Tag Archives: south africa

ruth miller – it is better to be together (1965)

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It is better to be
Together. Tossed together
In a white wave, than to see
The ocean like an eagle.

It is better to lie
In the stormy seething
Than to judge the weather
In an eagle’s eye.

Cold is the bird
Who flies too far
In the clear vision
Which saints and eagles share:
Their faraway eyes are bitter
With darkened prayer.

O, it is better to try
WIth the white wave, together
To overturn the sky.

It is better to be together.

__

From Floating Island, 1965.

Ruth Miller was a South African poet, born in 1919 in Uitenhage. She grew up in the northern Transvaal and spent her adult life in Johannesburg, working as a school secretary and later an English teacher. The accidental home death by electrocution of her son, aged 14, clouded the last six months of her life; she produced nothing for some time, and subsequently wrote some of her finest work. She died of cancer in 1969. More HERE.

björk – notget (2017)

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If I regret us
I’m denying my soul to grow
Don’t remove my pain
It is my chance to heal

We carry the same wound
But have different cures
Similar injuries
But opposite remedies

__
directed – by warren du preez & nick thornton jones
creative direction & masks – by björk & james merry
cgi & vfx creative – wicked pixels
cgi & vfx creative director and cgi artist – gavin coetzee
produced – by campbell beaton
2d flame – framestore london
d.o.p. – john mathieson
editor – owen oppenheimer @ the quarry
colourist – simona cristea @ rushes
production design – josephe bennett
make up – andrew gallimore @ clm
hair – martin cullen @ streeters

pure – no secrets (2017)

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‘The journey has been so humbling! The significance of the search for self and internal happiness has been so clear and i’ve started listening in a big way for the very first time. This is my way of saying to myself “Purity i hear you loud and clear”.
This video embodies everything i believe in and stand for as a woman, as an artist and as an ever growing entity. I’ll let the piece speak for itself…’

siphokazi jonas – extraction (2016)

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Listen. This woman’s words will transport you beyond the brutality, the sordid pettiness of humanity, and restore to you the depth of timeless Truth, which is Love. Give thanks with every atom of your being.

The stone is a room
Without windows or doors
Or floors.
The stone is a fist – holds
Captive a handful of broken bones
And perfect thorns.
The body of the stone does not conceive
She is a muted womb, a blunt fallopian tube
With a uterus like Jericho,
Her walls are always seven days
Away from falling.

She lies submerged
In an ocean without borders,
A stranger to shores.
Even the bulldozing tide cannot breach her pores,
What! with her lungs unravelled and
Worn like second skin to seal herself
From the influence of
The Spirit which hovers outside like breath.

She no longer desires to
Shatter surfaces and float.

A student to necessities of survival
She has taught herself to harness tornadoes like cattle and
To plow the dark and
Bury her solitude in the saline barrenness
Of the ocean floor –
The silence of the deep
Is graveyard.
From between tombstone lips she counts each body by name:
There is buried Faith.
There rests what is left of Peace,
In that corner is Love
In all its inglorious manifestations
And here lies Hope. Cremated.

She makes home in the company of ghosts
Where she once prayed for their resurrection.

Finds comfort
In the erosion and corrosion
Of a current without conscience
Surrendering to her inability to preserve things
To keep them from hitchhiking
On the tide and sailing away.

She is rooted in shadows here
Is undisturbed here
Wounds are familiar here
Healing is unwelcome here
Pain is a refugee here
Pretends to the point of believing
That the water in her lungs is air. Here.
Who would recognise
The tears of a stone submerged
In an ocean, without borders?

In this reluctant baptism
How can she know, that
She has all of God’s attention?
A Sculptor in love with a drowning stone.

In the beginning was a message in a bottle. He writes:

You say
To face God uncensored
Feels like almost dying
Feels like dying, almost.
Of course, life is a curse to those at
Peace with their death.

You ask
Who could love a stone without form
In the darkness, in the deep?

I have had feelings for you
Since before existence.
I have only created time to mark
Our first encounter.
This first love will not be relegated
To forgetfulness the tombs of memory.
Just
Give me six days to woo you.

