Black South African artists have typically had their work labeled "African art" or "township art," qualifiers that, when contrasted with simply "modernist art," have been used to marginalize their work both in South Africa and internationally. This is the The first book to fully explore cosmopolitan modern art by black South Africans under apartheid.
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.
Diana Wylie is Professor of History at Boston University. She is the author of A Little God: The Twilight of Patriarchy in a Southern African Chiefdom and Starving on a Full Stomach: The Triumph of Cultural Racism in Modern South Africa (Virginia), which won the Melville J. Herskovits Award.
In 2 February 1990, FW de Klerk made a speech that changed the history of South Africa. Nine days later, the world watched as Nelson Mandela walked free from the Viktor Verster prison. In the midst of these events was Lord Renwick, Margaret Thatcher's envoy to South Africa, who became a personal friend of Nelson Mandela, FW de Klerk and Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, acting as a trusted intermediary between them. He warned PW Botha against military attacks on neighbouring countries, in meetings he likens to 'calling on the führer in his bunker'. He invited Mandela to his first meal in a restaurant for twenty-seven years, rehearsing him for his meeting with Margaret Thatcher - and told Thatcher that she must not interrupt him. Their discussion went on so long that the British press in Downing Street started chanting 'Free Nelson Mandela'.In this extraordinary insider's account, Renwick draws on his diaries of the time, as well as previously unpublished material from the Foreign Office and Downing Street files. He paints a vivid, affectionate, real-life portrait of Mandela as a wily and resourceful political leader bent on out-manoeuvring both adversaries and some of his own colleagues in pursuit of a peaceful outcome.
Featuring some of the most iconic images of our time, this unique combination of photojournalism and commentary offers a probing and comprehensive exploration of the birth, evolution, and demise of apartheid in South Africa. Photographers played an important role in the documentation of apartheid, capturing the system's penetration of even the most mundane aspects of life in South Africa. Included in this vivid and compelling volume are works by photographers such as Eli Weinberg, Alf Khumalo, David Goldblatt, Peter Magubane, Ian Berry, and many others. Organized chronologically, it interweaves images and essays exploring the institutionalization of apartheid through the country's legal apparatus; the growing resistance in the 1950s; and the radicalization of the anti-apartheid movement within South Africa and, later, throughout the world. Finally, the book investigates the fall of apartheid, including Mandela's return from exile. Far-reaching and exhaustively researched, this important book features more than 60 years of powerful photographic material that forms part of the historical record of South Africa.
Beautifully illustrated, Portrait Photography in Africa offers new interpretations of the cultural and historical roles of photography in Africa. Twelve leading scholars look at early photographs, important photographers' studios, the uses of portraiture in the 19th century, and the current passion for portraits in Africa. They review a variety of topics, including what defines a common culture of photography, the social and political implications of changing technologies for portraiture, and the lasting effects of culture on the idea of the person depicted in the photographic image.
"Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand history – and then go out and change it." –President Barack Obama Nelson Mandela was one of the great moral and political leaders of his time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. After his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela was at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa's antiapartheid movement, he was instrumental in moving the nation toward multiracial government and majority rule. He is still revered everywhere as a vital force in the fight for human rights and racial equality. Long Walk to Freedom is his moving and exhilarating autobiography, destined to take its place among the finest memoirs of history's greatest figures. Here for the first time, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela told the extraordinary story of his life -- an epic of struggle, setback, renewed hope, and ultimate triumph. The book that inspired the major motion picture Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.
African news making headlines today is dominated by disaster: wars, famine, HIV. Those who respond - from stars to ordinary citizens - are learning that real solutions require more than charity. This book provides a comprehensive, panoramic view of US activism in Africa from 1950 to 2000, activism grounded in a common struggle for justice. It portrays organisations, activists and networks that contributed to African liberation and, in turn, shows how African struggles informed US activism, including the civil rights and black power movements.
Reconstructing Exhibitions in Art Institutions spans exhibition histories as anti-apartheid activism within South African community arts; collectivities and trade unions in Argentina; Civil Rights movements and Black communities in Baltimore; institutional self-critique within the neoliberal museum; reframing feminisms in USA; and revisiting Cold War Modernisms in Eastern Europe among other themes. An interdisciplinary project with a global reach, this edited volume considers the theme of exhibitions as political resistance as well as cultural critique from global perspectives including South Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, USA and West Europe. The book includes contributions by ten authors from the fields of art history, social sciences, anthropology, museum studies, provenance research, curating and exhibition histories. The edited volume finally examines exhibition reconstructions both as a symptom of advanced capitalism, geopolitical dynamics and social uprisings, and as a critique of imperial and capitalist violence. Art historical areas covered in the book include conceptualism, minimalism, modern painting, global modernisms, archives and community arts. This volume will be of interest to a wide range of audiences including art historians, curators, gallery studies and museum professionals, and also to scholars and students from the fields of anthropology, ethnography, sociology, and history. It would also appeal to a general public with an interest in modern and contemporary art exhibitions.
