When John Muafangejo was 12 years old, his father died and his mother moved their family to Epinga, an Anglican mission village on Namibia’s northern border. The village had an art school, called Rorke’s Drift, where Muafangejo took his first art classes. But this print, like many of Muafangejo’s works, is both biographical and deeply political...
Natal Where Art School Is captures the geographical features of Rorke’s Drift, a crossing point in the Buffalo River, and the vitality of daily life in the area. Muafangejo’s use of text makes clear the historic divide between Natal, the province with the most forced removals of black people in South Africa during apartheid, and Zululand, the former territory of the Zulu Kingdom, renamed KwaZulu and designated for black occupation by the apartheid government.
