South African Social Photography: The Moment of Drum
Borderline inaugurates its second essay in its Worldmaking forum on the politics of anti-colonial solidarity across and beyond the Middle East.
Sidney Luckett
“To see is not the same as to look” (Achille Mbembe)
‘Rhodes Must Fall’- A student activist standing on the plinth from which the statue of Cecil John Rhodes was removed
University of Cape Town. ©SidLuckett
“What we know today as South African photography emerged in 1948,” said the late Okwui Enwezor, a Nigerian and world-renowned curator and art critic. He was referring to the emergence of Drum magazine, a magazine that gave urbanized black South Africans a platform to challenge the hegemonic representation of Africans in the print media. This essay is a critical examination of Enwezor’s claim that 1948 was the start of a unique South African (social) photography. The year 1948 was a significant year for the people of both South Africa and Palestine, and in discussing the role of photography in both countries, it will be impossible to avoid the name Susan Sontag (I return to her below). While 1948 was the beginning of political ‘catastrophe’ – for Palestinians, the Nakba, and black South Africans, Apartheid – both were forcibly displaced from their homes and dispossessed of their lands.
However, the parallels are not so similar when discussing the social photography of the transition period (1947-1950). Whereas in the case of Palestine during this period, there was no dramatic shift in the depiction of Palestinian subjects; photographs were taken of Palestinians being “uprooted from their natural surroundings … columns of expelled refugees” and also of “Jewish soldiers and police … the perpetrators with the authority to turn others into what they will.” Such photographs were taken by the ‘Government Press Office’ and stored in Israeli archives and it was only in 2009 that Ariella Azoulay curated them in an alternative archive with “a new surface appearance” (Michel Foucault). However, in the case of South Africa, in the late 1940s and 1950s, Drum was already on a collision course with the subject matter of the white colonial gaze, the ‘African tribalist’.
South African social photography has a long history, almost as long as the history of photography itself. It could be argued that the very word ‘photography’ was conceived in South Africa by the scientist John Herschel during a sojourn in Cape Town in the 1830s where he used a Camera Lucida to obtain accurate outlines of botanical specimens. Less than a decade later there was sufficient demand for photographs in the Cape to sustain scores of professional photographers.
Here, I pick up the story of social photography in South Africa from the mid-1930s and of a genre of South African social photography that emerged in 1948 to collude and collide with the hitherto, hegemonic ‘colonial gaze.’ The latter refers to a way of seeing, or rather, of not seeing what lies behind the ‘veil’; the veil shields the settler from seeing the violence of colonialism, providing instead a visual construct of a picturesque South African landscape and its contented peoples. Let me briefly introduce the concept of the photographic ‘gaze.’
The Photographic ‘Gaze’
In discussing the work of the widely acclaimed Brazilian documentary photographer, Sebastião Salgado (in Between the Eyes), David Levi Strauss, like many photography critics before and after him, refers to Walter Benjamin’s much-quoted reference to the aestheticization of the suffering of photographic subjects:
‘The World is Beautiful’, a famous book … in which we see [photographs that have] even succeeded in making misery itself an object of pleasure, by treating it stylishly and with technical perfection’, [and] … self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism. Communism replied by politicizing art.
Passages such as these reflect Benjamin’s significant contribution to “the institutionalization and dissemination of the dichotomy between the political and the aesthetic” (Azoulay in Civil Imagination).
Strauss, however, argues against those who see in Salgado’s photographs the aestheticization of suffering, suggesting rather that his photographs ‘threaten the boundary between aesthetics and politics.’ In fact, it is Azoulay who transcends this dichotomy, by arguing that the aestheticization and politicization of photographs are not mutually exclusive. (By drawing on a notion of imagination, Azoulay deploys a very subtle argument which I cannot enter into here).
Significantly, in the South African context, it was this boundary between aesthetics and politics that the emergence of Drum both challenged and overcame. However, to fully understand the role of Drum (or any other photographic collection) we need to understand that the photographer(s) are situated/embedded in an aesthetic field, an ensemble of agents and institutions which participate in the production of the value of the work (Bourdieu in Rules of Art).
