Affective Images

Post-apartheid Documentary Perspectives

Marietta Kesting

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781438467849, 9781438467856
• eBook ISBN: 9781438467863
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

Affective Images examines both canonical and lesser-known photographs and films that address the struggle against apartheid and the new struggles that came into being in post-apartheid times. Marietta Kesting argues for a way of embodied seeing and complements this with feminist and queer film studies, history of photography, media theory, and cultural studies. Featuring in-depth discussions of photographs, films, and other visual documents, Kesting then situates them in broader historical contexts, such as cultural history and the history of black subjectivity and revolves the images around the intersection of race and gender. In its interdisciplinary approach, this book explores the recurrence of affective images of the past in a different way, including flashbacks, trauma, "white noise, " and the return of the repressed. It draws its materials from photographers, filmmakers, and artists such as Ernest Cole, Simphiwe Nkwali, Terry Kurgan, Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, Adze Ugah, and the Center for Historical Reenactments.

1

Mapping Context and Place

South Africa’s Visual History of Migration

Essentially Mozambique borders on Zululand … like these are artificial borders. Xenophobia doesn’t make sense. … the idea of the foreigner doesn’t make sense … essentially it’s all down to the Berlin Conference you know—scramble for Africa. …1

White South African photographer Nadine Hutton (self-)consciously explores some of the contradictions of the South African nation, as well as the question of who is considered a “foreigner” and who is a “citizen.” Her quote evokes images of maps and the drawing and re-drawing of borders on the African continent with a ruler by the colonial powers at the Berlin conference in 1914. “South Africa” itself was invented by the colonial empires and thus had a 350-year history of European and therefore white domination that was foreshadowed by the landing of Vasco da Gama and his men in South Africa in 1497 en route to India. In 1652 Jan van Riebeeck established a permanent settlement of Europeans at the Cape.

Yet, it is important to remember that the European borders were also highly contested and artificial constructs and that any idea of “natural” borders is only indicative of a desire for a romanticized primal state, which never existed, either in Africa or in Europe.2 Rather, the Berlin conference marks the entangled histories of Europe and Africa and thus is an event of modern global history. At the same time history was locally defined and constructed in the territory that is today South Africa. To return to photographer Hutton’s quote, she claims that the “idea of the foreigner” makes no sense since the black people, who live across the border area in South Africa and Mozambique speak the same language—Xitsonga, also known as Tsonga or Shangaan. Hutton, however, does not reflect that she herself may be considered a “foreigner” in South Africa by some people and does not question her own history of her European ancestors migrating to South Africa. The most prominent event of white migration within South Africa started in 1830—the “Great Trek” of mostly Dutch, German and French settlers from the Cape up north toward the inner parts of South Africa. Thus there were white European migration movements to Africa and there were black African migration patterns without equating the two—one being a clearly colonial endeavor of conquest and domination and the other dependent upon survival, labor, and other factors that may not have been researched thoroughly—I suggest, however, that they are both part of the visual history archive of migration within South Africa.

This study is not an attempt to write yet another “history of South Africa;” it is therefore beyond its scope to give a thorough account of history and politics, but instead it only cross-maps the interconnection of the historical visualization of black and white migration, by looking at some selected visual examples—film stills, maps, and posters to analyze how concepts or conceptions of a history of migration and at the same time belonging in South Africa can be “excavated” in the Benjaminian sense.3 As Walter Benjamin has exemplified in a short text—which he called a “Denk-Bild”—a reflective image with the programmatic title “Excavation and Memory,” the work of remembering, memory, and understanding the past is akin to the work of an archaeologist, who digs into layer after layer of the ground to unearth what is hidden beneath.4 Benjamin emphasized that while doing so, one must not be afraid to come back to the very same subject again and again, comparing it to someone digging up the soil and breaking it up, scattering it, and rooting it around all over again. Similarly, this study will again and again return to historical “crosscuts” (as in the mining industry) from the past that pierce through and puncture the present and may get restaged and reenacted.

White Migration—“The Great Trek”

A photograph from 1952 documented the reenactment of a historical event of the Great Trek of the white Dutch settler (Boers); it was broadcast on the weekly newsreels in the cinemas throughout South Africa. The year 1952 marked exactly 300 years after the arrival of the Dutch Jan van Riebeeck with three ships at the Cape of Good Hope on April 6, 1652, whereas the Great Trek originally had taken place between 1830 and 1840, and therefore no photographic image exists from it.5 In the photograph of the reenactment a float is visible, symbolizing a ship (from van Riebeeck’s fleet), draped in white linen with white women and men onboard, grouped around a giant wheel of an ox wagon. The women are all wearing pure white clothes, the men are half naked, underlining their athletic bodies.

This iconography immediately calls up registers of both Leni Riefenstahl and fascist visuality as well as the western frontier that both combine “aestheticized leadership and segregation.”6 This event of festive reenactment was remarkable in several ways—first of all it combined two historical dates that were far removed from each other but were both imbued with special ideological meaning for the apartheid regime. Second, the “great trek” of white migration was staged as a heroic, visual spectacle, thus highlighting the construction of history by visual means; this was called “’n Fees vir die Oog”—a feast for the eye.7 This draws attention to the inherent relationship of visual media as recording and storing devices and the question of a national archive. The ANC and other anti-apartheid organizations protested against the festivities, and called instead for a “People Protest Day,” thus contesting who “the people” of South Africa are and whose history should be remembered.

