Gerard Sekoto: ‘I am an African’

By N. Chabani Manganyi and Es'kia Mphahlele

Gerard Sekoto is without doubt one of South Africa’s major painters of the twentieth century. Considered increasingly as one of the earliest South African modernists and social realists, he completed his most memorable work during the early and middle years of the 1940s. When he left for Paris in 1947, he was at the height of his creative powers. He spent forty-five years as an exile in France, and during these often difficult times his talent, dedication, belief in the equality of all people and, most of all, his identity as an African sustained him. Chabani Manganyi’s biography is informed by the discovery, after Sekoto’s death, of a ‘suitcase of treasures’, which contained previously unknown musical compositions, letters and a large quantity of notes, writings and private documents. Photographs and full colour plates of previously unpublished and significant paintings are included.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2004
• ISBN: 9781776145157

N. Chabani Manganyi

N. Chabani Manganyi is one of South Africa’s most eminent intellectuals and an astute social and political observer. He has had a distinguished career in psychology, education and in government, and has written widely on subjects relating to ethno-psychiatry, autobiography, black artists and race.

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‘I am an African’

‘I am an African’

A Biography by N Chabani Manganyi

Foreword by Es’kia Mphahlele

Wits University Press

1 Jan Smuts Avenue

Johannesburg

2001

South Africa

978-1-86814-400-6 (Paperback)

978-1-77614-517-1 (Hardback)

978-1-77614-514-0 (Web PDF)

978-1-77614-515-7 (EPUB)

Text © N Chabani Manganyi, 2004

Artwork © The Gerard Sekoto Foundation

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

The publishers wish to acknowledge the Gerard Sekoto Foundation for permission to reproduce the artwork, and Iziko South African National Gallery and the University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries for making the artwork available for reproduction.

Cover art: The Cigarette Smoker, Undated. Oil on canvas, 65x80.5cm. Presented by the Department of Arts and Culture, Iziko South African National Gallery Collection.

Cover design and layout by Crazy Cat Designs, Johannesburg

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Wonder and Joy at Wonderhoek

