Notes

Starting in the 1930s, Irma Stern produced a remarkable archive of paintings recording the widespread existence of the Islamic faith in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2021, artist Karel Nel made this important subject the focus of an exhibition at Norval Foundation in Cape Town. Irma Stern: The Zanzibari Years gathered portraits related to Stern’s two visits to the Indian Ocean island of Zanzibar in 1939 and 1945. Nel provided further context by including earlier portraits of Muslim subjects produced by Stern in Cape Town and Dakar. The earliest work in the exhibition was dated 1930.

There is a direct human link between Cape Town and Zanzibar. Some of Cape Town’s Muslim population trace their ancestry back to East Africa, rather than the East Indies. Having previously detailed the religious and marital rituals of Cape Town’s Muslims, Zanzibar was a logical destination for Stern given her blossoming orientalist tendencies. But Stern’s reasons for travelling to Zanzibar in 1939 are not as easily summarised. Hostilities in Europe also played a part: they summarily ended Stern’s nearly annual steamship journeys north to exhibit and paint.

In 1946, Stern, always an unreliable narrator and mythmaker, provided a wholly different account of her motivations for visiting Zanzibar. One morning in 1938, Stern told a journalist, she was strolling down a windswept Cape Town boulevard, thinking about the stories of an elderly Arab cook from Zanzibar who had been employed by her moneyed family. ‘For some unaccountable reason I remembered that morning one of his favourite phrases: ‘Miss Irma, you and I used to pick vanilla in Zanzibar’.’¹ Stern, who had journeyed to Europe via Zanzibar as a child, promptly walked into a travel agency and asked, ‘Can I motor to Zanzibar?’ No was the response, so she booked passage aboard a steamship.

Stern’s itinerary from her 1939 trip to Zanzibar included a visit to one of the island’s madrasa. These Islamic religious schools had been a facet of the island’s social and cultural life since the 1830s.² Stern very likely produced this tranquil study of learning and devotion based on a charcoal drawing depicting a boy and girl in similar seated pose. Stern’s presence in the madrasa was only briefly tolerated, a fact Stern related to a Sunday Times journalist: ‘The mothers of the pupils wanted to kill her as they were firmly convinced that if she painted the children, she would be stealing their souls.’³

In February 1940, Stern exhibited her new work at Martin Melck House, Cape Town. Both the city’s news dailies remarked on her work’s vitality. This lot was advertised as ‘Reading the Koran’ in the catalogue and offered at 45 guineas (about £7,200 today, adjusted for inflation). Lilian Isaacson, a wellknown inter-war personality and art collector who taught at Cape Town’s College of Music, acquired the work. This lot did not travel to Johannesburg for Stern’s December 1940 exhibition with Gainsborough Galleries, nor did it appear in Nel’s 2021 exhibition. This is less an oversight than a reminder that Stern’s remarkable archive, much of it held in private collections, remains unmapped. Major works such as this are still being recovered.

^1. H.T. Lawless (1946) Spotlight: In the Limelight, Cape Times, 15 March.
^2. – (1940) Irma Stern Exhibition in City, Sunday Times, 8 December.
^3. Salma Maoulidi (2011) Between Law and Culture: Contemplating Rights for Women in Zanzibar, in Dorothy L. Hodgson (ed), Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, pages 36 to 37.

Provenance

Estate Late Lilian Isaacson.

Stephan Welz & Co in Association with Sotheby’s, Johannesburg, 8 November 1999, lot 483.

Private Collection.

Exhibited

South African National Gallery, Rembrandt Van Rijn Art Foundation, Pretoria Art Museum, Pretoria, Cape Town, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, Homage to Irma Stern 1894–1966, 1968, catalogue no. 17.

Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, Irma Stern: Expressions of a Journey, 25 September to 29 November 2003, illustrated in colour on page 102 with the title ‘Children Writing’.