Illuminating Lives

by Vivian Bickford-Smith

  Above all, Pattle’s place in the Empire–Commonwealth ranks of Britain’s war effort has probably been determined by the kind of South African he was or, more to the point, that he wasn’t. There were options to what being a South African meant. He was cut from a different cloth from more identifiably Springbok aces in the RAF, particularly those flies in the Afrikaner nationalist ointment of their homeland, the Battle of Britain pilots Adolph Gysbert ‘Sailor’ Malan and Petrus Hendrik ‘Dutch’ or ‘Khaki’ Hugo. Their flying-suit insignia identified their Springbok identity. For Pat Pattle in 1939, throwing in his lot with the English was never a matter of choice or deliberation. Could Butterworth have produced an Anglo–South African more instinctively English than M.T. St John Pattle?

  Further reading

  It will be no surprise to know that shelves today groan more than ever with accounts of the RAF’s Fighter Command in World War II, focused overwhelmingly on the 1940 Battle of Britain. For more about South African pilots, including Pat Pattle, in other parts of the conflict, there is D.P. Tidy, ‘South African Air Aces, 1939–1945’, South African Military History Society: Military History Journal 1 (3) 1968. Christopher Somerville explores the wartime experiences of volunteer servicemen and servicewomen from across the British Empire–Commonwealth in Our War: How the British Commonwealth Fought the Second World War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1998). More on Pattle’s exploits is to be found in E.C.R. Baker, Ace of Aces (London: New English Library, 1973); Christopher Shores, Fighter Aces (London: Hamlyn, 1975); and Christopher Shores and Clive Williams, Aces High (London: Spearman, 1994). Intimate, first-hand contemporary impressions of RAF combat flying can be found in Noel Monks, Squadrons Up! (London: Victor Gollancz, 1940); T.H. Wisdom, Fighter Boys (London: Collins, 1942); and Paul Richey, Fighter Pilot (London: Collins, 1941). T.H. Wisdom, Wings over Olympus (London: Allen & Unwin, 1942) depicts the air battle for Greece.

  John Koenakeefe Mohl: Painting with a peculiar beauty

  Neil Parsons

  * * *

  ‘I am African and when God made Africa, He also created beautiful landscapes for Africans to admire and paint.’1 This was John Koenakeefe Mohl’s defiant response to ‘a white admirer … not to concentrate on landscape painting but to paint pictures of his people in poverty and misery. Landscape, he was advised, had become a field where Europeans had specialised and they had advanced very far in perfecting its painting.’ It puts a finger on J.K. Mohl’s frustration with the Eurocentric art world, driven by racial ideas with which he had to contend. It also cautions us about accepting too easily the scholarly argument that the notion of ‘landscape’ in Africa is the product of colonial capitalism, global tourism, and modern photography or other image-capture technology.2

  Mohl was a prime figure in Johannesburg’s ‘Sophiatown renaissance’ of the 1940s and 50s – South Africa’s equivalent of the Harlem Renaissance among African American artists of the 1920s and 30s. His work was initially appreciated in ‘white’ establishment art circles, but it almost disappeared from view in such circles during the apartheid period. Acknowledgement of his skill as a painter began to return with the rising interest in African art in the international art world during the 1960s, but full recognition in his homeland did not come until after his death – in ‘The Neglected Tradition’ exhibition of 1988 at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Three decades later, many of his paintings are reproduced on the internet and recorded as having sold for many thousands of dollars.

  Mohl died in Soweto on 28 January 1985. The outline of his life and basic details are known thanks to the cultural historian Tim Couzens, who interviewed him in November 1975, and the art historian Elza Miles, who interviewed Mohl’s widow and a cousin of his after the artist’s death. Yet, in the words of art critic Jillian Carman, ‘There is no monographic publication on Mohl, and details of these ventures remain unclear.’3 This chapter takes a look at the known outline of J.K. Mohl’s life and career, and then further explores some key aspects of historical context.

