What is Township Art? The Street-Level Movement That Defined a Generation

Ask a South African art dealer what township art is, and they will likely give you a confident answer. Ask a South African art historian the same question, and they will probably wince. The term is everywhere. What it means and whether it means anything useful at all is far more complicated.

Township art is at once a legitimate artistic movement, a contested label, a market category, and, for some critics, a trap. To understand it, you have to understand the places that made it possible — and the system that created those places.

The Place Before the Art

Townships were not organic communities. They were engineered ones.

The Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 formalised what segregationist policy had been building toward for decades: Black South Africans were to be kept at the edges of cities, close enough to service the white economy, distant enough to remain invisible. The matchbox houses of Soweto, identical, cramped, often without electricity or plumbing, were not designed for living. They were designed for containment.

And yet. People lived there. Children were born, raised, and educated there. Music played in shebeens. Washing hung between yards. Food cooked in tiny kitchens. The state built a geography of deprivation, and inside it, a generation of Black South Africans built a culture.

That culture produced art.

Two Founders, Two Arguments

Before township art had a name, it had two pioneers who disagreed with each other about almost everything.

John Koenakeefe Mohl (1903–1985) is widely regarded as the father of the form. He was the first Black artist to work and exhibit professionally in Sophiatown and Soweto, and the first to offer art classes inside a township. He believed Black artists had a duty to document their own community. When his colleague Gerard Sekoto prepared to leave for Paris in 1947, Mohl urged him to stay. South Africa needed artists, he argued, who could paint their people and their way of life not in the spirit of apartheid, and not in submission to it.

Sekoto left anyway. He would not return.

This small disagreement contains a larger argument that has defined township art ever since. Mohl stayed. He built something local, continuous, and community-rooted. His oils depicted Sophiatown's streets in rain and mist, early morning and late evening, observational, compassionate, quietly insistent on the humanity of the people inside those cramped streets.

Sekoto, by contrast, painted Sophiatown from inside it for only a few years before his exile, and those years produced some of the most luminous work in South African art history. His Yellow Houses, Sophiatown (1940), warm-toned and full of ordinary life, documented a community that the apartheid government would shortly destroy. He painted people not as victims of their circumstances, but as people: working, talking, praying, existing. There was no anguish performed for a white gaze. The characters simply went about their lives.

In 1947, Sekoto left. He died in Paris in 1993, having received his first major South African retrospective only in 1989. The man who most powerfully painted township life never lived inside it for long.

The Destruction That Deepened the Art

The irony of township art is that it intensified after the townships it depicted were destroyed.

Sophiatown, one of the few urban areas where Black South Africans could own land, was razed between 1955 and 1962. In the predawn hours of 9 February 1955, 2,000 armed police descended on the suburb. Residents were moved by force to the sprawling emptiness of Meadowlands, which would become Soweto. The government renamed Sophiatown "Triomf." Triumph.

District Six in Cape Town followed. So did other freehold communities. The human cost was devastating. The cultural cost was equally severe; these had been diverse, layered, self-organising spaces where music, literature, and visual art had flourished together.

What replaced them was different. Soweto's anonymity, its monotonous rows of identical houses stretching across the flat Highveld, created a new kind of disorientation. The loss of community cohesion, of familiar streets, of the multi-racial energy of Sophiatown, generated something unexpected: a yearning for self-definition. Township art in the 1960s arose partly from this yearning. It was not primarily political. It was existential. Artists were asking who they were in a landscape that had been deliberately designed to tell them they were nobody.

Durant Sihlali is one of the most significant artists of this period. Working largely in watercolour, a medium he chose partly because it was cheap, Sihlali documented Soweto's streets with meticulous attention. Hostel courtyards. Women at standpipes. Children playing between corrugated iron walls. His work was technically accomplished in ways that the gallery system consistently failed to recognise, because the gallery system was, for most of his career, not designed for him.

The Problem with the Label

Here is where the argument gets uncomfortable.

Art historian John Peffer, in his study Art and the End of Apartheid, described a significant portion of work sold under the township art label as "repetitive, sentimental, self-regarding, and limited." This is a harsh verdict, but not an unfair one. As the township art market grew, particularly from the 1970s onward, as white liberals bought work from Black artists as both aesthetic choice and political gesture, it generated demand for a specific kind of image.

Vibrant street scenes. Bold primary colours. Figures caught in motion — dancing, playing music, carrying loads. The formal vocabulary was relatively fixed, and it sold.

The market reward was real. So was the distortion. Critics began to argue that township art, consumed primarily by white buyers, had become what one analysis called the "aestheticisation of poverty" — a beautification of deprivation that allowed its audience to feel moved without being disturbed. The art said: " Look how alive these people are. The market said: And doesn't it look good on your wall.

David Koloane, one of South Africa's most significant artist-curators and a co-founder of the Bag Factory Studios in Johannesburg, pushed back on this critique. For Koloane, township art represented something that the label's critics were missing: collective memory. It was not propaganda. It was not naivety. It was the record of an experience that the apartheid state was simultaneously producing and trying to erase. To dismiss it as sentimental was to apply the aesthetic criteria of the gallery world to art that had not been made for galleries.

Both arguments have force. They are not fully reconcilable.

What the Artists Had and Didn't

One thing that shaped township art as a style was not vision. It was scarcity.

Black artists in apartheid South Africa had severely restricted access to formal training. The Polly Street Art Centre in Johannesburg, opened in the 1950s under Cecil Skotnes and Sydney Khumalo, offered one of the few spaces where Black artists could develop their practice. However, its curriculum has also been criticised for reinforcing a primitivist aesthetic. Later, institutions like FUBA (Federated Union of Black Artists) and Funda Community College opened more genuinely self-directed pathways.

Oil paint was expensive. Canvas was expensive. So artists used what they had: watercolour, ink, cardboard, and board. Necessity drove invention. Sihlali's watercolours are not timid sketches. They are fully realised works in a medium he mastered under constraint.

The same dynamic shaped the subject matter. Artists painted what surrounded them, because that was what they could observe directly. The township was the studio and the subject at once.

After Apartheid: What the Label Became

By 1994, the township art market was well established. With democracy came a complicated inheritance.

On one hand, the art began receiving the institutional recognition it had long been denied. Works by Sekoto, Sihlali, and others entered major public collections. Retrospectives followed. Auction prices rose. On the other hand, the label "township art"  never hardened into something commercial. By the 2000s, it was applied indiscriminately to decorative work sold in tourist markets across the country: bright, busy, technically modest images designed for export. These bore little relationship to the serious, complex practice of the movement's founders.

This is the final irony. Township art, born from the need to assert Black dignity in the face of enforced dehumanisation, became a brand. A gift shop category. A postcard.

The artists who defined it, Mohl teaching painting in Sophiatown, Sekoto capturing a street he would never see again, Sihlali mapping Soweto in watercolour, were doing something much harder. They were insisting, under enormous pressure, that their lives were worth painting. That their streets had light worth catching. That the people inside those matchbox houses were not the sum of the government's verdict on them.

That insistence is what township art, at its best, actually was. Not a style. Not a palette. A refusal to disappear.