The ‘Colonial Gaze’
Building on Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Mbembe argues that the ‘colonial gaze’ of the white colonialist casts a veil over both the subjugation of indigenous peoples and the carving up of the land into territories. By aestheticizing the images of the dispossessed and the territorialized landscape, the veil is woven out of “a thousand details, anecdotes and stories” that occludes their faces. As Mbembe so eloquently puts it in his Critique of Black Reason,
To see is not the same as to look. You can look without seeing. And it is not clear that what one sees is in fact what is. But looking and seeing have in common the fact that they solicit judgment, enclosing what is seen or the person who is not seen in inextricable networks of meaning- the beams of history … the colonial gaze also serves the very veil that hides this truth. Power in the colony, therefore, consists fundamentally in the power to see or not to see, to remain indifferent, to render invisible what one wishes not to see.
The power to see or not to see through the colonial gaze applies both to the way indigenous people are (not) seen and to the landscapes where people are simply ‘absent’ in the colonial gaze.
“This is the way Africa should look”. In his Imposing Wilderness, Neumann records this ironic remark by a traveling companion, a British expatriate ecologist employed by a highly regarded international nature conservation organization made while they were gazing over Tanzania’s Arusha National Park, with the iconic Mount Meru at the far end. In their gaze there was no sign of any human life, yet, in the ‘other landscape’ behind them, were overgrazed lands, Maasai curio shops, and beggars along the road. The people who had lived and farmed for decades had been forcibly removed to make way for this picturesque wilderness landscape – described by the writer Evelyn Ames as a Glimpse of Eden.
This way of seeing, the ‘pictorialization of nature’, was based on the aesthetic field of the European Romantic tradition which celebrated landscapes of ‘sublime’ (heavenly) or ‘pristine’ wilderness; indeed, the notion of ‘pristine wild nature’ is no more than a European cultural aesthetic, an aesthetic which erases the past and veils history with ‘natural beauty’—"the beautiful in nature is history standing still and refusing to unfold” (Adorno) quoted by WJT Mitchell in Landscapes and Power. Mitchell argues that
“[T]he concept of landscape that dominates the discourse of Western art history is one that is resolutely focussed on visual and pictorial representation, the scenic, picturesque, and superficial face presented by natural terrain.”
This ‘gaze’ is equally applicable to the Palestinian scenery, “Israeli forests often concealed the marks of Palestinian habitation, or that the landscape they covered was not sandy desert, but cultivated olive groves and rural villages” as it is to North American and African national parks. In the colonies: images of wild nature, together with the myth of wilderness, were primary drivers for the establishment of national parks. In colonial Africa, the ‘national park ideal’ followed the example of the Yellowstone National Park established in the USA in 1872, where “the removal of Native-Americans to create uninhabited wilderness – uninhabited as never before in the human history of the place – reminds us just how invented, just how constructed, the American wilderness really is” (Cronon, Uncommon Ground).
Inevitably, there were intense political struggles as a result of this dispossession but for over a century, the political-aesthetic gaze of the colonialists and subsequently that of neo-colonialist ‘liberation’ governments, embraced the ‘national park ideal’; for the former, it was a function of conservation-aesthetic complex, but for the latter, the attraction of foreign exchange weighed heavily. And, until very recently, the ‘national park ideal’ was the hegemonic political-aesthetic complex in the conservation discourse globally. However, since the World Parks Conference held in South Africa in 2003, there has been a significant shift towards a ‘people and parks’ political aesthetic paradigm that recognizes the right of indigenous peoples to be involved in the management of the protected areas from which they were displaced. I now turn to the ‘colonial gaze’ in the story of South African social photography.
The ‘colonial gaze’ in South African Photography
Returning to South Africa, the dominant figure in South African social photography from the mid-1930s up to 1948 was the Irish-born Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin (1874-1954). His photos were in the same aesthetic mould as that of the American, Edward Curtis who created a 20-volume photographic record of the customs, dress, and dwellings of North American indigenous tribes that were fast disappearing. Curtis’s images were aesthetically pleasing with the intention of emphasizing the mythic nature of tribal life (as shown here and here ). His images of tribal life fitted neatly into the colonial gaze that Mbembe decries above: the subjects of his photos were seen only through the ‘veil’ of culturally biased preconceptions of the ‘noble savage.’ Following this tradition, Duggan-Cronin produced an eleven-volume book, The Bantu Tribes of South Africa: Reproductions of Photographic Studies, which became, [for] many people the definitive image of Black South Africans (Godby). Not only did he arrange his photos to create the impression of a ‘noble savage’ living a contented life in the Native Reserves set aside by the Native Land Act, but his accompanying text idealized the reserve system (as can be seen here and in this article by Godby). Duggan-Cronin was later lauded by the Afrikaner Nationalist government in a publication, Lantern: Journal of Knowledge and Culture. To support his work, he received grants from the De Beers mining company, the Carnegie Corporation as well as government research grants. This was the perfect collusion of an aesthetic field in the service of a political ideology that worked to justify the Native Reserve system that provided cheap black migrant labour for the South African gold mines.
