An Interview with Ernest Mancoba
Abstract Ernest Mancoba (1904–2002) was born in Boksburg on the rim of Johannesburg. He first studied at a teachers’ training college in the diocese of Pietersburg, then taught there from 1925 to 1929. He is one of the most unrecognised painters and sculptors of the twentieth century. He began his education at the Christian school of Pietersburg, where in 1929 his Bantu Madonna created a scandal. It showed her barefoot with African features, her hand making the gesture made by Bantu girls on nearing the head of the family. This break with tradition was not limited to iconography but extended by implication to the whole Christian world‐view as upheld in the West. Seven years later the Madonna was placed in the Anglican cathedral of St Mary in Johannesburg. In 1938 he moved to Paris, was imprisoned during the war, then lived in Denmark before going back to Paris at the end of the 1940s. In 1948, with colleagues including Asger Jorn and Karel Appel, he founded the highly influential art‐group CoBrA. He died ...