A Record of the Hidden History of Dumile Feni's Era-defining Drawing Mother and Child (1966)
Provenance:
After the work’s creation in 1966, there are records of it being exhibited a few times over the next few months. But in 1967 it went into a private collection in Bishopscourt, Cape Town. Fifty-three years later, this “missing and lost” masterpiece finally resurfaced. Dumile’s Mother & Child (1966) formed part of Aspire Art Auctions’ first auction of 2020 as lot 41, taking place in Cape Town on Friday 14 February. With commission included, the work sold for double the top estimate of R300 000 with two telephone bidders locked in a fierce struggle. The under-bidder was an American collector who kept asking, How much is that in dollars? as the bidding reached its climax. The work was accompanied by a scant and generic catalogue entry, which neglected to mention any of the information and research listed below, including the work’s exhibition history and illustration history. Most telling and significant was the omission of The World newspaper controversy and other related historical context, which is essential in order to gain an insight into the true cultural and historical significance of this work. It is this hidden history that makes Feni’s Mother & Child (1966) one of the most culturally significant and historically important works made by any black artist working on the African continent during the sixties.
Exhibited:
S.A. National Gallery, Cape Town, September – October 1966
Pretoria Art Museum, October – November 1966
Civic Theatre, Johannesburg – November – December 1966
Durban Art Gallery, January – February 1967
Illustrated:
S.A. Breweries Art Prize 1966 exhibition catalogue (page 8)
(Esmé Berman) Art & Artists of South Africa, A. A. Balkema, Johannesburg, 1970 (page 83)
(Prince Dube) Dumile Feni Retrospective Exhibition Volume 1, Johannesburg Art Gallery, 2005 (page 85)
NOVEMBER 1892-93
Max Nordau (1849 – 1923) publishes his book Entartung (Degeneration) in two volumes in Germany in 1892 – 93, in which he postulates:
The norm is healthy and the deviant is sick. Most advanced modern art and literature, almost without exception, is sick or degenerate, hence the need for change. Degenerates corrupt and delude and frequently exercise deep influence and the modern art and literature produced by them were products of character deficits. Symptoms of degeneration were also caused by the metropolis and were also phenomena of a relatively small, incestuous, sickly upper class.
JULY 1937
Adolf Hitler and other Nazi officials standing by the Dada wall at the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition, Munich, 16 July 1937.
JANUARY 1938
Adolf Hitler and other Nazi officials inspect degenerate artworks confiscated from German museums at the Speicherhaus Köpenicker Strasse, Berlin, 13 January 1938.
At the same time we see everywhere a preference for an emphasis on manifestations of degeneration familiar to us from the army of the sunken, the sick and the physically deformed. The methods chosen for depiction, which are, after all, highly characteristic of their time in any art, point more or less to a physical and moral low. If we were to identify the symbols that are expressed in the majority of paintings and sculptures from that time, they are the idiot, the whore and sagging breasts. You have to call a spade a spade. It is a veritable hell of subhumans spread before us here, and we exhale when we leave this atmosphere to step into the pure air of other cultures, especially antiquity and the Renaissance, in which a noble race struggled to express its desires in its art. We can only presume that our reader is familiar with the art that until very recently filled our exhibitions and the chambers of horrors of our museums and about which advertising executives issued their ceaseless cries of ‘unprecedented!’
Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Kunst und Rasse (Art and Race), Munich and Berlin, 1938, p.116 – 117
OCTOBER 1940
Discrimination with regard to degenerate art surfaces for the first time in the South African art community in Cape Town when Professor Edward Roworth, then director of Michaelis Art School and director of the South African National Gallery, openly supports Hitler’s suppression of modern art:
In our day, art in Germany adopted some of the most degrading forms which the modernist movement has yet known, but quite recently this flood of ‘degenerate art’ has been stemmed by Herr Hitler, who has given the exponents of modernism their choice between the lunatic asylum or the concentration camp.
