“It’s almost like he knew.” Art dealer Choni Gavin’s words echoed eerily at Johannesburg’s Studio Nxumalo gallery. Just days before, on 6 October 2022, the artist on show in the Keyes Art Mile building had opened what was arguably the largest solo exhibition of his work; a career highlight. Titled Man of the Hour, the show’s launch had seen the proverbial artist of the moment, Samson Mnisi, making art in situ as bassist Banda Banda played to an enraptured audience. On the walls, a portion of Mnisi’s abstract expressionist works were on display. 

A day after the heady revelry, Mnisi reportedly died of a heart attack in his studio-come-home at the Asisebenze Art Atelier building on Plein Street in Johannesburg’s city centre. His son, Refiloe Mnisi, who is also an artist, was with him when he passed away.

Mysticism is often attached to artists of whatever stature when they die. Now, some weeks after, as the soil settles on the artist’s grave and Johannesburg is drenched with the first storms of its rainy season, it is timely to reflect on the life and work of the visual artist nicknamed “Rainmaker”.

Man of the Hour greets the viewer with a textured gold canvas, in portrait, split lengthways by a blue, meandering line reminiscent of a river. To the line’s left, a thick black bar of paint drips below a green line; a white v-shape points downward and is attached, by dotted line, to a pattern of six short, red lines. To the right of the canvas, a thick, red, diagonal bar is a distorted mirror of the black one to the left of the canvas; a cluster of blue, green and brown circles congregate below a filled-in red triangle. These details, sometimes clustered, at other times scattered, give the artwork an overall impression of being a map of sorts, one half of it in conversation with the other.

Similarly split in two, the seven works to the viewer’s right are a display of Mnisi’s masterful use of colour and symmetry alongside organic shape, pattern and the interruption thereof. The effect is one of repellent awe. To the viewer’s left, a series of muted works use red, black, pink, grey and aqua on textured black canvases to hypnotically draw the viewer in. 

Friends, collaborators, acquaintances and critics of Mnisi agree on his having lived in at least two realms: the physical and spiritual. He occupied both with his truest self. “Mnisi sings our hidden lives into existence, thrusts us deeper into ourselves,” writes academic and critic Ashraf Jamal, who co-curated Man of the Hour, “while also thrusting us outward into the cosmos. He is unbounded, calculatedly ungoverned, as mortal as he is beyond the pale – free.” 

Mnisi asserted his pursuit to free himself from intellectual approaches to his art. “It’s not art for art’s sake, but it’s also not for any sake either,” he told writer Nolan Stevens for the Man of the Hour catalogue. “For a long time I have been removing brain out of my work. For a long time I thought about stuff, but I’m trying not to think. I’m trying to remove thought from my work.”

His immersion in the spiritual realms preceded his artistic practice. Mnisi’s father was Swati. In 1971, Mnisi’s mother had a veiled birth (or en caul birth), the rare occurrence of a baby coming out enwrapped by the still intact amniotic sac. This would have been a sign of his having a spiritual gift, or a “light” in that culture. A number of the women Mnisi would have considered grandmothers were sangomas, African traditional health and spiritual practitioners. He spent extended periods of time visiting with these women who lived in Mpumalanga, forming bonds that would inform his own spirituality. 

The channelling of his beliefs and ideas took shape during his tutelage in visual art, sculpture and printmaking at what was known as the Federated Union of Black Artists (Fuba) School of Drama and Visual Arts. His time at Fuba was also integral in forming Mnisi’s longstanding marriage to Zanele Mazibuko and in stabilising his then tumultuous family life. 

After working at Raven Press as an administrator, Mazibuko had been influenced to take up Drama at Fuba by the 1980s US TV show Fame. It soon became apparent to Mazibuko, her lecturers and the school’s principal that her interest in acting would not be a sustained one. She brought her administrative experience to bear on the independent art school as a Fuba member of staff after abandoning dramaturgy for journalism. 

The couple met when Mnisi and other Fuba students were enlisted to donate artworks to the German Embassy in South Africa regularly over a period of time. In exchange, the Embassy would help to fund Fuba’s operations. “Samson was interested in me and I wasn’t,” Mazibuko remembers. “I wanted to draw a line that I wasn’t going to be involved with students.” 

Enraged at his unrequited interest, Mnisi left Fuba and stopped contributing to the art-for-funding exchange with the German Embassy. Mazibuko says that at the time, “His mother and father had just gone through a divorce and it was hard living at his (family) home in White City, Soweto. Instead he lived somewhere in town, in different buildings. He was basically a street person but a very talented and intelligent artist.”

Meanwhile, funds were drying up at Fuba and the art school was struggling to pay salaries, including Mazibuko’s. “I was begged by the school principal to talk to Samson (for) him to come back, because they were aware that he liked me. I did that, Samson came back and we started getting paid. Samson came back when I promised him that we will try and be an item. I liked him, it’s just that I wasn’t really ready.”

The couple bought the first of three flats that they would own together in 1993. In 1994, their first son Refiloe was born. Mnisi held his first solo exhibition in Market Theatre Gallery in 1996, the same year that the couple’s second child, Lebogang was born. “Samson was present in the lives of his children,” Mazibuko says. “He was there when I gave birth to all of my four children. No matter what happened, he was there, with a group of his friends: fellow artists.”

Tragically, their second born passed away in 2002 when Mazibuko was pregnant with twins Dineo and Lesego, who are now 20 years old. 

For over two decades, Mazibuko and Mnisi lived and worked together making contributions to the South African cultural landscape across visual art, music, live events, film and poetry. Their company, Blackagemedia, has project managed and facilitated cultural events and cross cultural exchanges featuring artists and institutions in the echelons of Hugh Masekela and Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Art (MoCADA) in New York, US. 

From 2005–2007, they owned the One Drop restaurant in the cosmopolitan Yeoville suburb adjacent to Johannesburg’s CBD. There, they helped to launch the careers of musicians Sliq Angel, MXO, Pitch Black Afro, Martin Machapa and others through their weekly open mic session called Monday Blues. Mnisi, who produced music, would go on to record songs with these artists as well as recording albums with vocalist Dorothy Masuku, her son Stanley Masuku and South African poetry doyen Lesego Rampolokeng.

None of the works exhibited in Man of the Hour are titled, signed or dated. Gavin, who is a co-founder and managing partner of the Asisebenze Art Atelier, under whose auspices Man of the Hour was presented, says “Samson had a habit of not signing and not titling works. Often, over the years, I remember that I used to sell his works and I’d have to bring them back to have them signed, or take them out of the frame, realising that they weren’t signed. I don’t know why he would do this. He was quite prolific and he’d have to usually sign them at a later date.”

Whether intentionally or as a by-product of his unwavering pursuit of art on his own terms, Mnisi’s body of work is partially obscured from the mainstream South African art ecosystem. He was critical of both the commercial artworld’s insatiable appetite for stars and works that advanced inevitable profit imperatives. He also rejected government-funded art projects as tools for promoting thinly-veiled political ambitions. Refusing to name, date and sign his work until absolutely necessary is a renunciation of even the most established acts of artmaking and canonisation.

Seen overall, Mnisi’s practice should not be misrepresented as being contrary.Instead, it is an affirmation for those cautious of both the commercial and government-sanctioned artworlds, censure for those who have fallen for the former and the latter’s guiles, and a reminder to all viewers of his work of the importance that art, especially in South Africa, continues to have.