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Kronos (Bellville)

ISSN: 0259-0190
Subject: history
Published by SciELO

No Issue Number

Reflections on the making of the AmaBandla Ama-Afrika Exhibition (2011-2012): Martin West's Soweto photographs
In the 1930s social anthropologists Eileen Jensen Krige and Jacob Daniell (Jack) Krige undertook intensive fieldwork among the Lobedu people of the north-eastern Transvaal of South Africa (now in the province of Limpopo), whose ruler, Modjadji, was widely known as a rain-maker. In 1943 their ethnographic monograph, 'The Realm of a Rain-Queen. A Study of the Pattern of Lovedu Society', was published and has remained in circulation ever since. The photographs in this work comprise a small fraction of some 700 photographs taken in the field by the Kriges and kept for private use until 1990 when Eileen Krige donated them to the South African Museum. This article considers the photographs produced during two phases of field-work, the first comprising short visits in 1930 and 1932, followed by an extended period of research between 1936 and 1938, and the circulation of the photographs thereafter. We argue that the early photographs are less formally structured than the later images which reveal a change in fieldwork practice and the influence of functionalism. Once in the curatorial domain, the photographs accrued new meanings. We present two projects, one undertaken in 1996 by Davison and the other in 2011-12 by Mahashe, both of which sought to extend the circulation of the photographs in public spheres, invite new readings and show their generative potential. As a visual archive, the Krige photographs provide insight into the practice of social anthropology in the 1930s in South Africa but their significance is not limited to that context.
Visualizing The Realm of a Rain-Queen: The production and circulation of Eileen and Jack Krige's Lobedu fieldwork photographs from the 1930s
In the 1930s social anthropologists Eileen Jensen Krige and Jacob Daniell (Jack) Krige undertook intensive fieldwork among the Lobedu people of the north-eastern Transvaal of South Africa (now in the province of Limpopo), whose ruler, Modjadji, was widely known as a rain-maker. In 1943 their ethnographic monograph, 'The Realm of a Rain-Queen. A Study of the Pattern of Lovedu Society', was published and has remained in circulation ever since. The photographs in this work comprise a small fraction of some 700 photographs taken in the field by the Kriges and kept for private use until 1990 when Eileen Krige donated them to the South African Museum. This article considers the photographs produced during two phases of field-work, the first comprising short visits in 1930 and 1932, followed by an extended period of research between 1936 and 1938, and the circulation of the photographs thereafter. We argue that the early photographs are less formally structured than the later images which reveal a change in fieldwork practice and the influence of functionalism. Once in the curatorial domain, the photographs accrued new meanings. We present two projects, one undertaken in 1996 by Davison and the other in 2011-12 by Mahashe, both of which sought to extend the circulation of the photographs in public spheres, invite new readings and show their generative potential. As a visual archive, the Krige photographs provide insight into the practice of social anthropology in the 1930s in South Africa but their significance is not limited to that context.
'Native work' is an artistic response to Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin's life-long project to photograph black southern Africans. Cognizant of the dangers inherent in Duggan-Cronin's colonial ethnographic approach, 'Native work' nevertheless recognizes an impulse of tenderness running through his project. By trusting this impulse in Duggan-Cronin's photographs, 'Native life' attempts to provoke another way of reading these images, using them as the basis for making new work motivated by the desire for social connection, a desire which emerges as a particular kind of historical possibility in the aftermath of apartheid.
The 'Nevergiveups' of Grandmothers Against Poverty and AIDS: scholar-journalism-activism as social documentary
This article traces our collective experiences as a photographer, a journalist and an academic engaged in the process of documenting the lives of South Africa's grandmothers - who are confronting the HIV/AIDS pandemic while carrying an immense history of social struggle in the apartheid era. We set out with individual aspirations to record, in visual and narrative forms, the life stories and lived experiences of members of the Grandmothers Against Poverty and AIDS (GAPA) organization based in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. Over the course of three years of building relationships and working with leaders of this organisation, we developed a social documentation project that involved a series of individual portraits, family photographs, longitudinal life narratives, organizational ethnographies and film footage. Collectively, this data formed the foundation for 'The Nevergiveups' photo exhibition at the District Six Museum and the Khayelitsha Community Centre in June 2011. This installation emerged as a collective, international effort to promote wider awareness of the significance and particularity of the juncture many South African grandmothers face - between the trauma of a collective memory of apartheid and the contemporary HIV/AIDS crisis. This project emerged in a distinct approach that combined social documentation with scholar-activism - as our professional spheres as journalist, photographer and academic sociologist intersected in a larger shared pursuit of contributing to a social documentation and activist project that would provide an archival record of South African grandmothers' lives through the elder women members of GAPA.
