Verdict: carrot
SINCE the early nineties, South African art historians have done a great deal of research into the black artists of the 20th century and earlier.
Disregarded or patronised as “native painters”, and seen as either producing indigenous craft or merely aping in a n ä ive fashion the traditions of Europe, very few of them found patrons who recognised their worth, and many of those who did manage to exhibit later fell into obscurity, their work scattered and their worth devalued.
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Verdict: carrot
Newspaper photographers can be scruffy fellows. Ken Oosterbroek wore his baseball cap backwards, they generally revel in flak jackets filled with lenses and Red Bull, neatness seemed wimpish to the Bang-Bang Club of war snappers.
But Alf Kumalo – note the lack of an h – is different. Always dapper, always neat, always polite, always smiling.
This book of some of his best photographs, mostly black and white, reflects the man. Neat, tidy, carefully considered
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Verdict: carrot
He is every bit as dedicated now as he was 50 years ago to documenting the roller-coaster history of our nation, she says, and any discussion with him “reveals a dogged determination that has not been eroded by the passage of time”.
To contain the long and full life of Kumalo, a colleague at Independent Newspapers of many years, is surely no small enterprise. This book, which not only relates Kumalo’s early beginnings in Utrecht in Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal, later Wakkerstroom, where he was sent under the care of his uncles, to the present day, tells the history of South Africa, vividly.
It tells also of Kumalo’s bravery and his indomitable spirit.
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