Articles & Essays Book Reviews
Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Volume 17 Number 3, December 2016 ___________________________________________________________________
Miles, Elza, Selby Mvusi: to fly with the north bird south, Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2015. 123, ISBN 978-1-86888-746-0, CD (Companion to the book) ISBN 978-1-86888-817-1, SET (Book and CD) ISBN 978-1-86888-826-9
Reviewed by
University of South Africa
Selby Mvusi: legacy at large
In the book, Selby Mvusi: to fly with the north bird south (2015), Selbourne Charlton Sobizwa Mvusi (1929 – 1967) receives a recognition befitting the multiple trades that he practiced. The acknowledgment is also appropriate to the nuances that he highlights within the evolution of South Africa’s black modernism, commencing allegedly around the middle of the 19th century and climaxing between the Second World War and the end of the 20th century. The homage, which aims at ‘compil[ing]’ his ‘writings’ (xi), is made about half a century after his unexpected demise in Kenya. But the act of ‘compiling’ the legacy of an intellectual giant is always at the mercy of the tendency to eulogise. At every turn, the image of the celebrant is shown resplendent, ironically threatening to dim his talents. In each curve, he is faintly heard engaged in dialogues with the intellectuals who came before him and who have enjoyed aggressive and extensive research than him for many decades.
Irrespective of the density of these subtexts, the book makes Mvusi rise from within their gaps, extending the horizon beyond what these pioneers chart. These trailblazers enjoy a lot of publicity in those research enterprises that define the era in which South African black intelligentsia burst into public spaces and define the African person in relation to the violence of European modernity. There seems to be consensus that this period begins in 1829, the year in which Reverend Tiyo Soga was born. 1829 rhymes with 1929, the year in which Selby Mvusi came into the world. In the recent studies on the subject of alternative South African modernity (see, for instance, Nxasana 2015, cf. Kumalo 2014), Soga impresses the readers for having allegedly modelled an image of a black South African modern intellectual. This is largely owing to the fact that he ostensibly hybridized Christianity with black African cultural practices. The template for this intermeshing seems to resonate in Soga’s life story. In particular, this is the impressive figure of a man who left South Africa for Europe and subsequently redefined Africa in non-antinomian lines upon his return armed with the instruments of the enlightenment such as Christianity and Western erudition.
This black experimentation with the values of the enlightenment and with what it means to be a modern African man is also associated with another pioneer of the time, Pixley Ka Isaka Seme (1881-1951), whom, by contrast to Soga, this book (Miles, 2015: 69) mentions. In African Cultural Studies, Seme is famed for his 1906 ‘The Regeneration of Africa’ speech delivered at Columbia University. As Leonard Harries (2009: 181) argues, Seme’s ‘Pan African sensibilities created the conditions for [Alain] Locke to explore what it means to pursue an African Renaissance’. At the time, and even today, Locke is considered one of the brains behind the Harlem Renaissance. This movement was, in turn, further popularised by Langston Hughes (1902 – 1967). However, intent on not letting the Afro-American movement eclipse Mvusi’s contribution to the construction of the new African, Miles (2015: 69) rhetorically asks whether the phenomenological underlying his delineation of his African identity in his poem alludes to Seme’s essay.
As Miles (2015: 83) notes, shining through the images of Soga and Seme but particularly his ‘Regeneration of Africa’ essay is another prominent cultural activist and intellectual of the time, Solomon Tshekiso Plaatje (1876 – 1932). Together with Seme, among others, Plaatje is known as an architect of the progenitor of the ‘African National Congress’, the ‘South African Native National Congress’. Plaatje, in particular, is often recalled for responding to the colonial subjugation of black Africans during the Anglo-Boer War through his Native Life in South Africa and for having authored the first black African novel in English, Mhudi. As, later on, with Seme, Soga left South Africa for the US and then England for his University education. The travels to the US by black African intellectuals, especially those who became instrumental in the formation of the South African Native National Congress such as Soga, Plaatje, Walter Rubusana, etc., underline cartography of the rise of the modern African. In all these ventures, creative writing was integral and seminal, as shown in what Miles (69) says is the resonance of H.I.E. Dhlomo’s ‘traditional past’ in Mvusi’s wooden sculpture, ‘The Family’.
