Illuminating Lives

by Vivian Bickford-Smith

  We do not know the exact years that Mohl was at Tiger Kloof, as surviving registers of students in the Botswana National Archives do not include any John Koenakeefe Motlhankana/Mohl. He may have still been at Tiger Kloof when pioneer African nationalist and novelist Sol Plaatje visited from Kimberley with a ‘very interesting’ bioscope show, twice in 1927 and once in 1928. Another visitor in 1928 was progressive journalist Richard Selope Thema, from Johannesburg’s Joint Council of Europeans and Natives. A number of ‘Old Tigers’ proceeded on to Fort Hare University College in the Eastern Cape around this time. Others were sponsored for scholarships overseas: K.T. Motsete went on to take a theology degree at the University of London, and Osborne Ntsiko was assisted to reach Morris Brown College in Atlanta.15

  Probably of the most significance is a record in Tiger Kloof Magazine that Reverends F. Müller and G. Kuhn of the Berlin Missionary Society visited the institution in 1927.16 The Berlin mission was the biggest German Lutheran mission in South Africa. This visit could have resulted in Mohl’s preliminary art training in South West Africa (c. 1928) before his sponsored studentship at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany (c. 1929).

  There is no doubt that John K. Motlhankana was registered as Möhl at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He arrived at the end of the 1924–29 period of German economic and political recovery, which followed the country’s defeat in the First World War and the 1922–23 hyperinflation and social disruption. Industrial output had recovered to 1913 levels by 1928 and was second only to the United States. The post-war Weimar Republic experienced a temporary cultural and artistic renaissance associated with expressionism in art and architecture, theatre and film. Its economy and society were, however, skating on thin ice. The new art played to the tastes of the new rich and not to the interests of the masses that it might claim to represent. The whole German economy was dependent on international loans, which were being pumped out of an ever-deepening well of debt to US banks.

  The well went dry in the worldwide panic that followed the Wall Street crash of 22–29 October 1929. The US banks recalled existing loans and refused new ones. Germany suddenly reverted to its post-war ‘hunger years’ during the 1929–1932 depression. Nazi power arose out of the chaos – helped by uniformed thugs, brilliant propaganda by Joseph Goebbels and the deification of Adolf Hitler as the Leader. Centre-left and centre-right governments collapsed while Nazis and communists clashed in the streets. Hitler was sworn in as chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. On 23 March that year, he became an effective dictator when the elected parliament, which was dominated by Nazis, surrendered all its legislative powers to him.

  But Düsseldorf was not Munich or Berlin, where the Nazis thrived. The city was on the east side of the Rhine River, in the Ruhr industrial area, which experienced significant regeneration after temporary occupation by French and Belgian troops in 1923–25 in order to force the German government to pay more financial reparations for the war. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Rhine, the Rhineland – with the exception of Cologne, which was under British occupation – continued to be occupied by large numbers of French troops until 1930. Many of them were from French West and North Africa, and some estimates put the number of Africans in Germany as high as 20 000 in the 1930s. In the Rhineland, it is estimated that there were 600–800 children born to white mothers and black (mainly Senegalese) fathers. Hitler, in his bestselling autobiographical treatise Mein Kampf (1925–27), bedevilled these children as so-called Rheinland Mischlingers or ‘Rhineland Bastards’.

  As for J.K. Mohl’s education in Düsseldorf, we have good clues from the life story of the great painter Paul Klee, who was a professor at the Kunstakademie between 1931 and 1933 and likely taught Mohl. Klee had moved there from the Bauhaus – an experiment of combined artistic talents led by the architect Walter Gropius in Weimar and subsequently in Dessau in the eastern part of Germany. Klee had become disillusioned and left in 1931 after Nazi bully-boys began to persecute ‘subversive’ or ‘degenerate’ intellectuals, forcing out Gropius and other talented artists.

  Düsseldorf was at first a great contrast: ‘Life here is easy and friendly’, Klee wrote to his wife, Lily, around April 1931. ‘People in the streets are relatively cheerful.’ While his wife stayed in Dessau, Klee taught a maximum of nine students in a large studio at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He never joined other people in the mess but cooked his own meals on two paraffin heaters in the studio – his favourite being cauliflower cheese.

