TAMAR GARB  I only became an active feminist when I came to London. I had read Simone de Beauvoir as a teenager and was aware of women’s issues, but hadn’t found a way to integrate my understanding of art practice and history from a feminist perspective. In South Africa we lived in the context of a fascist regime, which had a repressive relationship to cultural and political expression. It was a very coercive and intimidating environment. The Michaelis School of Art was, for me, an oasis of critical thinking and political awareness in a segregated university system, draconian in the way it policed thinking and the curriculum. But the art history we were exposed to was exclusively Eurocentric – from ‘Plato to NATO’ as we came to understand it. The art practices we were taught to admire stemmed from Greenbergian modernism, that is, an American-centred attachment to abstraction and the idea of a progressive ‘evolution’ of art from the Renaissance invention of space through to the apparent autonomy of painting. But there was also an awareness of the relationship of art and politics in Weimar Germany and Constructivism in the Soviet Union, the classic 20th century movements that had a political underbelly. The disconnect was in relation to indigenous histories, practices and African-based cosmologies and epistemologies that were under our nose, but to which we were not exposed. There was only a tiny number of students of colour in the ‘whites-only’ university. You had to get special permission from the Provincial Council if you were classified as ‘coloured’, and you had to show that the subject you wanted to study was not offered in ‘coloured universities’. For Black students, it was impossible. I use the word ‘coloured’ because that was the invented South African term for people of ‘mixed-race’. And it operated as an actual, identifiable group identity, fixed and patrolled by law. For the most part, the art school was a whites-only environment, invested in Eurocentric models of thinking and making. I had a strong sense that women could do whatever they wanted to do, but I didn’t have an understanding of how a feminist approach to art practice or history could be expressed. That connection only came for me after I arrived in London in 1979. This was during the heyday of an emerging critical discourse that challenged conservative, modernist and connoisseur models of art history. And I soon became very politicised as a feminist.

TG  I need to inject a little bit of biographical information here. On the one hand, many privileged white students in South Africa, who had studied in an anglophone environment, wanted to do graduate work abroad, in the US or in the UK. That was the pervasive ambition, at least. But my personal story was a bit more fraught, in that of the three students of colour at the art school during my studies, one became, illegally, my boyfriend. He is now my husband of some 43 years. I met him when we were students at a time when the Immorality Act, which was the law that prohibited cross-racial relationships, was a vicious and punitive legal structure. The repercussions of being caught with someone from across the colour bar were huge. It usually ended up in imprisonment for Black or ‘coloured’ people. I came from a fairly privileged, middle-class white background. My parents could probably have hired a lawyer to get me out. But my husband came from a poor background without resources. He would have ended up in prison. So, my politicisation and my personal life were deeply entwined. For two years, as an undergraduate, I was in a clandestine relationship that involved hiding. You couldn’t sit in a restaurant, go on a bus, or be seen in public with a person of colour. Everything was segregated. It was a relationship conducted in secret. We let very few people into that secret because it was so dangerous. Our parents and families didn’t know. If I were to visit where my husband lived, the Cape Flats, where ‘coloureds’ were forcibly removed to, I would drive in my parents’ car and he would hitch on the highway and pretend I just picked him up. It was a very tyrannical environment, full of fear. When I left South Africa, there was no knowledge of how he was going to get out, and whether he could get a passport. He managed to come six months later. But I knew that I was never going back. So, coming to London was an amputation from the life I had known, and from my family to which I was very connected. That was a big break. I had to invent a new life, a new self and a new politics in London. Feminism became a lifeline. I gradually found a new world in exile because, from 1979 to 1992, we couldn’t go back together to South Africa. I had to invent an arena of interest and expertise that could heal me from this amputation, and I became obsessed with French culture and feminism. I only started learning French as an MA student, and I became involved in what was called the ‘new art history’. I was so ashamed to be a white South African that I didn’t want to be recognised, and I certainly didn’t want to think about South African culture. I hadn’t yet come to the realisation that what had been repressed in my education were the rich traditions of resistance art and African-based thinking, and scholarship and cultural production. Growing up as a white South African meant that Africa was completely excluded to you. London felt closer to Cape Town than Luanda. Airplanes from Cape Town to London were not allowed to fly over the continent. It was only much later that I learned to see South Africa as an African space, but that had to wait until the end of apartheid in 1994. The 1980s and 90s were the period when I became a feminist art historian and critic. I was involved in women’s art projects, interviewing, writing and talking with contemporary women artists, and accompanying that with this incredible journey of the recovery of women’s art practices from the past, which had been so repressed in our history.