The decision to leave

Life as a black intellectual and artist in South Africa's racially discriminatory system was not easy. His parents' families had earlier been dispossessed of their cattle and land in Tsomo, Transkei, and then again in Middleburg Transvaal ( now Mpumulanga) forcing them to seek work on the mines. The Hertzog Bills of 1935 eliminated black political rights and confirmed the natives land act allocation of 13% of South Africa’s  land  to black people.

In the midst of the turmoil in South Africa in the 1930s, Mancoba experienced an artistic crisis as he sought to express himself as a sculptor and gain artistic knowledge. He yearned for a reconciliation of the spiritual and material which the material basis of political discourse seemed to disallow.

He searched for more information on African art and his fellow sculptor, Lippy Lipschitz, directed him to the book, Primitive Negro Sculpture (1926) by Paul Guillaume and Thomas Munro. He was intrigued by avant-garde European artists' respect for African art and believed he might find a deeper discussion of African art in Europe.

'I wanted to participate in the great universal debate where Africa, though present by its ancient sculptural masterpieces in the possession of collectors and museums and in the opinions of so many European thinkers and artists, had nobody to speak for it and remained mute even in the elements of dialogue that concerned directly its own civilisation and culture,' he said when he returned to Johannesburg nearly 6 decades later.

He was insulted by the Department of Native Affairs' offer of a job carving tourist souvenirs; it seemed as a black person in South Africa, his contribution on a spiritual level was denied. In colonial society, there was no public to receive what he had to express and he did not wish to be overwhelmed by anger and hate.

'Everything I make ... is a striving towards an understanding of the past and a looking forward to the future. We are full of sorrow and disillusionment. We have the sense of having had everything taken. We are left with nothing except that which cannot be taken away,' he said in an interview when he arrived in England in 1938 enroute to art school in Paris. 'My work shows our perplexity as we stand at a crossroads, wondering which road Africa will take.'

He left the country in 1938, aged 34, on a bursary to study art in Paris. Mancoba left behind him his comrades in the New African Movement with whom he had grappled with issues of history, identity, meaning and modernity. He had been a mentor to leaders like Govan Mbeki and, according to the prominent educator, Nimrod Ndebele, he was regarded as the leading intellectual of his generation.

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