The Guardian, 17 October 1940
JULY 1959
The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) in collaboration with the state-funded academic journal Lantern publishes the first of three volumes of Our Art. Of the 24 artists whose work is featured, none are black. JH Pierneef is chosen to illustrate the front cover of the first volume with his dominant visual language of mountains, clouds and trees.
JULY 1961
The SA Association for the Advancement of Knowledge and Culture publishes the second of three volumes of Our Art. Of the 26 artists whose work is featured, there is only one black man, Gerard Sekoto, who incidentally went into exile almost two decades earlier.
1964
A famous and iconic portrait of Dumile Feni painted by Ephraim Ngatane (1938 – 1971) when both men were convalescing at the SANTA Soweto Tuberculosis Clinic. This portrait is of historical importance as it depicts Feni with his paintbrushes only months before he made the transition to draughtsman working in charcoal and pen and ink. I located this work in the winter of 1998 and sold it to the MTN art collection in the same year.
JANUARY 1966
Scan of newspaper article with headline SUCCESS FOR YOUNG AFRICAN ARTIST.
Dumile Feni (1939 – 1991) comes to the attention of the South African art world when he receives rave reviews for his first solo exhibition opening held at Gallery 101 on 17 January 1966. Three days later, The Star publishes the following review under the headline, SUCCESS FOR YOUNG AFRICAN ARTIST:
Instant success came to Dumile, the young African artist who can barely read or write, when his exhibition of drawings and sculpture opened in Johannesburg on January 17.
Within a couple of days three-quarters of the work on view was sold, at a total price of many hundreds of rands.
‘Only a few of the smaller works are left,’ said Mr Fernand Haenggi at the Gallery 101, where the exhibition is being held.
‘One of Dumile’s sculptures is being sent by air to a big collector in New York and another is going to a purchaser in Cambridge, England. Visitors say they are overwhelmed by the strength and emotional impact of the work.’
Dumile – his full name is Mshaba Zwedumile Mgaxvi – never had a drawing lesson in his life. He is 23.
He began to take art seriously a year or two ago when he was a patient in a tuberculosis hospital and he was given drawing materials to occupy himself with. Apart from two charcoal drawings, which were accepted by the 1965 Transvaal Academy, this is the first time the public has seen his work.
Dr Matthys Bokhorst, director of the South African National Art Gallery, has taken several of his drawings to Cape Town with the view to a purchase by the gallery.
MARCH 1966
The National Party under Prime Minister Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd (1901 – 1966) wins the all-white South African general elections held on 30 March 1966. This is the National Party’s fourth election victory since coming to power in April 1948.
Bram Fischer is given a life sentence in early May 1966. He passes away one day short of his ninth year of imprisonment on 8 May 1975. The accurate record of his struggle against apartheid oppression only becomes publicly available in 1998 with the publication of Stephen Clingman’s excellent biography.
Justice Boshoff’s original trial evidence file used to convict Braam Fischer in early May 1966.
Part of the evidence against Fischer shows his falsified identity card where he changed his name to Douglas Black. Collection Warren Siebrits.
THE LAST WORDS OF BRAM FISCHER, 28 MARCH 1966, BEFORE BEING SENTENCED TO LIFE IMPRISONMENT BY JUSTICE BOSHOFF
I accept, my Lord, the general rule that for the protection of society laws should be obeyed. But when the laws themselves become immoral and require the citizen to take part in an organized system of oppression – if only by his silence and apathy – then I believe that a higher duty arises. This compels one to refuse to recognize such laws.
The law, my Lord, under which I have been prosecuted, was enacted by a wholly unrepresentative body, a body in which three-quarters of the people of this country have no voice whatever. This and other laws were enacted not to prevent the spread of Communism, but, my Lord, for the purposes of silencing the opposition of the large majority of the citizens to a government intent upon depriving them, solely on account of their colour, of the most elementary human rights: of the right to freedom and happiness.
Stephen Clingman Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary, David Philip Publishers, Cape Town, 1998, page 410
APRIL 1966
Adverts for the inaugural South African Breweries (SAB) Art Competition begin to appear in all the country’s newspapers as well as on the radio to give artists three months in which to create and submit their work.