For your sake, I will
Disguise myself as language.
My voice is a birth canal
Each word born a seed
That sprouts in speech
Each letter a bristle on a broom
To clear the air

I have always seen you
Crocheted and crafted you
In imagination
Every thread of DNA was designed
In thought
You are what I intended

Let there be light – that you might
See Me too
Hands First
Let them be home
Here the universe sleeps
Without anxiety and
Your name is a constellation that
Pre-dates the stars
Tattooed in nails
These palms are promises
Eager to cradle a rolling stone
These palms are day and revelation
They will anchor you in untethered night
When you do not see me
Acquaint yourself with the fingerprint of my works.

I will abolish the waters at the compulsion
Of my tongue, like a staff
Under the sea my word forges dry ground
And the tide will not go further
Than my command.

I could offer bouquets of flowers exiled from their roots
Or carpet petals at your feet
But the borders of my affection
Traverse generations
That the children of a stone
Might not forget the attention of Sculptor

You will buckle under the weight of my tenderness
Until you transform into flesh then spirit
And the spirit is clay, is soil, is field is fertility.

Let me dress you up from within
Make you an anchor for roots
Here you will yield fruit
like Russian dolls
You will bear
Seeds within seeds within seeds
Within season. A stone will be paradise.
For living things to gather
The site of resurrection for buried things
Wild and tame,
By air or on land.

The stone is a mine
Of precious things
The stone is mine.

Here are two rings
Their names are sun and moon
Sprinkled with galaxies and stars for gemstones
Encased in velvet heavens
This my proposal
In balls of fire and light
Wear them day or night
Until we reunite.

Now rest.
It is Sabbath.

****

The value of a precious stone
Lies in its cost to the one who will find it
Ask the Saviour of this blue and green culprit
Exchanged His life just to mine it
Day 6 set aside to carve it
With His hands until He fit it
Into His image. There can be no counterfeit
Not when the price was God in
A human outfit

Tell a poet
Who chisels words
Between papers and pens
But she will never be the Word
Only its subsidiary
Remind her
A stone can never earn or diminish
The love of a Rock
That stood before the beginning
All her attempts to give herself value
Are dust. Now mud. Now wrinkled.
The philosophies of one who has
Been in the water too long.

We are stones submerged
In the distortion of waters
Our separations from God are sirens
Singing us into
Resistance and suicide.
Tell that stone resident under your ribs
It is only precious
Because of the love of a Sculptor

7 billion stones drowning
In an ocean without borders
Some reluctant for rescue
Even if we refuse the proposal
The love of an ageless Rock will outlast
The extinction of time itself.

___

Siphokazi’s website is HERE.

feel free to play the piano (21 october 2016) 

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My kind friend Anwar gave me a ticket to Abdullah Ibrahim’s solo concert last night at the Fugard Theatre. It was the quietly incandescent performance of an old man who has been so far and seen so much, whose heart remains rooted in this troubled land even as it hurts to be here, even as his fingers know he doesn’t have forever. His playing held such sorrow, yet such peace, and playfulness, too. Refusing easy resolution, defiantly free as ever.  We imagined afterwards how incredible it would have been if the whole performance could have been broadcast live on loudspeakers, into every roiling corner of this country, for everyone to hear it simultaneously. A lament. A hymn. A balm. A lesson. Beyond the span of words’ expression.

john perkins on empire’s power tools

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“Fear and debt. The two most powerful tools of empire.”
– John Perkins

Image: #Umhlangano

Image: #Umhlangano

tune me what? – getting over sugarman (2016)

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If you’re interested in the history of the musical struggle against apartheid in South Africa, this is a worthwhile listen:

Did the Oscar-winning documentary Searching For Sugarman make things up and distort facts to the point where international audiences got a false impression of the South African music scene? Did they make Rodriguez an undeserving hero at the cost of local South African musicians? With their special guest, music sociologist Michael Drewett, Brett & Leon reveal the scandalous truth about Malik Bendjelloul’s ‘fake-umentary’.

Featured in this episode of Tune Me What? are:

  • Roger Lucey
  • National Wake
  • David Kramer
  • Edi Niederlander
  • Kalahari Surfers
  • Juluka
  • James Phillips
  • Mzwakhe Mbuli
  • Jennifer Ferguson
  • Bright Blue
  • Just Jinger

saturday, 1 september 1984

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Pick an old photograph of you. Go back and look what was happening in the world around the time it was taken.

