Cocooned in the valley near Isandlwana is the Rorke’s Drift Art and Craft Centre. The air is clear and silent, uncluttered and invigorating. The buildings, some dating back to the mid-19th century, whisper the names of artists from its past: Azaria Mbatha, Cyprian Shilakoe, Vuminkosi Zulu, Gabi Nkosi and others.
Founded as the Evangelical Lutheran Church Arts and Craft Centre in 1962 by the Church of Sweden Mission, it was initially set up at Ceza Hospital and catered for female patients.
The first resident teachers were Swedes Peder and Ulla Gowenius, who had graduated from Konstfackskolan, one of Sweden’s premier art schools, in printmaking and weaving respectively.
Moving to the scene of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift a year later, the centre was — according to Elizabeth Rankin and Phillipa Hobbs in their book Rorke’s Drift and Empowering Prints: Twenty Years of Printmaking in South Africa — instrumental in developing a black, fine arts identity in South Africa during a period when access to formal training in the fine arts was largely denied to black communities by the government. One of the only other arts schools in the country at the time was the Polly Street Art School in Soweto.
Initially craft and market-driven by European buyers, it expanded to the fine arts disciplines and produced more than 80 artists, in the fields of printmaking, etching, ceramics and photography, before closing in 1982.
Thami Jali, a graduate from the class of 1982, believes the centre — which reopened in 2004 as a learner-ship with funding from the Department of Trade and Industry and the Department of Arts and Culture — has the ‘facilities and the history to play a relevant role in South Africa’s artistic future, especially in developing a new generation of young black artists”.
Hobbs and Rankin believe the conventional analysis of the centre’s role as a fountain of primitive African art was ‘engendered by the views of white clients who favoured works which fitted their preconceptions about African art, and which were less overtly confrontational”.
For the authors, the amalgamation of African naturalism, European aesthetics and a Christian tradition produced work that confronted apartheid society while reclaiming and subverting traditional Christian icono-graphy, especially in the Seventies.
They assert that the ‘rich range of processes and styles, as well as the depth of content in Rorke’s Drift printmaking [should be] acknowledged in order to ensure the centre a central place in that history, directing attention to the need to redraw the parameters of so-called mainstream art in the 1960s and 1970s [which saw artists such as Walter Battiss teaching at the school], and to reinvent the concept of canonical South African art”.
Last year, 20 arts learners and 23 heritage learners — tour guides in training — participated in programmes at the centre. Arts facilitator Jali says that in the past ‘the bulk of the artists who trained here came from Gauteng, but recent participants were drawn from a radius of 23km around the centre”.
He believes that history has come full circle: ‘In September 2004 we reopened with learnerships which are more geared towards production — ceramics, weaving and textile printing — not the fine arts as such, which was how it first began. At the beginning of this year, the programme became a mentorship, which meant going back to art. The government may be interested in the end product: you teach me this and I will make sure I can mass-produce it. But we want to reclaim the fine arts history here.”
The Rorke’s Drift Arts and Craft Centre: (034) 642 1627