Painted across a crucial decade, these three watercolours trace Ephraim Ngatane’s emergence as one of the sharpest observers of township life and its psychic undercurrents. Figures Beside a Car (1963) belongs to his early Sophiatown–Pimville period, when cars signified mobility, status and danger all at once: for Black residents whose movements were governed by pass laws, the parked vehicle is both promise and trap, a symbol of how aspiration was constantly negotiated with surveillance and control. By 1969, in Wild Dogs, Ngatane channels that tension into animal form: the snapping, colliding bodies can be read as avatars of township survival, embodying hunger, speed, and pack instinct in a landscape shaped by poverty and overcrowding. Township Gathering pulls these energies back into the human realm, depicting a dense assembly that might be a meeting, a street service, a shebeen crowd or a political rally – the kinds of gatherings the apartheid state watched anxiously and repeatedly sought to disperse. Across all three works, Ngatane’s fluid, improvisatory handling of watercolour mirrors the precariousness of the world he depicts, while his instinct for narrative detail anchors them in lived experience.