Me, Heather, my dad Ray, and Paul. Waterfall, Natal. First day of spring, 1984.

1 September 1984
It was a Saturday. The US president was Ronald Reagan. The UK Prime Minister was Margaret Thatcher. In that week of September people in US were listening to “What’s Love Got To Do With It” by Tina Turner. In the UK “Careless Whisper” by George Michael was in the top 5 hits. Amadeus, directed by Milos Forman, was one of the most viewed movies released in 1984 while First Among Equals by Jeffrey Archer was one of the best selling books. (From HERE).

In South Africa, on 3 September 1984, the day the new constitution creating the tri-cameral parliament became effective, and the day upon which the first executive state president took the oath of office, the Vaal exploded and unrest and rioting spread countrywide. Read more HERE.

From SA History Online:

1984
12 July, A car bomb explosion in Durban, Natal, kills five and injures twenty-six.

13 July, The last all white Parliament ends its last session in Cape Town.

16 July, Supreme Court Act No 2: Provided for the separation of the Ciskei judiciary from South Africa. Commenced: 16 July 1984

27 July, Republic of Ciskei Constitution Amendment Act No 10: Removed the post of VicePresident. Commenced: 27 July 1984

30 July, Campaigning for the new tricameral Parliament begins.

30 July, South Africa has held up supplies of British weapons to Lesotho and the UK has complained several times about the delays, officials said today. South Africa has decided to close its Consulate in Wellington instead of waiting for New Zealand’s new Government to carry out its pledge to shut down, New Zealand’s Prime Minister David Lange said.

August, Elections for Coloured and Indian Chambers of Parliament.

August, Boycotts and demonstrations in schools affected about 7% of the school population. In August demonstrations affected 800 000 school children.

7 August-9 August, Conference of Arab Solidarity with the Struggle for Liberation in Southern Africa, organised by the Special Committee against Apartheid, in cooperation with the League of Arab States.

8 August, The government is to grant self government to KaNgwane. This is seen as confirmation that it has finally abandoned its land deal with Swaziland, of which KaNgwane was to have been a part.

14 August, Lesotho rejects South Africa’s proposal for a draft security treaty.

16 August, An explosion, believed to have been caused by a bomb, ripped through police offices near Johannesburg today, a police spokesman said.

17 August, The UN Security Council rejected and declared null and void the new racist constitution of South Africa. It urged governments and organisations not to accord recognition to the “elections“ under that constitution. (Resolution 554)

22 August, Elections to the House of Representatives among the Coloured community show overwhelming support for the Labour Party. Official results record only a 30.9 per cent turn out and protests and boycotts are followed by 152 arrests.

28 August, Elections to the House of Delegates among the Indian community are marked by a low poll, protests, boycotts and active opposition by the UDF. Results show eighteen seats for the National Peoples Party (NPP), seventeen for Solidarity, one for the Progressive Independent Party (PIP), four for independents.

30 August, Prime Minister Botha declares that the government does not see the low turnout at the poils as invalidating the revised constitution.

31 August, KaNgwane proclaimed a self governing territory.

31 August, South Africa declared the black homeland of KaNgwane on the Swaziland border a self governing territory. The Swazi Council of Chiefs of South Africa, which backs a controversial plan to incorporate KaNgwane into Swaziland, warned of possible bloodshed in the territory if it is granted independence.

September, Mr P.W. Botha was elected the first executive state president in September. 1984-1986.

September – 24 January 1986, From 1 September 1984 to 24 January 1986, 955 people were killed in political violence incidents, 3 658 injured. 25 members of the security forces were killed and 834 injured. There were 3 400 incidents of violence in the Western Cape.

2 September-3 September, The revised Constitution comes into effect.

3 September, As South Africa’s new Constitution was inaugurated at least 26 people died in riots and police counterattacks in black townships, according to press and news agency reports. Reuter reported that the military has been brought in to guard Government buildings in Sharpeville and other black townships.

3 September, 175 people were killed in political violence incidents. On September 3 violence erupted in the Vaal Triangle, within a few days 31 people were killed.

5 September, P.W. Botha is unanimously elected to the post of Executive President by an Electoral College composed of the majority parties in each house fifty NP members of the white House of Assembly, twentyfive Labour Party members of the Coloured House of Representatives, and thirteen National People’s Party members of the Indian House of Delegates.