One of the best-known photographers who began to disrupt the Duggan-Cronin idealization of the African ‘noble savage’ living in the reserves was Constance Stuart (later Stuart-Larrabee). After her schooling in South Africa, the English-born Stuart went on to study photography in London and the Bavarian State Institute for Photography where she was influenced by the Bauhaus modernist aesthetic. Thus her photographic acuity was informed by the contemporary international aesthetic field. In her early career in South Africa, she showed remarkable independence from the local ‘aesthetic field’ by eschewing the ‘noble-savage’ genre. She soon tired of portrait photography and travelled through South Africa, spending much time in the Native Reserves and African townships on the edge of the white cities. She took aesthetically pleasing photos of her subjects, often against the indigenous architecture of their homesteads. In doing so she created a very different African identity to that portrayed by Duggan-Cronin. She gave careful attention to composition, texture, and light texture because “to me it is important to keep photography pure … If it is to be recognized as an art.” However, being fiercely independent of the photographic circles, publishers, and funders of her time, Stuart also ventured into the documentary political gaze pioneered by Dorothea Lange and regarded Life Magazine as an exemplar of documentary photography.
In the meantime, on the political front, General Smuts, an architect of the League of Nations, and Prime Minister of South Africa established the Native Laws Commission in 1946. Based on the findings of the commission, the Smuts government argued for the recognition of Africans as permanent residents in the urban areas. But this led to an unintended reaction on the part of Afrikaners. Alarmed by overwhelming evidence of a growing presence of ‘Natives’ in the urban areas, a majority of whites voted for the Nationalist Party and its Apartheid ideology, the cornerstone of its election campaign. Thus in the 1948 ‘whites only’ elections, the Nationalist Party ousted Smuts and his United Party.
This victory by a white supremacist party served to reinforce the hegemonic colonial gaze as depicted by Duggan-Cronin. However, the emergence of Drum with its photos of urban African life initiated a counter-hegemonic challenge to the ‘noble savage’ ideal of the colonial gaze.
Sophiatown and the Emergence of Drum
It is of some significance that at about the same time as the birthing of Drum, Margaret Bourke-White, by then an internationally highly regarded (political) documentary photographer, arrived in South Africa (1949-1950) to cover the victory of the Nationalist Party for Life magazine. During her assignment she depicted the anger of Black South Africans, she used a photographic technique quite the opposite to Duggan-Cronin’s and employed an aesthetic very different to that of Stuart’s, an aesthetic that did not cast a veil over the conditions of her subjects. Using black and white film to great effect, she starkly portrayed the anger and anguish of black South Africans. She expressed her anger to a friend in a letter, noting
“[T]he complete assumption of white superiority and the total focusing of the whole country around the schemes of keeping black labour cheap, and segregated, and uneducated, and without freedom of movement” (Godby).
It was in his book, Rise And Fall of Apartheid that Enwezor proclaimed that “What we know today as South African photography emerged in 1948.” Enwezor was referring to the arrival of Drum magazine. 1948 is best understood as a Kairos moment in South African photography, a moment when the contradictions between white South Africans’ colonial gaze collided with the ways of ‘seeing’ by the black urban dwellers. Photography in Drum shattered the noble savage-wilderness complex of the colonial gaze, by elucidating the relationship between the modern township dweller and the tribal African.
African Drum, the forerunner of Drum, was founded, financed, and edited by Robert Crisp, a Rhodes Scholar who was an archetypal figure of the liberal English-speaking establishment. The photos that he chose for African Drum in the Duggan-Cronin genre – ‘the noble savage.’ However, he soon realized that he had misread the emerging market, a small but growing urban African middle-class who lived near the industries located along the ‘golden arc,’ a gold-bearing reef radiating from Johannesburg. The new African middle class was not interested in these traditional depictions of African culture, while the majority of the more tribal African migrant workers were illiterate – especially in English, the language of the Drum.
