1
On Belonging: landscape and photography in
South Africa.
Francki Burger
A research report submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of the
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the
requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts by Dissertation.
Johannesburg 2008
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Abstract
This research thesis examines how place, space and landscape constitute
belonging. I discuss the different meanings of place: how it figures in relation
to geography, space and landscape and how place constitutes a sense of
belonging. My interest lies in how people, especially the Afrikaner,
constructed and imagined space, place and landscape in South Africa to
assert identity and belonging; also, how land and landscape act as an
ideological tool, in which social, cultural and political meanings are embedded.
I concentrate on how photography assisted in shaping the geographical
imagination of the British Empire, to assess how it impacted on place and
belonging in South Africa. The concluding chapter examines my practical
work while completing my masters degree. I investigate landscape, history,
memory and identity through photography in an attempt to find a sense of
belonging. I explore how the photographic image may contain layers of
meaning ?underneath? its immediate perceived and physical surface, in an
attempt to evoke history and memory.
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Declaration
I declare that this dissertation is my own, unaided work. It is being
submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of Masters of Arts in
fine arts in the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. It
has not been submitted before for any degree or examination in
any other university, nor has it been prepared with the assistance
of any other body or organisation or person outside of the
University of the Witwatersrand.
-----------------day of ----------------------- 2008
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Acknowledgements
For my mother Lucia Burger, my inspiration.
I would like to thank my wonderful supervisor Jo Ractliffe.
Also Louis, Lucia and Eloise for all the patience and love.
Thank you to Deirdr? du Toit and Darryl Hossack for reading and
editing.
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Table of Contents
Page
Abstract 2
Declaration 3
Acknowledgements 4
List of illustrations
Introduction 8
Chapter 1 Geography: Space place and belonging 14
Place and space 18
Place and landscape 22
Chapter 2 Photography and Place 30
The imperial eye 36
Photography and landscape
in South Africa 41
Chapter 3 Santu Mofokeng 57
Chapter 4 Place in the world 72
Belonging 77
Conclusion 85
Bibliography 87
Illustrations 98 98
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List of Ilustrations
Page
Figure 1: Unidentified photographer, ?The veld?, July 1925 47
Figure 2: Santu Mofokeng, Black Photo Album. 58
Figure 3: Santu Mofokeng, Inside Motouleng Cave, 1996 63
Figure 4: Santu Mofokeng, Concentration Camp for ?natives?,
Free State, 1999. 68
Figure 5: Santu Mofokeng, The Namib: Where did the road
Lead when it lead nowhere? Namibia (1997) 69
Figure 6: Absence I, hand-printed fiber based silver prints.
(2006) 98
Figure 7: Absence II, hand-printed fiber based silver prints.
(2006) 98
Figure 8: Absence I, (small) hand-printed silver prints.
(2006) 98
Figure 9: Absence II, (small) hand-printed silver prints.
(2006) 98
Figure 10: Absence III, hand-printed fiber based silver prints.
(2006) 99
Figure 11: Absence III, hand-printed silver prints. (2006) 99
Figure 12: Magersfontein I, hand-printed fiber based silver
prints. (2007) 100
Figure 13: Magersfontein II, hand-printed fiber based silver
prints. (2007) 101
Figure 14: Untitled I, hand-printed fiber based silver prints.
(2008) 102
Figure 15: Untitled Grid II, hand-printed silver prints.
(2006) 102
Figure 16: Veld I, hand-printed fiber based silver print.
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(2007) 103
Figure 17: Veld II, hand-printed fiber based silver print.
(2007) 104
Figure 18: Veld III, hand-printed fiber based silver print.
(2007) 105
Figure 19: Veld IV, hand-printed fiber based silver print.
(2007) 106
Figure 20: Veld V, hand-printed fiber based silver print.
(2007) 107
Figure 21: Veld VI, hand-printed fiber based silver print.
(2007) 108
Figure 22: Veld VII, hand-printed fiber based silver print.
(2007) 109
Figure 23: Hide I, digital inkjet print. (2008) 110
Figure 24: Hide II, digital inkjet print. (2008) 110
Figure 25: Hide III, digital inkjet print. (2008) 111
Figure 26: Hide IV, digital inkjet print. (2008) 111
Figure 27: Hide V, digital inkjet print. (2008) 112
Figure 28: Hide VI, digital inkjet print. (2008) 112
Figure 29: Land I, hand-printed silver prints. (2006) 113
Figure 30: Land II, hand-printed silver prints. (2006) 113
Figure 31: Land III, hand-printed silver prints. (2006) 113
Experimental works 114-119
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Introduction
"Landscape is indifferent: it reveals facts: sky, koppies, veld. Dispersed
about it are towns, dorps, isolated dwellings where the lives of the present
are lived against history. The places in the landscape can be visited, they
can be documented, recorded, reported. We can walk about on the places
that hold the memory of human suffering: places where there were battles or
massacres or single lonely deaths. If once there was blood on the ground it
has long since leeched away. But the memory hasn?t and each time we return
to these places and record the experience we add new layers of complexity."