10 September, Fresh detention orders were issued for seven opponents of the South African Government freed by a court on Friday. The seven, including Archie Gumede, President of the two million strong anti apartheid United Democratic Front, had been held without charge since just before the controversial elections to a new Parliament in August.

11 September, Following unrest and rioting in the townships, the Minister of Law and Order prohibits all meetings of more than two persons, discussing politics or which is in protest against or in support or in memorium of anything, until 30 September 1984. The ban extends to certain areas in all four provinces, but is most comprehensive in the Transvaal.

12 September, South African riot police used tear gas and whips in Soweto as unrest continued and a sweeping ban on meetings critical of the Government came into effect. Opposition leaders criticised the ban, saying that the Government appeared to be overreacting to the unrest, in which about 40 people had died in the past fortnight.

13 September, Six political refugees, including the President of the United Democratic Front (UDF) seek refuge in the British consulate in Durban, and ask the British government to intervene on their behalf.

13 September, Six South African dissidents hunted by police in a big security clampdown today entered the British Consulate in Durban, British officials said. Police had been trying to rearrest the six, leaders of the United Democratic Front and the natal Indian Congress, following their release from detention last Friday on the orders of a judge. Major military manoeuvres were conducted by the South African Defence Force in its biggest exercise since World War II, which, the Times contends in a separate article, will surely be interpreted by the neighbouring States as a show of hostile preparedness. The exercise seemed to illustrate the successes and the failures of South Africa’s efforts to circumvent the international arms embargo imposed in 1977, the paper adds, noting that Western military specialists were impressed by the manoeuvres.

14 September, The inauguration of the new President, P.W. Botha, takes place. Under the revised Constitution, the post of President combines the ceremonial duties of Head of State with the executive functions of Prime Minister. Mr. Botha is also chairman of the Cabinet, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces and controls the National Intelligence Service which includes the Secretariat of the State Security Council.

Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, gives an assurance that the six refugees will not be required to leave the consulate against their will, but also states that Britain will not become involved in negotiations between the fugitives and the South African government.

15 September, Members of a new Cabinet responsible for general affairs of government and three Ministers’ Councils are appointed and sworn in on 17 September 1984.
The leader of the Labour Party, the Reverend H.J. (Allan) Hendrikse and A. Rajbansi of the NPP are appointed to the Cabinet as Chairmen of the Ministers’ Councils, but neither is given a ministerial portfolio.

17 September, Over the weekend, South Africa’s new President, Pieter W. Botha, announced the appointment of a Cabinet which, for the first time in South Africa’s history, includes non-whites.
The two non-white Cabinet members, the Reverend Allan Hendrickse, leader of the Labour Party, and Amichand Rajbansi, whose National People’s Party is drawn from the Indian community, were sworn into office in Cape Town, along with the other members of the new 19 man Cabinet for General Affairs, which is otherwise all white.

18 September, South Africa’s black gold miners today called off their first legal strike, which lasted just one day but, according to mine owners, saw 250 workers injured during police action against pickets.

19 September, Riot police firing birdshot, tear gas and rubber bullets clashed with 8,000 striking gold miners, killing seven and injuring 89, police said today.

24 September, Minister of Foreign Affairs, ‘Pik’ Botha, announces that in retaliation for the British government’s refusal to give up the six men, the government will not return to Britain four South Africans due to face charges of having contravened British customs and excise regulations, and believed to be employed by ARMSCOR.

25 September, South Africa and the UK faced what could be their worst diplomatic crisis for several years because of tension over six dissidents hiding from police in the British Consulate in Durban. Pretoria said last night that in retaliation for London’s refusal to evict the fugitives it would not send four South African back to Britain to stand trial on charges of illegal export of arms.

26 September, Five of the political detainees are released and on the same day the banning order on Dr. Beyers Naudé is lifted.
Schools reopen, but 93,000 pupils continue to boycott classes.

28 September, South Africa was told by IAEA to open all nuclear plants to international inspection or face sanctions by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The resolution was passed by 57 votes to 10, with 23 abstentions. The US and other Western nations opposed it. The resolution was tabled by Morocco on behalf of African States.