In Miles’s reconstruction, Mvusi’s life story enlivens ruptures in the outlined narrative on the making of the modern South African black subject. In the first instance, Mvusi died very young in Kenya and thus did not return to South Africa alive. As it were, this fate appears to have anticipated that of another artist, Zwelidumile Feni (1942) who died in 1991 in New York also slightly less than 50 years old as Mvusi was. As Miles (2015: 83) suggests, the temptation to compare Mvusi and Feni is irresistible, also as they were both visual artists and sculptors. In the second case, Mvusi elaborated on the idea of the new African by engaging a dialogue between poetry, sculpture and visual art. It appears that, aside from Mvusi, the only South African black artist who dabbles across genre is Pitika Ntuli (1942) in his 2010 book. Could it be that it is an oversight on Miles’s part that, in paying tribute to Mvusi and for highlighting that he dabbled across genre, she does not note that he set the foundation for the later generation of artist to redefine the black African subject using multiple genres? In the third case, Mvusi saw and experimented with art in terms of the concept of design, as defined in his letters and lectures. In addition, it does not appear that there is any evidence that Mvusi mulled over whether or not to appropriate Christianity to an African nationalist cause as was the case with his intellectual ancestors such as Tiyo Soga. Also, it does not seem that Mvusi aligned his artistic idioms exclusively to European modernist legacies such as expressionism and cubism.
Miles (2015) publishes these dossiers in a compact disk companion to her book which is under review. It is curious that the section containing the letters comprises only two items, that they were all written by Mvusi to the famous South African writer and visual artist, Peter Clarke, and that they are dated 26 August 1956 and 2 October 1956, respectively. It is in these letters that the reader encounters Mvusi sketching his training into an artist. However, the first letter is more revealing of Mvusi’s philosophy of art than the second one. As it were, the reader eavesdrops on Mvusi tracking the genesis of the institutionalisation of the teaching of art to Africans to Fort Hare University (1). Also in this companion, Mvusi analyses the teaching of visual arts in South African black schools in 1955 when he was 27 just after graduation (2). His assessment of the Black Indian and Coloured Arts Group (BICA), which was based in Durban, is also enclosed in these documents, highlighting his membership in this venture, detailing its interdisciplinary approach to art and delineating how this group attempted to construct its social and spiritual mission (2). In my view, it is the first time that the public is treated to a personal account of the genesis of the institutionalisation of South African black arts. This is despite the fact that, among others, Zwelidumile Feni who also became a member of BICA, died apparently having neither published nor provided his explication of his philosophy of art in prose. The second and final section of the Part Three contains the ‘academic papers’ that Mvusi delivered at various points in his short-lived career. All but two of these lectures are designated also by the date in which each was delivered. What ties up these presentations together is Mvusi’s contextualising of the arts within life at large. The reader will have to chart points of convergence between Mvusi’s philosophy in section three, on the one hand, and Miles’s narrative of him in the first two sections, on the other hand.
Before arriving at the companion, which is indexed in the book’s table of contents as ‘Section Three’, the reader has to make two stops, all authored from Elza Miles’s third person perspective. However, this third person seems overwhelmed by the enormity of the person whom Miles attempts to memorialise, and this happens in three stations prior to the table of contents, which is usually found immediately after the Dedication page in many books. Each stop is saturated with evidence of the expansive reach of Mvusi’s talent, and of his critical indebtedness to the ideologies of the early South African black intellectuals.
The first stop, which is not designated by a page number and introduced by the dedication page, comprises three more pages each featuring a photograph of Mvusi’s art work. While the first page of this untitled part of the book shows an image of Mvusi’s sculpture, ‘Madonna – the Zulu Maiden (1958), the second and fourth pages exhibit drawings from his sketchbook, and the third his photo of a feather.
