Coming home

Despite growing international recognition of his work, Ernest Mancoba is still relatively unknown in South Africa. His key contribution to 20th century art is only now being more fully appreciated. Renowned South African artist Cecil Skotnes said that Mancoba's art was powerfully African in its use of line and colour, and similar to that of Swiss artist Paul Klee in its universality.

After the advent of democracy in 1994, Mancoba returned to South Africa after 56 years absence for the celebration of his work in two retrospective exhibitions, curated by his biographer, Dr Elza Miles, at the Johannesburg Art Gallery and then at the National Gallery in Cape Town in 1995.

In 1996, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, the University of Fort Hare, from the hand of his old friend, comrade and fellow spirit, Senator Govan Mbeki, then chancellor of the university. When the university of the Western Cape bestowed a similar honour on him in 1994. It was received on his behalf by his old friend, Jane Gool Tabata, by then also in her 90s.

The intellectual world of the New African Movement of Mancoba's youth was all but decimated by apartheid and this intellectual heritage has not been substantially reclaimed in post-democratic South Africa. Mancoba's work offers a bridge to heal the severing of memory that took place during the apartheid years and to restore recognition of indigenous knowledge and aesthetic principles not recognised or taught formally in our institutions of learning.

'Mancoba's achievement flies in the face of all the binaries that are constructed by colonialism – white/black, coloniser/colonised, self/other, modern/primitive, etc etc – and whose legacies continue to undermine the freedom of the postcolonial, liberated subject, by denying him/her a place in the genealogy of mainstream modernism. Mancoba has not only challenged but demolished these binaries.'

-- Rasheed Araeen, founding editor of Third Text.

Engaging with Mancoba's revolutionary message, we can transcend our cultural limitations and approach a deeper world view that embraces the very essence of what it means to be human.

'In the name of all humanity: the African spiritual expression of Ernest Mancoba' is the first exhibition of his work since his death in 2002.

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