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SELBY MVUSI |
| When one considers the Sophiatown Renaissance phenomenon of
the 1950s more broadly as a cultural movement, it is interesting and surprising
that it seems never to have given rise to a strong representation in painting.
In the 1960s it was generally assumed that literature, because of the Drum
writers, had been its cultural dominant. But with publication in the 1980s
and 1990s of books consisting of photographs by the artists of this decade
(‘The Fabulous Decade: The Fifties’ as Lewis Nkosi has characterized it)
has challenged this canonizing and establishment viewpoint. The publication
in 1987 of The Finest Photos from Old Drum and The Fifties People, as well
as Jurgen Schadeberg’s Images from the black 1950s (1994), Alf Khumalo’s
Mandela: Echoes of an Era (1990), Peter Magubane’s Nelson Mandela: Man of
Destiny (1996) as well as others, has made this received wisdom untenable.
Making possible the contestation of this literary varolization from yet
another artistic perspective, has been the return to South Africa in the
1990s of musicans from exile, from Hugh Masekela to Jonas Ngwangwa, from
Miriam Makeba to Abdullah Ibrahim (Dollar Brand). Given these interrogations
as to the original premise of hierarchical relationships between the various
artistic forms of expression within the cultural of the Sophiatown Renaissance,
it is no longer intellectually plausible to place literature in precedence
of music and photography. This overturning of aesthetic and cultural judgement
accompanied by conjuctural changes, has led to the questioning of the idea
that this cultural moment was definined singularly by ‘ black ‘creativity; whereas in actual fact it was the cultural intersection of various creativities : ‘Indian’, ‘Coloured’, ‘Jewish’ and ‘white’. In other words, the cultural remapping of the Sophiatown Renaissance is still an open question. What has never been in dispute in the interpretation of this cultural experience is the fact that painting has invariably played second fiddle. Selby Mvusi is the paramount figure in the painting of the 1950s around whom this enigma revolves. Part of the explanation may reside in the fact that an important fine artist in the generation preceding that of Mvusi, Gerald Sekoto left for permanent exile in Paris in 1948, thereby rupturing the continuity between the two generations most adjacent to each other. Selby Mvusi himself left for a Fine Arts lectureship at the Nairobi University College in 1960. Mvusi had a tremendous impact at the University of Nairobi in the 1960s. One of the teachers this author had at Delamere Boys High School in Nairobi was an Indian Goan who had been his student. My teacher was enthralled with Selby Mvusi. I ‘knew’ Selby Mvusi through my family. At this time the South African exile community in Nairobi rotated around four families: the Mphahleles, the Mvusis, the Masilelas and the Mbathas. On week-ends the families would visit each other. I remember Selby Mvusi as a regal, serious and determine person. In other woirds,m he did not tolerate any kind of nonsense. He was one of the intellectual lights of Nairobi. He was a leading light of the expatriate community in the city, a community that consisted of Europeans, Africans, Indians and Asians. His death by car accident in 1967 devastated the South African community. His memorial service, since his body was to be buried in South Africa, was one on my memorable events during my stay in Nairobi at this time. Doing research for this New African Intellectuals research project I came across an article by Lewis Nkosi on his visit to Brazil in 1966 with other South African exiles (including Robert Resha, Peter Raboroko, Ronald Segal and Selby Mvusi): “Encounter with Brazil”, New African, November 1966. In one of our long telephone discussions of 1998 between California and Wyoming, Lewis Nkosi asked me in detail about the car accident that resulted in Selby Mvusi’s death as well as the memorial service. It was only later when I reflected on why Lewis Nkosi had drilled me for details for something that had happened over thirty years earlier, I realized that Selby Mvusi in all likelihood died within six months of this encounter with him in Rio de Jainero. In unusual ways, Selby Mvusi had an extraordinary impact on people. Even I at that relatively young age recognized in Selby Mvusi a person of unusual talent. A serious study still needs to be written about how the historical moment of Gerald Sekoto, Selby Mvusi and Dumile Feni was critical in the development of South African painting and sculpture in the twentieth-century. Such a study would illuminate the role of visual arts in the consolidation of the New African Movement historical project. |
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