An Aesthetics of Ubuntu in Twentieth-Century Black Art in South Africa

Abstract In this article, I explore how a widely celebrated African philosophy of being, Ubuntu, is artistically expressed and imagined. I provide a formative theorisation of Ubuntu aesthetics, or an aesthetics of Ubuntu, through an analysis of selected artworks produced by black artists depicting urban black life in South Africa during the twentieth century. The complicated and polarised experiences of black people who resided in colonial and apartheid cities provide a persuasive case for understanding the creative visualities of Ubuntu. To navigate the segregation of the colonial and apartheid city, black people adopted forms of existence that obscured and questioned the centrality of Ubuntu as part of the modern African experience. Nevertheless, equally undeniable is that the characteristics of the artworks created by black artists who captured and documented urban black life throughout the previous century were some of the most salient aesthetic embodiments of Ubuntu at work. In the main, I argue that the creative choices and visual languages adopted by the black artists discussed here are imbued with an Ubuntu sensibility or an Ubuntu aesthetics that reveals the nuance of humanity among urbanised black people. I also discuss an artwork that complicates the performance of Ubuntu in the urban context.