Illuminating Lives

by Vivian Bickford-Smith

  The fracture between Tshekedi and Seretse Khama was healed in 1956, when the latter was permitted to return home from overseas as an ordinary citizen. Mohl’s optimistic painting A Few Days after Rain in the Bush, B.P. dates from that year. Meanwhile, though he took no active role in politics, Mohl no doubt sympathised with his own Bahurutshe chief, Kgosi Abram Moiloa, and Mohl may well have been the bridge that took Kgosi Abram into exile with Tshekedi Khama at Pilikwe.

  Mohl’s residence in Sophiatown came to an end during the forced removals of the late 1950s. Removals to ‘Meadowlands’ in the south-west began with tenants from crowded shacks in landlords’ backyards and proceeded apace until African landlords were finally obliged to relocate to their separate ethnic cantons in Soweto.

  The exhibition of Mohl’s work in 1957 at Father Huddlestone’s Church of Christ the King in Sophiatown may be seen as a final act of cultural defiance, after Mohl himself had begun to live in Soweto. It was presumably the anti-apartheid spirit of Trevor Huddlestone and Bishop Ambrose Reeves of Johannesburg, as well as that of Charles and Sheila Hooper among the Bahurutshe back home, that accounted for Mohl being an observant Anglican for the rest of his life.

  As for the details and significance of Mohl’s White Studio and his mentorship of other artists during the ‘Sophiatown renaissance’, the ‘sustained research’ called for by Steven Sack in 1988 is as yet wanting.31 There is also, as yet, despite his outspokenness on artistic matters, no evidence of J.K. Mohl having anything other than cultural prominence during his Sophiatown period. Mohl’s years in Sophiatown saw the rise of the militant youth wing of the African National Congress, the Gandhian-type Defiance Campaign, and the ANC Congress of the People at Kliptown.

  Mohl’s move out of Sophiatown into Soweto roughly coincided with the resistance campaign of his people, the Bahurutshe in Dinokana, against the imposition of South Africa’s new identity passbooks on women in 1957–59. The resistance was supported by campaigning lawyers George Bizos, Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela, as well as Shulamith Miller, the wife of a Durban-based rabbi.

  Kgosi Abram had been infuriated by the implementation of the 1951 Bantu Authorities Act and the 1953 Bantu Education Act, remarking of their creator: ‘Who the hell is Verwoerd? He is just a minister. I am not afraid of him.’ From March 1957, Kgosi Abram refused to order the women of Dinokana to register for identity passbooks. Bahurutshe resistance peaked on 25 January 1958, when four women were shot dead by police officers wielding sub-machine guns at nearby Gopanestad, after which there was a steady flow of refugees to nearby Lobatse and to further afield in Bechuanaland.32

  The rising of rural women against the pass laws, supported by the working men of the Bahurutshe Association in the Witwatersrand, has been celebrated as a worker-peasant revolt. Historians Andrew Manson and Bernard Mbenga have begged to differ. They have argued that Kgosi Abram Moiloa of the Bahurutshe in Dinokana, since being recognised as a ‘hero’ of the resistance, was profoundly compromised as the representative of both ‘tradition’ and ‘progress’ – and a similar argument might be applied to his age-mate J.K. Mohl.

  Kgosi Abram stood for the right of women to continue as small-scale cultivators, supporting the rural families of urban-industrial migrants, and for the right of some women to become such migrants themselves. But he was also an educated ‘progressive’, and he was surrounded by like-minded relatives. Tribal elite property-accumulators stood to benefit from the agricultural ‘betterment’ schemes of the apartheid state, such as subsidies for the fencing of privatised land and the elimination of ‘scrub cattle’.33

  Kgosi Abram hesitated before following others who fled over the nearby border with Bechuanaland Protectorate. When he arrived in Pilikwe in January 1959, he was a key figure in Tshekedi’s plan to build up Pilikwe as a new power base among the Bangwato – populated and organised into wards, as had been the tradition of Tswana state growth over the past century, by refugees from neighbouring countries.

