As an art historian with an anthropological bent, I am interested in the ways in which modernity is manifested in the arts and cultures of peoples in Southern Africa. My interest in the works of mid-twentieth-century black South African artists is centred on their creation of specifically African, South African modernisms. In the work of Sidney Kumalo, Ezrom Legae and Dumile Feni (among others), trained in the tenets of ‘free art’, African identity is espoused as modern phenomenon. It has therefore been contrasted with the work of other, supposedly untrained artists, such as Jackson Hlungwane, whom I argue are equally modernist.