MAY 1966
Feni celebrates his 24th birthday on 21 May.
Ill-advisedly, Feni participates in the Republic Day Festival, which celebrates the fifth anniversary of the formation of the Republic of South Africa on 31 May 1961.
JUNE 1966
US Senator Robert Kennedy and his wife Ethel visit Johannesburg on 8 June and are mobbed by thousands of well-wishers in Soweto.
That evening, Kennedy delivers one of his finest speeches to a capacity crowd assembled at the Great Hall at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he states:
The teaching of our time is that cruelty is contagious, and its disease knows no bounds of race or nation. Where man can be deprived because their skin is black, others suffer because they believe men should not be deprived; and in the fullness of time, others will be deprived because their skin is white. If men can suffer because they hold one belief, then others may suffer for the holding of other beliefs.
Freedom is not money, that I enlarge mine by taking yours. Our liberty can grow only when the liberties of all our fellow men are secure; and he who would enslave others ends only by chaining himself, for chains have two ends, and he who holds the chain is as securely bound as he whom it holds. And as President Kennedy said at the Berlin Wall in 1963, ‘Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free.’
Original LP vinyl record in a limited edition of 100 pressings issued by the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), who invited Robert Kennedy to South Africa without the permission or acknowledgement of the South African government. This recording documents his speech given at the University of Cape Town on 6 June 1966. Collection Warren Siebrits.
JULY 1966
The well-organised and planned reception which Senator Kennedy received from South Africa’s liberal universities is a measure of the extent to which the internationalists have gone to embarrass South Africa in the outside world.
Senator Kennedy: Sincere or Sinister, Boomerang Publications, Pretoria, South Africa, p.2
The covertly state-funded but privately published 40-page booklet Senator Kennedy: Sincere or Sinister, Boomerang Publications, Pretoria, South Africa. The book is a right-wing/white-supremacist concoction published under the guise of helping save South Africa from internationalism.
The cover of Bruno Mtolo’s The Road to the Left, published by the apartheid-government-owned Drakensberg Press, Durban. This book, a covert project of the Bureau of State Security (BOSS), was intended to convince gullible and conservative white South Africans that even convicted saboteur and ANC terrorist Mtolo (who operated in a two-man terrorist cell with Ronnie Kasrils) saw the error of his ways in initially supporting the banned ANC. After his arrest on charges of terrorism and high treason in 1963, Mtolo came to his senses and became a supporter of the white apartheid government’s fight against communism. The truth is that Mtolo was broken psychologically under BOSS interrogation and was offered a substantial amount of money to change his beliefs, in so doing betraying the ANC and every fellow black man, woman and child in South Africa. Mtolo became the key state witness in the Treason Trial, though his identity at the time was concealed, with him only being referred to as Mr X. Due to his understanding of the inner workings and command structure of the banned ANC, it was ultimately Mr X’s damning evidence that was the final nail in the coffin, putting Nelson Mandela and comrades behind bars, each receiving a life sentence in the aftermath of the Treason Trial. Due to the sly propaganda-filled nature of this book, it has, five decades later, become an expensive collectors’ item, changing hands for thousands of rands when a copy does surface for sale.
AUGUST 1966
Scan of newspaper article with headline AFRICAN TO SHOW HIS DRAWINGS.
Dumile’s second solo exhibition consisting of 25 large drawings opens at the Durban Art Museum on 18 August. The exhibition opening is announced in the Natal Mercury under the headline AFRICAN TO SHOW HIS DRAWINGS:
An exhibition of charcoal drawings by Dumile, the well known African artist and sculptor from Johannesburg, opens at the Durban City Hall Art Gallery today. This is the first time the 23-year-old artist has exhibited in Durban.
Keen on drawing since his childhood when he used to sketch on scraps of paper and walls, he was ‘discovered‘ a few years ago by Mrs F. Haenggi, director of the Gallery 101 in Johannesburg.
Since then his works have been bought by collectors throughout the country and in Europe and America. He is seen with his six-foot drawing entitled 'Our Father Amen.'
