African Arts at 50: Teaching African Art in the Face of Apartheid

In 1967 the first issue of African Arts was published. In 1967 I first enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (Wits), for a BA degree, majoring in English Literature, History of Art, and Fine Art, in a class entirely of white students. This was eight years after the English medium universities in South Africa had been closed to black students under the system of apartheid.¹ Nationalist party rule had, in 1959, legislated this final educational discrimination in which black, white, “coloured,”² and Indian people were separated into their own highly unequal educational systems. The mid-1960s nevertheless saw a generation of accomplished black artists (Sidney Kumalo, Ezrom Legae, Dumile Feni, among many others) emerge as powerful presences on the contemporary art scene.³ Despite the lack of access to tertiary education for these black artists, they had acquired formal art training at the men's recreation centre in...