  John Koenakeefe Mohl was born on 29 September 1903 in the indigenous town of Dinokana, which lies between Zeerust and Lobatse on the Transvaal side of the border with Bechuanaland Protectorate (Botswana). His father was a skilled carver of wooden chairs and mortars and pestles. As a young boy, J.K. Mohl is said to have drawn ‘portraits’ with chalk-like stone called pepa on the rocks – or on the smooth sides of hides. This made him neglectful in herding his father’s goats and sheep, and his grandfather had to pay the kgotla (court) fines when he allowed his charges to invade people’s gardens.

  At the Barolong Wesleyan school in Mafeking, his talent was recognised by the visiting educationist Reverend Alfred John Haile, who recommended that he ‘be allowed one day a week to practise his talents’.4 It is said that Mohl then ‘attained a teacher’s diploma’ at Haile’s own school, the Tiger Kloof Native Institution, near Vryburg on the railway south. Haile also brought Mohl’s talents to the attention of German missionaries. It was agreed that Mohl should work and study privately in ex-German South West Africa (Namibia), and then proceed to art school in Germany.

  Mohl studied part-time while he was employed in Windhoek and Lüderitz Bay, receiving art tuition from a French artist named Mary du Pont. She gave him ‘a sound training in the preparation of canvases and boards’. In later years, he recalled that he ‘felt at home’ as he ‘went about painting the sea, the hills, the islands. It was wonderful to draw and paint all I saw.’

  It was here at Lüderitz Bay that I did all sorts of jobs to earn money so that I could continue to study painting. I worked as a dock labourer, a house painter, and a coal miner [collier loading ships?], until I had enough money to go back to painting again.5

  For up to five years, Mohl studied painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. No more is known about his time in Düsseldorf, as the records of the institution are said to have been destroyed by Allied bombing in the Second World War.

  Mohl was back in South Africa by 1936, living in Cape Town. He submitted twelve paintings – two of which were accepted – to the Empire Exhibition at Milner Park in Johannesburg, which opened in September 1936.

  By 1938, Mohl had taken up residence in Sophiatown in Johannesburg. He began to achieve distinction in the white-dominated commercial art world through solo exhibitions of his work. In 1941, he achieved a solo exhibition of his paintings at Bloemfontein, followed by another at the Transvaal Art Society in City Hall, Johannesburg. He also received an award at the South African Academy of Art exhibition held at the Duncan Hall in Johannesburg and was rewarded with a solo exhibition in the Arts Society Room in the Stuttafords Building.

  In Sophiatown, Mohl bonded with fellow artists Moses Tladi and Gerard Sekoto. The three men went sketching together on the mine-dump hills. Unlike the other two, however, Mohl had already been professionally trained and was financially self-sufficient, so he was no longer indebted to white patrons. He felt strongly that the prime loyalty of progressive Africans should be to stay and work among their people. So he was disappointed when Gerard Sekoto disappeared to live and work in France and Tladi went off to join the army.

  Mohl became the pioneer black art educator in southern Africa. From 1944 until the apartheid demolition of Sophiatown, he ran his own art school – known as the White Studio – in the backyard of his house in Annadale Street. His teaching was ‘open-minded and sensitive in recognising talent’ in other artists and craftworkers. As a former student told an interviewer in 1980, in addition to painting and sculpture, Mohl taught piano and even flower-arranging at the White Studio. He encouraged his students ‘to develop along lines directed by their own individuality and inclination’. As he told the Bantu World newspaper in May 1944:

  Our efforts in this studio aim at encouraging African talent through bringing, within the reach of promising pupils, a good training in painting.

  A very high percentage of our talent lies buried. It is for Africans themselves to unearth it, train it and enable it to make
a full contribution to the culture of our country. What is more, African artists will be among the foremost interpreters of our people to other races.6

  He was indignant when white critics suggested that Africans could not appreciate high art and music. As he said in his appreciation of the genius of Beethoven and Mozart, ‘In all their compositions they usher you in with comparative ease, until you reach a certain point in the composition. Then suddenly it becomes very difficult and you realise they are masters and you are nothing.’7

  Honours continued to come Mohl’s way in post-war South Africa. In 1946, his landscape paintings featured at the annual South African Academy of Art exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery and at the equivalent exhibition of the South African Society of Artists in Ashbey’s Galleries, Cape Town. Two years later, he exhibited again with the South African Academy of Art at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, as well as in the ‘Rural Paintings’ collection at the Herbert Evans Art Gallery in Johannesburg.