(Jo Ractliffe and Mike Nicol,1998)
My dissertation aims to explore how place, space and landscape constitute
belonging. I will discuss what place is and how it figures in relation to
geography, space and landscape; how place constitutes a sense of
belonging. Although the South African landscape for most South Africans
represents an emblem of place and belonging, it has been associated with
tension, displacement and contestation for both white and black communities.
Political power was gained and retained by controlling land. It became an
important political tool, which determined where people could and should
belong.
Europeans constructed and imagined space, place and landscape in South
Africa to assert identity and belonging; and also, land and landscape acted as
an ideological tool in which social, cultural and political meanings were
embedded. Throughout the dissertation my focus is mainly on the Afrikaners.
I am interested in the ways they imagined space, place and landscape to
attain power, identity and belonging within the South African landscape. This
investigation mostly excludes discussions around landscape and belonging
for other cultural groups.
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Geographer Edward Relph (1976: 49-53) claims that to have a ?sense of
place? is fundamental to our feeling of ?belonging? as an individual, a nation or
a cultural group. A sense of place is a geographic concept that attempts to
define our human relationship with the environment. Geographer Yi-Fu Taun
(1977: 6) states that where space allows movement, "place is pause". It is
within this 'pause' that place is formed by personal biographies and memories.
These notions of memories and place, via landscape, become a site through
which one may study personal, national and cultural identity (Stewart and
Strathern, 2003: 2).
My study focuses on the geographical imagining through place, space and
landscape and is an important aspect of this dissertation, as it figures
prominently in the creation of the Afrikaner as a cultural group. Geographical
imagination is a mechanism through which people situate themselves in the
world, through which the geographical can be ordered, understood and
constructed. According to Derek Gregory in his book Geographical
Imaginations (1994: 217), it entails a ?sensitivity towards the significance of
place, space and landscape in the constitution and conduct of social life?.
A group or a nation is informed by the circulation and acceptance of certain
narratives and rituals; images that would serve to unify a group of people. The
Afrikaners imagined that the landscape was ideally suited for the white settler,
the interior perceived as empty, a place where the Afrikaner could live
independently. These homeless Afrikaners saw themselves as ?God?s chosen
people?, who spoke a language that ?fitted? the landscape, which in turn was
?proof of the Afrikaner?s natural ownership of the land? (Coetzee, 1992: 377).
Claims of ownership of the land by native groups living within the landscape
were ignored, as the Afrikaner went forth to ?civilise? the ?dark? interior. Over
time, together with language and religion, the Afrikaner perceived an intimacy
with the land. After the South African War1, these narratives were revisited
and stories and images of the pain and suffering during the battle of Blood
1 Also known as the Anglo-Boer War. The South African War is the terminology adopted to
reflect the fact that others besides Boers and British were involved in and affected by the war,
such as armed black people who acted as scouts and spies for both Boers and British.
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River and the broader war were appropriated in forging a national identity.
Personal stories became political.
Geographical imagination acquired a powerful tool with the invention of
photography in 1839 (Schwartz and James, 2003: 1). The photograph
provided amplification in landscape images to assert place. Anthropologist
Denis Cosgrove affirms that the idea of landscape in the past was connected
to the "faculty of sight", a landscape was viewed, or painted, and relied on the
perception of truth. "Significant technical innovations for representing this truth
included single-point perspective and the invention of aids to sight like the
microscope, telescope, and camera? (Cosgrove,1984: 9). Photography as a
medium, above all other, was credible, and contained likeness to a scene or
landscape, and likeness is equivalent to evidence and truth ? proverbially,
?seeing is believing?. In South Africa, photography was used to depict the
vastness of the 'empty' landscape, thereby affirming Afrikaner ownership and
identity, as well as ideological narratives.
In my practical work ? as an Afrikaner ? I investigate landscape, history,
memory and identity through photography, in an attempt to find a sense of
belonging. I am interested in how visual images shaped the geographical
imagination of place and belonging in South Africa during colonialism and
apartheid, and will argue that, through photography, we assert place, which
can contribute to the reimagination and remaking of the land to attain a
possible common identity in a multicultural landscape.
