The Rorke’s Drift Art and Craft Centre and South African Works on Paper
Dr. Haley Jones, a previous Mellon Fellow at the High and contributing researcher in the African Art department, discusses Rorke’s Drift and its prominence in the history of South African art.
By Dr. Haley Jones, High Museum of Art Mellon Graduate Curatorial Research Fellow 2022–2023
Commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the dissolution of apartheid and South Africa’s first democratic presidential election in 1994, the installation Three Decades of Democracy: South African Works on Paper presents eight South African artists who produced innovative works during the tumultuous final decades of apartheid and the years immediately following its end. During this period, printmaking had special prominence as a medium for social and political communication due to its economic and technical accessibility, reproducibility to mass audiences, and often collaborative nature for artists. Art centers were key sites for the proliferation of printmaking practices in South Africa beginning in the 1950s. Some of the artists featured in this assembly of works from the High’s collections of African, Modern and Contemporary, and Photography have one biographical detail in common: they studied at Rorke’s Drift Art and Craft Centre, which operated from 1962 to 1982 and influenced the careers of some of South Africa’s most prominent contemporary artists. Featured artists John Muafangejo, Sam Nhlengethwa, and Kay Hassan attended this vibrant art school, and the stories of their lives and artistic developments shed light on art making from the height of apartheid through its ending and aftermath.
The Origins of Rorke’s Drift Art and Craft Centre
The independent art schools that played a prominent role in the history of South African art in the twentieth century came about as the result of a few different, but related, historical influences. First, they filled a void in arts education created by the apartheid government’s systematic exclusion of non-white South African students from higher education. Young South African artists who wished to advance their arts education but were not permitted to attend university relied on alternative resources, including attending privately operated art schools or studying abroad. Many of the artists featured in Three Decades of Democracy pursued one or both of these pathways to artistic development. These schools were the cheaper and more accessible option for many students, as traveling abroad for artistic apprenticeships or courses was often unaffordable for non-white South Africans without the financial aid of scholarships or grants.
Second, these art centers often arose due to a complex and problematic combination of white philanthropic and missionary influence. The Rorke’s Drift Art and Craft Centre is an example of this phenomenon. Founded by members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (ELC) in 1962, the art center was conceived by individuals from Sweden who were concerned about the oppression Black South Africans faced — especially women who were disproportionately impacted by the socioeconomic challenges under apartheid — and sought to create opportunities through arts education.[1] Arts educator Berta Hansson and missionary Helge Fosseus, who worked on an ELC mission in South Africa, formed the idea for an art center, and they selected textile artist Ulla Gowenius and her husband Peder, a printmaker, to bring the initiative to fruition.[2] The center began as an occupational therapy initiative at Ceza Hospital, and many of the first students were patients at the hospital.[3] The program grew to include a campus at the Rorke’s Drift settlement and began providing students with board and two-year certificates. The Rorke’s Drift site, also known as Sandlwana in Zulu, was the historic battleground for a conflict during the Anglo-Zulu War in 1879 in which approximately 139 British soldiers defeated 4,000 Zulu warriors.[4]
The potential of students to achieve commerical success through the sale and exhibition of their work in fine art spaces became clear, and the program began to fashion itself as both a fine art school and a craft center.[5] The first workshop established at Rorke’s Drift, which was devoted to textile arts including strip weaving, free weaving, sewing, and spinning, attracted primarily women students. The lack of widespread enthusiasm for weaving from men studying at Rorke’s Drift prompted Peder Gowenius to introduce linocut printing after noting the men’s interest in using cutting tools to whittle wood.[6] Early students of the printmaking workshop such as Azaria Mbatha and Muziweyixhwala Tabete produced narrative and figurative works, with Mbatha depicting primarily biblical subjects and Tabete creating compositons informed by Zulu cosmology and mythology.[7] A ceramics workshop also thrived, and there was great exchange and fluidity between Rorke’s Drift’s workshops and its participants.[8] For example, John Muafangejo, best known for his linocut prints, reportedly learned how to knit while at Rorke’s Drift.[9]
