The Culture Broker

By Karen Mac Gregor

"I am a pilgrim seeking a place of peace, a place where I can sow the seeds of love and watch them grow until the time of harvest comes. The peace I seek is not that of finding cool shade and dozing off to sleep, but that peace found after hard work and having done something for others.

"I know you are quite familiar with these things, for you have walked the same path."

So wrote sculptor Michael Zondi in a letter to Jo Thorpe, founder and coordinator of the African Art Centre in Durban, in 1965. Indeed, Jo was familiar with these things.

For 30 years - during apartheid's dark days - she devoted her time and energy to deprived but talented black artists whose work she passionately felt deserved recognition. She believed totally in the value of African art and craft, and committed her life to getting it recognised as an authentic art form and a means of communication between people.

By 1990, the 'seeds' Jo Thorpe had sown had grown into an extraordinary volume of work and had transformed the lives of scores of people. She had, in the words of her friend Professor Eleanor Preston-Whyte, become:

"...both an institution and phenomenon in black art in KwaZulu-Natal. She has been responsible, firstly, for encouraging black artists to produce and experiment in a wide range of mediums and genre and. secondly, for bringing them and their work to the notice of the public. Virtually single handedly she has put Durban on the map as a centre of black artistic development..."

And Jo was at peace. Her involvement with African art and artists had, she admitted, been a 30 year 'love affair':

"But as with most love affairs, not without problems.

"There have been many exciting revelations of creative art and craft, and added to this has been my contact with the creators. Many of them have been people who, despite lacking the material things of life, I have found warm, wise and often humorous, though perhaps taxing from time to time. Artists are often romanticised, but by their very need to express something personal, they can be self centred. I do not exclude myself."

With an unerring eye for quality, Jo quietly discovered artists. She organised exhibitions of their work, gently guided their development, and protected them from commercial exploitation. And, of course, she helped provide them with a means of living or a supplement to their meagre wages.

As Duchesne Grice, for a long time a friend of Jo's and a South African Institute of Race Relations colleague, told Siza Ntshakala in a Natal Mercury interview to mark her retirement in 1991:

"although she did not regard money as a priority, she worked for every cent for the artists who brought their work to the Centre. Jo has that special sense, that eye, to sift the good and the promising from the bad and the phoney. She has helped many young and totally unknown artists to climb the ladder of success."

Buyers of art also benefited from her 'eye', as they invested in the up-and-coming artists she spotted. Jo decided to call this book It's Never Too Early to make the point that art, if it is good, will one day realise great value. It makes the same point about her: Jo was a woman before her time, whose work was profound but took decades to be properly appreciated.

Jo Thorpe was born in 1921, at Fishoek in the Cape, where she spent the early years of a life that was destined to be different. She grew up in Mooi River, completed her high school education at Pietermaritzburg Girls High School and, on leaving, abandoned the comforts of a sheltered family life to drive trucks for the South African Army during World War 11.

Thereafter she worked as a secretary at Michaelhouse school in Balgowan. and in London, before being appointed regional secretary of the South African Institute of Race Relations in Durban in 1959.

That year she became involved in a small beadwork venture which led to a deepening interest in African art and craft, and to her initiating what in 1963 became the African Art Centre.