The Erasure of Ernest Mancoba: Africa and Europe at the Crossroads
Abstract Artist Ernest Mancoba has become, for many scholars, representative of the West’s neglect of Africa. Mancoba left his native South Africa for Paris in 1938 and later became a founding member of the European art movement CoBrA. Yet Mancoba’s relationship to CoBrA has been almost entirely erased from history. This article asks why Mancoba has been excluded from art historical texts on CoBrA, and explores three factors that may have resulted in his exclusion. First, this article argues that Mancoba was marginalised by CoBrA, whose founding ideology would have demanded that they view him as a ‘primitive’ Other. Second, it is likely that Mancoba sought to distinguish himself from the group in order to escape the colonial mentality that drove their artistic inspiration. Finally, the celebration of Mancoba as a pre‐eminent ‘South African artist’ has caused his work to be ghettoised, celebrated as uniquely ‘African’ but denied the possibility of being understood in dialogue not with other African art but...