Written and illustrated by Gerard Sekoto (Jacana)
Gerard Sekoto, the ground-breaking South African artist, is likely to become known to a new generation through this children’s book, written and illustrated 30 years ago and now published for the first time.
Sekoto’s life story follows the trajectory of many talented South Africans who were born black into a white-run society, ended up leaving the country of their birth for voluntary exile, and never achieved what they should have in their lifetimes.
Yet his work has been exhibited in France, Sweden, the US, Italy and of course South Africa. And his painted records of life in places like Sophiatown, District Six and Eastwood in Pretoria are now hung all over the world, reflecting a clear-eyed yet affectionate view of the places he lived.
Shorty & Billy Boy was produced in 1973, possibly as a gift for the children of friends. The Gerard Sekoto Foundation, which has collaborated in the publication of the book, says it is perhaps a sentimental souvenir of his own childhood. It tells the story of two jaunty “dog-chaps” who live in a pretty village called Grasslands, and who survive by theft – stealing fruit and eggs and money.
Eventually, they are driven out of town to a much less pleasant place called Porcupine Hills, which immediately experiences something of a crime wave.
But the people of Porcupine Hills are having none of it, and police set up an ambush. A night or two later Shorty and Billy Boy are found stealing eggs in a fowl run, and while Shorty gets away, Billy Boy is arrested and jailed. The night before his release he dreams that the people of Grasslands have forgiven him, and he goes home determined to apologise and atone – and get Shorty to do so too.
Sekoto was born in December 1913 at the Lutheran Mission Station in Botshabelo in the Eastern Transvaal, now Mpumalanga.
All his life music and art were his strength and support. Music was part of his early life at the mission station, but art, even for a well-educated black boy of the time, was not part of the curriculum, and he taught himself to draw and paint.
He trained as a school teacher and taught for a while, but in 1939, after winning second prize in a major art competition, he went to Joburg in a bid to become a full-time artist. There he made contacts in the art world, especially with the artist Judith Gluckman, who taught him how to use oils.
That same year he had his first exhibition, which was a sell-out and received enthusiastic press reviews, and in 1940 one of his paintings was bought by the Johannesburg Art Gallery, the first picture painted by a black artist to enter a South African museum collection.
He left South Africa for France in 1947 and while the quality of his work was recognised and admired, he had to fall back on his musical skills to make a living, often playing his own compositions in night clubs on Paris’s Left Bank. A CD of some of these songs was released by the Gerard Sekoto Foundation in 2003 called The Blue Heads: Introducing the Songs of Sekoto.
The Gerard Sekoto Foundation, which promotes Sekoto’s legacy for all South Africans, says after a visit to Senegal in the 1960s, he adopted a more Africanist approach to his work.
After his death in France in 1993 the foundation was established to persuade the French government to waive taxes owed by the estate. Eventually all his papers and art were returned to South Africa, and the collection is housed in the Iziko SA National Gallery in the Gardens. There is also a collection of his work at the Wits Art Museum.
* All royalties from the sale of Shorty & Billy Boy will go to the foundation.