Figure 1.1. Reenactment of Great Trek, “Piet Retief’s Manifesto, a float in the 1952 Jan van Riebeeck Festival,” Courtesy of the Cape Times.

In British-ruled colonial Africa the spheres of “custom” and law were disjoined at the basis of a system of “indirect rule” that did not extend full citizenship rights to the African population.8 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the white Afrikaans leaders, who were discontented with British rule, crafted the myth of South Africa as “an empty land” awaiting its occupation and cultivation by white settlers. This notion culminated in the “Great Trek” of the “Voortrekkers”—a self-given name of the settlers and farmers of mostly Dutch, German, and French decent.9 The Voortrekkers went north and eastward during the 1830s and 1840s, away from the British control of the Cape Colony. As postcolonial and gender theorist Anne McClintock has stated: “In the voluminous Afrikaner historiography, the history of the ‘volk’ is organized around a male national narrative figured as an imperial journey into empty lands.”10 However, African people already populated the Southern part of the African continent. In order to integrate this contradiction into the Afrikaans historical narrative, a conflict around the merit of civilization had to be staged. Therefore, “the colonial journey is figured as proceeding forward in geographical space, but backward in racial and gender time, to a prehistoric zone of linguistic, racial and gender degeneration. At the heart of the continent, a historic agon is staged as degenerate Africans ‘falsely’ claim entitlement to the land.”11

“Native Reserves,” “White Cities,” and “Homelands”

Awaking on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth. …12

The Native Land Act 1913 (No. 27 of 1913) was passed by the parliament of South Africa in order to regulate the acquisition of land by black people.13 It was also known as the “Black Land Act,” and was passed because of pressure by whites to prevent blacks from settling in white areas. This law incorporated territorial segregation into legislation for the first time since the founding of the Union of South Africa in 1910; it made it illegal for blacks to buy land from whites.14 It gave whites control over the majority of the land, displacing blacks and forcing them to live in only 7.3 percent of the country that was allocated as “native reserves.” It also made it illegal for blacks to stay on the land of whites unless they were so-called bona fide employees. This created even more unequal power relations and modes of dependence between black workers and white employers and intensified the migrant labor system.

The apartheid government’s enforcement of material separation in space needs to be connected with the segregation of the affective imaginary realm in order to divide and control people’s desires and aspirations. Different visual regimes were created for people classified as white and as black; this meant that there were separate film productions for white and black audiences, who were also not allowed to watch films together.15 These divisions and control of the audio-visual sphere had a political impact and determined who was depicted and whether or not these images showed people in “despair” or positions of “victimhood” versus having a “good life,” and more generally who becomes visible in the first place and therefore is part of the national cultural archive.

The white South African parliament passed the Entertainment Act of 1931 that established censorship clearance of films before public screening and prohibited scenes that showed “intermingling of Europeans and Non-Europeans.” In 1934 an amendment was added that further restricted film societies, especially with “native members,” to show films that included “communist propaganda.”16 Film censorship was thusly connected to apartheid visual segregation, restricting the visual, political, and affective realm. The amendment from 1934 shows that the regime was also afraid of the affective impact of images to move the population politically—and especially the population classified as black since they were constructed as childlike and “naïve.”

When apartheid was set into place, the whole African (black) population was perceived as foreigners belonging only to their ahistorical, assigned homelands, depending on their (constructed) ethnicity. So while black men were forced into becoming migrant workers, the right to reunite with their families was denied to them, as black women and children were kept immobile in the “native location.” Black women, however, did not let the state take away their right to move; they organized the first anti-pass campaign 1913 in Bloemfontein.17 The fight against the pass laws, which came to symbolize oppression as a whole, continued over the next decade.18 The right-wing general and later Prime Minister Jan Smuts, who supported racial segregation and white minority rule, argued in 1944, “… it is this migration of the native family, of the females and children, to the farms and towns which should be prevented. As soon as this migration is permitted the process commences which ends in the urbanized detribalized native and the disappearance of the native organization.”19

Moreover, Jan Smuts’s statement shines a light on the ambivalent meanings that have been conferred to “migration” in the South African context and especially to the migration of the othered and raced parts of the population—a motor of modern urbanity, a necessity, a threat, a frequently denied choice of living and working circumstances, as well as a promise for a different (often imagined better) life. As Mamdani proposed: “The migrant worker needs to be seen as the locus of all major social contradictions in such a context. Besides articulating the tensions generated by a market economy—those o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Mapping Context and Place
• Chapter 2 Affective Images
• Chapter 3 Burning Questions
• Chapter 4 Photographic Speech Acts
• Chapter 5 In/Visibilities and Reenactments
• Chapter 6 Conclusion: Affective Images of Belonging
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index
• Back Cover