I will discuss the work of documentary photographer Santu Mofokeng, as his
work corresponds with the understanding of place and belonging I explore in
my own work. Mofokeng explores places and landscapes marked by trauma
in an attempt to reclaim landscape as a place of belonging severed by
colonialism and apartheid. Throughout South African history, black people
were depicted as not having a connectedness to landscape, but for Mofokeng
the landscape is a place from which he can investigate his personal identity,
his place in the community, where not only he but South Africans can find
a home.
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Mofokeng states that it is his desire to reclaim landscape, through
photography ?not merely as achronic and neutral, removed from human
struggles, but as the repository of politics, history, and memory? (Raditlhalo,
2001: 68). In the past, Mofokeng perceived the landscape as a "hostile
environment", "tense with racism" (Bester and Pierre, 1998: 108). After the
1994 elections, it was possible to find new ways of imagining ourselves in a
country no longer characterised by binary positions such as ?us? and ?them?.
We could now move freely through the land, not restricted by where we had to
live or where we had to belong. Mofokeng, from documenting the struggle for
liberation to everyday life in Soweto, started to renegotiate the complexities of
history, memory, identity and the self, connected to landscape. He writes in
the statement for his 2007 exhibition Invoice that: "Re/member is a process by
which we restore to the body forgotten memories. The body in this case is the
landscape ? on whose skin and belly histories and myths are projected ?
which is central to forging national identity?. By photographing sites of trauma,
Mofokeng aims to find a way to compare and renegotiate his personal history
in the South African landscape. In conversation with Natasha Christopher
(2004: 3) in Unsettled, he states: "What my work has always been about is a
search, a search for home?.
Outline of chapters
This dissertation is divided into four chapters.
The focus of Chapter 1 will be on place and belonging, and how it relates to
space and landscape. I will discuss the work of theorist Irit Rogoff in her book
Terra Infirma, where she investigates the notion of belonging through
geography. Geography as a discipline aims to understand the world we live in,
how we mark or write the earth. Human geography, as a branch of
geography, investigates place and people's sense of, and relationship with
places. The philosophies of phenomenology and existentialism influenced
humanist geographers like Yi-Fu Taun, Christopher Tilley, Edward S Casey,
Edward Relph and Doreen Massey, and their writing on place, space and
landscape, which I will discuss briefly. Framed by the writings of these
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geographers, I explore how the Afrikaner constructed a sense of belonging
through place, space and landscape.
Over the past century and a half, photography has been used to shape our
geographical imagination, and the focus of Chapter 2 is how the invention of
photography influenced our understanding of place and belonging. I explore
how photography shaped the geographical imagination of the British Empire,
to assess how it impacted on South Africa under colonial rule. I extend this
discussion to investigate how photography assisted in the making of place
and belonging, and unbelonging, for South Africans during apartheid and
post-apartheid.
Chapter 3 comprises a discussion of the work of photographer Santu
Mofokeng, who photographs the landscape in an attempt to reclaim it as a
place of belonging. Landscape, for Mofokeng, acts as a mnemonic device, a
place where we remember. Throughout South African history, black people
were depicted as not having a connectedness to landscape, but Mofokeng
challenges this idea and investigates identity, home, belonging and
unbelonging through landscape.
In Chapter 4 I write about my own work and investigate landscape, history,
memory and identity through photography, in an attempt to find a sense of
belonging as an Afrikaner. In particular I am interested in the ways that
landscape reflects our historical and ideological subjectivities ? the complex
set of relations between people and places. In this exploration the landscape
becomes a vehicle through which to explore ownership or ?laying claim? to a
sense of belonging. Landscape can be seen as a site for the construction of
history, knowledge and identity. This view would regard landscape
conceptually ? a space of shifts and changes rather than that of physical
place ? and therefore subject to the same kind of critical theorisation as in the
discourses of race and gender, for example. Geography is the relation
between subjects and places that the landscape makes visible. Land
becomes a body of knowledge, ?a process by which social and subjective
identities are formed? (Rogoff, 2000: 1). While these positions are constantly
changing, being renegotiated, landscape often ?serves as a crucial marker of
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continuity with the past as well as a reassurance of identity in the present and
a promise for the future? (Stewart, 1988: 4).
I am interested in the notions of surface and depth in the photographic print,
and as the landscape layers soil and rock, history and memory are embedded
within the landscape. I explore how the photographic image may contain
layers of meaning ?underneath? its immediate perceived physical surface. My
materials comprise my own photographs as well as historical photographic
material. In the darkroom, I manipulate the print by layering negatives on top
of each other in various configurations to create a complex but coherent final
photographic image. The result of this darkroom process is a photographic
print that acknowledges some of the photograph?s function as a trace of the
real, but on closer inspection however, this becomes less stable.