  With rare excursions into figurative art, Klee was an abstract artist. Around the time of his move to Düsseldorf, his style of painting moved from Bauhaus-type ‘constructivism’ built of blocks of often sombre colour into more French-style ‘pointillism’ – points of light and colour – expressing feelings inspired by his days as a visitor in the Mediterranean sunlight of North Africa.

  Unlike at the Bauhaus, where he had pontificated on theory in a lecture hall, Klee now ran more informal weekly tutorials or workshops in his studio for students who presented their own paintings for his comment and advice. He also enthused about his love of Bach and Mozart, and he taught that art must always be based on observation of the real world: ‘Art does not produce the visible but makes visible.’17

  Paul Klee might have felt some kinship with the South African J.K. Mohl, as his own appearance suggested some ancestry from North Africa. Klee was described as being Arabic in skin colour, hair and eyes, with ‘the same calmness of movement’.18 However, we should not overemphasise any artistic influence of Klee over Mohl. Landscape painting was reckoned to be the particular strength of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and Mohl would also have had classes in life drawing, architecture and design, and craftwork such as pottery and basketry.

  Mohl’s typical landscapes are populated by human figures, and they seem to share more with, say, the landscapes of L.S. Lowry than with the abstract paintings of Paul Klee. Yet Mohl and Klee’s paintings share similar values of graded colour and light seen in bright open air or – sometimes for Mohl – under an urban-industrial gloom populated by human figures in bright colours.19

  Trouble returned to Klee in March 1933, after police raided his house back in Dessau. On 21 April 1933, he received notice that his professorship in Düsseldorf was suspended as of 1 May. The director of the Kunstakademie, Walter Kaesbach, was dismissed at the same time. Kaesbach was one of the main targets of Goebbels’s Kulturpolitik, proclaimed in March 1933, and of the Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts, which was founded a couple of months later to impose Hitler’s ideas on the art world.20 Jewish and other ‘progressive’ intellectuals – academics, artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers – began to leave for Switzerland, France, England and the United States. In May 1933, Goebbels initiated the public burning of books and literature that he considered dissident.

  By the latter part of 1933, all hell was being let loose in Germany against Jews, communists, intellectuals and anyone considered racially impure. We do not know how long Mohl lasted in Germany over the next year or so, if he did at all. People of colour weren’t that rare in the Ruhr and Rhineland, but at least Mohl was a ‘pure’ African. Under the Nazis, some people of ‘pure’ exotic origin were paraded in ethnographic freak shows, while Rheinland Mischlingers and the Eurafrican children of German missionaries were sterilised or were actively ‘disappeared’.

  It is very likely that J.K. Mohl kept his head down in Germany, and he appears to have continued doing so when he returned to South Africa, at a date unknown. There is reason to believe that he resorted again to casual stevedore labour, loading and offloading ships in the Cape Town dockyards. There was also a small community of black artists in the Langa township of Cape Town, who survived by selling door-to-door for five shillings what sold for five pounds in tourist art shops.21

  We do know that Mohl submitted twelve paintings to the committee that was choosing art for display at the 1936 Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg. Two were accepted: one a landscape and the other a por
trait of Tshekedi Khama. If the portrait was from life, it could have been painted in Serowe in Bechuanaland Protectorate or on one of Tshekedi’s rare visits to Cape Town. Tshekedi may also have been visiting Mohl’s new chief, Tiger Kloof–educated Abram Moiloa, a close contemporary of both Mohl and Tshekedi.

  Even if Mohl was still overseas in the latter part of 1933, he would have been struck by international news of the invasion of the Kalahari by the Royal Navy’s marines, who were aiming to depose Tshekedi Khama as regent or acting chief of the Bangwato. Tshekedi’s alleged crime was in ordering the judicial beating of a young white mechanic named Phinehas McIntosh for seducing young women and getting into fights with jealous young men. McIntosh accepted his punishment as a tribesman, but there was racial outcry among white politicians in the Union of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. Tshekedi was deposed in September 1933 by the irascible British admiral E.K.G.R. Evans, who was temporarily acting as Britain’s high commissioner in southern Africa.