  Enforcement of Verwoerd’s ‘grand apartheid’ in the Northern Transvaal (Sekhukhuneland and Zoutpansberg) resulted in Bapedi refugees crossing the Limpopo. Those who fled to relatives across the river were more easily accepted by the Bangwato authorities in Serowe. Many were members of the Zion Christian Church, which was still considered subversive by the South African state. Tshekedi also recruited political activists Guy and Molly Clutton-Brock from Cold Comfort Farm in Southern Rhodesia in order to set up the Bamangwato Development Association, a cooperative farm in Radisele next to Pilikwe. After the arrival of Abram Moiloa and his followers, the South African government complained to Britain’s high commissioner in Pretoria that Pilikwe had become a hotbed of subversion.34

  But Pilikwe declined in importance following the death of Tshekedi Khama in a London hospital on 10 June 1959, just days after initialling the mineral agreements that were to become the basis of Botswana’s subsequent economic take-off. Thereafter, Kgosi Abram Moiloa decamped southwards to Lobatse and Pitsane, much closer to home. After the Sharpeville massacre in March 1960, and the banning of the ANC and PAC, the number of South African refugees crossing the border, most of whom were young men, greatly increased by November that year.35 (After a period of active support for the ANC, travelling as far as Dar es Salaam, and a decade of futile applications to return, Abram Moiloa was eventually allowed back home in 1979 – as an inducement for himself and other ‘progressives’ to divert their energies into the new Bophuthatswana ‘homeland’.)

  The death of Tshekedi Khama broke the intimacy of Mohl’s link with Botswana, though he continued to visit exiled relatives over the border, notably Ismail Matlhaku in Mochudi.36 This distancing from Botswana is maybe symbolised by his 1964 painting Beating Back a Bush Fire in a Bechuanaland Village, which portrays a sea of flames on a very dark night. Lesotho became Mohl’s alternative escape from the confines of life in South Africa during the 1960s. His paintings of Lesotho are open landscapes between mountains populated by horsemen in colourful blankets and women carrying water on their heads. Mohl also took aloes from the Maloti Mountains and planted them carefully in his garden in Soweto.

  Mohl was a modest but self-confident artist and intellectual of the generation of mission-educated artists and writers that grew to maturity between the two World Wars and flourished in the 1940s. They appreciated Western ‘high culture’ but asserted their identity as Africans, in the face of condescension among ‘progressive’ white colonial artists and intellectuals. As challengers to the white establishment, they were suppressed by the apartheid state. As an artistic and intellectual vanguard, they were themselves challenged by post-war African nationalist and Black Consciousness generations.

  Mohl fell into a loose grouping of writers and artists of his generation who emerged out of, but developed beyond, Western education and training. They have been dubbed ‘New Africans’. They laid emphasis on their continental identity as Africans, ignoring colonial boundaries, and were proud of their particular ‘tribal’ ethnic-linguistic inheritances. By contrast, the subsequent generation of African nationalists sought political power within nation states that were defined by colonial boundaries. The distinction between generations, however, was never hard and fast, as (pan-)Africanist ideas varied over time.

  The term ‘New African’ was used as early as 1924 by R.V. Selope Thema, after the South African Native National Congress changed its title to African National Congress in 1923.37 The idea of a ‘New African’ was roughly parallel to the ‘New Negro’ of the Harlem Renaissance in New York. New Africa was also the title of the periodical of the Independent Industrial and Commercial Workers Union in the late 1920s. ‘New African’ was picked up in the 1940s by author-dramatist H.I.E. Dhlomo. Inspired by post-war prospects of ‘a social order where every South African will be free to express himself and his personality fully’, Dhlomo was intensely critical of African artists who were ‘too lazy, too ill-informed and too-poisoned by the missionary influence’:

  Our main mission on ear
th is not only to blend the best in the European and African cultures, but to interpret our own, living cultural heritage to the world … we are not merely borrowers with no background, but we have a living past which influences our conscious progress to a living future. We want, not to be europeanised Africans, but civilised Africans.38

