In a book lavishly illustrated with beautiful images, one photograph stands out. A young black woman sits atop a large workbench, surrounded by her sketches and paintings, with her name on the wall behind her. Wearing the straw hat that she donned “while sculpting in the sun,” she holds her head up, her eyes beaming with pride, her lips curved in a smile (p. 190). She appears utterly self-possessed. It is November 1978 in South Africa.
This is not the type of image that historians might expect to see coming out of that place and time. The most famous moment in South African educational history remains June 16, 1976, when high school students in Soweto, the large black township outside of Johannesburg, marched in protest against apartheid's system of Bantu Education. Images of police opening fire on students shocked the world, leading to an acceleration of global anti-apartheid activism. Across South Africa, students boycotted classes; many teachers resigned, particularly in Soweto. The young woman in that photograph, Daphne Biyela, had been a teacher in Soweto amid the protests. But she was also an artist. To both escape the political tumult and pursue her art, she went to Ndaleni Art School in the rural Natal Midlands for a one-year course.
The Ndaleni Art School was created by the apartheid government in the early 1950s to train African art teachers to work in Bantu Education schools. It was located on the campus of an old Methodist mission school, on which the government also ran a general teachers’ training college and laboratory school. By the time it closed in 1981, Ndaleni had educated almost a thousand students, typically young adults already teaching in government schools. In exchange for a government bursary to cover their time at Ndaleni, they agreed to return to teach the Bantu Education art syllabus. The course was popular, selective, and often personally transformative. But choosing to enroll in an apartheid institution, and then work for the government, demanded that students make difficult compromises. To many activists—and to some historians of the anti-apartheid struggle—such compromises simply signified complicity with apartheid; Ndaleni students would appear to be collaborators with an unforgivable regime. The taint of collaboration may explain the previous neglect of this institution in histories of both education and art.
To Daniel Magaziner, dismissing Ndaleni students as collaborators enacts violence on the memory of their lives—lives which were often precarious, yet punctuated by moments of beauty like Biyela's exhibition. By looking closely at the history of this institution and the students and teachers that gave it life, Magaziner argues, historians can see that “the work of self-making was ongoing under apartheid, in ways that were beholden neither to the state nor to its opposition” (p. 18). He asks us to take seriously that Ndaleni students made hard choices to make art: “What of community born not in the choice of whether to conform, collaborate, or rebel but instead in the choice to subject oneself to the regime of the wholly different authority—in this case, art?” (p. 21). For historians of South Africa, this study's major contribution will be theoretical and methodological, as Magaziner urges us to move the story of apartheid and anti-apartheid resistance to the background and to foreground what made life meaningful to our historical subjects. For historians of education, this book offers still more.
First, Magaziner roots South Africa within the shifting global networks of debate about art education that were lively in the decades before apartheid. He shows how a British colonial discourse on the importance of craftwork education to preserve African tradition in the face of modernity and urbanization flourished, even as ideas of art education as a project of unique self-making also came across trans-Atlantic educational networks, particularly through American links.
Second, Magaziner provides a clear introduction to Bantu Education. The fact that the apartheid government sustained an art school vividly shows that apartheid schooling was about more than oppressing black students by confining them to segregated and impoverished schools. Apartheid ideologues also believed that Bantu Education would both preserve and develop African cultures, so that Africans would confine their political aspirations to ethnically differentiated “homelands” rather than fighting for rights on the national political stage. The project of cultivating ethnic difference meant investing significantly in the expansion of black schooling during the Ndaleni era, as other recent studies have shown, including Cynthia Kros's The Seeds of Separate Development: Origins of Bantu Education (2010). As I demonstrated in A World of Their Own: A History of South African Women's Education (2013), students and teachers could turn that state investment in education to their own ends.
Ndaleni certainly exemplifies how students and teachers could use an apartheid institution—intended to promote ethnically differentiated art—to serve their individual creativity. This point comes through in the third, and most impressive, contribution of this study: a pioneering, close-grained social history of the experience and applications of the Ndaleni education. Drawing upon diverse archival sources—particularly the significant Ndaleni Art School collection at the Campbell Collections of the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban; the Ndaleni magazine, ARTTRA; and oral historical interviews—Magaziner follows students from their application and arrival, through their lectures and lesson plans, to their subsequent careers. His chapter on “Journeys” is most evocative, highlighting the drama of students who traveled from across the country to Ndaleni's isolated campus and the sense of partial freedom that students seized in that space. Under Lorna Peirson's long tenure as director (1963 to 1981), and amid political tumult, remarkably little changed in the rhythms of Ndaleni campus life. Students worked with inexpensive materials—recycled wood, leaves, shoe polish, and papier-mâché—to prepare for careers teaching in impoverished schools, but images of their work and their testimonies reveal the richness of their imaginations. They studied broadly, revering Picasso and West African art as well as studying many local artistic traditions. Students and teachers shared news of the rewards of this campus community, communicating via ARTTRA and epistolary networks after graduation. These networks could often be lifelines, as alumni's lives were hard. They struggled with underemployment, with school inspectors who prized copying over creativity, and with violent activist students. As Biyela told Magaziner, “If I had it my way, I would have gone on and on in an environment like Ndaleni, but unfortunately, we were supposed to be there for a year and from there we were supposed to go and face our crude reality and see what we could do about it” (p. 205).
Ndaleni's closure in 1981 reads like a tragedy. This closure was an act of a reformist late-apartheid state, which sought to streamline their specialist teachers’ courses at a new college near the capital, Pretoria. Ndaleni's former campus, now partially repurposed as a school for the deaf, stands in disrepair, with alumni's sculptures in ruins. The surrounding community has endured decades of violence and neglect. And yet Magaziner concludes by emphasizing that the beauty and potential of this place endures in deaf students’ engagement with what remains of earlier generations’ art. This study has certainly shown that Ndaleni's alumni, and their ways of seeing, deserve our attention.
