Background
George Milwa Mnyaluza Pemba was born in 1912, in Hill's Kraal, Korsten, Port Elizabeth. He was the fifth child of Rebecca and Titus Pemba.
George Milwa Mnyaluza Pemba was born in 1912, in Hill's Kraal, Korsten, Port Elizabeth. He was the fifth child of Rebecca and Titus Pemba.
George attended the Van der Kemp Mission Primary School and Paterson Secondary School on a Grey scholarship, which he won, enabling him to receive post primary education. Like most schools for black pupils in South African, neither offered art as a part of its syllabus but as a child he was encouraged by his father to draw and paint, and so began painting murals on the family house and producing portraits from photographs of his father's employers.
As a 16 year old pupil, he entered and won an art competition at a local agricultural show. Pemba began to expand his repertoire to include drawing portraits based on photographs, for which he earned pocket-money. In 1931 he obtained a Teacher's Diploma at the Lovedale Training College in the Eastern Cape.
George continued to pursue his art successfully over the next six decades. His exquisite paintings and drawings slowly began to attract a wider audience and led to his exhibiting more widely. After his works were accepted for an exhibition of “Negro and Bantu Art” in Port Elizabeth in the late 1930s, Pemba exhibited regularly (until shortly before his death in 2001).
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.
Despite indifference from the mainstream art world which regarded his work at best as colloquial, and antipathy from the apartheid government which, given the pre-ordained prescriptions of the Apartheid ideology, saw his profession as inappropriate for a ‘native’, Pemba persevered with his work thanks to the support of a few patrons, and his wife Eunice who helped to supplement his income by running a ‘house shop’.
In the last few years of his life, this great pioneering South African artist received belated recognition from the art world and South Africans at large. Pemba, was also a writer of note, and penned at least two plays known to have been staged. On July 12, 2001, Pemba died at his home in New Brighton, Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan Municipality in the Eastern Cape.
Adam
At the clinic
Eviction: Mother and Child
Homeless
I had so many
Inkanyamba
In the mood
Lesotho landscape
No Work
Paying tribute to the chief
Police raid
Portrait of a man in traditional dress
Portrait of Sol Plaatje
Terror
The activist
Traditional Xhosa woman
Xhosa mother and child
Young woman
Zulu woman – unfinished symphony
Quotations: “I do not know if ever I will become a great artist, but an artist of my own nation I surely am to be”.
George was married to Eunice Nombeka and they had eight children before she died after 47 years of marriage.