By the time his exhibition closes on 5 September, more than two thirds of his works have been sold.
Irma Stern dies in Cape Town on 23 August 1966 at age 71.
SEPTEMBER 1966
On Tuesday 6 September, just after the lunch recess at the Houses of Parliament in Cape Town, the Prime Minister of South Africa Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd is stabbed in the neck and chest by court messenger Dimitri Tsafendas (1918 – 1999). He is pronounced D.O.A. half an hour later at Groote Schuur Hospital.
Two colour photographs of H. F. Verwoerd on the mortuary slab. Collection Warren Siebrits
White South Africa is thrown into turmoil and the political climate becomes more conservative and oppressive in the aftermath of the biggest state funeral ever staged in South African history, observed and attended by tens of thousands of people who line the streets of Pretoria and squeeze into every available space at the Union Buildings where the ceremony takes place. Millions more listen to the four-hour live radio transmission, which is broadcast in Afrikaans and English only. The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) issues 100 sets of a lavish 10 LP set documenting the full funeral service. These never become commercially available but are given as gifts to National Party cabinet ministers and other high-ranking dignitaries.
The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) publishes a limited-edition 10 vinyl record set to commemorate the life of HF Verwoerd. Only 100 sets are made and distributed to National Party insiders. The motivation behind making this commemorative item is to position HF Verwoerd as a hero of the South African people, black and white alike. Collection Warren Siebrits
Colour newspaper poster published the day after the funeral of H. F. Verwoerd, Sunday 11 September 1966. Collection Warren Siebrits
OCTOBER 1966
Dimitri Tsafendas is given a life sentence in early October 1966. He passes away on 7 October 1999 just days short of serving his 33rd year of incarceration. The accurate record of his struggle against apartheid oppression only becomes publicly available in 2018 with the publication of Harris Dousemetzis’ excellent biography. Tsafendas never knew his mother even though he searched for her in vain as an adult.
After a three-day summary hearing, Judge Andrew Beyers rules that Tsafendas is unfit to stand trial, and therefore not guilt by reason of insanity.
JUDGE BEYERS’ VERDICT AT TSAFENDAS’ SUMMARY TRIAL, 18 OCTOBER 1966
It became clear, as psychiatrist followed psychiatrist, that there can be no doubt whatever in this case that the man before me is a schizophrenic, that he is a lunatic – in more direct terms – or, as Roman Law would have it, that I have before me a furiosus. A furiosus is something which I cannot try. I can as little try a man who has not got at least the makings of a rational mind as I could try a dog or an inert implement. A man who is mentally disordered can perform no legal act. He cannot possibly plead.
Harris Dousemetzis, The Man Who Killed Apartheid: The life of Dimitri Tsafendas, Jacana Media, Auckland Park, Johannesburg, 2018, page 270.
On Friday 21 October, the coal-mining community of Aberfan in south Wales is devastated by a massive landslide that kills over 140 residents, mostly small children whose school is totally buried under the avalanche of thousands of tons of coal debris and slurry. It takes days for some of the bodies to be located and retrieved.
Day of the funeral of more than 140 children in a mass grave in Aberfan, Wales, October 1966
The official announcement that Dumile Feni has won a South African Breweries Art Prize merit award is greeted by M. T. Moerane (1913 – 1989) with shock and ridicule in his editorial column published in The World on Friday 28 October in Johannesburg. He writes:
On the opposite page today there is a picture drawn by a Soweto artist. It is called ‘Mother & Child’. The man who drew it has earned a prize of R100 ($150).
We nearly did not put the picture in the paper because we thought it so ugly. The head of the mother seems to have fallen off. She is obviously in very great pain. We got the same feeling when we looked at this picture as we do when we look at the bottom of an old garbage can or the thing the dog dropped onto the lounge carpet.
Of course we are just ordinary people, and we happen to believe that art is meant to inspire and lift man from being an animal to something nearer the angels. And that’s the same, if the art is dancing, or music or architecture.