  Historian Tim Couzens adopted the title The New African for his 1985 study of Dhlomo’s life and work. No doubt reacting against the highly politicised dismissal of these ‘New Africans’ in the 1980s as aspirant petty bourgeois darlings of white liberals, Couzens argued that such ‘progressive thinking African intellectuals’ should be respected as leaders of ‘intelligently led mass action’.39 More recently, literary-historical scholar Ntongela Masilela has returned to a more nuanced understanding of the ‘New Africans’ as products and exponents of the cultural and social values of their times.40 The cultural commentator Gwen Ansell has suggested that the ‘urban black visual arts tradition’ of South Africa ‘can be traced back at least to John Koenakeefe Mohl’s “White Studio” in Johannesburg’s Sophiatown suburb in the 1940s’.41

  John Koenakeefe Mohl’s most characteristic later paintings of his Soweto period express the fortitude of Africans going to city work in predawn gloom and the cheerfulness of ordinary people battling against driving rain to celebrate their Christian perseverance in church. Dark greys and blues contrast the claustrophobia of the atmosphere in urban-industrial South Africa with the wide-open vistas and relatively open societies that Mohl found in Botswana and Lesotho. It is this broad understated ‘politics’ that makes the art of J.K. Mohl so important, distinctive and reflective of his times. Though Mohl could be outspoken in his opinions, he was a relatively quiet man who did not stick his head above the political parapet.

  It was not until 1988, three years after his death, that Mohl was given proper recognition at ‘The Neglected Tradition’ exhibition held at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. The exhibition was organised over the preceding year by Steven Sack, at a time when black townships around Johannesburg were governable only by themselves, opposing apartheid rule not only with violence but also with renewed cultural pride. Sack’s ‘The Neglected Tradition’ exhibition, and the book that followed it, subtitled Towards a New History of South African Art, brought to the world’s attention the work of many black artists (and three selected white artists) since 1930. The top price paid so far for a John Koenakeefe Mohl painting appears to be R300 000, at a Johannesburg auction in 2005.

  Further reading

  While there is no published biography or book-length study of J.K. Mohl, details about his life and times can be found in Elza Miles, Land and Lives: A Story of Early Black Artists (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau and Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1997); Jillian Carman (ed.), Visual Century: South African Art in Context, Volume 1, 1907–1948 (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2011); Tim Couzens, The New African: A Study of the Life and Work of H.I.E. Dhlomo (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985). Numerous copies of Mohl’s paintings, mostly on the websites of auction houses, can be found by an internet search.

  Lilian Ngoyi: Flying with clipped wings

  Martha Evans

  * * *

  In another time and place, who might Lilian Ngoyi have been? In the 1950s, Ma Ngoyi, as she was affectionately known, was poised for political greatness. Despite having left school at eleven, she ascended the male-dominated ladder of political leadership with impressive speed. She became president of the ANC Women’s League (ANCWL) shortly after joining the party, and in 1956 she was the first woman to be elected to the ANC’s national executive committee. Her name was linked to Nelson Mandela’s – both romantically and politically – and, despite her limited education, she was chosen as a delegate to attend the World Congress of Mothers, journeying to Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Germany and China.

  Without a passport, and in a time when it was prohibitively expensive to travel, she’d seen more of the world than most of her countrymen, black and white. Having glimpsed a reality beyond the confines of apartheid, she returned to lead the triumphant Women’s March of 1956, fittingly in protest against restrictions on women’s movement in their birthland. In between, she featured in a prestigious Drum profile – no mean feat, given what scholar Rob Nixon refers to as the magazine’s ‘relentless machismo’.1 She was, according to writer Ezekiel Mphahlele, the ‘most talked-of woman in politics’.2 Her future looked bright.

  Two decades later, the cleric Beyers Naudé would report on Ngoyi’s living conditions in Soweto. Ngoyi had been dependent on sporadic donations from Amnesty International benefactors for a decade, and Naudé was tasked with properly assessing her requirements. His report makes for grim reading. He cites Ngoyi’s urgent need for the most basic of supplies: a new pair of spectacles, a bed and wardrobe to replace her ‘scant’ furniture, as well as a new coal stove, given the ‘hopeless condition’ of the one in use.3

  Despite hoping to experience freedom in her lifetime, Ngoyi died in 1980 – four years after the Soweto uprising, and a decade before the release of Nelson Mandela. If ever a life illustrated the brutality of the apartheid banning order, it was Ngoyi’s. In the period between the Women’s March and her death, the state ate away at her prospects, not only banishing her from active politics but also condemning her to a life of penury.

