The Story of Moses Tladi

A Painter Who Defied Every Odd

Moses Tladi was born in 1897 in the village of Lobethal, Limpopo Province, South Africa. In an era when Black South Africans were systematically excluded from the arts, Tladi taught himself to paint — using house paint and a stick in a modest garden in Johannesburg.

In 1931, he became the first Black South African artist to exhibit at the National Gallery in Cape Town. His landscapes — dramatic renderings of the Drakensberg mountains and the Limpopo bushveld — were executed with a sensitivity and technical skill that rivalled any of his white contemporaries.

Yet history nearly forgot him. In 1956, the apartheid regime's Group Areas Act forced Tladi from his home. He was exiled to Soweto and never painted again. He died in 1959, his work scattered, his name fading from memory.

"Tladi opened museum doors for Black artists. His legacy is not just in his paintings — it is in every Black South African artist who followed."

It was not until 2015, with the landmark exhibition Moses Tladi Unearthed at the Iziko South African National Gallery, that his work was finally restored to its rightful place in art history.