And because we are just ordinary folk, we believe that a mother and child is the loveliest sight on earth. Here is the symbol of care and compassion, of selflessness, tenderness – all the best side [sic] of human beings. Now look again at the twisted limbs of the mother in the picture. Was the artist’s own mother like that? We think not.
The point we want to make today is that a sickly kind of art (mostly done by people) has come out of Europe and America. In Africa let us refuse to have this stuff pushed on to us. Let us keep it out of our homes. Let us keep our art as pure as our summer skies, as exciting as our wild life, as strong as our mountains. Let us keep it African.
Our African art shall be a thing of beauty, as art is meant to be.
Scan of newspaper article with caption THIS UGLY PICTURE WON FIRST PRIZE IN A SOWETO ART COMPETITION. BELIEVE IT OR NOT, MR. MALABA DUMILE, WHO DREW THE PICTURE, WON R100. THE PICTURE IS CALLED ‘MOTHER AND CHILD’.
What could R100 buy you in 1966? According to a 1966 inquiry by the South African Institute of Race Relations, a black labourer earned R10.53 a week, a truck driver R19.52 and a laboratory assistant R24.30. So R100 was equivalent to eight weeks’ salary for a black labourer, five weeks’ salary for a truck driver and a month’s salary for a laboratory assistant.
THE EDITOR
Scan of newspaper article with headline THIS IS NOT OUR ART.
One must bear in mind that The World, although South Africa’s biggest black newspaper at the time, was white owned. As a result of this tenuous financial relationship, there are known instances where the “black voice” was interfered with and/or completely replaced in order to shift sentiment. In my opinion, this is the case with this entire editorial, most noticeable in the last paragraph.
When viewed in retrospect, how would it be possible for a black man (M.T. Moerane, the newspaper’s editor from 1963-72) to make the following comments about a fellow black man, irrespective of his opinions on art, especially when saying: The point we make today is that a sickly kind of art (mostly done by people)…? This is clearly a derogatory and racist comment.
The balance of the last paragraph smacks of the same rhetoric — help save us from internationalism — that so clearly defined the mood of Senator Kennedy: Sincere or Sinister published three month earlier. In short, every attempt was being made by defenders of apartheid to discredit internationalism in any form or manner. Feni’s Mother and Child became one of many casualties of this ideological affront. Thank goodness a few people were able to see through it, such as Mr Ezekiel Mabusela with his letter, Ugly Picture not Wrong.
NOVEMBER 1966
Five days later on 3 November 1966, Ezekiel Mabusela from Mofolo Village, Soweto, had his response to this letter published by The World under the headline, UGLY PAINTING NOT WRONG:
SIR, I feel it my duty to give vent to my feelings about the leading article published in The World concerning Art. The headline read: ‘This is not our art’.
Art is nothing but self-expression – in other words a language. It is through the careful and thorough study of art work that you can get to know different people’s moods and characters. It is therefore not wise to say a picture is ‘wrong’. Experts would say; ‘unusual or different’.
There is no limit as to how an artist should express his individual feelings. They have different temperaments. They have been brought up in different environments.
They have strong characters. You might find them very difficult to deal with if you are not tactful.
The writer said: ‘The picture of a mother and its baby is a symbol of compassion, of selflessness, tenderness – all the best side [sic] of human beings.’ This is quite right.
The picture referred to, though so unusual, still carries the same message. For though the head is twisted, the arms are still clinging to the baby. To my mind the message is: ‘There is no greater love than mother’s love amidst all tribulations and care, she’ll never forsake me.’
If anyone still holds that the picture is bad, wrong, or unworthy, then they and the artist are not to blame, but me. (EDITOR: If someone sits on the piano, is that music?)
Whilst the media controversy surrounding Feni’s Mother and Child raged on, the work was seen by audiences around the country as it travelled from one South African museum to another starting at the S. A. National Gallery in Cape Town (Sept – Oct). It then went to the Pretoria Art Museum (Oct – Nov), Johannesburg Civic Theatre, Johannesburg (Nov – Dec) and Durban Art Gallery (Jan – Feb).
