It was with shock and deep sorrow that I learned of the death of Durant Sihlali. I knew this exceptional man and artist well, and enjoyed many hours together with him looking at works and talking art.
Sihlali was born on March 5 1935 in Elsburg, Germiston, where his umbilical chord is buried. He was the first-born son and grandson to survive what he called “early tragedies” visited on his parents, John Sonwabo Sihlali of the Sabalele district and Tjentjie Agnes Moletsane of the Taung clan, who had their origins at Witsieshoek. His parents were married in 1928 in Tarkastad, to where they returned for his baptism. He was christened Durant by a French Presbyterian priest, while his grandmother gave him the second name of Basi. She believed this boy was going to be master of his destiny. And so it proved, for Sihlali was a deeply committed artist and fiercely independent in every way.
Sihlali worked across many media and was one of the few artists who lived through the early years of the building of contemporary South African art. He experienced first-hand many of the key institutions and events widely held to be formative of the experience of black artists in the decades of apartheid. Included here are the Polly Street Art Centre (circa 1953), the Thupelo Project (circa 1982), the Federated Union of Black Artists (circa 1982) and the Funda Centre in Soweto.
His work in the 1970s was branded pejoratively as “township art” while in truth it documented historical realities that had little to do with the romantic patina and racist paternalism of the term. He spent time abroad in the 1980s and produced a remarkable — and remarkably different — body of work that anticipated artistic interests that were to become widespread in the 1990s.
He exhibited innovative installations at the first and second Johannesburg Biennales and his work continues to be sought for important local and international shows. Sihlali continued to exhibit until his death, and was at work at his Umlanga Papers studio when he passed away.
Sihlali is one of the few visual artists whose artistic career coincides with the entrenchment of formal apartheid (1948) and predates the republic (1961). While he is a very significant figure in the founding generation of South African modernist art history, he has also been an important artistic force in post-apartheid, contemporary South African art (1990 to the present). In this he is unique.
In some ways he has also been uniquely neglected. While others of his own and earlier generations have rightly benefited from “revisionary” histories of art, these have been almost exclusively of artists who went into exile (Azaria Mbatha, Gerard Sekoto, Ernest Mancoba) before or during apartheid.
Exile in that sense was not part of Sihlali’s experience, although when speaking to him it was clear that apartheid forced a painful internal exile and sense of homelessness on him and his compatriots. In his work Sihlali captures the early moments of a still poorly understood perspective on modernist South African art. His work also captures not only early debates about authentic “Africanity” in art, but also specific interventions from Europe and the United States that prefigure current debates about cultural globalisation, art and nationalism and identity formation.
Sihlali will be sorely missed by those who knew him, and by the South African art world at large. His death will leave a gap in our lives. We must work as tirelessly — following his lead — so that the rich legacy Sihlali has bestowed on us, both artistically and as a human being, does not get squandered. He was truly one of the foundation stones of contemporary South African art. — Â