Sophiatown: Buttons, Helmets and Guns

Journey into the Unknown

Saint-Germain-des-Prés

A Death of One’s Own

Room 105

Old Man Sekoto

End of an Odyssey

Postscript: Responsibility and Solidarity in African Culture

Sources

Index

List of coloured plates from Private Collections and Iziko

South African National Gallery Collection

Yellow Houses, A Street in Sophiatown Undated

The Artist’s Mother and Stepfather, Undated

3rd Class Carriage, 1940

District Six Dancer, Undated

The Wine Drinker, Undated

Couple Dancing, 1963

Woman’s Head, 1963

Country: Township: City, 1964

Three Senegalese Women, 1968

Song of the Pick, 1978

Homage to Steve Biko, 1978

Building across the Seine, 1978

The Bull, 1979

The Professor, Undated

Nu de Jeune Fille Africaine, 1979

The Red Turban, 1986

The Cigarette Smoker, Undated

List of drawings from The Sowetan Collection of Sekoto drawings housed at the

University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries

Dozing on the Road, 1941

Lippy Lipschitz’s Sister, 1945

Cigarette, 1949

Relaxed/Untitled, 1949

Standing by the Wall, 1949

Three Figures Resting, 1949

The Band, 1955

Song of the Pick, 1960

Prisoner before the Horse, c1960-65

A Group by the Market Side, 1966

Rue des Grands Augustins, 1969

Marthe, 1975

The Daily Struggle, 1976

Children on Bicycles, 1987

Cigarette by the Glass, 1987

Dance with an Umbrella, 1987

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An undertaking of this kind is not only time consuming. Much depends on the goodwill of people and institutions at different places and different times. An earlier version of this book was published in 1996 under the title A Black Man Called Sekoto. A full acknowledgement of people and institutions that contributed to the successful completion of the book was given at that time. The present book is much more than an expanded version of the earlier one. Large sections of the text have been rewritten. There has been greater reliance on Sekoto’s private documents, currently housed in the South African National Gallery in Cape Town. I want to thank Barbara Lindop of the Gerard Sekoto Foundation for having drawn my attention to Sekoto’s suitcase, the repository of a substantial collection of the painter’s private papers. Marie Farrel-Descours contributed significantly to the success of the research visit which I undertook to Paris in 2003. Not only was she willing to be interviewed, but she was kind enough to arrange interviews at the Maison Nationale des Artistes with Raymond Laboute and Anne Gasper. Subsequent to my research visit to Paris and Nogent-sur-Marne, correspondence with Marie Farrel-Descours provided illuminating insights into Sekoto the Parisian, the painter amongst painters during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The research visit was made possible by a grant from the National Research Foundation. It was this kind of institutional support, coupled with the generous research time made available to me by my university, which made the completion of this book possible. Since the foundations of the present book were laid during the 1980s and early 1990s, it is still appropriate to convey my sincere appreciation to a number of individuals. In this regard, I would like to single out individuals who participated at different times in formal interviews in London, Paris, South Africa and New York, namely: Lorna de Smidt, Abdou Berrada, Bokwe Mafuna, Es’kia Mphahlele, Phyllis Lewsen, Mary Dikeledi Sekoto, John Guenther and the late Nimrod Ndebele and Paul Koston. On a more personal level, my greatest thanks are reserved for my wife, Peggy Sekele-Manganyi, who did more than provide me with needed support and encouragement, and the lady in charge of my office at the university, Johanna Loubser. Veronica Klipp and her staff at Wits University Press went beyond the call of duty to ensure that this book was produced in accordance with the highest editorial and production standards.

FOREWORD

Chabani Manganyi began his series of interviews with Gerard Sekoto in Paris in 1984, through to 1992, a short while before the artist died. The rapport between them came to transcend the banal, prosaic, journalistic relationship that one often sees in serialised investigative reporting.

This is not what one writer once termed ‘a mahogany-desk biography’ – a deadpan, stilted narrative about a person that lacks blood and warmth. Manganyi gives us a vivid portrait of Sekoto on a large canvas as it were, and in a scholarly yet elegant style that he sustains to the end. He engages our emotions and intellect as we follow his story of the artist’s fascinating life. We observe Gerard the country boy toying with drawings, improvising materials along the way, working with the barest minimum that his simple rural environment could offer. He grows up and takes the conventional paths from the few that were available to black male children and adults: teacher or church minister or, with luck, a clerk of the lowest level in a government office. Sekoto never eases up from his efforts at creating with pencil and crayon and other colours; he improvised even while employed as a teacher. As he moves from country to city lights – Sophiatown, to District Six in Cape Town, to Eastwood in Pretoria, we realise how heavily such an artist must rely on his senses: seeing, feeling, smelling, tasting, hearing his environment – and, of course, using his intuition. But this is what graphic and plastic artists have always relied on, from time immemorial. Accordingly, as Manganyi documents the artist’s movements and work, we see a mirror of changing lifestyles from community to community. The clean idyllic rural landscape suddenly yields to urban shacks, road diggers and other less robust figures, and their movements. Very few works by Sekoto create a display of the sky and the elements, almost as if human life and landscape exercised their magnetic power on him as he, in turn, sensed the organic attachment between them.

As Sekoto moved from one social milieu to another, devouring chunks of life with an artist’s appetite, he also built up a core of friends and associates. Among these were his old mate, Ernest Mancoba the sculptor, painters Koenakeefe Mohl and Pemba. Sekoto eagerly welcomed the patronage of Brother Roger of St Peter’s Priory in Rosettenville, Johannesburg, who appreciated his work and introduced him to artists, gallery owners and white liberals in Johannesburg and later in Cape Town.

Then came the journey into the unknown: Paris and neighbouring districts – from 1947 until his death on March 20, 1993. The Senegalese excursion turns out to have been a fascinating interlude, for Sekoto found great delight in displaying the tall, slender West African figures in elegant attire and long shirts. In the grey and near-blue colours is a subtle suggestion of the dry Sahara winds sweeping across and over the dunes …

In this biography Manganyi adds a great deal of new information from various sources, material that gives the reader further insights into the life of the artist. And we are the richer for it. It is evident that Sekoto was a tidy, methodical artist, notwithstanding the closed-in apartments he occupied, especially at Rue des Grands Augustins on the Parisian Left Bank, a traditional symbol of the struggling artist’s life.

