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Cormick, Dina : Bernard Gcwensa and Ruben Xulu: Christian Artists of Natal

Academica, 1993

ISBN 0868744573

the wraps have been plasticised which is lifting a little on the edges. internally the book is clean and well bound with no inscriptions.. Book Condition: Very Good. Binding: Paperback

First Edition.

Cormick, Dina : Bernard Gcwensa and Ruben Xulu: Christian artists of Natal

(Pretoria: Academica, 1993) 0868744573

ISBN 0868744573

242 x 170 mm; laminated pictorial wrappers; pp. xii + 138; profusely illustrated with photographs of the sculptors and their works. Fine condition. ''The telephone call came in the morning. "Dina, our Ruben is no more!" It was 14 December 1985. Ruben Xulu had been stabbed to death during the night of Friday, 13 December (at about eleven) on the street leading up to Mariannhill Convent. There had apparently been no motive for the murder. It was a "hit and run" attack. The following Friday I went with the funeral procession which carried Ruben's body back to his family and home at Hlabisa. It was my first visit to Hlabisa, a small settlement midway on the road to Nongoma from Mtubatuba in Northern KwaZulu, some 200 kilometres up the north coast from Durban. I was immediately impressed by the extent of the art at the Roman Catholic Mission of the Good Shepherd at Hlabisa. They told me it was all the work of Bernard Gcwensa and Ruben Xulu, and that Bernard had died of tuberculosis only a few months earlier. That night we spoke of the two artists of Hlabisa, and I learnt that it was Bernard who had taught Ruben how to carve. On the return trip to Durban we visited several of the mission churches in which sculptures by Bernard and Ruben had been placed. One of the churches was badly in need of repair and the sculptures had suffered from neglect, but the indifferent attitude of many of the local priests to the works of art was even more distressing. It was then that the thought struck me how so much of the work was unknown and unacknowledged, and that it was imperative that the contribution by both these artists ... be recorded for posterity.'

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