  Born Lilian Masediba Matabane on 25 September 1911 to Isaac Mmankhatteng, a mineworker, and Annie Modipadi Matabane, a domestic worker, the sparse details of her childhood come from a handwritten autobiographical letter, penned at the suggestion of Amnesty benefactor Belinda Allan, whose role in Ngoyi’s life we will return to later.

  The exact location of her birth is uncertain. Some sources claim that she was born in Ga-Matlala, a rural area some 300 kilometres from Pretoria, but Ngoyi’s own account cites Blood (more commonly Bloed) Street, Pretoria, as the place of her birth.4 The street, which bordered the newly established and bustling Asiatic Bazaar, was one of two tarred roads in Pretoria at the time. She explains her family’s presence in the town – already a segregated space – by virtue of the fact that her grandfather had cast off his ‘primitive’ ways to become a missionary and was thus presumably tolerated in an area reserved for Indian traders. Lilian’s mother needed additional help at the time of Lilian’s birth and so went to stay with her own mother for support.

  The only girl in a family of six, Lilian was likely used to asserting herself around members of the opposite sex. By all accounts, she was a strong-willed child, known as ‘the biggest crier in the neighbourhood’. ‘She would cry until she fainted,’ Mphahlele wrote of her. She attended Kilnerton Primary School – a Methodist-affiliated teacher-training college that also provided schooling for the local community. The lessons in basic numeracy and literacy were supplemented with instruction in Christian doctrine, and Ngoyi often referred back to biblical narratives in later life. Her schooling was sometimes interrupted when her mother found work because she had to look after her younger brother. On these occasions, she accompanied her mother to the homes of white people and received an altogether different form of education.

  One memory was particularly formative. Forbidden from entering the house, she waited outside beneath a tree in the garden. Her mother had to breastfeed Lilian’s brother there, while the pets of the home roamed freely within. To the young Lilian, whose parents were deeply religious, the injustice stung, at first leading her to believe that ‘the black man was made second by God’, but ultimately causing her to reject her parents’ explanation that ‘our tears shall be wiped away in the next world’.

  Food was never far from her mind, and in her various rememberings of childhood, its scarcity features prominently. The family was too poor to afford much more than mielie meal, eating meat only one Sunday a month. Milk, rice and cheese were luxuries that they seldom enjoyed, unlike the white population, who, it appeared to Lilian, not only had the ‘best food’ but also relaxed in cinemas and on tennis courts. No doubt also influenced by her father, whom she reme
mbered as being ‘bitterly anti-white’,5 she soon developed a defiant sense of racial injustice. ‘I believed’, she later said, ‘that we should start enjoying life here.’ The missionaries struck her as hypocritical, preaching the Gospel but failing to love thy neighbour ‘when it came to the black man’.

  As a girl, she encountered additional barriers. She witnessed her mother’s struggle to enrol her in boarding school when the family moved away from Pretoria. The fees were a heavy expense – unnecessary for a girl, her father argued, because Lilian’s prospects for upliftment would likely come through marriage. Although her mother managed to win him over, the eleven-year-old Lilian eventually gave up her dream of becoming a teacher and left school, because it was ‘too straineous watching my mother working so hard’ to afford the extra fees.

  The family’s situation further declined at this stage because of what Ngoyi refers to as her father’s ‘asthma’. This was likely miner’s phthisis, a form of silicosis caused by the inhalation of fine rock dust over long periods, which often led to tuberculosis. At some point, he stopped working on the mines and became a packer in a local shop, labour that was poorly paid, putting additional pressure on both Lilian and her mother to earn a living.

  To help, at seventeen, Lilian moved to Johannesburg to train as a nurse at City Deep Native Hospital. Although the first ‘native’ nurse had registered in 1908, the profession had been the province of English-speaking men before the First World War. But, just as the state ordered the mines to provide medical care for their workers (one hospital bed for every forty miners employed), the Union suffered an outflow of orderlies to the British Army, resulting in a dire skills shortage. Several mine hospitals attempted to solve the problem by training ‘native’ female nurses – an ‘experiment’ that was deemed successful in 1917.