Using a few select media, Rorke’s Drift students created artwork that had political and gendered implications. Notably, the Goweniuses avoided any emphasis on existing local indigenous craft forms, such as basket weaving and weaving with reeds; they feared this would align with the apartheid government’s emphasis on encouraging the development of “native craft,” which they viewed as “tribalizing,” and would further isolate Black South African artists from accessing and participating in Western systems of knowledge.[10] Teachers intended to maintain a noninterventionist approach to students’ artistic choices, supplying them with tools and technical training without dictating the subject matter they chose to depict or the artistic style they used.[11] Responses to teaching methods at Rorke’s Drift among students and buyers of their artworks varied and oscillated over time with changing political and social attitudes both in South Africa and Sweden.[12] For example, students such as Cyprian Shilakoe and Mbatha were critical of their experiences at Rorke’s Drift and of the valorization of the institution, and scholars such as James Macdonald have warned against the institution-centric narrative of twentieth-century South African art due to the resulting minimization of individual agency among artists who trained at Rorke’s Drift.[13]
John Muafangejo’s Didactic Prints
Muafangejo (1943–1987) was born in Angola and moved to present-day Namibia in 1955 following the death of his father. At the time, Namibia was called South West Africa, and it operated under South Africa’s administrative control and was subject to its apartheid policies until it achieved independence in 1990.[14] Muafangejo attended Anglican missionary schools in Namibia. While he was a student in Standard 6 at Saint Mary’s in Odibo, his teachers recognized his artistic talent and wrote to Peder Gowenius arranging for his study at Rorke’s Drift.[15] Muafangejo left Namibia to attend Rorke’s Drift between 1967 and 1969. He was among what Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin describe as the “early group” of printmakers trained at Rorke’s Drift.[16] After his studies, he returned to St. Mary’s and taught for four years before returning to Rorke’s Drift as an artist-in-residence in 1974. He then returned to Namibia in 1975, where he resided in the Katutura township of Windhoek until his death in 1987. His prints were exhibited nationally and internationally in the 1980s, and in the year following his death, the National Arts Festival in Makhanda (formerly known as Grahamstown) hosted a retrospective exhibition of his work.[17]
During his artist residency at Rorke’s Drift, Muafangejo produced a linocut print (fig. 1) illustrating the environment of the rural Natal province surrounding him, giving visual and textual attention to its geography. Herds of cattle and sheep nestled amid rolling hillsides brimming with a variety of trees and plant life create an impression of natural abundance. Muafangejo labels the river bisecting the landscape as “Buffalo (uMzinyatha) [sic] River Between Natal & Zululand,” referring to the Buffalo River and its name in the isiZulu language, uMzinyathi. An additional text label reading “Zululand” accompanies an illustration of rondavels beyond the river, a style of conical dwellings commonly found among rural Zulu peoples and widely in parts of southern Africa. Such descriptive texts and a black-and-white color scheme were typical in Muafangejo’s prints, which Brenda Danilowitz and Gavin Younge have suggested indicate the didactic purpose of his works, meant to clearly transmit narrative and sociopolitical content to viewers.[18] In contrast to the rondavels of Zululand, Muafangejo’s depiction of Natal features markers of modernity in the style of houses and the presence of cars and buses, while human figures on both sides of the Buffalo River wear a combination of indigenous clothing styles and suits.[19] His inclusion of so many elements within the same composition communicates the diversity and dynamism of the region in which Rorke’s Drift formed a key creative nexus.
During Muafangejo’s lifetime, his missionary education and art schooling at Rorke’s Drift received a perhaps undue amount of credit in influencing his work. Narratives developed that cast his images as “naïve and primitive,” recognized and brought to commercial success through the benevolent influence of white mentors.[20] Scholars have since called this perspective into question by examining the overtly political and anticolonial dimensions of his work, particularly those images he produced while living in Namibia.[21] Similarly, the following two artists I will discuss learned valuable skills and participated in a lively artistic community during their time at Rorke’s Drift, but their experiences there were by no means the single defining force in shaping their artistic careers or creative outlook.
