The Activist Collector
Lida Clanton Broner’s 1938 Journey from Newark to South Africa
Published by the Newark Museum. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
“After twenty-eight years of desire and determination, I have visited Africa, the land of my forefathers.” So wrote Lida Clanton Broner (1895–1982), an African American housekeeper and hairstylist from Newark, New Jersey, upon her return from an extraordinary nine-month journey to South Africa in 1938. This epic trip was motivated not only by Broner’s sense of ancestral heritage, but also a grassroots resolve to connect the socio-political concerns of African Americans with those of black South Africans under the segregationist policies of the time. During her travels, this woman of modest means circulated among South Africa’s Black intellectual elite, including many leaders of South Africa’s freedom struggle. Her lectures at Black schools on “race consciousness and race pride” had a decidedly political bent, even as she was presented as an “American beauty specialist.”
How did Broner—a working class mother—come to be a globally connected activist? What were her experiences as an African American woman in segregated South Africa and how did she further her work after her return? Broner’s remarkable story is the subject of this book, which draws upon a deep visual and documentary record now held in the collection of the Newark Museum of Art. This extraordinary archive includes more than one hundred and fifty objects, ranging from beadwork and pottery to mission school crafts, acquired by Broner in South Africa, along with her diary, correspondence, scrapbooks, and hundreds of photographs with handwritten notations.
Christa Clarke’s The Activist Collector, a triumph of archival research and art historical scholarship, is a revelation of the astonishing degree to which symbolic and spiritual connections to South Africa were shared by African Americans at every social level as much as a century ago. Clarke’s work demonstrates in stunning detail that consciousness of Black African culture and politics and truly ‘Pan-African’ artistic sensibility were not merely embraced by exemplars of the African American intellectual elite, but were much more broadly-based, and shared across black social classes. In stunningly insightful analyses of the collection of art objects that Lida Clanton Broner gathered as she engaged in a one-woman campaign for black liberation throughout apartheid South Africa almost a century ago, Clarke has resurrected from the archives a story that reveals the power and magic of courage, imagination, and the belief that the battle for freedom must be pursued one speech and one art object at a time.
From hairstylist and housekeeper to grassroots activist, Ms. Broner led an extraordinary life. The granddaughter of enslaved Africans, she was determined to visit her ancestral home. Her history with us began in 1943 with an exhibition of objects and artifacts she collected (and later donated to the Museum) during her 1938 trip to South Africa. That installation was among the very first museum exhibitions to focus on the art of South Africa and may well have been the first museum presentation of a collection by an African American woman.
This extensively researched volume, supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, is an important contribution to scholarship. At the same time, the book’s engaging narrative style, with its generous inflections of Broner’s voice and its portrayal of her 'spirited and independent personality and outspoken opinions', has the potential to keep broader audiences cheering for this activist collector. Clarke’s writing conveys Broner’s wit and tact without varnishing her occasional tourist faux pas. It showcases her networking among prominent political leaders, intellectuals, and other 'New Africans'—the growing Christian and educated Black middle class of South Africa—while acknowledging her affection for and interest in those from rural areas who were uneducated and who followed traditional belief systems. These qualities make Broner an everywoman: fascinating and formidable, but also human, relatable, and entertaining. A trailblazing Black woman’s legacy and voice are now recorded, undoubtedly able to inspire Black women still on today’s literal and figurative picket lines and on a mission.
Christa Clarke is an independent curator and art historian. Previously she was senior curator of Arts of Global Africa at the Newark Museum of Art, where her work was supported with major grants from the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment of Humanities. Her books include Representing Africa in American Art Museums (2011, coedited with Kathleen Berzock), the award-winning African Art at the Barnes Foundation, and Arts of Global Africa: The Newark Museum Collection.
2 From Personal Pilgrimage to Political Purpose
3 “Welcome to Africa!”
4 Onward and Inward to the Transvaal and Natal
5 Return to the Eastern Cape and Voyage Home
6 Activist Exhibitions
7 The Newark Museum and Beyond
Epilogue “Mother of the Oceans”
