DISCOVERING MY TRUE IDENTITY

40 pages, 12 colour plates, numerous black and white and colour illustrations, pictorial card wrappers (paperback), a very good copy.

Durant Basi Sihlali was born on 5 March 1935 in an industrial area, Germiston, Transvaal, now known as Gauteng Province. Due to harsh living conditions, his parents sent him to live with his paternal grandparents in a rural village called Cala in the Eastern Cape. The wall murals Xhosa women painted captivated Sihlali, who tried to imitate the designs but was chastised for engaging in what was considered a women’s job. He resorted to copying newspaper cartoons onto toilet rolls, the only paper available.

He studied with Cecil Skotnes at the Polly Street Recreation Centre from 1953 to 1958. He married his wife, Annah Mokholo Moloi, in 1958, and had five children with her.

As a student of Skotnes, Sihlali departed from the instructor’s approach of drawing on imaginative interpretations of traditional African sculptural forms. Instead, Sihlali worked from observations of the world around him.

He won a scholarship from the French government in 1985 which allowed him to study at the Villa Arson Art School in Nice. After travelling to Europe and taking part in conferences such as Triangle in the United States of America (USA) and Thupelo in Johannesburg, he incorporated more abstraction as well as themes from graffiti, Ndebele mural designs and cartoons.

He won awards for his painting, sculptures and graphics in the 1970s and 1980s, and completed commissions for churches and private companies in the same period. Collections of his work include those at the University of Fort Hare, the Africana Museum in Johannesburg, the National Museum of Botswana and several South African corporate institutions. http://www.sahistory.org.za/content/durant-basi-sihlali