When Mandela was liberated and he flew to Paris, he gave Gérard Sekoto an appointment to meet him at the Musée de l'homme "parvis" in Paris - in full sight of the Eiffel Tower - where he ran up to hug and embrace him. It was the culminating moment of Sekoto's life, according to the painter.

[This article was published in the Journal of Comparative Poietics/Revue de Poïétique Comparée, Vol. I: 2 & 3 (Paris), 1990-1991, pp. 4-12.]
 
 
             Gérard SEKOTO: the poïetical comeback of an
8autodidact
 
                  
                   T. Wignesan
                   Chercheur au C.N.R.S.
 
 
                                  I
 
     In Gérard Sekoto, we have a living African legend, if you will, a hibernating one. This is not because his production has not already turned him into a "rags-to-riches" legend in South African eyes but that he does not as yet feel ready to lay his brushes aside and hang his canvasses up for good in order better to contemplate them from a distance and through them evoke a country he had left forty-four years ago "to see other places and other peoples", in fact, to learn, to teach himself something of what most people called art .For him, art was/is only a means to an end. As he says:
 
     All that I do, even outside of South Africa, is still
     with the eye, the heart and the soul of the land of my
     birth. I must hear and listen to the cares and joys -
     gaities which shoulder all the sufferings, injustices,
     greeds and hatreds. Through the wealth of gold and other
     minerals in our country - yet still looking forward
     into building up a future suitable to the honour of
     mankind.(sic)[1]
 
     It is this world of "sufferings, injustices, greeds and hatreds" which he has recorded faithfully on his canvasses while in Paris. Here, for the first two years, however, he supported himself mainly as a jazz pianist (another self-taught métier) until he moved into a Rue des Grands Augustins apartment and patronage of sorts which allowed him a life of relative artistic independance. Until then he had known only the squalor and drudgery in a sleepless world of dreams and impressions and a memory that ached in his bones, a memory of a land he had left behind in the throes of apartheid. Now he groans, afflicted by the news of the terror of brother against brother in a land hopefully to be free of man's inhumanity to man.
 
     Born on 9 December 1913 in the mission station of Botshabelo, near Middelburg (Transvaal), his early days quickly passed through townships like Sophiatown (Johannesburg), Eastwood, nine miles off Pretoria, and District Six, Cape Town. He recounts in his own inimitable style his life in South Africa in the only book on his work, put together by a close friend, Barbara Lindop.[2]
 
     Not until he was fourteen had he even the slightest notion of what colours were like on paper.
 
       While I was looking for a job, I came upon a shop
       which sold poster colours in big glass pots, and
       fortunately I had sufficient money to pay for the
       ones I chose, as well as two brushes. At my cousins'
       home I tried the poster colours to see how they came    
       out. I worked on brown wrapping paper and it gave
       a delightful feel. That was my first attempt and
       I much enjoyed it.[3]
 
     The Lindop book  - when it appeared some four years ago - brought Sekoto sudden recognition and a place in the sun in the cultural history of his country, and, consequently, extended his influence pan-African-wide. The simple, unsophisticated speech of a man of art speaking without guile in the book (he penned his own look-back-in-hunger of his artistic life) revealed the essential nature of an oppressive truth, a truth only the blacks felt to the marrow. The rhythmic forms and warm colours so typical of the re-memoried pictures of his native land soon gave place to the exigencies of fame: he had now to intellectualize his art and his poietics to visiting dignitaries, academics and journalists in search not only of a long-lost or long-forgotten son of Africa but also of a fresh subject for research. This rather unprofessional activity has begun to take its toll. He has less and less time for work, less and less the self-imposed discipline which goaded him on in more trying times.
 
 
     But what really robbed him of his sense of isolation in work, or his ability to work through the night on one canvass to the finish, sometimes going on nights on end, was the car accident which felled him down in 1983 and confined him to a hospital bed for four and a half years while he waited for his fractured bones to heal. He has since limped out to a comeback which is taking longer than he had anticipated. A few canvasses studiously begun though none brought to a definitive frame; at all costs, none to recall his pre-accident vigour and natural élan. But this frenetic lapse in his creative life - the only life he has or wants to know - has opened up other vistas in his richly and naturally endowed personality. Lindop urged him to speak of himself and his art. And he spewed out, daily, in the form of letters (a couple of letters a day in his full-blooded, decorative handwriting) a whole series of self-examinatory dissertations. Perhaps, this new outlet for his creative energy is the cause of his hesitation on canvass - who can tell! But one thing is certain, Sekoto is a self-made man, a man who has fulfilled his life like few people have: both as a South-African black and as a dedicated, engagé painter.
 