  Tshekedi put up a good legalistic defence and briefly travelled to Cape Town to advance his cause. A mere three weeks after his deposition, he was reinstated as acting chief by the British government in London. The admiral gave way with egg on his face, and the incident drew widespread press coverage as a comic opera worthy of Gilbert and Sullivan. Among youthful Africans, in South Africa and overseas, Tshekedi Khama was a hero for having shown up the empty fraud of white racial superiority. He had also shown that Africans were perfectly capable of ruling themselves. Indeed, Tshekedi was next in the news in 1936 when he challenged in the highest court of Bechuanaland Protectorate the constitutional basis of British over-rule.22

  Mohl’s was not the only portrait of Tshekedi Khama at the Empire Exhibition. The other was by the expatriate South African painter Neville Lewis, which was probably painted when Tshekedi was previously in London. Unlike Mohl’s, it still survives.

  Mohl lived in Sophiatown on the western side of Johannesburg from 1938 until all Africans were expelled from there between 1953 and 1958. During the same period, he found some kind of fulfilment by crossing the frontier into Bechuanaland Protectorate, an unconquered African civilisation by comparison with the Union of South Africa. Mohl’s surviving painting On a Road through the Mist, South of Bechuanaland is dated 1950. Another work celebrating the different environment across the border is the undated Ploughing Season in Bechuanaland.23

  The border at that time was a low farm fence, with cattle guards at the gates, but crossing into Botswana was ‘like sailing out of fog into crisp fresh air … a journey between two worlds – a jump between two diametrically opposed ideologies which form the kernel of the race conflict in Africa today’.24 In the words of the Botswana-born poet and dramatist L.D. Raditladi,

  South Africa is like the moon, the vicinity of which has no air. My fears are that I might suffocate there and die because of the lack of political air, which is plentiful in my country and is not being denied to anybody.25

  From at least 1946 onwards, and possibly earlier, Tshekedi Khama commissioned Mohl ‘to record scenes of historical importance’ among his people. Tshekedi and the Bechuanaland colonial administration had come to terms with each other by 1940. He and other Bechuanaland chiefs exploited the new ‘worlds of possibilities’ opened up by the Second World War. They refused to recruit men for the unarmed labour corps of the South African Defence Force and instead sent ten thousand men to the armed Pioneer Corps of the British Army.

  In 1946, Tshekedi Khama took up the cause of fellow chiefs in Namibia against the Union of South Africa incorporating South West Africa. He thereby made an enemy of Prime Minister Smuts of the Union, who regarded incorporation as the Union’s reward for supporting the Allies in the war. The British government refused to allow Tshekedi to fly to New York to present the case at the United Nations Organisation, and he deputed a friendly Anglican clergyman – Reverend Michael Scott – to do so instead.

  Mohl and Tshekedi had become firm friends, sharing common ideals about African self-determination and autonomous development. Tshekedi commissioned and purchased from Mohl landscape paintings that expressed ‘a strong sense of the historical significance of place’ – notably of the sites of the abandoned indigenous towns of Shoshong and Old Palapye, including the remains of their stone-built great churches that were constructed by the Bangwato during the days of Tshekedi’s illustrious father Khama III.26

  Tshekedi Khama was not only an ardent developmentalist but also an ‘enlightened despot’. During and after the Second World War, he drove his people hard to render their labour and their tribute in cash or kind to build roads, dams and his great pet project: a new college in a remote valley called Moeng. The Bangwato rebelled in 1949–50 by proclaiming Seretse Khama (Tshekedi’s nephew) as rightful kgosi in place of Tshekedi. As is well known, without prior consultation of his uncles, Seretse had married an alien Englishwoman, and the uncles led by Tshekedi had objected to the marriage. Unlike in 1933, the white regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia now supported Tshekedi to the hilt. Both Labour and Conservative governments in London prevaricated and then banished Seretse permanently overseas and Tshekedi temporarily elsewhere in the Protectorate.27

  In the widespread bitterness that ensued among the Bangwato, one night in October 1951 Tshekedi’s house in Serowe was burnt down by persons unknown. It is assumed that Mohl’s 1936 portrait of Tshekedi was lost to the fire, along with his paintings of Old Palapye and Shoshong. Tshekedi put the value of his destroyed artworks and historic papers at hundreds of pounds. It is ironic that the person who refused to order the quenching of the fire was one Keaboka Kgamane, the president of the regency council that replaced both Tshekedi and Seretse. Back in 1935, Tshekedi had made arrangements for Keaboka, who was a talented young artist, to be apprenticed to wood sculptor Herbert Vladimir Meyerowitz (until Meyerowitz left to teach in Achimota in West Africa) and then to attend the New Educational Fellowship (Art Section) of R.J. Pope Fincham in Cape Town. Keaboka Kgamane and Mohl must have known each other.

