I could be happy with you, if you could be happy with me: The playful inventions of a visionary headrest artist from the Msinga region of KwaZulu-Natal

In the early 1970s, a migrant labourer from the Msinga district in present-day KwaZulu-Natal assembled several highly idiosyncratic headrests using a variety of industrial off-cuts while working somewhere in the greater Johannesburg area. Taking them home as wedding gifts, or selling them to other rural migrants from the same region, he probably lived in one of the single-men’s hostels erected on the city’s southern border, returning home every year during the Christmas recess. At least six of these headrests have survived. The contexts of their creation—labour migration, of a deep sense of nostalgia, and of an unwavering commitment to cultural continuity—are all critically important to making sense of his remarkable, indeed unique, creative energy. But, as I also argue, his work was shaped—significantly, if somewhat elusively—by the realities of rural dispossession that in the Msinga area dates back to the 19^thcentury when, in 1849, the colonial government in Natal established one of its first ‘native’ reserves in the area. Ultimately, though, the powers of invention evidenced in this artist’s work attest to the fact that he developed playful ways of transcending the challenging realities of daily life, in some cases producing defiantly escapist visualisations of well-being that warrant comparison to the initimatist preoccupations of early 20^thcentury European artists like Bonnard and Matisse, both of whom produced intensely lyrical composition in the face of two devastating world wars.