  Thereafter, however, there was a drought of recognition by fellow white artists in the days of high apartheid. Mohl’s only known solo exhibition between 1948 and 1963 was at Father Trevor Huddlestone’s Church of Christ the King in Sophiatown in 1957. After Sophiatown was bulldozed (and replaced by an all-white suburb named Triomf), Mohl moved to No. 1909 Gumede Street in Rockville, Soweto. He held exhibitions there in the front garden of his home, earning a limited income from sales to fellow Africans.

  In 1960, Mohl extended the practice of independent exhibition by African artists by helping to found ‘Artists Under the Sun’, which held weekend exhibitions in the open air on the railings at Joubert Park, defiantly placed outside the Johannesburg Art Gallery.8 He remained a committee member until his death in 1985.

  J.K. Mohl in 1944. His veld fire painting has not been identified

  From 1963 to 1964, precluded from operating a business in a ‘white’ area by apartheid laws, Mohl arranged with a Belgian ‘frontman’ to run an art gallery named the Apollo in central Johannesburg. The Apollo Art Gallery featured a solo exhibition by Mohl and a joint exhibition with his former pupil Mizraim Maseko. Mohl’s panoramic landscape paintings featuring human figures were described as ‘documentary’ by art critic Teddy Winder in the Rand Daily Mail:

  As usual, they are documentary, reflecting in a competent manner the life in the locations. Somehow one cannot miss the stress of the going to work and coming home part of the everyday life of the urban African. It is almost as if nothing else matters. The artist has a facility for capturing atmosphere … Yet there is a peculiar beauty reminiscent of that which one finds in Japanese prints.’9

  Mohl’s paintings for the South African Institute of Race Relations’ Christmas cards in December 1964 were subsequently displayed at the Aster Fielding Galleries. Several of his paintings were then included in the ‘African Painters and Sculptors from Johannesburg’ exhibition at the Piccadilly Gallery in London in 1965.

  During the 1970s, Mohl moved to Moroka township, an area allocated to his Tswana ethnicity within Soweto. He exhibited at the Dube YMCA in Soweto and at Dorkay House and the Elysia Gallery, which were cultural centres for Africans who managed to survive in central Johannesburg. As a leading member of the St Francis Anglican Church close to home in Moroka, Mohl painted a fresco of Christ’s crucifixion on the wall. He taught art at Madibane and Orlando high schools, and he tutored individuals. Among those whom he taught were Mizraim Maseko, Helen Sebidi, Lybro Nyelele from Botswana, eccentric Zulu author and herbalist Credo Mutwa, and Mohl’s future wife Puseletso.

  In November 1975, Mohl was interviewed by the young Wits University scholar Tim Couzens, delving into cultural history before Black Consciousness. Mohl told Couzens: ‘South Africa or Africa needs artists badly … to paint our people, our life, our way of living, not speaking in the spirit of apartheid or submission.’10

  This sums up what is generally known about the artist and man. What more can we add?

  We do not know when John Koenakeefe got the surname Mohl, but it was a common German surname and a variant of his African one: Motlhankana. Misspelt ‘Motlhakangna’ in some sources, it places him as a member of the Motlhankana clan of the Bahurutshe ba ga Moiloa nation in Dinokana. The clan emblem or totem was a hippopotamus (kubu). The name Motlhankana and its totem indicate that it was a vassal (motlhanka) clan subordinate to the ruling Bahurutshe chief, whose emblem was a baboon (tshwene).

  The name Koenakeefe, roughly translated as ‘little crocodile’, was probably given to him at birth. It may be derived from some maxim or proverb, or it may indicate a connection with the Bakwena (Bakoena) people, with whom the Bahurutshe were closely related. John, of course, is a baptismal Christian name. As an English forename, it could reflect the fact that the Transvaal was under direct British rule at the time of Mohl’s birth – though it might have been adopted on entry to the local Hermannsburg (German) mission school in Dinokana.

