Region
Art of Southern Africa
Southern Africa — South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Namibia, Botswana and their neighbours — holds some of the oldest art in the world, from the Blombos drawing to the rock paintings of the San. It produced the gold rhinoceros of Mapungubwe and the soapstone birds of Great Zimbabwe, the painted homesteads and beadwork of the Ndebele and Zulu, Zimbabwe's modern stone sculpture and Mozambique's Malangatana, and a contemporary scene centred on Johannesburg and Cape Town.
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The oldest art
Southern Africa holds the oldest known drawing — a cross-hatched pattern on a stone flake from Blombos Cave, about 73,000 years old — and the painted slabs of Apollo 11 Cave in Namibia. The San and their ancestors painted and engraved rock shelters across the region for millennia, from the Drakensberg to the Tsodilo Hills and Twyfelfontein. See African rock art.
Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe
On the Limpopo River, the kingdom of Mapungubwe flourished in the thirteenth century; its royal graves held gold objects, including a small gold rhinoceros that has become a national treasure of South Africa. Great Zimbabwe, which flourished from about the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, built great dry-stone enclosures and carved soapstone birds that are now the emblem of Zimbabwe. Both are World Heritage Sites.
Painting, beads and clay
Ndebele women in South Africa paint the walls of their homes with bold geometric designs and make beaded aprons, capes and blankets; Esther Mahlangu took the tradition to Paris and onto a BMW. Zulu and Xhosa beadwork, and Zulu burnished black beer pots, are among the region's best-known arts. See African beadwork and African pottery.
Modern art
In apartheid South Africa, art centres offered Black artists training they were denied elsewhere: the Polly Street centre in Johannesburg, from 1949, and the Rorke's Drift art and craft centre in KwaZulu-Natal, from the early 1960s, famous for printmaking and weaving; the Namibian printmaker John Muafangejo trained there. Gerard Sekoto (1913–1993), who painted township life and left for Paris in 1947, became a founding figure of Black South African modernism.
In Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, a modern movement of stone sculpture grew from the late 1950s. In Mozambique, Malangatana painted visionary canvases and murals, and in the north the Makonde carved masks and blackwood sculpture.
Among the painters, J. H. Pierneef defined the South African landscape in ordered, geometric views; Irma Stern brought German Expressionism home in the 1920s and painted her celebrated portraits in Zanzibar and the Congo; and Vladimir Tretchikoff, scorned by critics, made Chinese Girl one of the most reproduced pictures of the century. See our list of South African artists.
Contemporary art
South Africa has one of the strongest contemporary art scenes on the continent, with Zeitz MOCAA and the Norval Foundation in Cape Town, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and fairs in both cities. Its best-known artists include William Kentridge, known for animated charcoal drawings, the painter Marlene Dumas, and the photographer and visual activist Zanele Muholi. See contemporary African art and African photography.
The country's photographers documented apartheid at great risk: Peter Magubane and Ernest Cole in the 1950s and 1960s, David Goldblatt over six decades, and Sam Nzima, whose 1976 photograph of the dying schoolboy Hector Pieterson went around the world. In the early 1990s the Bang-Bang Club covered the township violence before the 1994 election. See our list of South African photographers. Roger Ballen, born in New York and based in Johannesburg since 1982, moved from documentary portraits of rural South Africa to staged, unsettling interiors.
Music
From township jazz and kwaito to amapiano, the house music that has conquered dance floors across Africa and beyond, Southern Africa's music is as inventive as its art.