Notes

Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania, became a protectorate of the British Empire in 1890. In the decades up until 1963, when it reverted back to the Sultan of Zanzibar, Zanzibar featured prominently in the work of a number of important South African painters, among them Freida Lock,
JH Pierneef, Alexis Preller, Frans Oerder and Irma Stern. British-born Lock, who grew up on a farm near Stellenbosch, was a founder member of the New Group in 1938, an association of progressive artists united, as Gregoire Boonzaier noted at the time, “against junk”.¹ Lock spent 18 months between 1947 and 1949 travelling in Zanzibar and Lamu, an island chain off the Kenyan coast. Her work from this period included portraits of Arab traders, marine landscapes and street scenes. This is one of two oil studies from 1947 in which Lock juxtaposes scenes of natural splendour and fecundity (signified in the lush vertical palms) with signs of human habitation and the passage of time (the homesteads and cemetery). Lock exhibited her work in Cape Town shortly after her return and also spoke publicly. Artist Johannes Meintjes recorded in a diary entry how her “descriptions and narration” of her travels at one such talk created an urge among those present immediately to follow in her footsteps.²

1  ‘New Group of Artists, united against junk’,  Cape Times, 16 February 1938, page 11.

2 Johannes Meintjes. (1961 ) Die Dagboek van Johannes Meintjies, Molteno: Bamboesberg-uitgewers, page 67.