Sam Nhlengethwa’s Jazz-Inspired Prints
Sam Nhlengethwa (born 1955) was born in the Springs township of Johannesburg and studied at Rorke’s Drift from 1977 to 1978. Following his studies at the Johannesburg Art Center, he came to Rorke’s Drift after receiving recommendations from friends he knew while attending Tlakula SecondarySchool who had later attended Rorke’s Drift, including Judus Mahlangu and Mafa Ngwenya.[22]
By the time Nhlengethwa began his studies at Rorke’s Drift, students and teachers there had become thoroughly enmeshed with and cognizant of the growing Black Consciousness movement influencing South African political discourse in the 1970s. The politics of race entered the classroom in subtle ways, such as Nhlengethwa mentioning to his classmate Bongiwe Dhlomo-Mautloa that she need not depict Adam and Eve as white in a print she was working on at the time.[23] The death of anti-apartheid activist and Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko while in police custody in 1977 left a lasting impact on Nhlengethwa, who feared producing politically charged art in the 1970s and 1980s and finally illustrated Biko’s death in a 1990 collage. [24] Galvanized by such events, students of Rorke’s Drift critical attention not only to the overarching power dynamics of South African society but also to the conventions and structure of the art center itself.[25] In addition to internal tensions, Rorke’s Drift as an institution came under external scrutiny, most notably from police officers who suspected any context in which white and non-white South Africans gathered and exchanged ideas. Art schools such as Rorke’s Drift were neither isolated from broader historical developments nor unaffected by social and political concerns from within.[26]
Nhlengethwa’s passion for jazz culture, which he developed through his familiarity with the Springs music scene, is visible in many of his prints, such as this color lithograph depicting a saxophonist performing (fig. 2). Jazz clubs in apartheid-era townships such as Springs afforded musicians and members of the community opportunities to perform, collaborate, and socialize outside of apartheid structures, which made them hotbeds of revolutionary ideas and targets of legal restriction.[27] The composition is highly geometric and abstract, consisting of large blocky forms, jagged and linear shapes to produce both texture and outline, and an expressive rather than representational use of bold primary colors. The wide and foreshortened mouth of the saxophone projects toward the viewer and extends beyond the tightly cropped frame of the image, as does the figure of the musician. The image impactfully captures the high-energy environment of an instrumental jazz performance that comes from decades of Nhlengethwa’s personal relationship with the musical and lithographic mediums.
Kay Hassan’s Paper Constructions
Kay Hassan (born 1956) was born in Alexandria, a township of Johannesburg at the time. He enrolled in Rorke’s Drift in 1978 and, after a pause in his study, completed his certificate in 1980. His early career successes in the early to mid-eighties — including his exhibition at the British International Print Biennale in Bradford, England, in 1983 and his scholarship to study printmaking at Studio 17 in Paris from 1984 to 1986 — stemmed from the printmaking processes he learned at Rorke’s Drift. He continued his studies abroad at the Schule für Gestaltung in Basel, Switzerland, from 1990 to 1993 and later joined the Bag Factory studio, which Nhlengethwa cofounded in 1991.[28]
Hassan attended Rorke’s Drift only a few years before the school’s closure in 1982. Student interest remained strong even as the Center became beset by financial problems and staffing issues. Its closure was meant to be a temporary move.[29] However, intended reopenings never materialized despite the enduring hopes of former students and staff.[30] The 1980s marked a particularly challenging period for South Africa. Anti-apartheid protests reached such an intensity and ubiquity nationwide that the government declared a state of emergency in 1985, which would remain in effect for five years.
By the mid-eighties, Hassan had largely turned away from the printmaking practice he had engaged in at Rorke’s Drift and became preoccupied with other forms of works on paper. His paper constructions are a form of recycled art made from discarded cardboard and billboard posters. His aim in using these materials is not to form collages of the original images and graphics but to break the images down to raw color and texture from which he can create new compositions.[31]
In 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from twenty-seven years of political imprisonment on Robben Island, and the apartheid regime finally began to decay through negotiations with the African National Congress. In the spring of 1994, the first South African election held with universal suffrage resulted in Mandela becoming the president of a newly democratic nation. Decades of resistance, struggle, and violence culminated in this event marking the end of apartheid. Hassan’s triptych Bus Ride (fig. 3) depicts an everyday scene, keeping with Hassan’s tendency to portray ordinary life in Johannesburg. The image has deeper social implications, however, when considering the history of transit and apartheid in which non-white South Africans had to commute incredible distances from townships and state-demarcated “native homelands” to their low-wage jobs in white urban areas. The nodding posture of one of the figures may be a visual reference to the photographs of David Goldblatt, who documented the long commutes of Black South Africans during the 1980s. Goldblatt’s 1985 print 4 a.m. on the Marabastad-Waterval Bus (fig. 4), also on view in Three Decades of Democracy, shows an exhausted passenger trying to sleep during a long bus ride. Created in 1996, only two years after the official end of apartheid, Hassan’s Bus Ride questions how much of this insidious legacy may linger in the fundamental structure of post-apartheid society.
