Patricia Hayes

‘Picturing the Past’ in Namibia: The Visual Archive and its Energies

‘Do you hate me?’ The question came at a moment when personal, family and national histories converged for a group of history students. A foreign student at the University of Namibia had just encountered a scientific publication on race3 during her research in the National Archives. It included photographs of six severed heads of Nama-speaking prisoners-of-war from the big rebellions against German rule in 1904 to 1907.4 As she was reporting back to her classmates, a second student revealed her discovery of a German diary. This diary named one of the men decapitated for experiments in racial science as Cornelius Fredericks.

The form of the norm: shades of gender in South African photography of the 1980s

This essay deals with questions of form and content in the medium of photography in South Africa in the 1980s. The avowed purpose of progressive photographers was a more complex portrayal of society than the images projected by the apartheid state. It is now routinely argued that particular norms emerged in the ensuing representation of socio-economic conditions and political resistance, and that these marginalised or elided women and broader questions of gender. I believe that while there are problems of gender that need examination, the critiques of what is now glossed as ‘documentary photography’ are frequently reductionist because they are made with little or no scrutiny of the actual work in question. This has impelled me to re-examine selected works and their production from this period. Researchers with the Visual History project at the University of the Western Cape interviewed photographers grouped within and around the progressive collective Afrapix, which operated between 1982 and 1992. Our interview team asked questions about gender issues within Afrapix as an organisation, and within photography more broadly. This elicited an intriguing comment from Gille de Vlieg (2003): ‘I think one of the things that occurred to me along the way was that there was a hierarchy, and it was a South African hierarchy. . .’. De Vlieg goes on to describe a pyramid with white middle-class men at the top, white women and coloured men in the middle and black men at the bottom. That it only occurred to her ‘along the way’ suggests a hierarchy that was not always obvious in the midst of political mobilisation, with features that only became defined over time. Thus, it is important actually to periodise the emergence and development of different bodies of work in relation to historical shifts around them. Between the Soweto uprising of 1976 and the start of the present century, there are three phases in South African photography where the inter-relationships between images, audiences and distribution are quite distinctive. This is not to insist that when a new phase began the previous one disappeared – on the contrary, continuities are apparent. But the phases coincide strongly with new economies in what Ingrid Masondo (2007) has called the ‘market of photography’. The first phase can be seen prior to the rise of international interest in the antiapartheid struggle in the mid-1980s. This is a rich, painstaking phase during which

Nationalism's Exile: Godfrey Nangonya and SWAPO's Sacrifice in Southern Angola

Godfrey Nangonya hardly figures in any liberation narrative in southern Africa. Born and educated in the border region of Namibia/Angola, he gravitated to Cape Town and the ferment of radical, nationalist and pan-African politics in the late 1940s. Departing for Angola, he joined militants who founded the MPLA. He was imprisoned twice under the Portuguese and, because of the complications of plural political affiliations, twice after Angolan independence. This article explores Nangonyas transnational political, nationalist and carceral journeys, and especially the years 1974–75 when, as SWAPOs liaison officer with UNITA in southern Angola, he was ‘sacrificed’ by the Namibian liberation movement. It examines the open and volatile southern Angolan frontier region in a time of expanding historical possibilities for national liberation, a space that had to be forcibly stabilised, whether as a buffer zone for the South African military, a zone of passage for SWAPO guerrillas, or sovereign territory for the MPLA. The new Cold War dynamics soon resulted in a hardening of political boundaries and the narrowing of nationalist alignments and internal debates. Nangonya was exiled by a Namibian nationalism and its history that was purged of its plural alternative narratives, and which is only now slowly opening up to debate.

A Land of Goshen

The general appearance was that of the most abundant fertility. It was a land of Goshen to us. Galton, 1858, p. 195