2 October, The death toll in rioting and clashes with police has risen to over sixty.

2 October, The Government took into custody the leader of South Africa’s most prominent anti-apartheid group and held him under security law. The arrest came as four blacks were killed in a day of unrest in black townships raising to at least 61 the number of people killed in the past month in ethnic violence and 130,000 black students boycotted classes.

 

sisters (1987)

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Pick an old photograph of you. Go back and look at what was happening in the world around the time it was taken.

1987-Lombard's-Bakery-and-Delicatessen-2

Waterfall, Natal, winter 1987

From SA History Online:

1987
11 June, The year old State of Emergency renewed. Regulations governed security, media and black education. Initial period of detention extended from fourteen to thirty days.

24 June, Government Notice No 68: Repealed curfew regulations. Commenced: 24 June 1987

30 June, Proclamation No 8: Declared a state of emergency in Transkei. Commenced: 30 June 1987

July, Key African ANC personnel are assassinated in South Africa’s neighbouring states. Amongst them is Cassius Make and Paul Dikeledi, both killed in Swaziland.

1 July, Eight multi-racial Regional Services Councils are established to provide basic services, such as water and electricity.
The Reverend Frank Chikane succeeds the Reverend C.F. Beyers Naudé as head of the South African Council of Churches.

6 July, A new black party, the Federal Independent Democratic Alliance (FIDA) is launched to oppose apartheid and prepares to work with the government.

9 July, The Margo Commission of Inquiry into the death of President Samora Machel releases its findings. The plane carrying him crashed due to pilot error and negligence and was not lured off course by a decoy beacon as alleged by the Soviets and Mozambicans.

9 July – 12 July, Sixty-one white South Africans, mainly from the Afrikaans community, meet the ANC in Dakar, in search of a democratic alternative for South Africa. Eric Mntonga, an IDASA official, who organized this meeting, is found stabbed to death.

10 July, Ratifies the Convention on Assistance in the case of a Nuclear Accident or Radiological Emergency; also ratifies Convention on Early Notification of a Nuclear Accident.

20 July, Signs an agreement with the Federal Islamic Republic of the Comores relating to the basic conditions governing the secondment of officials to, and the recruitment of other personnel by South Africa on behalf of the government of the Republic of the Comores.

26 July, Prominent anti-apartheid activists are arrested. Amongst them is Azhar Cachalia, national treasurer of the United Democratic Front (UDF).

30 July, A bomb explodes outside the headquarters of the South African Defence Force, injuring soldiers and civilians.

31 July – 3 August, International Student Conference in Solidarity with the Struggle of the Students of Southern Africa, London.

31 July – 3 August, International Student Conference in Solidarity with the Struggle of the Students of Southern Africa, London.

14 August, Reverend Allan Hendricks, a cabinet minister, resigns from government.

4 September, KwaNdebele: Public Safety Act No 5: Commenced: 4 September 1987

7 September, An intricate prisoner exchange takes place in Maputo, involving 133 Angolan soldiers, anti-apartheid activists, Klaas de Jonge, a Dutch anthropologist, Pierre Andre Albertini, a French university lecturer and Major Wynand du Toit, a South African officer captured in Angola two years ago.

11 September, A revised National Statutory Council is released providing a forum for blacks to discuss policy and assist in drawing up a new constitution.

13 September, Venda Border Extension Act No 31: Included further territory into Venda. Commenced: 13 September 1979

23 September, Signs treaty with Malawi providing for the training of nurses from Malawi in South Africa.

24 September, Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa is launched to articulate the interests of tribal chiefs and act as an extra-parliamentary opposition movement.

27 September, Oliver Tambo, President of the ANC denies that it is in contact with the South African government.

October, Chris Hani is appointed new Chief of Staff and Deputy Commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe.

5 October, President P.W. Botha decides against scrapping the Separate Amenities Act, but agrees that some residential areas can be opened to all races.

“bared life” – looking at stereographs of south african miners produced in the early 1900s (rosemary lombard, 2014)

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This is a research paper I wrote in 2014 for “The Public Life of the Image”, an MPhil course offered through the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town.

“[T]he striking mine workers at Marikana have become spectacularised. It is a stark reminder that the mine worker, a modern subject of capitalism, in these parts of the world is also the product of a colonial encounter.”

— Suren Pillay (2014)

“We need to understand how photography works within everyday life in advanced industrial societies: the problem is one of materialist cultural history rather than art history.”