 Native Work : an artwork by Andrew Putter consisting of 38 portrait photographs (with photography by Hylton Boucher, Kyle Weeks and Andrew Putter)
'Native work' is an artistic response to Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin's life-long project to photograph black southern Africans. Cognizant of the dangers inherent in Duggan-Cronin's colonial ethnographic approach, 'Native work' nevertheless recognizes an impulse of tenderness running through his project. By trusting this impulse in Duggan-Cronin's photographs, 'Native life' attempts to provoke another way of reading these images, using them as the basis for making new work motivated by the desire for social connection, a desire which emerges as a particular kind of historical possibility in the aftermath of apartheid.
Portraits, publics and politics: Gisele Wulfsohn's photographs of HIV/AIDS, 1987-2007
Contemporary South African documentary photography is often framed in relation to the history of apartheid and the resistance movement. A number of well-known South African photographers came of age in the 1980s and many of them went on to receive critical acclaim locally and abroad. In comparison, Gisele Wulfsohn (19572011) has remained relatively unknown despite her involvement in the Afrapix collective and her important contribution to HIV/AIDS awareness and education. In focusing on Wulfsohn's extended engagement with the issue of HIV/AIDS in South Africa, this article aims to highlight the distinctive nature of Wulfsohn's visualisation of the epidemic. Wulfsohn photographed the epidemic long before there was major public interest in the issue and continued to do so for twenty years. Her approach is unique in a number of ways, most notably in her use of portraiture and her documentation of subjects from varied racial, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds in South Africa. The essay tracks the development of the different projects Wulfsohn embarked on and situates her photographs of HIV/AIDS in relation to her politically informed work of the late 1980s, her personal projects and the relationships she developed with non-governmental organisations.
Wounding apertures: violence, affect and photography during and after apartheid
Between March and September 2012 there have been sixteen instances of 'necklacing' in the townships just outside of Cape Town. This article argues for understanding these events in relation to the violence of apartheid. It approaches the question of the meanings of the persistence of necklacing through an analysis of photographs of people who had been subject to vigilante violence in the 1980s. The article focuses on the work of Gille de Vlieg, a photographer who, during apartheid, was a member of the Black Sash and of the Afrapix photography collective. I read de Vlieg's photographs as a series of 'wounding apertures' that open a space for affective engagements with the violence of both the past and of the present. The importance of such engagements, the article argues, lies in what political philosopher Hannah Arendt has theorised as the constitutive relation between feeling, thinking and judging.
Picturing the beloved country: Margaret Bourke-White, Life Magazine, and South Africa, 1949-1950
In 1949 and 1950, the pioneering female photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White spent five months in southern Africa, producing four photo-essays for Life, one of America's most widely read magazines. Two of the essays, which dealt with South Africa in particular, were Americans' visual introduction to apartheid. The first essay depicted the dedication of the Voortrekker Monument and naively reproduced Afrikaner nationalist ideologies. Appearing several months later, the more substantial of the two essays was a surprisingly vigorous condemnation of racial oppression and labour exploitation at the beginning of the apartheid era. While it remains one of the most compelling photo-essays ever to appear in Life, the decision that Bourke-White and her editors made to avoid showing or mentioning black activism undermined its analysis. The close ties between labour unions, black political groups, and the Communist Party of South Africa made the subject taboo in the strongly anti-communist political climate of post-war America.
Lounge photography and the politics of township interiors: the representation of the black South African home in the Ngilima photographic collection, East Rand, 1950s
This article attempts to historically contextualise and interpret a selection of photographs from the collection of South African ambulant photographer Ronald Ngilima and his son Torrance. Ngilima pioneered indoor portraiture in the Benoni townships of the early 1950s, thanks to his early acquisition of artificial lighting. As a consequence, his black, Coloured and Indian clients increasingly chose to be photographed at home, in particular within the space of their lounge (sitting room), or in Ngilima's lounge-studio. In these portraits, the subject poses amidst a lavish display of objects (tea cups, ashtray, gramophone...), furniture and homemade decorations (doilies, curtains, newspaper clippings...). Though the lounge portraits represent only a fraction of the entire Ngilima collection, I approach this subset of about 170 images as evidence as to how the residents of Wattville township appropriated the uniform sub-economic houses through long-term improvement schemes, contrasting with the apartheid State's deliberate efforts to frame them as temporary tenants. More broadly, these images invite us to think of photography's role in the construction of space and of self-representations in relation to space. What is the idea of a lounge? Why did it become such a popular photographic background? How did vernacular photography help to articulate abstract notions of selfhood (such as respectability or modernity) within historically specific circumstances?
