(b Zululand, 1941). South African printmaker and textile designer. His interest in art and design was fostered when he was in Ceza Mission Hospital with tuberculosis in the early 1960s. The Swedish textile designer Peder Gowenius was teaching art and craft at the hospital as a therapy for the patients; he taught Mbatha the technique of linocut. In 1962 Mbatha began to study art at the Evangelical Lutheran Church Art and Craft Centre at Umpumulo in Natal, later moving with the centre to Rorke’s Drift, Natal. There he expressed an interest in drawing, which was discouraged because, unlike printmaking, it was not considered an economically ‘useful’ technique; instead great emphasis was placed on the translation of the narratives and oral history of rural Zululand into the design of prints for textiles and illustrations. Mbatha established a personal style of dividing the format of his prints into a series of tableaux making up a complete narrative dealing with biblical subjects, as in the Revelation of St John (c. 1965; Johannesburg, U. Witwatersrand). In his prints he employed a range of personally developed symbols that expressed the alienation and oppression experienced in contemporary black society. He graduated from Rorke’s Drift in 1964, later winning a scholarship to study at the Konst Fack Art School in Stockholm (1965–7). He returned to South Africa in 1968, teaching for a brief period at Rorke’s Drift, but in 1970 he moved back to Sweden, where he studied fine arts and social sciences at the University of Lund.

• Mbatha, Azaria
  • Shilakoe, Cyprian
  • South Africa, §IV, 2: Printmaking
  • works
    • Durban