The New African Movement and the Artists It Inspired

Abstract

This chapter explores the advent of the New African Movement in South Africa during the early twentieth century and creative legacies it inspired. The author argues that the transformative agenda and planetary ideals of the New African Movement intellectuals were an early manifestation of Post-African rationality. The New African Movement intellectuals of the early twentieth century, made up of the first generation of Western-educated clergy, teachers, lawyers, and professionals, believed that the incorporation of Africa into the global capitalist paradigm was a unique historical opening for a renewed Africa to emerge from the ashes of colonization. Unsurprisingly, the teachings of the New African Movement had a profound influence on the art and politics of the formative modern Black artists in South Africa, who attempted to imagine and image this “new Africa” in and through their art. The chapter revisits this formative and golden generation of modern Black art in South Africa, and reframes it as early incarnations of a de-Africanized Post-African art. This proto-Post-African art reimagined the African as a citizen of the world, and the images sought to cultivate the modern renaissance of Africa.