By the time Gerald Sekoto made his presentation "A South African Artist" in 1956 at the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris, in front of an audience which included among others, Alioune Diop, Jacques Rabemananjara, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, George Lamming, Chekh Anta Diop, Richard Wright, Peter Abrahams, Jean Price-Mars, Camara Laye, Rene Depestre, a formidable line of African and diasporan intellectuals in the twentieth-century, he had been in self-imposed exile for nearly a decade. He had become part of the black cosmopolitan culture. In order attain this, he had to leave Johannesburg for Paris in 1947. His biographer, N. Chabani Manganyi, quotes Sekoto at the moment of his embarkation for Paris: 'I must get to Paris. I must get to France. . . . Where a man is free, where a man finds freedom' (A Black Man Called Sekoto, Witwatersrand University Press, 1996). Another major South African intellectual who had to go abroad to fully realize his potential was Ezekiel Mphahlele in 1957. In his instance, it was to Nigeria, but later gravitated toward Paris in August 1961. There Mphahlele met Sekoto. In his autobiography, Afrika My Music (1984), Mphahlele remembers the master painter: "Tonight I'm thinking of you, Sekoto. The Paris nights we crawled from one night ckub to another until the wee hours of the morning. It's---what---fourteen years now [actually twenty-four years back]. And you had already been there for fiteen! Why do I think of you? Your large painting of an African head hanging on the wall opposite me. A young woman's. The most precious of my art collection. Remember how, as you told us, it was the first few years in Paris. How very sick you were? After nights of slaving in night clubs playing the guitar to keep yourself in food, clothing and shelter? . . . You must remember, of course, the blue that is dominant in your paiting, varied by patches of white, toned down by dim artificial lighting in my living room---Nairobi, Denver, Philadelphia, Lebowakgomo (Northern Transvaal), Johannesburg. Big eyes, big lips, firm, youthful raws, a handkerchief casually but elegantly worn. A stylised straight neck, a collar-bone pulling with a horizontal tension." This author while in High School in Nairobi in the mid-1960s remembers this painting hanging in Mphahlele's beautiful house. It is unfortunate and said that Gerald Sekoto towards the end of his life refused all invitations for him to come back for visits in South Africa. This was at a time when he was getting this acclamation that he rightfully deserves. There are several studies of Gerald Sekoto's work: Barbara Lindop, Gerard Sekoto, Johannesburg, Dictum Publishing, 1988; Lesley Spiro, Sekoto: Unsevered Ties, Johannesburg, Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1989.