. This can be irksome if one is attentive to detail or knows other truths than those in the narrative. (3) More problematic and perplexing for this reviewer is the choice to eliminate all notes from the biography, which nonetheless cites copiously from published and unpublished sources. Manganyi made fastidious use of notes in his earlier biography, A Black Man Called Sekoto. In his revision, a list of sources at the end of the text is prefaced by this author's note: "Increasingly today biography is crossing the boundary between fiction and non-fiction. This is a welcome trend and I have deliberately avoided using a style that burdens the narrative with references and matters that have little to do with the unfolding story" (p. 229). Inquisitive readers must sort through each listed source and make educated guesses as to which one is likely be that quoted in the text. Still, our understanding of the circumstances and contexts in which Sekoto developed and produced his art is well served by Manganyi's biography.

Azaria Mbatha's lengthy autobiography does not directly focus on his life as artist, although it is illustrated with more than sixty of his works. Mbatha was born in 1945 in the Mahlabathini district of KwaZulu-Natal. In 1961, while being treated for illness at a Lutheran mission hospital in Ceza, he was introduced to art as a form of therapy by Peder Gowenius. Gownenius, under the auspices of the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Church, established an art center for Africans at Umpumulo, which moved in 1963 to Rorke's Drift, or Sandlwane, in KwaZulu-Natal. It is best known as ELC Art and Craft Centre, or Rorke's Drift. Mbatha was a participant at both art centers and one of its earliest practitioners of printmaking, especially linocuts. In 1965 he received a scholarship for a two-year study in Sweden at the Konstfackskolan of University College in Stockholm. After a brief return in 1968, during which time he taught textile painting at ELC Art and Craft Centre, Mbatha settled permanently in Sweden, where he lives today.

Mbatha is primarily a graphic artist and his linocuts in particular are viewed as quintessential examples of Rorke's Drift graphic production. While the ELC Art and Craft Centre is rarely mentioned without including Mbatha, Rorke's Drift and the arts produced there have a negligible place in Mbatha's autobiography. What little he does impart is by way of both high praise and light criticism. Mbatha is equally restrained about his art studies in Sweden, later studies there in art history, and his artistic practice on the whole. This book is not about his artistic life; rather, it is an autobiography about Mbatha's family, Zulu ontology, and South African history, illustrated with more than sixty prints--linocuts mostly, and a few etchings. Here our understanding of Mbatha the artist arises only to the extent that we may re-read Mbatha's work through his autobiography.

Mbatha's oeuvre, like Sekoto's, deserves more attention, delineation, and contextualization and we must hope such will ensue. More than a decade ago, Rhonda Rosen claimed, "In South African art history, there is no real Azaria Mbatha. The term 'Mbatha' has numerous different authors. It may well be argued that 'Mbatha the artist' was made, rather than born, by the Lutherans, by art historians and later, by his own autobiographical recollections" (1993:11). Within Loving Memory of the Century does not offer a real "Mbatha the artist." One might even say it enacts a kind of theater of refusal in terms of canonical art history by eliminating any concrete discussion about art save for the interspersed images. What is real for Mbatha herein is South Africa's past and present, told alongside personal anecdotes and occasional moralizing. This seems to be what is real for his art as well. For now, those desiring to know more about the scope and evolution of Mbatha's art can go to the catalogue (Addleson et al. 1998) produced to accompany an exhibition of his work at the Durban Art Gallery, to which Mbatha also contributed an essay. (4)

In the preface to his autobiography, Mbatha notes, "I wrote these memories not because of their historical or political significance but because they signified for me the expression of what life had meant in moments of actual living" (p. ix). This is a complex if seemingly contradictory idea, if only because in a typical autobiography the moments of actual living are remembered, that is, recorded by way of memory. But this helps clarify a key strategy employed by Mbatha: We move as readers across time through the experiences of two embodied souls, Susi and Chuma. At times they seem to be Mbatha himself, but at other times they are time travelers who witnessed things Mbatha did not. Mbatha calls them "doppelgangers" who would "meet the same people in the future ... Ultimately, friends, you may fail to recognise who is who ... is Chuma still alive? What has happened to Susi who introduced this part? Who is telling the story: Susi or Chuma? Or is it all just confusion, even as life confuses us?" (p. 146). All three tell the stories that overlap, meet, and diverge, but ultimately it is Mbatha who takes these journeys. "I recount my life for you, then, in its time and place, hoping you will find something to identify with. I walk through the scrub of the past, interpreting events as a pilgrim raised in an African village, a rural herdboy with many names, an aging man who now inhabits another continent among people very different from his own" (p. 210).

