“[Courtney-Clarke] has a special eye for the experiences of women who are celebrated here in their role not only as mothers, homemakers, gatherers and nurturers, but individuals who, in later life, hold sovereign dignity as matriarchs; no less regal under their shredded canopies than queens of old.”

Virginia MacKenny, Associate Professor of Painting, Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town

“In her earlier work Margaret’s concern was the art of African women. In this work her involvement is with the people themselves and their place. Like a pulse in the background her involvement throbs with anger and love. Anger at the stunting of lives, the blunting of hope, the desecration of the Namib and her own frailty, when there is so much to tell. Not the least of which is love.”

David Goldblatt, May 2016

“The art of Africa is known as a casualty of colonial exploitation, surviving principally in the museums of other continents, never seen by the people who created it. What reappears among African artists today is regarded as a renaissance of a destroyed tradition.”

Margaret Courtney-Clarke’s book is a revelation, not of that renaissance but of a glorious continued existence, under the most destructive forms of physical and psychological hardship imaginable, of an artistic culture at the very centre of life itself… The beauty of this book is unsurpassed in its combination of content and meaning. Its art is also the art of life”

Nadine Gordimer

“What is Africa to me? It is mysterious, it is exciting, and it has been made more wonderful and more knowable because of the women’s art. The women of West Africa and Margaret Courtney-Clarke”

Maya Angelou