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Vivian Bickford-Smith, Daniel Magaziner. The Art of Life in South Africa., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 182–184, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.182
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The Art of Life in South Africa is the kind of thought-provoking institutional history that fits Charles Joyner’s description of microhistory as a genre able to pose “large questions in small places” (Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture [1999], 1). Daniel Magaziner’s “small place” is a school for training specialist African “arts and crafts” teachers that was financed by the South African government’s Department of Bantu Education between the 1950s and 1980s. This school was part of a larger educational complex located at Indaleni, originally a nineteenth-century Methodist missionary settlement, some thirty miles southwest of Pietermaritzburg in Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal). Drawing on a variety of written, visual, and oral sources (at their heart are several wonderful collections located at the Killie Campbell Africana Library in Durban), Magaziner tells us much that is fascinating about both teachers and students. He explains who they were, where they came from (in the case of students, around 1,000 men and women in all, deliberately selected from many parts of South Africa), their ideas, their experiences, and, of course, the art that was produced.