— Allan Sekula (2003)

__

I pick up the odd wood and metal contraption. This is a stereoscope, I am told. It feels old, in the sense that there is a certain worn patina about it, and a non-utilitarian elegance to the turned wood and decoration, though not as if it were an expensive piece – just as if it came from an era where there was time for embellishment. It feels cheaply put together, mass-produced and flimsy as opposed to delicate, the engraving detail of the tinny sheet metal rather rough, the fit of the one piece as it glides through the other somewhat rickety in my hands.

stereoscope 02

stereoscope 01

From two elevations, a stereoscope almost identical to the one I used. Various kinds were devised in the 19th century. The particular hand-held variety, of oak, tin, glass and velvet depicted here dates back to 1901, Based on a design by the inventor Oliver Wendell Holmes, it is perhaps the most readily available and simplest model.

I reach for the pile of faded stereographs; flipping through them slowly. There are 24, picked up in an antique shop in an arcade off Cape Town’s Long Street together with the viewing device. A stereograph is composed of two photographs of the same subject taken from slightly different angles. When placed in the stereoscope’s wire holder, and viewed through the eyeholes, an illusion of perspective and depth is achieved as the two images appear to combine through a trick of parallax.

Susan Sontag remarks that “[p]hotographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy”2. And Allan Sekula calls the photograph an “incomplete utterance, a message that depends on some external matrix of conditions and presuppositions for its readability. That is, the meaning of any photographic message is necessarily context determined”3. In what follows, while unable to offer definitive conclusions, I will look more closely at 2 out of these 24 pictures and, through a contextual discussion, attempt to unpack a few aspects of the complex relationships of photography with its subjects and also with public circulation.

Each thick, oblong card with its rounded, scuffed edges discoloured by age has two seemingly identical images on it, side by side, and is embossed with the name of what I guess must have been the photographer or printing studio’s name in gold down the margin: “RAYMOND NEILSON, BOX 145, JOHANNESBURG”. The images depict miners underground. Some are very faded, to the extent that the figures in them appear featureless and ghostly. There is virtually no annotation on most of the photos. On just a few of them, spidery white handwriting on the photo itself, as if scratched into the negative before it was printed, announces the name of the machinery or activity in the picture and the name of the mine: “Crown Mines”.

I pick up the first card, slot it into the stereoscope, and peer through the device. On the left of the two images, the writing announces: “Ingersoll hammer drill cutting box hole. C215. Crown Mines.”

Photo 1: Stereographic image of miners in Crown Mines around the turn of the twentieth century.

Photo 1: Stereographic image of miners in Crown Mines around the turn of the twentieth century.

I slide the holder backwards and forwards along the wooden shaft to focus. I’m seeing two images, nothing remarkable, until suddenly, at a precise point on the axis, the images coalesce into one, three-dimensional. The experience is that of a gestalt switch, the optical illusion uncanny. I blink hard. It’s still there. It feels magical, as if the figures in the photos are stepping right out of the card towards me. Their eyes stare into mine through over a century of time, gleaming white out of dirty, sweaty faces.

Startlingly tangible, here stand two young white men in a mine shaft, scarcely out of their teens, leaning against rock, each with a hand on a hip and a jauntily cocked hat. They are very young… yet very old too, I immediately think: definitely dead now; and perhaps dead soon after the picture was taken, living at risk, killed in a rock fall or in World War One. A pang of indefinable emotion hits. I am amazed at how powerfully this image has flooded my imagination. Even with the difficult viewing process, the effect is astonishing.

I am reminded of Susan Sontag’s contention that all photographs are memento mori: “To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt”5.

I also notice that the trick of parallax (and concurrently, the evocativeness) works most pronouncedly on the figures in the foreground, probably due to the camera angle and vanishing points of the perspective. Behind the two white youngsters, almost fading into the darkness, is a black man, holding up a drill over all of their heads that seems to penetrate the tunnel of rock in which they are suspended.

He appears to have moved during the shot as his face is blurred. This could also be due to the low light in the shaft. Though he is looking straight at me, I can’t connect with him like I do with the figures in front. He is very much in the background, a presence without substance. The way the photo was set up and taken has placed him in that position, and this viewpoint is indelible, no matter how hard I try to look past it.

Photo 2: Stereographic image of Johannesburg miners around the turn of the twentieth century.

