When writing about artists and artistic expression, scholars typically focus on known or renowned works and individuals: artists with the biggest careers, popular music genres, and critically acclaimed fiction. Seldom do we focus on the mundane or unspectacular. Daniel Magaziner’s The Art of Life in South Africa does just that. It offers a microhistory of an obscure South African visual art school, Ndaleni, between the early 1950s and 1980s. Ndaleni’s main purpose was to train African art educators rather than artists. Few graduates became famous. Most taught in Bantu Education schools and lived ordinary lives. As a result, Ndaleni has largely been overlooked, receiving only “three short paragraphs” of coverage in a 2011 four-volume history of South African art (274). Because the legacy of Ndaleni was not extraordinary, it was therefore considered forgettable.
Relying on impressive discoveries in South African and U.S. archives as well as oral interviews, Magaziner unearths this neglected story. The Art of Life details how Ndaleni operated, what attracted students to the school, what they learned and experienced there, and how much they valued the school and the training they received. The result is an account in which the personalities of both students and educators shine through. Located in rural KwaZulu-Natal, Ndaleni also functioned, according to Magaziner, as an “island” of escape for its students. At Ndaleni they could explore their creativity, learn about different mediums and styles of visual art, and find fulfillment in an otherwise stifling country.
Ndaleni’s story is more complicated, however, in regard to its affiliation with Bantu Education and the commitment of its alumni to work for government schools. Since the primary objective of Bantu Education was to maintain apartheid’s racial and exploitative hierarchy, Ndaleni was part of this system. The Art of Life teases out this intertwined story of African artistry and education under apartheid, and how Ndaleni’s students and staff negotiated their passion for art and the social realities of the world around them. The text begins by examining how white South African educators and bureaucrats designed the pedagogy of African art education for the purpose not just of teaching art, but also of supporting the the apartheid state. Problematic notions of what made African art “African” and what types of mediums were best suited for Africans shaped the school’s curriculum going forward. The book then shifts its focus to the development of the Ndaleni school over the course of three-plus decades. The reader learns how semesters were organized, the assignments that students received, the process of curriculum development, why teachers sought out training at Ndaleni, and how alumni used the education they received as well as the connections they made there to search for jobs and build the art curriculums elsewhere.
The focus of the book, therefore, is art and art education, rather than apartheid. Nevertheless, apartheid lurks in the background. Ndaleni was created and operated not despite apartheid, but within and because of apartheid. “Of course, the reality was that in South Africa, art education existed only because its primitivist and racialist aspects were popular with the ideological pretensions of the white minority,” notes Magaziner (80). Apartheid also shaped the experiences of both teachers and students. Restricted government funding limited the materials that could be used in lessons. Teachers and students were forced to procure materials by scavenging forests for wood and collecting clay from riverbeds, and they solicited financial donations in the school’s newsletters. Paradoxically, such skills proved quite useful for students who would go on to teach at grossly underfunded Bantu Education schools.
While The Art of Life excels at exploring how apartheid shaped Ndaleni, one does wonder if more could have been written about the effects of South Africa’s racialized practices on relationships between students and their white teachers, as well as how the black students viewed this institution made possible by Bantu Education. Magaziner convincingly presents Ndaleni as an artistic “island” offering escape from apartheid, but one does wonder how racialist thinking crept into this expressive oasis. Or if it did not, then one wonders how the school managed to exclude it.
Overall, The Art of Life is an impressive work that is sure to become a basic text in the field of African cultural history. Ndaleni will no longer be forgotten.