  Mohl’s connection with Bechuanaland accounts for his adventure during the April 1947 visit of King George VI. The royal family arrived in Lobatse on the last leg of their subcontinental tour before their departure by sea from Cape Town. The royal tour was by way of a thank you to soldiers of the region for their war service, during the latter part of which the king requested that the hymn ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ (‘Kgosi Tshegofatsa’ in Tswana translation) rather than ‘God Save the King’ be sung by Africans.

  While the royals were greeted in Lobatse by crowds at the railway station, ‘a mysterious picture turned up outside the [royal] train’. Top local colonial official Anthony Sillery, a former employee of the British Council, subsequently wrote to the king’s private secretary:

  It has now been ascertained that it is the work of an African artist who intended it as a birthday gift for Princess Elizabeth. I have seen the man who was rather hurt that nothing had been done in the matter … His name is John Koenakif [sic] Mohl of 25 Millar Street, Martindale [Sophiatown], Johannesburg, and I understand that he is quite well known.28

  Mohl had been standing patiently for hours by the White Train with his painting, intended as a present for Princess Elizabeth, who was to celebrate her twenty-first birthday a couple of days later. Sillery had to explain to Mohl that the royal family had been refusing personal presents throughout the whole royal tour. Sometime later, the king offered to buy the painting for thirty pounds. The fate of the painting remains unknown, but Mohl’s landscape Dawn at Lobatsi subsequently featured as the background of the credits in the 16 mm silent colour film made of that day.29

  This may be the basis for Elza Miles’s statement that the colonial administration of Bechuanaland Protectorate, rather than Tshekedi Khama alone, also commissioned Mohl ‘to record scenes of historical importance’. Some colonial officials also might have bought paintings directly from him.

  Tshekedi Khama was angered by the loss of his possessions in the Sero
we house fire of October 1951, which included the New Testament given personally to his grandfather by Queen Victoria. He returned to the Bangwato reserve not as a chief but as ‘an ordinary person’ in 1952, and he founded a model modern village in Pilikwe, south of the Tswapong Hills. Mohl came to stay with him there over Christmas 1953, apparently bringing a picture or two with him and requesting Tshekedi’s patronage to paint more. Tshekedi wrote a letter of recommendation for him to his ally, the new ‘Native Authority’ in Serowe, Rasebolai Kgamane.30

  Mohl’s painting King Khama’s Memorial Stone depicted the grave of Tshekedi’s grandfather, Khama the Great, above the Kgotla on Serowe Hill topped by a fine bronze sculpture of the royal emblem (a phuti or duiker). Tshekedi also requested that Mohl paint a landscape view of the new buildings at Bamangwato (Moeng) College, the putative rival to Tiger Kloof, in a valley of the Tswapong Hills. Tshekedi complained that he was precluded from visiting Moeng, the culminating achievement of his career, by lingering hostilities. The two paintings remained on the walls of Tshekedi’s house at Pilikwe from 1954 until the death of his senior daughter-in-law, Seodi Molema Khama – the widow of Tshekedi’s oldest son, Leapeetswe Khama – in 2005. They are now in possession of a surviving daughter-in-law, the attorney Doreen Mmusi Khama.

  In Serowe, Mohl stayed with Peter Mazebe Sebina (1894–1962), one of Tshekedi’s closest colleagues. Sebina acquired two landscapes by Mohl: Kereke ya Morafe waga Mangwato (Church of the Bangwato Nation), Le ya Phirima kwa Serowe (Sunset at Serowe) and A New May Moon in Serowe. Sebina’s grandson Odeditse adds: ‘Mohl was a contracted artist and a personal friend of my grandfather.’ Another reported landscape, South East of Serowe, was no doubt painted on the road back through Palapye towards Pilikwe.