THE ART OF LIFE IN SOUTH AFRICA
NEW AFRICAN HISTORIES
SERIES EDITORS: JEAN ALLMAN, ALLEN ISAACMAN, AND DEREK R. PETERSON
Books in this series are published with support from the Ohio University Center for International Studies.
David William Cohen and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, The Risks of Knowledge
Belinda Bozzoli, Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid
Gary Kynoch, We Are Fighting the World
Stephanie Newell, The Forgers Tale
Jacob A. Tropp, Natures of Colonial Change
Jan Bender Shetler, Imagining Serengeti
Cheikh Anta Babou, Fighting the Greater Jihad
Marc Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa?
Marissa J. Moorman, Intonations
Karen E. Flint, Healing Traditions
Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola, editors, Recasting the Past
Moses E. Ochonu, Colonial Meltdown
Emily S. Burrill, Richard L. Roberts, and Elizabeth Thornberry, editors, Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa
Daniel R. Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets
Emily Lynn Osborn, Our New Husbands Are Here
Robert Trent Vinson, The Americans Are Coming!
James R. Brennan, Taifa
Benjamin N. Lawrance and Richard L. Roberts, editors, Trafficking in Slaverys Wake
David M. Gordon, Invisible Agents
Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara S. Isaacman, Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development
Stephanie Newell, The Power to Name Gibril R. Cole, The Krio of West Africa
Matthew M. Heaton, Black Skin, White Coats
Meredith Terretta, Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence
Paolo Israel, In Step with the Times Michelle R. Moyd, Violent Intermediaries
Abosede A. George, Making Modern Girls
Alicia C. Decker, In Idi Amins Shadow Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Conjugal Rights
Shobana Shankar, Who Shall Enter Paradise?
Emily S. Burrill, States of Marriage
Todd Cleveland, Diamonds in the Rough
Carina E. Ray, Crossing the Color Line
Sarah Van Beurden, Authentically African
Giacomo Macola, The Gun in Central Africa
Lynn Schler, Nation on Board
Julie MacArthur, Cartography and the Political Imagination
Abou B. Bamba, African Miracle, African Mirage
Daniel Magaziner, The Art of Life in South Africa
THE ART OF LIFE IN SOUTH AFRICA
DANIEL MAGAZINER
OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS
ATHENS, OHIO
Advance praise for The Art of Life in South Africa
The Art of Life in South Africa is a richly suggestive and moving contribution to South African intellectual history. Weaving in a highly imaginative way the two concepts of life and art, Magaziner opens unique pathways for research in the historical sociology of the object-worlds South Africans invented, created, and inhabited during the long twentieth century. Written with extraordinary clarity and precision, this book will appeal to anyone curious about new trends in the historiography of culture.
Achille Mbembe, author of Critique of Black Reason
The Art of Life in South Africa contributes to a global conversation about art and craft at the same time as it challenges neat distinctions between center and periphery, metropole and margins. Art education provides rich terrain through which the entangled relations of modernity, subjectivity, and materiality can be explored. This book is as important for students of global modernism as it is for scholars of South African art, history, and politics.
Tamar Garb, author of Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography
Magaziner tells a profoundly human story of the institutional and social constraints under which African artists operated and the different ways in which they sought to find a way to produce beauty in the midst of oppression.
Frederick Cooper, author of Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State
The Art of Life in South Africa is beautifully rendered, well researched, and tells an important, scarcely told story. Combining in exciting ways intellectual, cultural, and social historical approaches, Magaziner offers a meditation on what happens if we examine a past that is shaped by broader historical forces (in this case apartheid) but that cannot be reduced to them.
Clifton Crais, coeditor of The South Africa Reader: History, Culture, Politics
In this beautifully written book, Magaziner opens a small story to reveal expansive, deep questions. The Art of Life in South Africa offers an unexpected and transcendent intellectual history of African self-making and art practice.
Julie Livingston, author of Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic
The Art of Life in South Africa is an astonishing book, powerfully constructed, intricately researched, and gorgeously written. From the focused study of individual lives and practices that flourished in and around the Ndaleni art school, Magaziner extends the possibilities of a more democratic form of art history.
David Doris, author of Vigilant Things: On Thieves, Yoruba Anti-Aesthetics, and the Strange Fates of Ordinary Objects in Nigeria
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Magaziner, Daniel R., author.
Title: The art of life in South Africa / Daniel Magaziner.
Other titles: New African histories series.
Description: Athens, Ohio : Ohio University Press, 2016. | Series: New African histories | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016036236| ISBN 9780821422519 (hc : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780821422526 (pb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780821445907 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Ndaleni Art School. | Art teachersTraining ofSouth Africa. | ArtStudy and teachingSouth Africa. | BlacksSouth AfricaSocial conditions20th century.
Classification: LCC N88.5.S6 M34 2016 | DDC 707.1068dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036236
In a secluded corner of the yard he stumbled upon a gigantic operation. It was the work of the little girl. She was in the process of building a model village, all carved out of mud. There were mud goats, mud cattle, mud huts and mud people, and grooved little footpaths for them to walk on. He stood staring at it for some time, a look of pure delight on his face. Then he turned and chose a site as far removed as possible from this sanctuary of genius, and with lengths of string marked out the shallow foundation for the tobacco curing and drying shed.
