Against All Odds (Signed by George Pemba and Sarah Hudleston)

Sarah Hudleston's work on the life and art of George Pemba is quite well known and reasonably accessible. However, here is a very special copy indeed. This is one of 26 lettered copies which were specially bound and which carry the signatures of both Pemba and Hudleston.

The volume is bound in smooth black leather with gilt lettering to the spine and a gilt facsimile signature to the front board. All edges are gilt and there is a silk marker ribbon bound in. 156pp on heavy coated paper with numerous colour illustrations. The volume is contained in a handsome black slipcase. The only flaw to note is a small ding to the top right edge of the slipcase which intrudes slightly onto the spine of the book. Please see the associated images. Otherwise the book is beautifully immaculate. The slipcase is unworn and shows no weakness anywhere to the joints. Just tiny anounts of scuffing from normal shelfwear.

Mnyaluza Pemba was born on 2 April 1912 at Hill's Kraal in Korsten, Port Elizabeth. Although art classes were not offered at the Van der Kemp Mission Primary School where he was educated, Pemba developed an early love for art which his father encouraged by buying him pencils and crayons. The young Pemba became notorious for escaping from the drudgery of schoolwork into his private world of drawing.

Pemba turned professional in the late 1940s, and entirely against the tide of the growing threat of overt racism engulfing South African society, held his first solo exhibition in East London in 1948. Pemba’s successful exhibition and the sale of his paintings, at the Eastern Province Art Association’s annual exhibition in 1965, provoked undisguised racial hostility.

In the last few years of his life, this great pioneering South African artist, who in 1944 wrote that "I do not know if ever I will become a great artist, but an artist of my own nation I surely am to be...", received belated recognition from the art world and South Africans at large. His artistic talent - reflected in the body of work he has left to posterity - and his dogged determination to express himself as a black artist despite the odds, mark him as a South African who shall be remembered and admired for all time.

The South African Government bestowed Pemba with the Order of Ikhamanga in Gold at the National Orders awards on 19 October 2004, for his pioneering and exceptional contribution to the development of the art of painting and literature.

George Pemba died 12 July 2001.