When we were growing up our knowledge of the work of Thami Mnyele came to us through the covers he illustrated for the poetry books of his friend and mentor, Mongane Wally Serote. The tortured figures he drew for Yakhal ‘Inkomo (1972) and Tsetlo (1974) were published in slim volumes by AD Donker and, to young white readers, the characters with their twisted frames and eyes set in deep pools seemed quite remote. Their pain, like the pain expressed by Serote in his poetry, seemed removed from the “simple” experience of the barely literate individuals we came into contact with.
The complexity of Mnyele’s experience as a young black artist growing up is well articulated by himself in a rare essay now published in Thami Mnyele & Medu Art Ensemble Retrospective (Jacana), a post-exhibition catalogue that complements last year’s show at the Johannesburg Art Gallery.
I am ashamed to say that my assertion is completely contradicted by the late Mnyele himself, who wrote about the early African artists who lacked an appreciative audience among black working-class South Africans. At the same time, Mnyele suggested, they seemed to play to their eager white audience, downscaling their anger for the purpose of appreciation. This never earned them a living, and their forays into black society were equally problematic.
Musicians, mostly, were apparently met with a mixture of hatred and adoration from the broader black audience who seemed to despise the fact that, even with their talents, their heroes had to fawn for the white production sector to earn a pittance.
It was a dire need to take ownership of all art forms that gave rise to interdisciplinary groups such as the Mihloti Black Theatre (1971) and the later MDALI and Medu ensembles — and Mnyele would be a productive part of them all.
Along the way he worked at Sached as an illustrator and had a disastrous experience when he took up a scholarship at the legendary Rorke’s Drift art school.
In 1985, as we know, Mnyele was killed in a South African army raid on Gaborone. While his work as a propagandist — full of slogans and flat characters breaking out of chains and rallying — seems stuck in its political moment, it is his charcoal and pencil drawings that will endure as artifacts, possibly for eternity.
For his drawings are not merely what they appear to be. In Diana Wylie’s Art & Revolution (Jacana) we learn about Mnyele’s enigmatic process, and through his anger we learn how he simultaneously destroyed the paper upon which he created his strongest works. Thus we have a characteristic, fossilised look that so aptly expressed the confusion that ordinary people of the time must have felt.