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Illustrations for book, ' Aesop's Fables'. (pp49, plus end papers with texts by Beverley Naidoo)

This research through practice built on Grobler’s longer-term project to promote, through illustration, multiculturalism and consciousness of narratives derived from so-called “developing countries”. It sought to explore and develop visualisation of a retelling of Aesop’s fables from an ‘African perspective’, responding to Planudes’ thirteenth century description of Aesop as a Black man. As a 21st century retelling, the core aspiration of Grobler, author Beverly Naidoo and their publisher was to achieve an integrated ‘text’ that encouraged children, internationally, to engage with African cultures, from African perspectives, through the medium of the picture book. This involved contemporary reconceptualization of stories embedded in the formation of Western culture and widely popularly assumed to be a product of it. Grobler conceived of his task, within the context of this collaborative project, as being to develop illustrations that were informative, elaborative, decorative, confirmative, extensive and purposefully contradictory.

In intended playful interaction with Naidoo’s writing - which incorporated glossaried African regional dialects and languages - illustrations deployed geometric shapes, patterning, decoration and a palette drawn from traditional Southern African cultures. Naidoo introduced animals from this region, often echoing European/westernised equivalents conventionally featured in the fables - jackal (fox); warthog (boar); duiker (deer); Grobler developed illustrations with the aim of achieving similar visual introduction, quotation and allusion. He sought to reinforce the ‘sense of place’ in Naidoo’s writing through depiction of: regional vegetation (Tamboti, Acacia, Aloe, Banana); arid landscapes (the Savannah, veld or Karoo); traditional dwellings; elements of regional costume and artefacts (pots, woven carpets); and incorporation of only Black human characters. He set out playfully to destabilise dominant, Western-centric post-colonial tropes of interaction between caricature, folk art and ostensibly ‘African’ content and thereby to sensitise young readers, internationally, to the possibility of the African origin of some of Western culture’s most well-known moral tales.