In 1988, Barbara Lindop, a South African friend of Sekoto’s and the faithful, conscientious custodian of his works at home and a publicist in the art world at large, published a book of his works. It was a landmark of no mean importance. Thanks to Lindop and Chabani Manganyi’s biographies, we have the benefit of meeting Sekoto as a survivor of the South African nightmare of institutionalised racism, a living personality, rather than a shadowy figure of the past. An artist who happened to become an exile rather than an exile who happened to be an artist.

As we read Manganyi’s text, we picture Sekoto selecting his facts and materials, giving them, as Irwin Edman (Arts and the Man: 1967) says, ‘their particular order by impulse, reflectively disciplined’. So does the philosopher, we are reminded.

Manganyi takes us deeper into Gerard Sekoto’s ‘internal geography’, so to speak. The artist’s memories of his rural childhood were still with him in 1966, when he lived in Paris. The Christian beliefs he was born into and socialised to adopt as a child had, in time, become but a memory. Yet Manganyi discovered that the artist ‘was almost fanatical about the spiritual sources of art and its power to heal and effect reconciliation’. These beliefs still exercised an impact on his practice and became ‘part of the mainsprings of his imagination and his everyday life’.

By the time of his death in 1993, Sekoto had been living outside Paris for some time, in a home for elderly artists, the Maison Nationale des Artistes. Manganyi ends his narrative on an elegiac note that vibrates with its own kind of dirge long after reading it, particularly in one who knew Gerard as a friend:

No one will ever know whether he took the medication on 19 March 1993 but, that night, after returning at midnight from the Bar Loto Pronostic, alone in a foreign land and with no chance to whisper a grudging farewell and no welcoming hands to fall into, Gerard Sekoto died, taking with him to the grave the secrets of his last moments on earth.

Es’kia Mphahlele

Lebowakgomo 2004

The artist as a

young man

WONDER AND JOY AT WONDERHOEK

There is something even more fundamental than sex and work. The great universal, human need to look forward. Take the future from a man, and you have done something worse than killing him.

– John Berger

In the 1820s, the then north-eastern Transvaal was thrown into turmoil by the mass migration of African peoples. By the time of Andreas Sekoto’s birth in 1886, however, much had happened to eclipse this earlier period of social, political and military upheaval and the Pedi kingdom to which he and his ancestors traced their lineage had become a powerful force in the region, first under Chief Sekwati and later under Sekhukhune.

But the historical gains of the Pedi kingdom were not without significant losses. Ethnic and cultural homogeneity in the region were weakened by the influx of refugees in the wake of the wars that came to be known as the difaqane. Equally important for the region as a whole was the arrival in 1845 of the first group of Boer trekkers, who established an unmistakable white colonial presence. However, for the purposes of this story it was the arrival in 1861 of Alexander Merensky and Albert Nachtigal, two missionaries of the Berlin Missionary Society, that had the most telling consequences for the lives of the family upon whom this story centres. The arrival of the missionaries confirmed the colonial presence in the area but their intentions were different from those of the farmers. The Boers were land hungry; the missionaries were out to capture the hearts, minds and souls of the African inhabitants of the area. African resistance to colonisation had to be destroyed once and for all.

In 1864 the Pedi chief, Sekhukhune, who was opposed to the Christianisation of his subjects, had launched a relentless campaign against the missionaries and their converts. The following year Merensky and Nachtigal were forced to withdraw from Sekhukhune’s kingdom with a significant number of their African converts. Seeking a refuge out of reach of the chief’s wrath, they found a place near the small country town of Middelburg. It was there that they established a new missionary settlement which they called Botshabelo, ‘place of refuge’.

Today, time and history have joined hands to marry the old and the new. Botshabelo can be approached along modern highways from Pretoria and Johannesburg in the south and the farming town of Groblersdal in the north-east. Modern-day Botshabelo is a wooded enclave a short distance off the road that runs between Middelburg through a spine of mountains and valleys on the way to Groblersdal. The place seems to come to life rather unexpectedly as one encounters a number of ancient-looking buildings, tree-lined walkways, stonewalled courtyards and huge exotic trees. The village, ensconced between the brows of two low-lying hills and bounded by a river, appears to be a self-contained enclave. What secrets, hopes, scandals and achievements lie buried in the overarching sombreness that attacks one’s senses in this enchanted place? We will never know.

