Pitika Ntuli was born in Springs, Gauteng, South Africa, and grew up in Witbank in Mpumalanga. He became active in the struggle against the apartheid government, as a result of which he was exiled. From 1963, he lived in Swaziland, where he was eventually arrested and detained as a political prisoner, spending a year in solitary isolation in a death row prison cell in Swaziland until international pressure on the South African and Swaziland authorities secured his release in 1978 to the UK.
He subsequently went to study in New York City at the Pratt Institute, where he earned an MFA and an MA degree in Comparative Industrial Relations and Industrial Sociology. After completing these studies, he went back to England and began a career teaching at educational institutions, notably the Camberwell College of Art, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, the London College of Printing, Middlesex University and the University of East London. In 1994, he returned to South Africa, where he began lecturing in Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
The Rainbow Nation by Ntuli in The Hague
Ntuli has exhibited in several individual and group exhibitions in many countries in Europe and in the US, as well as organising numerous international art and cultural events in Britain. His sculptures are in several private collections worldwide, including that of Paul Simon, Phuthuma Nhleko, and Edward and Irene Akufo-Addo. Some of his public sculptures can be found in the Swaziland National Bank, St. Mary's Catholic Church in Lobamba, COSATU House, Johannesburg, and Diepkloof, Soweto.
Until 2010, more than a decade after his return from exile, Ntuli had never exhibited in his own country, holding his first exhibition in South Africa that year at Museum Africa, Johannesburg. The Scent of Invisible Footprints: the Sculpture of Pitika Ntuli was published by the University of South Africa (UNISA) to accompany that exhibition. It was followed in 2011 by showings in the Durban Art Gallery and the UNISA Gallery, Pretoria. Ntuli has subsequently exhibited at Constitutional Hill and Melrose Arch in Johannesburg and the Oliver Tambo Cultural Centre in Ekhuruleni.
Ntuli is an expert in African indigenous knowledge systems. A regular political and cultural commentator on television and radio, he is also well-known as a poet. He has been a keynote speaker at numerous high-profile events and has read his poetry in many forums. He is a frequent guest on television and radio and especially on many of the SABC African-language radio stations, and has participated in national and provincial task teams and ministerial advisory committees.
He was a judge for the Sunday Times Literary Awards (2009). He chaired the 2010 Task Team that advised the Minister of Arts and Culture with regard to cultural programmes associated with the World Cup, including the opening and closing ceremonies.
In 2013, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award for Visual Art from the Arts and Culture Trust and Vodacom Foundation.
In 2020, his exhibition Azibuyele Emasisweni, (Return to the Source) comprised works sculpted solely from bone, presented online during the COVID-19 pandemic. The exhibition won a Global Fine Art people's choice award, and was subsequently shown at the Oliewenhuis Art Museum in 2022 and the Durban Art Gallery in March 2023.