The study of the histories of graphic design in South Africa shows how graphic design has contributed to upholding and contesting power in the country, says UJ’s Professor Deirdre Pretorius.
Though much of the examples of historical graphic designs remains out of the public eye, she has made it her goal to continue exploring this rich heritage.
Prof Pretorius was speaking at her inauguration on Wednesday 13 May. She is a Professor and researcher in the UJ Department of Graphic Design, in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture.
Her interest took shape in the mid-1990s when, as a graphic design lecturer, she increasingly started to wonder about South African graphic design history, and why it seemed to not have been written about.
The standard textbooks were no help. The graphic design history she encountered seemed to deal mostly with design produced in Europe and North America, she says. “Africa appeared only in relation to Ancient Egypt’s contribution to the invention of writing and reference to South Africa was almost entirely absent.”
She started asking herself: “What did historical South African graphic designs look like, who made it and what roles did it play in South African society?”
One of the artefacts she discussed, drawn from her PhD studies, was the front page of Umsebenzi, the newspaper of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), dated 22 December 1934. The layout has a cartoon of a big black man kicking a tiny white Jan Smuts into the air beneath the demand “GET OUT!”
The cartoon was roughly cut from a lino block by Edward (Eddie) Roux, a Cambridge graduate with a doctorate in botany who taught himself the linocut technique because it was an easy and cheap way of printing. Roux produced the CPSA newspaper as a one-man-show and even sold it on Saturdays at the Cape Town train station.
“If I wanted to understand the visual propaganda produced by the CPSA, I had to find it and document it,” says Prof Pretorius. “I had to work through large amounts of microfiche and boxes of materials in archive reading rooms and from such primary visual sources write my account of a South African visual tradition that had been almost entirely ignored.”
Across twenty years, six thematic clusters have emerged in her exploration of hidden graphic design histories: the printed graphic propaganda of the CPSA; graphic design for the Union Government; resistance and protest graphics; surveys and historiography; visual identity, logos and elections; and gender and design.
A single thread runs through all of them. “My studies have shown the constant relationship between graphic design and power. Across every time period and body of work that I have studied, graphic design has been implicated in structures of power, sometimes in service of those structures and very often in opposition to them,” Prof Pretorius says.
Her 2015 article in the Journal of Design History widened the lens, finding that the development of the media, advertising, graphic design education, and the graphic design profession in South Africa had been closely implicated in settler colonialism. Meanwhile, a counter-tradition emerged in a diverse black press that served as a platform for protest.
When she turned to the post-apartheid period, the findings were sobering. Her analysis of 2013 award-winning work showed little engagement with the elimination of stereotypes, the establishment of gender equality, or a meaningful grappling with language and cultural diversity.
Archives make it possible to delve into this rich vein of South African history. Prof Pretorius is currently part of a transnational project, Graphic Design Histories for Creative Dissent, producing a White Paper on preserving graphic design materials.
“Preserving protest materials is itself a democratic act,” she says, “one that sustains cultural memory and enables future generations to better understand histories of struggle for democracy.”
The research feeds directly into her teaching. The Design Studies modules she developed, she says, were created to address the absence of South African content in what design students were being taught.
Much remains to be done, particularly on the individuals who contributed to South African graphic design. A significant figure is Muziwakhe Nhlabatsi, also known as Mzwakhe, who created illustrations for the journal Staffrider, as well as for the comic Down Second Avenue, inspired by the autobiography written by Es’kia Mphahlele. Also figures like Patricia (Trish) de Villiers who was involved in the collective making of posters for organisations such as COSATU and the United Democratic Front.
This history is really worth finding in those archives, says Prof Pretorius. “Graphic design in South Africa has been doing something consequential. It shows how power has operated through printed images and words, how identity is constructed and contested through visual culture”.