FEBRUARY 1967
When the S. A. Breweries Art Prize nationwide travelling exhibition came to an end in Durban, the following article appeared in Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, headlined BABY WITHOUT A NAME OR RACE:
Welfare authorities at Vereeniging are caring for a baby that not only has no name and no known parents or home but does not even belong with certainty to any particular racial group – an important factor in this racially segregated country.
A few days ago the baby, a boy, was left, wrapped up in what looked like just a bundle, by an African woman in a rural shop near Vereeniging, 36 miles from Johannesburg. He was taken to hospital, where doctors tried to determine his race. After checking his gum and tooth structure, eye colour, and hair texture, they decided that, provisionally at least, he was white.
There have already been inquiries from local white families who would like to adopt him. But there is another, and unmentioned, aspect of the case which would make this difficult; time may show that he is not white but a half-caste.
Article published in The Guardian, London, 25 February 1967
JUNE 1968
Dumile chooses to go into exile, leaving South Africa on a one-way flight. His departure is reported in the Rand Daily Mail on Monday 17 June under the headline, AFRICAN ARTIST ON U.K. VISIT:
Dumile, a promising young African artist, whose paintings have been sold in South Africa and overseas, flew from Jan Smuts airport at the weekend to work with internationally known artists in Britain. He has been invited to exhibit in London, New York and Brussels.
Dumile, 26, whose name is Mhlabax [sic] Zwelidumile Ngxavi, got the overseas offer when he was about to be endorsed out of Johannesburg under the pass laws.
He was to be sent to his Transkeian birthplace.
Dumile was found by Johannesburg authorities not to have had a pass permitting him to live in Johannesburg.
Prominent Whites in the painting field came to his rescue and pleaded for him to be allowed to stay in Johannesburg while an application was being made for him to obtain a passport to go overseas. A travel grant was obtained for him.
Five of his drawings were used in the South African exhibit at the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1967.
Dumile started to paint when he was a tuberculosis patient in a Johannesburg hospital four years ago.
Scan of newspaper article with headline AFRICAN ARTIST ON U.K. VISIT.
AUGUST 1968
A magnificent pen-and-ink drawing by Feni is used to illustrate jazz pianist Gideon Nxumalo’s seminal Gideon Plays LP. This vinyl changes hands today for thousands of dollars and shows Feni’s strong interest in and connection to the South African jazz scene. Collection Kgalema Motlanthe.
NOVEMBER 1970
South African publisher A. A. Balkema publishes art historian and art critic Esmé Berman’s (1929 – 2017) era-defining Art & Artists of South Africa. Only two drawings by Feni are illustrated, one of them being Mother & Child (1966), which is credited to the collection of S. A. Breweries on page 83. Incidentally, Berman was also one of the judges on the panel of art experts who awarded Feni a merit award for Mother & Child back in 1966 for the S. A. Breweries Art Prize.
Dust jacket design and scan of page 83 illustrating Dumile’s Mother & Child (1966)
JULY 1971
The Foundation for Education, Science and Technology, publishers of the state-funded academic journal Lantern, publishes the third volume of Our Art. Of the 20 artists whose work is featured, there is only one black man, Sydney Kumalo. There is no mention of Dumile Feni.
JANUARY 1972
South African photographer George Hallett (b. 1942) takes a number of iconic photographs of Feni whilst living in London. The most iconic of these images is of Feni with friend and jazz drummer Louis Moholo (b. 1940) with Feni making a universally recognised derogatory hand gesture – up yours.
George Hallett (b. 1942) Dumile & Moholo, London, 1972, silver gelatin print, 37 x 56 cm, as a result of a unique commission printed in 1999. Collection Warren Siebrits.
OCTOBER 1977
On the 19th of October 1977, Minister of Justice, Police and Prisons Jimmy Kruger officially bans The World newspaper and imprisons the newspaper’s flamboyant editor Percy Qoboza. The Medu Art Ensemble pays homage to his and many other newspapers’ bannings in Judy Seidman’s iconic silkscreen poster design from 1982.
