The Colouring Book

The South African-born artist looks back at his experience of art and activism under apartheid as well as forward to new directions in his own work, and to the continuing need to address the legacies of racism and colonialism in art and society.

Gavin Jantjes interviewed by Virginia Whiles

Freedom Hunters, 1977

Virginia Whiles: At what age did you start to become aware of political problems in South Africa? Gavin Jantjes: When I was growing up as a young child. From the age of three my parents sent me to the local kindergarten at the Children’s Art Centre, which was just around the corner from our house. I went there from kindergarten right until my late teens, when I started studying at the University of Cape Town. I later became a part-time teacher at the same school and ran an adult evening class teaching drawing – most of my students were in their 40s to 60s and I was 20. The Children’s Art Centre is a phenomenal place. It still exists today in spite of an attempt by the apartheid government to close it down. It was one of my first great anti-apartheid stories. We anonymously entered work by children from the Arts Centre into an open competition and won first prize in five of the six categories. When the government discovered that all the winning kids were from a black art school, which they had never heard of, they asked the local Cape Town city council to close us down, giving us 26 days’ notice. We were only saved by a local priest who walked in and said: ‘I don’t have a building, but I have a piece of land, and on this piece of land there are two tennis courts which we never use.’ That is exactly where the Children’s Art Centre still exists after almost 50 years.

So you have been in the art school system for over 60 years. I wondered whether your parents agreed to you going on to study art when you were growing up. Very reluctantly, because they couldn’t see a future in it. My parents were not well educated. My mother had three years of primary school. My father had maybe five years of schooling and then was forced to drop out, but they learned that instead of stopping your kids from doing something, you should encourage them to continue. When I told them that I wanted to go to art school, however, the problems started because they could not afford it. So my grandmother, a wonderful lady, gave me her entire life savings, which nevertheless only covered my first term at the University of Cape Town. The University accepted everybody on merit rather than on colour, but I had to get special permission from the South African minister of the Interior to study at what was then called a white-only university. I was the only black kid at a white university, and only the second black student ever to study at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town.

I graduated at the end of three years and became my faculty representative, which is where my engagement with the state really began: the minute that I had been elected by my student colleagues to represent them on a student council, I was visited by the security police

Art Monthly no. 477, June 2024

1