If you ask Sam Nhlengethwa when he began to draw it’s as if you’ve asked when he got to his feet and walked. Nobody supplied paper, pencils, crayons, at home; what does come to his mind is that when he was 10 years old he had what were, indeed, his first commissions: he would be asked at school by fellow pupils to decorate their exercise books and, later, the poems they wrote as class “tasks”. He was paid a penny a time.
His family in Payneville Location, a black ghetto segregated outside the gold-mining town, Springs, were poor. He had to drop out of school in adolescence and his father managed to get him employed humbly at the father’s own place of work, an industrial drawing office in the “white” town. The boy’s natural intelligence beyond limited schooling meant that he graduated to a desk job. Perhaps the plans he saw around him brought awareness of the transformation of organised space that was the very first art lesson he had.
Eager for formal education, he saved his modest earnings to be able to go back to school. When this was achieved, he used his quickly acquired knowledge of the niches open to blacks in the white world of the town, and found part-time work after school, thus continuing to provide for himself. Then came 1976, the student uprising against “Bantu Education” and, in particular, the Afrikaans language as a medium of instruction. Riots meant that studies for the Junior Certificate had to be abandoned; he found some sort of daily job.
By now it was not only education in the general sense that he was determined upon; the growing insistence within him of the desire to draw, to paint, increased his resourcefulness. A Lutheran Swedish and American mission ran a two-year fine-art diploma course at their Rorke’s Drift Art Centre in rural then Natal. His application was accepted. There the young man regaled himself with the opportunities he had been deprived of; during the first year he learnt print making as well as developing his range of hand and eye in drawing, sculpted wood, made pottery, experimented with photography. Becoming, through widened visual as well as tactile experience, newly aware of his own home background, he began to draw township life in charcoal, pen and ink, and was able to sell these drawings through the organisation of the art centre.
During the second year he began to paint in oils, and to work with collage, fascinated by the vision of people’s lives as depicted in magazines, reinventing the context with cut-outs and paint. During the vacations from Rorke’s Drift he studied and experimented in media at the Johannesburg Art Foundation under the inspiring direction of Bill Ainslie, the artist-director. By 1979, there was the assurance of having received his diploma from Rorke’s Drift, but still unknown to the galleries, he could not make a living with his proven talent.
If you were to meet Nhlengethwa now, a very successful artist, you might think his calm, his ease of warm self-confidence are the evidence of achievement; but he was life-affirmative, uncomplainingly dealing with the frustrations and discouragement of poverty when still vulnerably young. Rorke’s Drift had changed his life; made it possible because, for any of us in the arts, without the possibility of following whatever talent we have, there is no real life. But now he had to find regular employment of any kind. He worked for De Beers, the great mining company, not among the diamonds and gold but back in Springs at Ultra High Pressure Units — a mining equipment factory.
For the first time in his life he could afford to claim a space and place of his own, where he could draw and paint in his spare time. It was modest: two rooms in the black township, Kwa-Thema.
Enterprising Nhlengethwa took along to the SABC television production studios a portfolio of his drawings and was hired as a set designer — another challenge to extend his range of art forms. He was extremely successful, mastering the visual distortions of space made by camera angles, the proportions of the actors within it, and the demands of creating atmosphere, either of walled space or an outdoor environment. By 1985 he found himself as designer giving orders to white constructors on his sets.
These activities in the public domain were useful, even interesting, for Nhlengethwa, but always peripheral. His vision and skills as an artist whose conception of life sought form in drawings and paintings, the creation of immeasurable dimensions on the one-dimensional surfaces of paper and canvas, were central to his being. By 1986 his work had been included in many group shows in South Africa and a first abroad, in Germany, along with fellow South African artists, including that remarkable exile in Paris, Gerard Sekoto.
Nhlengethwa had become one of the most imaginatively perceptive exponents of “township art” that had been recognised as a genre school … a realism not just that of the observer but of what came from within: the artists were, so to speak, their own subjects when they depicted the people in shacks, when they drew the thoroughfare of crowded lives.
In the Nineties he was honoured with six awards as an outstanding young artist, at home and in London and New York. His works acquired for public collections during the Nineties and in the new millennium include the Smithsonian in Washington, the Art Museum of Frankfurt, as well as institutions all over South Africa.
Nhlengethwa refuses to label himself, so to speak. His work is abstract when that is the way he receives his strongest impressions, expressionist when inner and outer vision strike him with this kind of violence, realist when the painstaking surface of images needs to confront us with what this conceals.
His latest work uses space itself, approached with a kind of awe, as a presentation of our time. Our South African present. And as space has neither past nor present, contains all, so these paintings that ‘take place’ in rooms whose planes of shadowless colour both enclose and open out. Nhlengethwa has returned to ‘Township Art’ but not by the materiality of collage: by a dazzling form of minimalism which discards everything but the iconically significant. This is the most difficult challenge to what art represents as unattainable: Nhlengethwa has attained it. In these room-spaces there is nothing but, in one, the kind of chair, velveted and cheaply gilded, bought from a shop where there is an eternal last-chance sale; in another, hung up high, hardly to be distinguished seen from inhabitant level, a wedding picture, bride and groom, celebratory family; in some others a musical instrument, even a piano ‒ that’s all; in another the back of a jazzman with a saxophone seeming to rise out of him. Here is the world that has not yet been entirely moved into: the world of aspirations. Aspiring to bourgeois possession, to occupy rooms where a different life could be lived. Space. And given a place upon a wall of memory never to be denied but not decisive, the crowded township state of being ‒ wedding, school group image, the old life still alive within the new one. It has taken great painterly skill to bring all this to the individual who stands before the painting and receives understanding, identification beyond the limitations of his or her life. For what has been revealed is not only the aspirations of blacks but the confusion of materialism and the values beyond it that exist in all, in the new South Africa.
This is an edited extract from the book Sam Nhlengethwa edited by Kathryn Smith (Goodman Gallery Editions). The exhibition Townships Revisited is on at the Goodman Gallery, 163 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood, until December 2. Tel: (011) 788 1113