Imagining National Unity: South African propaganda efforts during the Second World War
This article focuses on the use of propaganda by the South African government during the Second World War in its attempt to create a unified nation from a society fractured by racial, gendered and class divisions. These divisions were evident in the unequal nature of war work for black and white men, as well as for white women recruited into the Union Defence Force and its auxiliary services. A war ostensibly fought for the principles of democracy also highlighted the inequalities of South African society and marginalised South Africans responded by making greater demands for equal treatment, particularly in terms of combat which was itself associated with masculinity and citizenship. In the course of attempting to maintain high levels of recruitment for the Second World War state propaganda underwent a number of shifts, corresponding to the changing fortunes of the South African military in the war, as well as to changes in the political and social circumstances of South African society. This essay traces these shifts using a combination of archival and secondary sources. Still and moving images drawn from official films, photographs and military publications are analysed in order to understand the changing nature of war propaganda and, with it, a society in flux. It is through these images that one is able to grapple with the complex constructions of identity by the war's participants - the possibilities, the limitations, and the ultimate failure of war propaganda.
Introduction to special issue: Documentary photography in South Africa
Arteries of empire: on the geographical imagination of South Africa's railway war, 1914/1915
This essay analyses a set of visual representations of the South African military campaign into German South West Africa in 1914/1915. This campaign is explored in terms of an imperial expansion and approached through the lens of visuality. Elaborating on an album produced by the Kimberley-based photographer Alfred Duggan-Cronin, and cartoons, photographs, and maps kept in the Transnet Heritage Library in Johannesburg, the article traces the ways in which the visual representation of the war favoured a distinct articulation of an imagined imperial space. The analysis of visualised imaginaries is anchored in an inquiry of materiality, and hence considers the importance of the railway system as the technology, vehicle and medium for a dramatic South African expansion in the region.�
Not quite fair play, old chap: the complexion of cricket and sport in South Africa
The key characteristic of the vast amount of literature on the South African workers' movement in the post-1973 period is the denial that the class and national struggles were closely intertwined. This denial is underpinned by a strong 'antinationalist current' which dismisses the national liberation struggle as 'populist and nationalist' and therefore antithetical to socialism. This article cautions against uncritical endorsement of these views. It argues that they are the work of partisan and intolerant commentators who have dominated the South African academy since the 1970s and who have a tendency to suppress all versions of labour history which highlight these linkages in favour of those which portray national liberation and socialism as antinomies. The article also points out that these commentators use history to mobilise support for their rigidly held ideological positions and to wage current political struggles under the pretext of advancing objective academic arguments.
Contestations over knowledge production or ideological bullying': a response to Legassick on the workers' movement
The key characteristic of the vast amount of literature on the South African workers' movement in the post-1973 period is the denial that the class and national struggles were closely intertwined. This denial is underpinned by a strong 'antinationalist current' which dismisses the national liberation struggle as 'populist and nationalist' and therefore antithetical to socialism. This article cautions against uncritical endorsement of these views. It argues that they are the work of partisan and intolerant commentators who have dominated the South African academy since the 1970s and who have a tendency to suppress all versions of labour history which highlight these linkages in favour of those which portray national liberation and socialism as antinomies. The article also points out that these commentators use history to mobilise support for their rigidly held ideological positions and to wage current political struggles under the pretext of advancing objective academic arguments.
Nostalgia and the native commissioners: a hundred years in the old Transkei
The key characteristic of the vast amount of literature on the South African workers' movement in the post-1973 period is the denial that the class and national struggles were closely intertwined. This denial is underpinned by a strong 'antinationalist current' which dismisses the national liberation struggle as 'populist and nationalist' and therefore antithetical to socialism. This article cautions against uncritical endorsement of these views. It argues that they are the work of partisan and intolerant commentators who have dominated the South African academy since the 1970s and who have a tendency to suppress all versions of labour history which highlight these linkages in favour of those which portray national liberation and socialism as antinomies. The article also points out that these commentators use history to mobilise support for their rigidly held ideological positions and to wage current political struggles under the pretext of advancing objective academic arguments.