     But then he has had some help though, the minimum coup de main without which sometimes one is lost or that one takes just that much longer to get there. He was introduced by Brother Roger of St. Peter's Secondary School - which he attended - to Judith Gluckman, a white South-African painter.
 
       At her studies she showed me how to mix colours,
       how to use different types of brushes, how to
       prepare a canvas, to use a palette and easel. She
       showed me all these methods without trying to exert
       any particular influence.[4]
 
     After a few, eye-catching exhibitions (Gainsborough Gallery, S. A. Art Academy, Vincent Gallery and Christie's, Pretoria), he managed to save enough to make that fateful journey - encouraged by Ernest Mancoba - to Paris where he did not (nor did he crave to) hobnob with the post-war literati in exile, or with the sacred intellectual cows who regularly sipped coffee serré at the Aux Deux Maggots or the Globe though he lived and worked around the St.Germain de Près and Montparnasse artistic enclaves. Once he passed James Baldwin, the latter literally with his worldly belongings on his back, while moving into his Rue des Grands Augustins apartment. He owes his relative comfort from then on to a Danish gallery owner, Else Claussen, who exhibited and sold his works just opposite the artistically sclerosed Ecole des Beaux Arts. Other people with similar interests gravitated towards him, but he remained essentially that intensely self-reliant and isolated painter that he is up to this very day. He belongs to no schools, to no movements, to no fraternities. He is just a man with a message from his people whose history of humiliations may never be forgotten - thanks to Sekoto's canvasses.

Who could better depict police brutality in his youthful days as in his painting of a mounted white policeman prodding the heels of his black prisoner on a leash scurrying in front of the trotting horse? [cf. painting in Lindop, p.10]

Or the ennui of the lack of opportunity in some slum quarter shebeen  where leisure meant getting tight on some cheap liquor, legs stretched apart in a gesture of aimlessness, while being dressed in one's Sunday best but with no where in particular to go? [cf. painting in Lindop, p.123]
 
     Recognition also brought with it honours: an honorary doctorate from a South African University, a citation from the French Ministry of Culture. These cannot fail to have their effect on a painter who had known no alliances, whether artistic or ideological. Just a lonesome painter, a bachelor all his life.
 
 
                             II
 
 
     Here we are particularly interested in Sekoto's comeback for this gives us an excellent opportunity of scrutinising his oeuvre en train d'être fait as if he were in the act of beginning - as if he were in the process of relearning his art - while tuning in on his already "automatic" processes as a painter. That he hasn't completed a single oil painting since his car accident appears notwithstanding crucial to our assessment. Sekoto's excuse, that is, what he would like us to know, remains that he is no longer "isolated", a key word in his poietics, but then he intones it with a vengeance as though - and we have no reason not to believe him - great things were working themselves to a crescendo behind those steely but smoulderingly set eyes. Evidence of this self-reproachful purpose lies strewn all over his room in the Maison Nationale des Artistes: stacks of sketches litter the already cluttered table on which pile up, day after day, all sorts of papers and documents. Books are oddly absent. He has only two copies of Lindop's book in his possession, and one is a highly-prized numbered copy. And he also talks incessantly of having the book republished. Even the copy of Naipaul's Miguel Street that I read out loud to him while he lay critically ill in his hospital bed is not to be found. Memory sometimes is not as reliable to a painter who often finds himself struggling with details of his health: the right pills to take and the food or drink to watch out for. And the weather leaves him worsted in the stifling Parisian summer afternoons. Laid out fully clothed on his made bed, he has difficulty dragging himself to the easel and to the "Cigarette Smoker" canvass started some year and a half ago (he wonders even when he may have begun it), a painting in the process of being made forever perched ready for his attentive hands which strangely retain their youthfully tense bloodedness. For a while, he laid off the "Cigarette Smoker" to begin another, "The Bistro", expressly for three Frenchmen who wanted to film his life and work. His search for "isolation" remains a chimera. Nothing advances with the pace of his earlier creative fury when his talents matured at the Rue des Grands Augustins in Paris, and so, this painting too has remained in bare, rough outlines: around a bar the figures of some habitués drool while the serveuse is in the process of moving about her job.
 
 
                             III
 
 
     Caught between the act of creation and the act of articulating his creative processes, he appears stymied, a trifle tentative about his motives, and even, sometimes, unable to follow the argument. Rather than circumvent the difficulty, his eyes brighten up suspecting the involvement in some area of knowledge that he might not have given much thought to. The discomfiture is mutual, and my questions are phrased and rephrased, turning over and over again on the same track, without much of a result. Here are two quotes which reveal, at least, some of his basic approach to his art.
 