Photo 2: Stereographic image of Johannesburg miners around the turn of the twentieth century.

There is no writing on this one except for what seems to be a reference number: “C269”. The figure in the foreground is a black man, miming work with a mallet and chisel against the rock face, though clearly standing very still for the shot, as he is perfectly in focus, his sceptical gaze on us, a sharp shadow thrown on the rock behind him. This is no ordinary lamp light: it seems clear that these pictures have been professionally illumined by the photographer, perhaps using magnesium flares, because these shots definitely predate flash photography.

To the man with the chisel’s left stands a white man, face dark with dirt. He is holding a lamp in one hand, and his other grasps a support pile which bisects the shaft and also the photo. Tight-jawed, he stares beyond us, his eyes preoccupied, glazed over. Behind the two men in the foreground, there are more men – parts of two, perhaps three workers can be seen, one a black man crouched down at the rock face behind the man with the chisel.

What strikes me most trenchantly about this picture — the punctum, after Barthes7 — is the man with the chisel’s bare feet. He is at work in an extremely hazardous environment without shoes. Looking at all the photographs, every white worker is wearing boots, but there are several pictures where it is visible that many of the black workers are barefoot.

This is shocking visual evidence of an exploitative industry which does not take its workers’ safety seriously: these men are placed at incredible risk without the provision of adequate protective attire: none have hard protection for their heads, and black workers are without shoes. Men not deemed worthy of protection are, by inference, expendable. From these photos, one surmises that black lives are more dispensable than white.

I am really curious to find out more about these pictures. Perhaps the visual evidence here is echoed in literature? Perhaps they can tell us things the literature does not?

Who were these people posing? There is nothing on the back of the photos. No captions, no dates. Who was the photographer? For what purpose were these pictures being taken? The lack of answers to these most mundane of questions lends the photos an uncanny, almost spectral quality.

Continue reading →

leigh-ann naidoo – hallucinations (17 august 2016)

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leigh-ann naidoo

Photo: Paul Botes, M&G

“Quite simply – and this is what I wish to discuss tonight in relation to the question of rage and violence – we are living in different times. Or at least, our time is disjointed, out of sync, plagued by a generational fault line that scrambles historicity.

“The spectre of revolution, of radical change, is in young peoples’ minds and politics, and it is almost nowhere in the politics of the anti-apartheid generation. In fact, even as they criticised young people just five years earlier for being apathetic and depoliticized, they have now thought student activists misguided, uninformed, and mad.

“You would think that it might be possible to resolve this difference in time by means of a careful reading of what is called the ‘objective conditions for revolution’: are we in fact in a time in which revolution is immanent? No matter the subjective experience of time – there must be a way of determining who has the better bearing on history, who can tell the time. What time is it? Yet to tell the time is a complex matter in this society.

“We are, to some degree, post-apartheid, but in many ways not at all. We are living in a democracy that is at the same time violently, pathologically unequal. Protest action against the government – huge amounts of it, what in most other places would signal the beginning of radical change – often flips into a clamour for favour from that very government. Our vacillations, contradictions and anachronisms are indication that what time it is, is open to interpretation.

“I want to argue that the comrades I have worked with in the student movement are not so much mad as they are time-travellers. Or rather, that their particular, beautiful madness is to have recognised and exploited the ambivalence of our historical moment to push into the future. They have been working on the project of historical dissonance, of clarifying the untenable status quo of the present by forcing an awareness of a time when things are not this way. They have seen things many have yet to see. They have been experimenting with hallucinating a new time…”

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Read the rest of this paper, delivered at the 13th annual Ruth First Memorial Lecture at Wits University in Johannesburg last night.

ica 3rd space symposium at uct

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L-R: jackï job, Dee Moholo, Koleka Putuma, Khanyi Mbongwa (Vasiki), Ilze Wolff, Lois Anguria

The most decolonised academic space I have yet had the joy of experiencing. The conference continues today. If you’re in Cape Town, come. It’s free!
HERE is the programme. 🌸

disrupt

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Published on 4 May 2016
Having followed the #RUReferenceList and #RUInterdict, Activate has put together a feature-length documentary about the silencing of students and staff within the space that is currently known as Rhodes University.