  Mohl’s grandfather was the sub-chief of the Motlhankana clan, which constituted a ward or kgotla among the Bahurutshe. Mohl grew up in Dinokana under the 1906–18 chieftainship of Kgosi Pogiso Moiloa and the 1919–32 regency of Alfred Ramokhutswane Moiloa – awaiting the succession of Mohl’s younger contemporary Abram Ramotshere Moiloa (son of Pogiso) as kgosi (‘chief’) in 1932.11

  Dinokana stood at the source of the Ngotwane River, which forms part of the frontier between what is today South Africa and Botswana. The Bahurutshe of the Moiloa lineage survived the wars of the early nineteenth century as intermediaries between Ndebele, Griqua and Boer invaders on the one hand and the Tswana states that remained doggedly independent to the west on the other.

  Kgosi Moiloa II (c. 1795–1875) allied himself with Boer hunter leaders Hendrik Potgieter and Jan Viljoen. The latter persuaded him to return home in 1853 after he fled to take refuge in Botswana from the attacks of Boer slave-raiders. Potgieter’s previous word of 1837 ensured that the Transvaal government confirmed Moiloa’s large ‘reserve’ outside Boer farms in the Marico district in 1865. President M.W. Pretorius of the South African Republic also ensured that German and Danish missionaries of the Hermannsburg Missionary Society replaced the British missionaries of the London Missionary Society who had been expelled in 1853.

  From the late 1850s onwards, Bahurutshe peasant farmers competed with Marico Boer farmers in the production of sorghum, wheat, tobacco and vegetables, with ox-drawn ploughs and irrigation. Moiloa was rich and favoured enough to be allowed to buy two neighbouring farms in 1867, the same year as the neighbouring trader village of Zeerust (Klein Marico) was founded. The Bahurutshe seem to have been seen as a protective frontier force for the Transvaal, as they were given exceptional permission to carry firearms: ‘a man without a gun is a poor man’ (1864). The downturn in hunting during the 1870s, as first elephants and then ostriches were exterminated, was compensated for by trade in food and supplies in Bahurutshe wagons to the new diamond fields of Kimberley.

  Caught between Boer forces and the British in Bechuanaland Protectorate just a few miles away, the Bahurutshe teetered between loyalties to one side and the other during the South African War of 1899–1902. The presence of two Griqua wards among them had given the Bahurutshe an advantage in Dutch/Afrikaans communication. The financial returns from the sale of labour and crops to the British military were partly invested in the expansion of local education, emphasising literacy in English.12

  Born in the year after the end of the South African War, Mohl went on from Dinokana’s Hermannsburg school to the Wesleyan Barolong school at Mafeking and then to the Tiger Kloof Institution near Vryburg. Even relatively high-status youths might be kept in the bush as herdboys until they were about twelve years of age, at which point they might begin formal schooling. From this, we can suggest that Mohl started school at Dinokana around 1915 and would have been in Mafeking by 1920. It was here that his artistic talent was recognised by the visiting educationist Reverend Haile, who later arranged for Mohl to attend ‘normal’ or teacher-training clas
ses at Tiger Kloof Institution.13

  Haile was the principal at Tiger Kloof between 1914 and 1945. The institution was the educational centre of the (mainly Congregationalist) London Missionary Society, training teachers (both women and men) and evangelists, masons, carpenters, tailors and leather workers. It also included elementary-school classes and extended to providing a high-school education from 1926 onwards.

  Haile was from a liberal Christian and even pacifist background. He rejected the current doctrine of racial segregation and believed that South Africa was ‘sitting on a volcano’. His educational ideas were along the lines of Victor Murray’s The School in the Bush, rather than the UK Colonial Office’s Education Policy for Africa (1925), which echoed the segregationist principles of the US Phelps Stokes Trust missions to Africa. Haile argued that African men and women should be given the means for ‘more adequate self-realisation’. He believed that academic education should embrace the arts and that industrial education should produce independent-minded craftworkers.14

  It was possibly at Tiger Kloof that Mohl developed his musical skills and love of Mozart and Beethoven. There was a fine musical tradition at the school, set in motion by prolific composer Benjamin John Peter Tyamzashe (1890–1978), who was the son of Reverend Gway Tyamzashe, the last black man allowed to own a claim in the Kimberley diamond mines. Benjamin Tyamzashe left Tiger Kloof in 1924.