ALFRED THOBA
TRUE LOVE

HIS LOVE WAS TRUE, BUT IT DIDN’T EARN HIM AN OBITUARY

text by Sean O’Toole

Alfred Thoba, the fiercely independent self-taught painter who achieved sudden public attention in 1988 with a painting recalling the black youth rebellion that had racked apartheid South Africa a decade earlier, died in obscurity in late 2023. Thoba, who lived alone, was found dead in his studio in his Hillbrow flat in central Johannesburg. He had lived and worked at various addresses in and around this congested residential neighbourhood for decades, establishing a professional career less than ten kilometres from Sophiatown, the energetic black settlement where he was born in 1951. Thoba’s death was not reported in the media. He received no obituary in any art press. Thoba, who in person sometimes embodied the heroism, brio and dandyism lampooned in 1971 by poet Oswald Mtshali (‘He was born in Sophiatown … He wears/ the latest Levison’s suits … from Cuthbert’s/ a pair of Florscheim shoes), had, it seemed, slipped from public memory.

The exhibition True Love, which gathers 27 Thoba paintings made between 1981 and 2022, remedies this. It commemorates the life of a singular and committed artist who achieved the respect of dealers, collectors and critics with his moralising narrative paintings featuring idiosyncratic paint treatments and richly textured surfaces. In a career marked by privation and obscurity, but also abundant self belief and dogged persistence, attributes that ultimately won Thoba a place in South African art history, it is sobering to learn that he produced only about 250 paintings. To put this in perspective, that is not much more than is attributed to Frida Kahlo, who died at age 47, and far less than the prolific George Pemba, who similarly battled hardship but left a rich legacy when he died at age 89 in 2001. Thoba’s renown was already in decline by this date, even though his commitment to painting remained steadfast until the end.

Notwithstanding the uneven public attention and sporadic critical affirmation he received in his later years, Thoba continued to paint, in the process refining his technique and also progressing his core themes of black conviviality, sensuality and spirituality. The outcome is an astonishingly rich and consistent body of work characterised throughout by Thoba’s fearless commitment to examining – enigmatically, through the lens of his extravagant religious and erotic obsessions – aspects of black urban life in a transforming South Africa. That he achieved this with little formal training demands acknowledgement. Thoba’s grandfather, it is said, made pots for the family. The work of South African sculptors, not just painters, is useful in contextualising Thoba’s figural approach. I’ll return to this thought later.

Thoba left school in his adolescence and worked as an art filer at various advertising agencies in Johannesburg. He reportedly studied drawing at Cleaver-Hume College, a correspondence institution. At some point in his early twenties – accounts vary as to exactly when in the 1970s – he struck out as a professional artist. Little is known of Thoba’s early work. Thoba, though, was not anonymous cipher. Artist and educator Bill Ainslie, a liberal force for good in apartheid Johannesburg, knew him and rebuffed Thoba’s appeal to study at his art school. He was good enough goes the legend. Matsemela Manaka, Steven Sack and Gavin Younge do not mention Thoba in their important survey books from the 1980s. E. J. de Jager, an important chronicler of neglected black artists, only mentions Thoba in passing – in 1992.

True Love includes two works from Thoba’s early wilderness years. Produced in 1981, A Lonely Lady portrays two couples, one of them French kissing, much to the intrigue of the titular female protagonist, who is decoupled from her gender opposite and closely observes the embracing lovers. The full-bodied proportions of his figures, their presentation in pairs and his use of smooth paint surfaces is typical of Thoba’s early phase, which extended into the 1990s. While his style did evolve in certain noticeable ways, especially at the level of technique and interest in multitudes, Thoba remained faithful to portraying scenes of heteronormative eroticism throughout his career.

Thoba decisively entered the public imagination in 1988 when he exhibited a stylised interpretation of the 1976 Soweto school rebellion in a group exhibition at the Market Theatre Gallery, Johannesburg. Painted in flat, bold colours a year earlier, 1976 Riots presents a clustering of five, characteristically neatly dressed black figures in a rudimentary landscape comprising box houses and a clustering of drooping trees. The attenuated but still lifelike figures in this work share much in common with the painted wood sculptures of Owen Ndou. Sue Williamson, in her influential book Resistance Art in South Africa (1989), quotes Thoba on the difficult production of the work, first in Yeoville, then Orange Grove and Jeppe Street, and finally in Berea. “I worked very hard on the picture. When I finished it I cried a lot.” She dates the painting as 1977. It was in fact completed in 1987. Thoba precisely dated the work “13/8/87”.

Art historian Colin Richards, referencing Williamson’s book and reiterating the incorrect date, linked the “saturated bloodiness” of Thoba’s 1976 Riots to works by Billy Mandindi and Mmakgabo Sebidi as descriptive of the violent spectacle of late apartheid. The stark political subject matter of this iconic work certainly marked a shift for Thoba from the low-key eroticism and aspirational middles-class domesticity of earlier works like A Lonely Lady and Red Chairs and Chickens (1984) – but it didn’t define him. Much like Pemba and Durant Sihlali, humanists similarly occupied with black domestic life, Thoba sometimes described instances of political strife, but it did centrally occupy his output. This is apparent in two works acquired by the Johannesburg Art Gallery in the early 1990s.

Two Sisters (1990) is a scene of religious devotion. The composition is dominated by two neatly dressed young woman engrossed in hymn. A rudimentary figure with elongated arms is cursorily evoked in a richly worked ground and hovers above this prayerful group scene. By contrast, JAG’s other work, If South Africa have love, I want freedom (c. 1992), which depicts two couples, one in embrace, is more closely aligned to his 1980s works in technique and subject matter. The stout naked man showering in public at the centre of the composition hints at the explicit sexuality that became a hallmark of his later work.