The second post, titled ‘Acknowledgements’ (ix-x), stretches over two pages. The first ticks off the names of the cultural activists, academics and family members whom Miles consulted in her preparation of this monograph. By contrast, the second page (x) features the photo of Mvusi in 1966, a year before his unexpected demise. As it were, the products precede the man. And yet, the greatest irony is that the photo of Mvusi – bearded – appears to be a portent of his end.
The second station leads spontaneously to the third, itself commencing with an outline of a dream in which Miles dialogues with Barbara Masekela. In the dream, Mvusi appears as a person who dabbles in inter-disciplinary processes, features that ‘disclose’ his ‘African personality … all embracing and flexible’, as hinted at in the stations preceding the ‘Dedication page’. The bulk of the book comprises two Sections. Section One contains the following bits: ‘The Life & work of Selby Mvusi’, outlining his life story in the subsections, ‘’The Early Years 1929-57’ (1-, 20), ‘America: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Boston, Massachusetts and Atlanta, Georgia 1958-60’ (21-24), ‘Elsewhere in Africa: To Live and To Work 1961-67’ (25-50), ‘Reading: Towards an Understanding’ (51-68), ‘Affinities’ (69-72) and ‘The Search for Inner Man’ (73-75). ‘Section Two’, ‘The Writings of Selby Mvusi’ (75-114), covers his poems. Irrespective of the biographical structure of these two sections, the prevalence in them of the images of Mvusi’s art and of select quotations from his lectures (found in the companion disk) unwittingly makes his first person’s voice outweigh Miles’s memorialising of him. This is because his presence is replete in visual expressions, allusion to major modernist forms of artwork such as cubism and to the poetic idiom of a famous and founding South African poet, H.I.E. Dhlomo. This legacy provides a rich shore for abstracting material to engage a dialogue between Mvusi’s philosophy of art in relation to the complex and fraught contact zones between his ancestors such as Tiyo Soga and the European enlightenment heritage. At the same time and against Miles’s locating of Mvusi within the evolution of the Negritude movement, the reader is able to delineate the degrees to which he enunciated an alternative black modernity. This is so particularly as Miles plots Mvusi’s life and philosophical development also against the 1962 Salisbury International Congress of African Culture (Miles 2015: 31), and 1966 ‘First Mondial des Arts Negrès (World Festival of Negro Art) under the patronage of Leopold Sedar Senghor’ in Dakar (2015: 42). It seems that, for Miles, the question of whether or not Mvusi aligned himself with negritudinism is answered in his cosmopolitanism, which is apparent in his lectures and in the many images of his art work in this book. The irony is that the seemingly forgotten or closed debates on Negritude never foregrounded Mvusi as a key commentator.
Having modestly inserted Mvusi in the map on the evolution of South Africa’s black modernism, the book concludes with a ‘Bibliography’ (115-118) and an ‘Index’ (119-123). The coyness of the book is particularly impressive, as it does not intend to provide an exhaustive study on Mvusi – not that this is possible. Indeed, throughout, Miles laments that her project, which she constructs as that of an archivist, is made difficult by the fact that Mvusi’s legacy is held in different hands across the world.
References
Harries, Leonard. 2015. Cosmopolitanism and the African Renaissance: Pixley I. Seme and Alain L. Locke. In International Journal of African Renaissance Studies – Multi, Inter -, and Transdisciplinarity. 4(2): 181-192.
Kumalo, R. Simangaliso. 2014. Religion and Politics in the heritage of uNtsikana ka Ghaba and its relevance to a democratic South Africa. In Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae, 40(1): 21-37.
Miles, Elza. 2015. Selby Mvusi: to fly the north bird south, Pretoria: University of South Africa Press.
Ntuli, Pitika. 2010. Scent of invisible footprint. Pretoria: Unisa Press.
Nxasana, Thulani. 2011. The Journey of the African as Missionary: The Journal and Selected Writings of Tiyo Soga. In English in Africa, 38(2): 61-76.
Seme, Ka Isaka Pixley. 1906. The Regeneration of Africa. In Journal of the Royal African Society, 5(20): 404-408.