Painter and sculptor · South Africa
Dumile Feni
Dumile Feni (1942–1991) was a South African artist, known as "the Goya of the townships", whose drawings and sculptures of tormented, distorted bodies are among the most powerful images of life under apartheid. His large charcoal drawing African Guernica (1967) is a landmark of South African art. He left the country in 1968 and died in exile in New York in 1991.
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Dumile Feni was born on 21 May 1942 in Worcester, in the Western Cape, though sources give his birth year as anywhere from 1939 to 1942. He moved to Johannesburg in the early 1950s and was in hospital with tuberculosis in 1963, where he met the artist Ephraim Ngatane. He trained at the Jubilee Art Centre under Cecil Skotnes and became known in the 1960s for monumental drawings in ballpoint pen and charcoal: figures with swollen limbs and twisted bodies, mothers and children, prisoners and the dead, that express the pain of the pass laws, forced removals and police violence.
His best-known work, African Guernica (1967), a huge charcoal drawing, takes its name from Picasso's painting of the bombing of Guernica and translates its horror to South Africa. Critics called him "the Goya of the townships", a name given to him around 1965, when a Johannesburg gallery began to support him; Gallery 101 gave him his first solo show in 1966. The drawing, in charcoal and pencil on paper and measuring 218 by 226 centimetres, was first shown at Gallery 101 in Johannesburg in 1967 and is held by the University of Fort Hare's National Heritage and Cultural Studies Centre. It had never travelled abroad until the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid showed it beside Picasso's Guernica from 25 March to 22 September 2026, in an exhibition curated by Tamar Garb. Feni was selected for the São Paulo Biennial in 1967.
In 1968 Feni left South Africa for London, and later moved to New York, where he continued to draw and sculpt; one source says he lived in Manhattan from 1978 and earned his living from record covers, book covers and murals. He died in New York on 16 October 1991, aged 49, a year after Nelson Mandela's release, without having returned home, and is buried in Lenasia. Chabani Manganyi's biography The Beauty of the Line (2012) covers his life in Johannesburg, London and New York. See our lists of South African painters and South African sculptors.