What we do know is that it was in this place that Merensky, having escaped the hostile attentions of a belligerent African chief and his heathen followers, assumed the mantle of landlord and religious and community leader. Under his guidance Botshabelo became the missionary showpiece of the Transvaal and, indeed, of the sub-continent as a whole. Ten years after its establishment, the mission station had its own stores, a workshop for building ox-wagons, a mill, a church, and a fortress, appropriately named Fort Wilhelm. Indeed, by 1871, the missionaries boasted of having built the largest school in the Transvaal.

Andreas (1876-1936) and his future wife Anne (1878-1968), the parents of Gerard Sekoto, were born and brought up at Botshabelo. From an early age they had watched the missionaries carrying out God’s work: collecting rent from their converts, extracting labour, and enforcing discipline. Being a devout Christian was not only a spiritual duty, it was a way of life; an ethos in which hard work, regular prayer and Sunday observance all occupied an important place.

Towards the close of the nineteenth century, more and more South Africans were growing up under the watchful eyes both of parents and of white and black missionaries. A new kind of African family was emerging. The first black priests at Botshabelo, Andreas’ father, Jan Gerard Sekoto, and John Serote, father of Anne, who would in time become Andreas’s wife, were Christian patriarchs who thrived on missionary patronage and the surrender of their wives and children to the absolute authority of the husband and father. Inevitably, they soon became the protagonists amongst Africans of this new family ideology based on Christian orthodoxy. Theirs was a life for God and church in defiance of more pervasive African traditions and customs still practised widely by people such as Sekhukhune and his subjects.

Andreas’ and Anne’s parents were expected to lead exemplary lives as Christians, not only to ensure the perpetuation of the new family values but also to help in the propagation of the faith. Indeed, through education and religion, Merensky and others like him were able to transplant nineteenth-century European ideals in the soil of the African lands where they now found themselves.

They also, at least temporarily, transplanted some of their flock to Europe – both Jan Gerard Sekoto and John Serote were dispatched to Berlin to undertake the translation of the Holy Bible into Northern Sotho.

Having attended school at Botshabelo, Andreas, like his father, was a devout Christian who devoted a large part of his adult life to the propagation of the word of God. So it is not difficult to see how Gerard, Andreas’ and Anne’s second son, was touched in no small measure by the imprint of Christianity.

But missionary enclaves like Botshabelo were, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, part of an evolving political economy and of new social values and relations in the Transvaal Republic and the sub-continent. While missionaries tried to turn Africans into ‘fishers of men’, the far-reaching social, cultural and economic transformations which followed – first, the discovery of diamonds in Kimberley in 1870, then that of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 – made more material claims on them and their traditional way of life. Politics and economics combined to produce intense new currents between town and countryside, with Johannesburg exerting the strongest attraction of all the new towns that were coming into being.

Andreas Sekoto was among those drawn to the promise of fame and fortune held out by the town that was to become known as Egoli, the City of Gold. His father had experienced both Botshabelo and Berlin; now he, too, was to travel beyond the confines and comforts of the missionary village.

Andreas, driving the horse-drawn carriage belonging to a Scottish doctor, became a familiar figure in the streets of early Johannesburg, a city that offered an apprenticeship for life. A man who was ready to absorb and learn as much as circumstances permitted, Andreas developed a love for horses as well as a working knowledge of useful everyday medical remedies for common ailments.

But skills in themselves were not enough. To become a permanent citizen of Johannesburg required enterprise and resilience. A vibrant and challenging world, it offered many lessons but it was also an unfriendly place that prompted A Pratt to write of it: ‘Ancient Nineveh and Babylon have been revived. Johannesburg is their twentieth-century prototype. It is a city of unbridled squander and unfathomable squalor… The wages are high indeed, but the price the workers pay for them is paid in suffering and blood.’

As their living and working conditions grew progressively worse – a situation associated partly with the emergence of discriminatory laws and practices, many workers opted to leave the city and return to a place that promised more and to a life in which the lives of others mattered. Andreas Sekoto was one of them.