Thoba’s iconography and technique are indivisible. His rich but also constrained repertoire of images is a product of his idiosyncratic technique. Commenting on his habit of inventively layering and working his surfaces, Rory Bester writes, “It is obsessive, time-consuming work, and the quality of his attention to detail is clearly reflected in the intricacies and nuances of the finely teased paint.” While his technique is undoubtedly arresting, Thoba, particularly during the 1990s, was judged as an outsider artist. Art historian Elza Miles likened his Christian themes to those of polio-stricken Calvin Lekoane, who painted with his feet. Esmé Berman lumped him together with the “black ‘naives’ attracting growing attention” in the early 1990s, among them Tommy Motswai, Clifford Mpai, and Phillip Rikhotso.

This need to correctly classify Thoba, while an unavoidable and necessary hazard, seemed to unearth uniquely South African pathologies around artistic facility, race and scientific identification. In 1989, Natalie Knight, Thoba’s earliest dealer, showed his work on a group exhibition at New York’s Dome Gallery. A press report details the vivid response Thoba’s work generated:

The artist who had the most extreme reaction was Alfred Thoba. Some people said he was the most original, most exciting artist on show, others said he was the worst. Most of those who disliked Thoba’s primitive technique were South Africans. However, in Artspeak, a publication given away in all New York galleries, Thoba’s work was chosen together with works by Thomas Kgope and William Kentridge to illustrate a review.

Thoba’s “primitive technique” invites conjecture. I found no instances of Thoba discussing his influences or professional associations, neither in his substantial personal writings nor published articles. This does not mean that his time-honed style is without precedent. Thoba’s lurid iconography and didacticism recall Trevor Makhoba, a contemporary who was similarly drawn to themes of sensuality, spirituality and violence. Thoba’s signature elongated figures of his later works have many precedents in earlier South African art, from the graphics of Cyprian Shilakoe to the wood sculpture of Thomas Masekela and Lucas Sithole. His flattened picture planes and simplified detailing of subjects invoke the rhetorical style of French primitivist painter Henri Rousseau and African-American painters like Horace Pippin and Jacob Lawrence. Thoba’s tendency to crowd human figures into theatrically arranged painterly space, as in his late composition Tattoo Organisation Company (2013), also share similarities with the pictorial design of medieval Christian altarpieces.

These correspondences and affinities should not detract from a key fact: Thoba was an autodidact who, over time, succeeded in creating a unique personal iconography. Where does Thoba figure in this iconography? One possible answer to this question is there in his baroque and apparently stream-of-consciousness notes that he attached to some of his paintings. They itemize his obsessions in a language that is singular and always disassembling. Although interested in the idea of human psychology, a fact often referenced in his notes, Thoba did not look at himself – not like Kahlo did. He produced only one self-portrait that I could find. My Spiritual Self Portrait (2001) is a stylised composition dominated by an elongated wooden mask, its geometric surface detailed in orange, purple and black. Like his depictions of poppies and violets – yes, Thoba painted flowers! – as well as an undated work showing a herder driving Afrikaner cattle across an open landscape (Shepards are my herrors [sic]), the self-portrait is an outlier.

It was the human subject – sometimes singularly observed, but mostly seen in pairs and understood in the context of the group – that compelled Thoba. While he lacked the basic artistic facility of Pemba, Thoba shared with this pioneering modernist an absolute belief in painting’s moral purpose. A painting is a narrative device, an occasion for instruction, nothing less. Notwithstanding the efforts of admiring young dealers and the devotion of a new generation of collectors, notwithstanding even a survey exhibition at the Wits Art Museum in 2018, Thoba’s stories, his instructions, spoke to a dwindling public as he grew older. This is a great shame. Thoba was a generous chronicler of life in South Africa. That his scenes of gregarious assembly and convulsed dispute, charged eroticism and lonely reverie, don’t quite look like how things were or are lived misses the point. Thoba depicted life as he perceived it with his alert eyes, and idiosyncratically processed it through an agitated consciousness, with his hand, with paint, on surfaces that were never still, always alive.

Sean O’Toole is writer, editor and curator based in Cape Town. He has authored two books, edited three volumes of essays and published well over 1000 news articles, reviews, features and commentary pieces with various media outlets.

Works referenced

—  (1989) Arts and Entertainment, Focus on South Africa, Pretoria, South African Department of Foreign Affairs.

Esmé Berman (1992), ‘Images from a Society in Transition’, in Beyond Walls and Wars Art, Politics, and Multiculturalism (ed.) Kim Levin, New York, Midmarch Arts Press.

Esmé Berman (1993) Painting in South Africa, Cape Town, Southern Book Publishers.

Rory Bester (2007) ‘An Unwavering Moral Compass’, in Art South Africa, Vol. 7.1, Cape Town, Bell-Roberts Publising.

Rory Bester (2022) ‘Artist Focus: Alfred Thoba – Separate, and Outside’, in The Oliver Powell and Timely Investments Trust Collection (auction catalogue), Cape Town, Strauss & Co.

Elza Miles (1997) Land and Lives: A Story of Early Black Art, Cape Town, Human & Rousseau.

Hayden Proud (2006) Revisions: Expanding the Narrative of South African Art, Pretoria, UNISA Press.

Colin Richards (2008) ‘Aftermath: Value and Violence in Contemporary South African Art’, in Antinomies of Art and Culture Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, (eds.) Nancy Condee, Okwui Enwezor, Terry Smith, Durham, Duke University Press.

Sue Williamson (1989) Resistance Art in South Africa, Cape Town, David Philip.