Esther Mahlangu
Learned to paint her mother's walls at ten and was first shown to the wider world at fifty-four
Esther Mahlangu was born on a farm near Middelburg in what is now Mpumalanga. Among the Ndebele, decorating the outside walls of the house is women\'s work, passed from mother to daughter, and she began learning at ten. The patterns are drawn freehand without measuring, using bundles of chicken feathers as brushes. In her youth the colours were made from earth, ash, cow dung and clay; later women used commercial paint. She did it for decades, in the ordinary way, for her own home and for neighbours.
In the 1980s French researchers documenting Ndebele painting found her house. In 1989 she was invited to Paris for Magiciens de la Terre, a large exhibition at the Pompidou Centre that set out to show living artists from every continent on equal terms. She was 54 and had never left South Africa. She painted a full-size replica of her house inside the gallery.
In 1991 BMW asked her to paint one of its cars for its Art Car series, following Warhol and Lichtenstein. She was the first woman and the first African to do so, and did it in feathers. Since then she has painted aircraft tails, vodka bottles, trainers and gallery walls, received the Order of Ikhamanga and an honorary doctorate, and had a retrospective in Cape Town at 89. She still lives in her village, where she runs a school in her home to teach young girls the technique.