Three Decades of Democracy: South African Works on Paper
The commonality of having studied at Rorke’s Drift that unites the artists John Muafangejo, Sam Nhlengethwa, and Kay Hassan represents just one thematic thread in Three Decades of Democracy, on view on the Skyway Level of the Wieland Pavilion in Gallery 15. Visit the installation to view works by these and other artists, including William Kentridge, Nils Burwitz, Billy Mandindi, David Goldblatt, and Rudzani Nemasetoni. The installation explores the many ways that South African works on paper, and printmaking in particular, have embodied and commented on the sociopolitical landscape of apartheid.
Notes:
[1] Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin, Rorke’s Drift: Empowering Prints (Cape Town: Double Storey Books, 2003), 15. Hobbs and Rankin’s text, which this article draws heavily from, remains the most comprehensive published text available detailing the formation, history, and significance of the Rorke’s Drift Art and Craft Centre.
[2] Hobbs and Rankin, Rorke’s Drift, 14–17.
[3] Hobbs and Rankin, Rorke’s Drift, 18–32.
[4] When I use the term “Rorke’s Drift” moving forward in this article, I refer to the Rorke’s Drift Art and Craft Centre, not to Rorke’s Drift as a historic site. Judith B. Hecker, Impressions from South Africa: 1965 to Now (New York: Musuem of Modern Art, 2011), 13.
[5] Hobbs and Rankin, Rorke’s Drift, 60–61; Hecker, Impressions from South Africa, 12.
[6] Hobbs and Rankin, Rorke’s Drift, 31.
[7] Hobbs and Rankin, Rorke’s Drift, 43–45.
[8] Hobbs and Rankin, Rorke’s Drift, 63.
[9] Hobbs and Rankin, Rorke’s Drift, 61.
[10] Hobbs and Rankin, Rorke’s Drift, 19–20.
[11] Hobbs and Rankin, Rorke’s Drift, 77.
[12] Hobbs and Rankin, Rorke’s Drift, 76–78.
[13] James Macdonald, “Rorke’s Drift (or Sandlwane) — with Measured Thanks,” Critical Arts 33, no. 6 (2019): 83–97.
[14] Brenda Danilowitz, “John Muafangejo: Picturing History,” African Arts 26, no. 2 (1993): 47.
[15] Hobbs and Rankin, Rorke’s Drift, 72.
[16] Hobbs and Rankin, Rorke’s Drift, 80.
[17] Hobbs and Rankin, Rorke’s Drift, 219.
[18] Danilowitz, “John Muafangejo,” 50; Gavin Younge, Art of the South African Townships (London: Thames & Hudson; New York: Rizzoli, 1988), 90.
[19] Hecker, 13.
[20] Margo Timm, “Inversion of the Printed Image: Namibian Perspectives of Jogn Ndevasia Muafanjego,” Nka 4 (1996): 40–45.
[21] Timm, 40–45; see also Danilowitz 46–57.
[22] Hobbs and Rankin, 221
[23] Hobbs and Rankin, 185
[24] Shannen Hill, “Iconic Autopsy: Postmortem Portraits of Bantu Steve Biko,” African Arts 38, no. 3 (2005): 19–20.
[25] Hobbs and Rankin, 187–191; Hecker 12
[26] Hobbs and Rankin, 192
[27] For more on jazz culture in South African townships, see Glenn Ansell, Soweto Blues: Jazz, Popular Music, and Politics in South Africa (New York; London: Continuum, 2005).
[28] Hobbs and Rankin, 212
[29] Hobbs and Rankin, 155–158
[30] Hobbs and Rankin, 158–159
[31] Rory Bester, “Kay Hassan: Borders and Borderlands,” Nka 10 (1999): 18–23.