Posters act: Namibian poster action and the photographic poster archive
This article mainly draws from ideas and approaches developed in a recently published volume Posters in Action. Visuality in the Making of an African Nation. In contrast to most African poster historiography our argument has developed towards an understanding of posters as images in action and has linked them to their specific historical contexts of production, circulation and visual communication. While remaining critical of the assumption that posters were and are necessarily linked to urban and industrialised settings, we have acknowledged their being located within processes of negotiation of modernisation. The action approach understands posters as active agents in processes of visual communication, which involved different people and spaces at different moments in time. By doing so we have shifted the focus towards the realm of consumption and perception. The article, of course, reflects on the specific form and function of posters, but rather than focusing on image content, graphic vocabularies and genres, we have tried to understand and interpret posters in the context of specific forms of visuality emerging in Namibia throughout the twentieth century. We pay attention to varied forms of agency linked to visuals and explore how they have become meaningful through the ways they have been distributed, perceived and appropriated. Historical posters are archival documents as they become available to us as parts of collections. Treating these collections and the specific status of posters as ephemera within them, we have engaged with an approach of exploring what we have termed archives of the poster, i.e. to link poster collections to other visual archives, such as photographic and oral ones. Discussing various examples of historical posters from Namibia and by linking them to historical photographs and oral knowledge about them, we have reconstructed the place and role of posters in the constitution of public reading sites, among them most significantly the street. Public visual consumption was determined and regulated by segregation and apartheid policies, making access to public spaces in general and to images in particular highly contested. Nevertheless, as the article shows, despite the repressive policies of the colonial state, and linked to them a strong propagandistic bias in image production and circulation, multiple cultures of visual literacies emerged, challenging and at times undermining the containment to narrow spaces and the silencing by colonial rule.
Photographic portraiture, neighbourhood activism and apartheid's industrial legacy: reflections on the Breathing Spaces exhibition
Breathing Spaces: Environmental Portraits of Durban's Industrial South was shown in Durban Art Gallery in July 2007 and travelled to Cape Town's Iziko Gallery of Good Hope at The Castle in January 2009. The exhibition was the culmination of a project that was launched in 2002 and that focused on three adjacent neighbourhoods, Wentworth, Merebank and Lamontville.
A flying Springbok of wartime British skies: A.G. 'Sailor' Malan
This article, an expanded version of a 2008 public lecture, explores the life and times of Adolph Gysbert 'Sailor' Malan, a South African who rose to prominence as a combatant in the 1940 Battle of Britain and who, after his post-war return to the Union, became a notable personality in liberal reform politics. A classic Anglo-Afrikaner empire loyalist or 'King's Afrikaner', Malan became 'Sailor' through his interwar merchant marine service, joining the Royal Air Force in the later 1930s. An exceptional fighter pilot, his wartime role as an RAF ace in defending Britain turned him into a national hero, a migrating loyal Springbok who had sprung selflessly to the defence of Great Britain. Subsequently, as an ex-serviceman, Malan drew on his wartime sensibilities and beliefs to return to political battle in his home country, in opposition to post-1948 Afrikaner nationalism and its apartheid policies. The mini-biography of Sailor Malan analyses several key life-story elements, including his seafaring apprenticeship, British wartime identity and combat experience, and troubled relationship with post 1945 South Africa as a gradualist liberal.
Utopia Live: singing the Mozambican struggle for national liberation
This article engages a historical reconstruction of the formation of Makonde revolutionary singing in the process of the Mozambican liberation struggle. The history of 'Utopia live' is here entrusted to wartime genres, marked by heteroglossia and the use of metaphor, and referring to moments when the 'space of experience' and the 'horizon of expectation' of the Struggle were still filled with uncertainty and the sense of possibility. Progressively, however, singing expressions were reorganised around socialism's nodes of meaning. Ideological tropes, elaborated by Frelimo's 'courtly' composers, were appropriated in popular singing. The relations between the 'people' and their leaders were made apparent through the organization of the performance space. The main contention of the article is that unofficiality, heteroglossia, metaphor and poetic license, although they feature in genres that have been marked out as 'popular' in academic discourse, are by no means intrinsically 'popular'. Much on the contrary, they are the first victims of populist modes of political actions, that is, of a politics grounded on a concept of 'people'.