Having realized that he was heading for financial disaster, Crisp persuaded his Oxford friend Jim Bailey to become a business partner. Bailey was the son of Sir Abe Bailey, a diamond mining tycoon with close ties to Cecil John Rhodes, and one of the ‘Randlords’ knighted by the King of England for services to the Empire. Bailey turned the Drum around, both in popularity and financially, by bringing in Anthony Sampson (another Oxford friend) as an editor. Bailey and Sampson intuited that black urban residents would be attracted to being depicted as jazz-loving cosmopolitan citizens of the world; in order to remove the stigma attached to the tribalist image of the African Drum, they rebranded it as Drum Magazine.
Bailey and Sampson established a board consisting of leading political and cultural figures who focussed on publishing black writers with modern cultural acuity. They also recruited a young German, Jürgen Schadeberg, a photo-journalist who saw the need to train residents of the African ‘townships’ in the art of photography so that Drum could penetrate the milieu of modern African urban dwellers. Schadeberg soon started training young Africans in photography, starting with Bob Gosani, a Drum messenger who became his dark-room assistant. This was in defiance of Apartheid policy that prohibited the establishment of formal training facilities in photography for Africans, a field reserved for Whites. This policy was made clear by the then Minister of Native Affairs, Hendrik Verwoerd: “There is no place for the Bantu in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour.” The ‘European community’ meant the areas occupied by white settlers. Because of these restrictions on black labour, Drum’s young black photographers were subject to regular harassment, arrests, and beatings by the South African police. In defiance of this harassment; photographers like Peter Magubane later worked for a Johannesburg-based newspaper whose unspoken mission was to “defeat this animal apartheid … show the world what is happening [in South Africa].”
The photos taken by young black photographers working for Drum were significant for the political turn of the photographic aesthetic of South Africa. But, although condoning or even encouraging political photography, Anthony Sampson, Drum editor, was careful not to portray it as a political magazine. All the same, the Drum became an integral part of the cultural insurrection that was simmering in the townships, an insurrection that rejected the pictorialist representation of tribes in favor of the cosmopolitanism of the cities. Drum rose to prominence in the cultural milieu of Sophiatown, one of the last remaining areas of black homeownership in Johannesburg. The sense of ownership bred a unique urban culture, a culture birthed from what Mbembe calls the “Will to Life.”
Sophiatown
Drum reflected back to the insecure Sophiatown dwellers their ‘Will to Life’ for them it mirrored the life they were living. It reflected the desires and lifestyles of those who clung precariously to cosmopolitan life in Sophiatown on the edge of the City of Gold – the colour and vibrancy of their social lives, street life, dancing, the shebeens. It was in the shebeens, run by ‘shebeen queens’ who served illicit alcohol throughout the night, along with street parties, that homegrown syncretistic music such as Marabi and Mbaqanga thrived. For the South African writer, Es’kia Mphahlele , Sophiatown “was a place where people could express themselves more freely than in any other place … It was never a shanty town. It was a real suburb with front gates which said, ‘This is how I want to live.’”
Sophiatown, one of the last areas of African home-ownership, became known as the ‘Chicago of South Africa’; like Chicago in the 1920s and 30s gangsterism was closely linked to jazz. It was the home of a number of criminal gangs that controlled the streets and went under names such as the Americans, Berliners, and Russians. “If you were not a big-shot in Sophiatown, you could not stay in Sophiatown,” recalls George Mbalweni, also known as Kort Boy, a member of the Americans. “It’s like New York; [there’s] fighting all the time in Sophiatown … You can’t stay if you can’t box.”
The forced removals from Sophiatown snuffed out the unique cultural milieu from which Drum had drawn its inspiration. Although the magazine became more overtly political thereafter and exposed some hitherto hidden atrocities of the Apartheid edifice, it never published photos of the trade unions or of the conditions in which the gold miners lived and worked (the subject of many of Eli Weinberg’s photos and the conditions that angered Margaret Bourke-White). Given that the Drum was part-owned by the son of one of the biggest mining magnates of South Africa, one can assume that it sat comfortably within the ideological apparatus of the liberal English-speaking establishment, a capitalist class with a thick web of connections to the gold and diamond mining corporations. This liberal capitalist establishment had no problem depicting and critiquing the social evils of Afrikaner Nationalist Party rule and showing black resistance to Apartheid. However, to have exposed the exploitation of migrant labourers from the reserves by the mining corporations, the very foundation on which the South African capitalist economy was built on, would have put the Drum on a collision course with the white English-speaking establishment, with whom it had colluded since its founding.