       These drawings were either from models or by
       imagination. It was rare that I worked before a
       model for a long time as my method was to make
       quick sketches and later work from memory.[5]
 
     He knows that his "style does not reflect imagination" and that "imagination doesn't take over concrete themes", such as the South African colour problem. But then he is quick to note that "an object can start the ball rolling, but I don't direct that...once it has got the feeling it goes."
 
     He believes in making repetitive sketches on the same object and in taking copious notes on the subjects that interest him: people, faces, busts, hairdos, postures (which to him communicate rhythm/movement/dance), groupings of persons, various stances, gatherings of all sizes either getting together professionally or socially - always, as it were, trying to capture that stilled moment which reveals more of the background of the figures than the stories one may read of similar characters in books.
 
       I hovered within arm's length [of District Six,
       Cape Town], observing and making sketches in a
       very acrobatic style. This meant making quick sketches
       in such a manner that an observer would imagine
       I was noting down some forgotten names of articles
       I needed to buy or notes I had to attend to. But
       shortly I would go to the studio to work upon those
       sketches on pieces of paper which were reminders
       to me.[6]
 
     Most of his canvasses have a story to tell - a story of oppression, ennui, poverty, stoicism and dignity in helplessness (the keytone of his depiction of South-African Blacks), gaiety as a means of escaping despair, total despair. The scenic background in which he envelopes his figures (as often as not they are faces or contours without features) remains desolate, spare and equally wounded as the flesh he carves in his dark stoic colours. "Quick sketches really give me a stir because it [sic] does not particularly concern the subject matter: I can use any part of the sketches."
 
     He is not particularly concerned with art (and artifice, of course) and all that talk about art; for him, art really becomes a means to an end - that of recording the impressions which have remained with him all his life, especially from his youthful days in South Africa. He takes care not to let his sketches and notes of his "models" get the better of him - as if his memory resisted the imaginative forms in which his impressions became clouded. "When I do find models which is rare, I work on; then I get to a point when I had [sic] enough, so must be acquainted to getting out of myself rather than be dictated to by the models."[sic]
 
     Genesis for Sekoto is an all-encompassing process. "I do not want to feel that I'm taking a step, then the next step, etc. I want to feel that I'm inside the thing... No, I don't like breaks, like to concentrate." He works at one painting at a time. "I really feel sad for breaking up. I do feel certain irritations. It has done some ill. The whole thing has to begin and get through."[sic]
 
     The notes and sketches, however, are there only to give him an "idea". When he does not take notes or make sketches, "I have roughly an idea, a predominant one." A fast worker, he does not particularly prefer or favour daytime: wakes up in the small hours of the night or works through the night. "When the feeling comes, I feel the need to go."
 
          
                             IV
 
 
     Sekoto feels that, under normal circumstances, he would have been able to finish "The Cigarette Smoker" in a day, going back only occasionally to touch it up a little, though once the work is "finished", he rarely goes back to it. It is also true that this feeling of finality only stayed with him in his Johannesburg and Rue des Grands Augustins days. Now, he has become tentative, preferring to potter on his canvasses or rather one canvass, interminably.
 
     "The Cigarette Smoker" epitomises his present plight. Of several sketches, some reveal part of the smoker's features, others lay stress on his hands, yet others on the cigarette and/or the flame, until, finally, the hat suppresses the face to give prominence to the cigarette. It is a mere stub, something the vagrant smoker picked up and the hands in their protective rapture keep the world away. It is in the lighting up of the stub that the anonymous smoker comes alive. The stub, the hands, the flame: they all come together for a tiny moment, a precious moment to suck some solace from this world, this prohibitive world. The hat annihilates the personality of the smoker, for he is of no great moment to this world. The smoker's joy of need - the Burroughsian algebra of need - lights up only for a moment. The stub could be anything: the remains of a rolled-up reefer, and the fumes light up for a fleeting moment the insides of this nonentity, most likely the black South-African, elbowed out of the thoroughfare, the highway, the high street, the pavement, the five-foot way.
 
 
 
Notes
 
 
   1) The quotations not emanating from the LINDOP book [see item (2)] are from interviews with the author, recorded in 1990 and 1991.
   2) LINDOP, Barbara. Gérard Sekoto.  Ed. by Mona de BEER. Randburg: South Africa: Dictum Publishing, 1988, xvii-294p.
   3) Ibid.,p.19.
   4) Ibid.,p.21.
   5) Ibid.,p.9.
   6) Ibid.,p.23.
 
 
Published originally with reproductions of Sekoto’s sketches.
 
1) Sketches of the "Cigarette Smoker";

 2) SEKOTO's Women of Senegal and South Africa;
 
 3) Photos of Sekoto by George Hallett and T.Wignesan.

(c) T. Wignesan - Paris, 1991