But how was he to earn his living? For one thing, he was still unmarried, and getting married was something good and socially responsible men did in time, once they had secured lobola, the traditional bride price. When the time came to choose a bride, Andreas’ eyes did not stray very far. He favoured Anne Serote.

The young couple had all the gifts of physical attractiveness that nature can bestow. Pictures taken during the first decade of the last century show a confident, self-possessed couple who knew their social place. They dressed and carried themselves like members of the educated African classes of the time. Teachers and priests were well represented in both families and the couple also shared a love of music, to which the young Gerard would be exposed from an early age. Many years after his departure from Botshabelo and, much later, from South Africa, he harboured fond memories of music-filled rooms at the large Middelburg home of a schoolteacher cousin who would play the organ.

On 29 September 1911, a son was born to Andreas and Anne and named Bernard Theodore Saku. A little more than two years later, on 9 December 1913, a second son was born at five in the morning on the day of a church synod. They named him Jan Gerard, but later he would come to be known by his second name, as well as by the nickname Senote, derived from the coincidence of his birth with that important event in the church year. A third child, Papinyana, died in infancy. The two surviving Sekoto children began life at a momentous time in the history and development of South Africa and the world.

In 1910 the Union of South Africa was established. In 1912 the South African Native Congress (later the African National Congress) was formed. The year of Gerard’s birth saw the passage of the Land Act, the single most important act of African dispossession in the country’s history. Then, while Europe slid into a cataclysmic world war, there were stirrings of militant trade unionism on the Witwatersrand.

Parents Anne and

Andreas Sekoto

Even in those days, it would not have been sufficient for the son of a prominent educated and Christian family to remain a cabdriver and evangelist. So, soon after the First World War, Andreas returned to the classroom to train as a teacher at Kilnerton Institution east of Pretoria. At the end of his training, in July 1921, he joined the emerging mission-school educated African elite of the 1920s, an elite that was becoming increasingly restless in the face of the continuing erosion of their political and other rights.

Andreas returned to Botshabelo soon after completing his studies in Pretoria but, unable to secure a permanent teaching post, he accepted a posting at a nearby junior primary school. His stay there was short-lived. Always ready for new experiences, and with the opportunity to spread the word of God, he accepted the challenge of establishing a new school and a Christian presence at a place called Wonderhoek, some thirty kilometres from Botshabelo. Quite how the name ‘Wonderhoek’ came about is not known. On the face of it, it seems to have been a run-of-the-mill place with no spectacular or surprising features. Unlike Botshabelo, a thriving community with ample water and vegetation, Wonderhoek was relatively barren, even though the land supported black subsistence farming as well as white farming on a small scale. Indeed, one white farming family in the neighbourhood was surrounded, as was often the case in those days, by African villagers. There was a sprinkling of Christian converts and it was among these rural, mainly illiterate people that the mission-educated former Johannesburg cabdriver turned teacher-evangelist established a new home and life for his small family.

They did so, though, only after Andreas had put his own imprint on their dwelling and the small church building which was to double during the week as a school. As a young man at Botshabelo he had learned to work with wood, stone and other materials used in the building trade. These skills appealed to his sense of independence and he considered work with his hands not only to be honourable but enormously fulfilling.

So, before he moved his family, Andreas commuted regularly to Wonderhoek to undertake the building work. The result of his labours was a biggish homestead: a five-roomed house with a semi-detached kitchen, a toolshed, and the traditional family courtyard. Next to the homestead stood the small church-cum-school building.

Young Gerard, his parents, his elder brother Bernard and the boys’ paternal grandmother moved from Botshabelo to Wonderhoek by ox-wagon, arriving there one morning. The memory of this arrival was to remain etched in Gerard’s mind for many years to come and he was to say while living in Paris that:

It was my greatest joy – and a wonder too – on the farm of Wonderhoek (corner of wonder) on that morning when mother shook me out of a blanket to see our new home. This was a big house … It was shortly after sunrise, ahead of us in the east, as the ox-wagon was slowly moving on from the west, thus we were looking at the shaded side of the house as it gained density, with its silhouette well imposed upon those