Mancoba's philosophy

'For me, art can only be founded on the single notion – of which it is confirmation and proof – that Man is One.' Ernest Mancoba in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, international curator and art critic, in 2002.

Like his peers in the 'magnificent generation', Ernest Mancoba went beyond the Western paradigm and formed a philosophical bridge between African and Western culture. In his own life, he reconciled the values of the Christian church with those of African traditional life. He was strongly influenced by his mother who was both a Christian and a traditional African – he said he was born with these spiritual traditions, one in each hand. As an artist, he explored a common humanity he found in both these value systems.

Of the philosophy derived from the proverb ‘umuntu ngumuntu ngabanye ubuntu¹, he once said: 'Man is not primarily a Chinese, a Negro, a European or a Red Indian. Man is man by and through other men. In Africa, as in ancient Greece, you are only a man when you, like Homer's hero Achilles, are able to conquer yourself and at last see in the enemy himself, yourself, and in his old white-haired father, your own.' He believed that the deeper one explored any given culture the more one can find its universal human essence.

Mancoba's concern was not with the Western approach to endlessly renewing form or performing repetitive technical stunts. He was concerned with the integration of form and content, man and man, colour and colour, balance within the picture, balance within humanity and balance in life on earth. This is the balance and serenity found in ancient artworks, an expression of societies that lived outside the iron fist of commodity fetishism. He longed for us to regain that state of grace.

Mancoba's art is a paean to the universal humanity within us all, regardless of colour, culture or era. It is a plea for our deepest spiritual qualities not to be overshadowed by our crass, materialistic industrial society. In his ongoing dialogue with humanity across space and time, he takes on the role of the imbongi or griot, the poet in society who has the right to speak the unspeakable and say the unsayable.

He believed that "the distinction between what's called figurative and abstract art has no real place for the African artist, just as it never did for the European artist before the period in the West that brought about a division in our conception between spirit and material, life and death, the interests of the individual and those of the community". For him, the individual finds himself in the collective and the artist has a shamanic and healing role to play.

His paintings often have an abstract ancestral figure at the centre which, curator Bridget Thompson believes, are expressions of mourning for the whole of humanity and our severance from our own inner spiritual nature.

Mancoba held firmly to his beliefs about art and society throughout his life, staying true to his African heritage. Central to this was an abiding concern that 'the spiritual and the material must be reconciled'. This simple yet complex statement typifies his philosophy.

'The artist of today is isolated in spite of himself, because of his search for spiritual integrity within a society all devoted to the satisfaction of material needs as its first priority. Nevertheless, he [the artist] is in harmony beyond space and time with the ancient world and artists in his awareness that spiritual and material values have to be reconciled.' -- Mancoba's acceptance speech at his graduation 'in absentia' as Honorary Doctorate UWC 1994.

¹ Ubuntu is embodied in the African proverb umntu ngumuntu ngabanye abantu (Xhosa) meaning: a person is a person by and because of other people

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