DISRUPT stands to continue the conversation surrounding this mistreatment of survivors and the ways in which the university management and police have failed us. It is a direct response to the use of legalese – in the form of an interdict against involved parties – to try and force the university back into “business as usual”.

Featuring interviews with members of the student and staff body, footage from the two weeks of protest and the resulting use of police force on students and workers, DISRUPT serves as both a chronological documenting of the events of the last three weeks; but also uses the window of the #RUReferenceList protests to shine a light on the institutional issue that is rape culture.

angelo fick on upholding rape culture in south africa

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Wits joins siletn protest“In South Africa we have no business criticizing the young with homilies about propriety and dignity, decency and politesse. There can be no equality for young women in higher education if the spaces they are supposed to study in are organized around enabling their violation by omission, silence and inaction.

The shame does not reside with the survivors, despite the insults and abuse flung at them, despite the rubber bullets fired at them, despite being wrestled to the ground for daring to object to the normalization of and silence on their violence, and the inaction of organizations and institutions.”

– Angelo Fick, 20 April 2016. Read the full piece HERE.

intersectional or bullshit

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fb_img_1459830146966.jpgPress release from Wits Fees Must Fall:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: FEMINIST AND QUEER DISRUPTION OF WITS SHUTDOWN, 04 APRIL:

Today, 04 April 2016, a group of students attempted to shut down Wits University in the name of Wits Fees Must Fall. These students were comprised of some members of the Wits student body and other popular faces from the #Fallist movements throughout the country. Leaders of this movement have been quoted in media confirming the shutdown as an act in solidarity with suspended, intimidated and deregistered from Wits as of today, 04 April 2016 as well as the continued struggle against outsourcing of workers on university campuses.

Through reliable sources and substantive evidence, we know that the plan to shut down the Wits campus was discussed at a private symposium this past weekend, convened under the banner of Fess Must Fall, the invite to which was not extended to the broader Fees Must Fall movement on different campuses as well as the explicit exclusion of feminist and queer persons. The feminist and queer bodies that have continued to challenge the problematic and archaic investment in the institutions of patriarchal masculinities by student leaders who have continued to erase and silence their narratives and participation in the struggle for free decolonised education and outsourcing.

As a collective, the democratic process of convening and mandating members to attend Fees Must Fall related events has always been one that is consultative and open. The collective mandates representatives at each turn as the movement maintains a flat democratic structure. Therefore, the symposium of the past weekend, facilitated through external funders that seek to infiltrate the movement, and the employ of what we suspect to be non Wits students and members of the public, is one we do not recognise and refuse to be held hostage by its political dictates and ambitions.

We have maintained our integrity as an intersectional; student led non partisan movement that is fighting for free decolonised education and the insourcing of workers.

As a movement, we fully support the disruption of systems of power that have continued to exclude black students from accessing the higher education space as well as the outsourcing and dehumanisation of black workers on campuses. However, we will never tolerate a situation in which these disruptions are allowed to happen at the expense of queer and feminist bodies wherein their bodies are only utilised for the purposes of protecting heterosexual black men on the firing line.

Since the inception of the #Fallist movements, the student’s movements have been plagued by incidences and complaints of latent and rampant misogyny, sexism, patriarchy, homophobia and transmisogyny and this must come to an end. The disruption of the shut down this morning was a step towards disrupting this problematic trend where feminist and queer bodies are only good to be used for protecting heterosexual black men.

The revolution for a decolonised South Africa where free decolonised quality education is a reality for every Black child is one that feminist and queer bodies have maintained will be intersectional or it will not be a revolution at all. However, this afternoon, feminist and queer bodies were assaulted, strangled, kicked and beaten by these black men in the service of the black revolutionary project. Black feminist and queer bodies continue to put their bodies on the line and continue to be disregarded and erased by heterosexual black men.

This practise by heterosexual black men to sacrifice feminist and queer bodies in this revolution will not be tolerated any longer. The exclusion, abuse, assault and endangering of Black Feminist, Queer, Trans and Disabled bodies by heterosexual black men will no longer be tolerated.

All identities of Blackness will be included in this revolution or it will be bullshit!

To all Feminist, Queer, Trans and marginalised bodies, we are convening at the Revolutionary benches (Green benches in front of Umthombo Building) from 10:30 on 05 April 2016.

#NotMyFMF #FuckyourErasure #AllofUsorNoneofUs