Beyond Drum: Afrapix
After the destruction of Sophiatown, Drum, together with other newspapers increasingly published politically oriented stories, such as on the Defiance Campaign against the past laws and the Sharpeville massacre. However, Drum and the other newspapers such as the World were accused by the black resistance movements of not adequately covering the political events of the 1960s and 1970s, notwithstanding the fact that the World published the dramatic photograph taken by their photographer, Sam Nzima, of the killing of a thirteen-year-old child during black student protests in Soweto on June 16th, 1976.
This hiatus in political reportage was filled largely by Afrapix, a collective of about two dozen photographers founded in 1982 by Paul Wynberg and Omar Badsha. This collective not only funded themselves but contributed from their earnings to advancing a project that was committed to bringing a local and global focus to the anti-Apartheid resistance struggles in South Africa.
Afrapix was so successful in achieving this aim that Susan Sontag, more than half a century later, after a visit to South Africa and shortly before her death in 2004, remarked that what had struck her during her visit, was the “strong moral and ethical dimension of South African photography and the attention given to the politics of photographic representation” in contrast to the treatment of documentary photography in the USA and Europe, where it had been problematized almost to the point of paralysis (Godby).
A celebratory exhibition of his photography by the University of Cape Town. Two students looking at one of his photos (Peter Magubane 1). Photo credit: Peter Magubane.
Photo with Paul Weinberg (Peter Magubane 3i). Photo credit: Peter Magubane.
Looking around at his photos with James Mathews, a renowned South African writer and anti-Apartheid activist who worked as a journalist contributing to many national newspapers and magazines including the Drum (Peter Magubane 4). Photo credit: Peter Magubane.
Ironically, Sontag made this observation about South African photography, since according to Susie Linfield, it was Sontag “more than anyone else, who was responsible for establishing a tone of suspicion and distrust in photography criticism, and for teaching us that to be smart about photographs means to disparage them.” To support her accusation, Linfield notes that Sontag described photography as “grandiose,” “treacherous,” “imperial,” “voyeuristic,” “predatory,” “addictive,” and “reductive.” Sontag singled out Salgado, claiming that his portraits were “complicit in the cult of celebrity”
Palestine And South Africa
It is doubly ironic that Sontag accepted the Jerusalem Prize for the ‘Freedom of the Individual in Society’ in 2000, ignoring direct appeals to her not to accept the prize by influential figures who she counted as friends – including Edward Said and Nadine Gordimer, a South African Nobel Literature laureate, who herself had turned down the prize. (It is possible that by the time she had accepted the invitation by Gordimer to give lectures at two South African universities, Sontag had understood the problematic politics of her acceptance of the Jerusalem prize, although she never publicly regretted it).
Since 1948 the history of the Zionist regime in Palestine has some parallels with the history of the Afrikaner Nationalist Apartheid regime in Southern Africa. 1948 was the year of the beginning of the al-Nakba for Palestinians when Zionist settlers erased the word Palestine from all official documents; it was also the year in which indigenous Africans living in South Africa were stripped of their citizenship and declared immigrants. Since then, both regimes have vigorously and brutally applied policies of separate ‘homelands’ and denied full civil rights to indigenous peoples living on territory outside of those ‘homelands.’
A recent public statement by Ilan Baruch and Alon Liel, both former Israeli Ambassadors to South Africa, explicitly acknowledges this: “During our careers in the foreign service, we both served as Israel’s ambassador to South Africa. In this position, we learned first-hand about the reality of apartheid and the horrors it inflicted. But more than that – the experience and understanding we gained in South Africa helped us to understand the reality at home.”
The Zionist regime in Israel continued to supply arms to the Apartheid regime long after Apartheid was internationally condemned – even after the Reagan administration of the USA and the Thatcher government of the UK changed tack and supported the boycott against South Africa. On the other hand, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was one of the first political parties globally to support the South African freedom struggle.
Drum still exists and is now one of the largest consumer magazines in Africa, fully colluding with what Mbembe refers to as the “modalities of Africa’s entanglement with global capital”. It is unfortunate that this collusion of the Drum with capital in South Africa was not remarked upon by Enwezor.
Sidney Luckett is a photographer and an academic whose research focuses on photography. He is also a veteran activist who played a leading role in the formation of the United Democratic Front, an anti-apartheid mass movement in the 1980s.
Prepared with the editorial assistance of Nishat Akhtar