The temporal ground covered in Mbatha's biography begins with the era of his father's birth in 1880. "Thus, through my parents I experienced things from their point of view; things that covered the entire century appearing in my title: Within Loving Memory of the Century" I (p. 12). Mbatha uses this process of remembering from 1880 forward to cover critical aspects of South African history, including colonialism, Christianity (his parents were kholwa/Christian), Nongqawuse's prophecy and Xhosa Suicide, the Anglo-Zulu war, apartheid (ubandlululo), Sharpeville, pass laws, and the TRC hearings. Mbatha writes, "Remembering my parents I see how Christianity came to Africa; how Western and African culture met. I see how the big waves of the one civilisation swallowed the small waves of the other ... perhaps my book is not so much about my family as it is about South Africa and its history" (p. 16). Mbatha'a narrative reflects his embrace of oral history, a tradition embedded in Zulu culture, and his deep respect for dreams. "My memories, like those of my reporters, are not strictly scientific. Many of them are fictionalised as dreams" (p. 225).

Mbatha, who settled permanently in Sweden in 1969, often refers to his task as one of weaving, and more than once says he is stitching a "morning gown." Perhaps this metaphor of weaving relates to his familiarity with textile work from Rorke's Drift and the Konstfackskolan; "I must rather seat myself at my loom," he writes (p. 209). The weaving and sewing are necessary to cover the vast historical territory. Mbatha narrates a South African history he did not directly experience, necessitating a reliance on patches of history, strips of public record. "Then come the richer, more detailed scenes of historical incidents woven as fiction, so to say, and the lengths of cloth that fall in coils around my feet as I try repeatedly to work them together" (p. 209).

Here the history most important for Mbatha to weave is that which most binds him to the country of his birth. His life in Sweden has only an intermittent presence in the autobiography. "How do I describe myself today after thirty years in Europe? The self, I Azaria, will not change like a new pair of trousers. The question is rather what Sweden means for me" (p. 345). The narrative Mbatha strives so hard to weave is predominantly a South African one, yet necessarily told from a certain distance. "Events in my memory are quite different from events in the memory of those who stayed. So, I plead guilty before my parents, who urged me to recount these stories to my children, and guilty before those as yet unborn. How will they live tomorrow if they don't know how I, and my parents before me, lived yesterday?" (p. 209).

For Mbatha, South African history is too often constructed from distorted and biased perspectives of the colonizers, whom he metaphorically calls the Greens (Africans are the Blues). He then compares the unreliability of the Greens' history to dreams. "To what extent is the past, again, even in the purely historical sense, any different from dreaming? It wears many faces and is often unreliable. It is like recalling dreams from one's boyhood, or from the other periods of one's life" (p. 220). Thus, in Mbatha's autobiography, dream telling and the sewing together of different patches of history narrated by diverse voices is no less History than that written by South Africa's colonizers.

References cited

Addleson, Jill, et al. 1998. Azaria Mbatha: Retrospective Exhibition. Durban: Durban Art Gallery.

De Jager, E.J. 1992. Images of Man: Contemporary South African Black Art and Artists. Fort Alice: Fort Hare University.

Hobbs, Philippa, and Elizabeth Rankin. 2003. Rorke's Drifi: Empowering Prints. Cape Town: Double Storey.

Lindop, Barbara. 1988. Gerard Sekoto. Randburg: Dictum.

--. 1995. Sekoto: The Art of Gerard Sekoto. London: Pavilion Books.

Manganyi, N. Chabani. 1996. A Black Man Called Sekoto. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.

Miles, Elza. 1997. Land and Lives: A Story of Early Black Artists. Capr Town: Human & Rousseau.

Spiro, Lesley. 1989. Gerard Sekoto: Unsevered Ties. Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery.

Rosen, Rhonda. 1993. "Art History and Myth-Making in South Africa: The Example of Azaria Mbatha." Third Text 23 (Summer):9-22.

(1.) The statement is credited to Sekoto from an August 1949 Time magazine article (p. 69).

(2.) Gerard Sekoto Foundation http://www.art.co.za/gerardsekoto/default.htm

(3.) For example, Sekoto is said to have met artist Peter Clarke in Cape Town in 1942-1943. But Clarke, who would have been thirteen and fourteen then, remembers otherwise. Clarke says he first met Sekoto in Paris in 1962-1963 at a New Year's Eve party at the house of Es'kia Mphahlele (p. 40, see also Lindop 1988:24). In both places Peter Clarke's name is misspelled, as Peter Clark.

(4.) Rorke's Drift and Mbatha's work there (including several photographs of him) is discussed in Hobbs and Rankin 2003.