The humanistic movement is poorly represented in South Africa. Minor excursions into the black urban environment as experiential place make almost exclusive use of literary material. Township art offers a wealth of images to extend this initiative into the visual realm and to deepen the local humanistic project in general. Its value lies partly in its documentation of black urban life and activities from an insideŕs perspective. More importantly, the evolution of township art from a medium for descriptive socialrealism towards an expression of urban consciousness and an ethos of resistance prefigures and commends a more socially relevant geographical investigation of indigenous qualitative material.

Township Art refers to the movement that blossomed in the black townships during the 1960s. Correctly, therefore it applies only to that historical phenomenon and the works of art that issued from it. Township art became a kind of hothouse, in which a generation of young black artists ripened. The main identifying features of of Township Art were its subject matter and its source. The artists involved were mainly residents of the black townships on the outskirts of Johannesburg; most students of the Polly Street Art Center; and their primary theme was the everyday life of the community in which they lived. Township Art was essentially concerned with the human situation. Conceived amid the the daily angst and hardship of existence in a deprived society, it testified to the spiritual resilience of the artists. Johannesburg's Sophiatown and Cape Town's District Six communities and culture was forcibly removed and dispersed. The anonymity of life in the sprawling Soweto, the loss of community cohesiveness and the feelings of displacement that followed the destruction of Sophiatown gave rise to a yearning for self-affirmation and to give a definition to a collective identity. It is therefore not surprising that Township Art coincided with the dawning of Black Consciousness among the townships residents. Yet, the wave of self-expressive energy that surged out of Soweto in the sixties was not motivated by political agendas. Though their records of daily life were often permeated by subjective emotions, there was little ideological content in the earlier work.