Land redistribution politics in the Eastern Cape midlands: the case of the Lukhanji municipality, 1995-2006
Since its initiation, South Africa's post-apartheid land reform programme has generated extensive analysis and critique that in turn has yielded a body of scholarship. Discussion revolves around the official policy of the programme, the challenges associated with its implementation and its reception at local levels. It cannot be overstated that much of the discourse on the formulation of the programme itself commenced in the dying years of apartheid, through a series of workshops, policy conferences, research projects and publications. Prompted by glaring disparities in the country's social and living conditions and primarily by entrenched imbalanced landownership, contemporary land reform dialogue has a well-built backdrop. What, however, is our understanding of local community politics that played perceptible roles in triggering land redistribution and facilitating patterns of settlement? This article gives some insight into a veiled history of interplay between community mobilisation politics, governance and official land reform policy in the Lukhanji municipality of the Eastern Cape during South Africa's transitional years of 1995 to 2006. After outlining how land redistribution was initially driven by forces operating outside government action, the article proceeds to illustrate the frailty of the government land redistribution accomplishment. Moreover, it demonstrates the complex nature of a rural setting that has arisen from community-facilitated and incipient government land redistribution achievements in the area.
Demanding satisfaction: violence, masculinity and honour in late eighteenth century Cape Town
This article analyses two separate cases of public violence which took place in Cape Town in the summer of 1772/3. At surface level they appear to be very different in character. One was a scrap among low-ranking soldiers who were playing cards at a shoreline outpost. The other was a formalised challenge between two captains of the VOC return fleet as they were lunching with the Governor, which resulted in a death and the flight of the murderer. Yet closer analysis suggests common ritualised codes of behaviour that intriguingly reveal how violence, masculinity and notions of honour operated at all social levels within the town. Both cases were complex and coded social conflicts, rooted in northern European early modern social beliefs and practices as transferred to a colonial context. However, none of these perpetrators of violence was viewed sympathetically by the VOC authorities at the Cape. By contrast, the assailant Captain who had escaped back to Europe was able to successfully appeal to the VOC directors in the Netherlands.
British air shows in South Africa, 1932/33: 'airmindedness', ambition and anxiety
In 1932/33 Sir Alan Cobham brought a touring British air show to South Africa. His roving circus was not the first, the only or even the biggest contribution to 'airmindedness' in the Union. It was preceded by other pre-and post-war air displays and was overshadowed by simultaneous aviation events. The immediate, localised civic impacts of some fifty successive air shows may have exceeded the intention of popularising flight. In isolated towns the pleasures, disruptions and disappointments to do with planning, staging and watching the circus were considerable. In retrospect, the tour was a cameo of colonialist assumptions, attitudes and practices. Not least, the paternalism of the circus disguised a larger intervention that acknowledged rather than ignored thriving aviation practices which had already made the Union 'airminded'. Cobham predicted, correctly, that British aviation interests in South Africa were threatened: his tour was also a flag-waving episode intended to benefit Britain, not only South Africa.
An early modern entrepreneur: hendrik oostwald eksteen and the creation of wealth in dutch colonial cape town, 1702-1741
This article uses the career of Hendrik Oostwald Eksteen at the Cape between 1702 and 1741 to illustrate the mechanisms free burghers could use to create wealth in an economically restrictive environment. By making use of the concept of entrepreneurship and its attendant issues, the article describes Eksteen's rise to fortune and prestige through his exploitation of a combination of economic opportunities afforded by Cape Town's position as a port servicing passing ships. Crucial to Eksteen's later success was his successful use of the opportunities provided by the monopolistic alcohol retail market at the Cape. Eksteen's initial success in this arena provided him with a capital base to pursue other opportunities in agriculture, fishing and meat provision, making him the wealthiest man at the Cape by the 1730s. The article also illustrates how Eksteen's upward mobility was linked to his use of social capital and the cultivation of large social networks through kinship. It demonstrates, furthermore, that economic success was wound up with social power and prestige. In using the biography of Eksteen, the article argues for the importance of economic history in the study of the early modern Cape, but calls also for a study which links economic developments with social and cultural ones through a focus on individual entrepreneurs. Shown, too, is the fact that the existing conception of the rise of a Cape gentry in the eighteenth century needs to be revised to take into account the role of entrepreneurship, the urban foundations of wealth creation, as well as the role of the free black community in this process.