JULY 1979
BLAC (Black Literature And Culture) Publishing House, Athlone, Cape Town, publishes a book titled Images, comprising photographs by George Hallett with texts by James Matthews, who is incidentally also the founder and owner of BLAC.
Front cover of George Hallett’s Images (BLAC, Cape Town, 1979).
Page 53 of Images where Matthews’ text reads: we shall quail them, with our stare, we are not subservient, to their demands.
Page 21 of Images where Matthews’ text reads: the agony inflicted, I shall no longer endure, I shall be me.
JANUARY 1980
Feni leaves London on the invitation of The African Humanities Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he takes up an artist in residency program. He will spend the last eleven years of his life living in exile in the United States.
APRIL 1981
Scan of page 47 of Staffrider, Volume 4 number 1, April/May 1981.
WILLIAM KENTRIDGE ON HIS ADMIRATION FOR DUMILE, APRIL 1981
On the other hand, the art of the clenched fist rings a bit hollow. The painters who, for fear of reducing the political import of their work, reduce their images to systematized diagrams of discontent (either torn trousers and hunched shoulders or fists – sentiment or bombast), create only scarecrows. We are fooled for a minute but after that we can ignore the work quite safely.
Now someone like Dumile when he worked here, did drawings which at first sight looked like down and out scarecrows. But when you came within a few feet of them they would give you a good kick in the guts.
SEPTEMBER 1981
Vernon February, the celebrated South African cultural and literary theorist, has his seminal research document Mind Your Colour: The Coloured Stereotype in South African Literature published by Paul Keagan International, in London and Boston. The book’s striking dust-jacket design uses a close-up, cropped photograph of Feni’s rude hand-gesture photographed by George Hallett in London almost a decade earlier.
Dust-jacket design for Vernon February’s Mind Your Colour. It is clear that February’s decision to use this image on the front cover of his book was inspired by seeing the same image published two years earlier in George Hallett’s Images (BLAC, 1979). Collection Warren Siebrits.
DECEMBER 1981
This shocking exposé reveals how in August 1976 Tsafendas was used by the Bureau of State Security to denounce a massive exposé of the terrible conditions in Pretoria Central Jail, published by Britain’s The Observer newspaper. Gordon Winter was the double agent and spy sent in to interview Tsafendas. It is rumoured that the apartheid government bought most copies of this edition and destroyed them to stop the truth about BOSS from emerging. As a result, copies now change hands for considerable amounts of money.
MAY 1991
Feni dies of a heart attack whilst looking for records in the jazz section of Tower Records in downtown New York. He is 49 years of age at the time of his death, having never returned to South Africa since going into exile 23 years earlier in 1968.
NOVEMBER 1998
ROLE OF THE ARTIST AS AN AGENT OF SOCIAL CHANGE
William Kentridge in conversation with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev cites Dumile Feni as the key local artist who influenced him in his decision to become an artist:
As a teenager I went to Bill Ainslie’s studio for art lessons two evenings a week. He gave considerable support to black artists who later became significant, particularly Dumile. Dumile made remarkably strong, demonic drawings, either in ballpoint pen on a small scale, or in charcoal on a large-scale. That was the first time I understood the power of figurative, large-scale charcoal drawings, that they could be so striking. I saw him working at Bill Ainslie’s studio, and he had the capacity to express things on a scale that I thought drawings could not achieve. He is the key artist who influenced me.
SEPTEMBER 1999
Dumile Feni’s Till Death Do Us Part (1967). I purchased this drawing from Feni’s daughter after a long period of negotiation. The work was initially in the Bowmint Collection and is now in a private collection in Johannesburg. It was exhibited as part of an exhibition titled Sekoto to Sihlali: Nine Black Pioneers of South African Art at Warren Siebrits Modern and Contemporary Art in February 2005 (catalogue).
SEPTEMBER 2001
Dumile Feni’s The People when we respect. To My Boy (1968) forms part of Aspects of South African Art 1903 – 1999 (catalogue). This work is owned by the Johannesburg Art Gallery.
