The Art of Life in South Africa

New African Histories

by Daniel R. Magaziner

From 1952 to 1981, South Africa’s apartheid government ran an art school for the training of African art teachers at Indaleni, in what is today KwaZulu-Natal. The Art of Life in South Africa is the story of the students, teachers, art, and politics that circulated through a small school, housed in a remote former mission station. It is the story of a community that made its way through the travails of white supremacist South Africa and demonstrates how the art students and teachers made together became the art of their lives. Daniel Magaziner radically reframes apartheid-era South African history. Against the dominant narrative of apartheid oppression and black resistance, as well as recent scholarship that explores violence, criminality, and the hopeless entanglements of the apartheid state, this book focuses instead on a small group’s efforts to fashion more fulfilling lives for its members and their community through the ironic medium of the apartheid-era school. There is no book like this in South African historiography. Lushly illustrated and poetically written, it gives us fully formed lives that offer remarkable insights into the now clichéd experience of black life under segregation and apartheid.

376 pages, Paperback

Published November 9, 2016

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Historian Daniel Magaziner’s 2016 monograph The Art of Life in South Africa is a history of the art school at the Indaleni Mission in KwaZulu-Natal Province in Eastern South Africa. The Indaleni Art School was open from 1952 to 1981. In other words, the school was open during most of the Apartheid era. Magaziner wants to complicate the popular version of modern South African art history, which tends to view all art produced by Black South Africans as a political statement on the nature of Apartheid. This popular narrative also views all incidences of Black and White South African artists working together during Apartheid as a necessarily political act (12). Magaziner agrees with the central premise of modern art history scholarship that all art in some ways is a reflection of the society, politics, and materials in which it is made (12). Magaziner argues that the art school in Indaleni was written out of the history of Apartheid South African art because as a training school for Black visual arts teachers who were supposed to work in the Apartheid public school system, it did not fit into the narrative mentioned above as art as a conscious political statement (76). The ideology of art education in Apartheid South Africa was a mix of early 20th-century art theory concerned with the effects of modernity and racist political ideologies. The theory of art education in Apartheid was formed by the thinking of the White South African intellectual, Jack Grossert. Between the 1930s and the 1970s, Grossert was one of the leading voices for art education in Apartheid South Africa. The book explores the nature and roots of Grossert's philosophy of art education. It was worth noting that only artistic expressions that were deemed ‘African’ were encouraged by the Apartheid public school system (76). Indaleni was the only official visual art school for Black South Africans in Apartheid South Africa and many of the Indaleni school students valued the artistic training they received there (264-265). I enjoyed this book. I thought this book was a well-balanced view of the Indaleni school that existed and operated within the racist regime of Apartheid South Africa, but which allowed Black South African art educators to have an artistic outlet and training during a bleak time in their country's history.