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Chapter 1
Geography: Space, place and belonging
Geography is the study of the earth, its topography and its inhabitants. In
Greek, it means ?to describe? or ?to write?, or ?map? the earth. Geographers
study how people map or write places externally and internally in their
interaction with place, space and landscape. Human geography is a branch of
geography that focuses primarily on the relationship between people and their
environment, the different and contested meanings that people attach to
places.
During the 1980s and 1990s feminist, postmodernist, post-structuralist and
post-colonial theorists began to re-evaluate the study of geography. At the
turn of this millennium, humanist geographers started to explore place,
through phenomenology and its various contexts that influence individuals.
These influences include environmental perception and landscape
iconography, as well as art, photography and film (Buttimer, 1996: 837).
Geographer Christopher Tilley (1994: 7) calls this development the
phenomenological 'school' of geography (Taun 1974, 1975, 1977; Pickles
1985; Relph 1976; Buttimer and Seamon 1980; Seamon and Mugerauer,
1989), stating that until the 1960s, human geography was directed by the
study of regions ? generally treating these regions as homogeneous, although
looking at diverse aspects, such as climate, soils and political systems.
Whereas post 1960, the ?school? was greatly influenced by philosophers such
as Husserl and Heidegger, and began to explore new ways to re-examine
place. The way people experience and understand space, place, landscape,
and how geographical imaginations are formed, is central to phenomenology.
The philosophical method of phenomenology acts as a tool to investigate
human experience and consciousness, including everyday interactions with
place. One of the humanist geographers Edward Relph (1976: 10-11) argues
that: "one of the first aims of phenomenology of geography should be to
retrieve these [everyday] experiences from the academic nether-world and to
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return them to everyone by reawakening a sense of wonder about the earth
and its places". The study of humanist geography through phenomenology,
according to geographer Yi-Fu Taun (2004: 44), is "mostly about how we
strive to feel at home on earth, rooted in place." Taun accentuates that it is an
empirical study, where place can be a favourite armchair, a landscape we
visited as children, or a house where we live. One could describe the 'feeling
of the place' as smoky smells on a cold winter morning, the light frost while
walking to school past your grandmother's house, or the homesickness when
not at home. When imagining these places, we feel a sense of belonging or of
not belonging, which is rooted in geography. Edward Relph (1976: 5) quotes
Eric Dardel, who writes that before scientific geography, geography?s
importance existed in the relationship that man has with the world he lives in.
Dardel argues that we should rather recognise that geographical reality is first
of all the place where someone is, as well as the places and landscapes they
remember; formal aspects of location, region or landforms are subsequent.
Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology, argued that experience is
essential, and that phenomenology is a science of consciousness rather than
of empirical knowledge. In his book Ideas, he states: "Natural cognition begins
with experience and remains ?within? experience"; he reasons that
phenomenology concerns itself ?not with matters of facts but with essences; it
is a 'science of essences' " (Russell, 2006: 22). Experience in all its
complexity must be studied, including the meaning of things experienced in
our everyday life, such as the self, interaction with others, the flow of time and
objects and places we encounter in our everyday lives.
Philosopher Martin Heidegger, a student of Husserl, expanded on Husserl?s
theory that one cannot experience anything without ?being-in-the-world?
(Russell, 2006: 30). The phrase ?being-in-the-world? is an important aspect of
Heidegger's philosophy. He argues that human beings find themselves in the
world and one can only have feelings, thoughts and experiences if one exists
in the world. This influenced human geography to look at how the spatial and
social environments interact and how people experience that in their daily
lives. According to Heidegger, it is not only important to ?know about? places in
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an objective way but also to ?understand? what people's sense of and
relationship to place, space and landscape might be.
This theory influenced geographer JK Wright in the 1940s (1947: 1-15) when
he introduced the term ?terrae incognitae?, which refers to the unknown areas
of peoples? minds, the internal places that people share with others from the
same culture or social group. He states that: "the unknown stimulates the
imagination to conjure up mental images of what to look for within it, and the
more there is found, the more the imagination suggests? (Wright, 1947: 1-15).
So the more we do not understand a place, the more the imagination will
ultimately construct ways of looking at place to assess ways of belonging
within that particular locale.
Through studying what people remember about places and landscapes,
geographers can start to understand how the geographical imagination works;
or how people imagine the geography they live in. People interact with their
environment by mapping the world physically, and also drawing mental
images of places in their minds. Geography is ultimately "the work of the
mind" as Simon Schama writes in his book Landscape and Memory (Schama,
1995: 7). He states that landscapes are ?constructs of the imagination" (Ibid:
61). The term 'geographical imagination', used by geographer David Harvey in
his book Social Justice in the City, describes the multifaceted ways in which
individuals, groups and nations perceive place, space and landscape.
According to Harvey, they enable individuals "to fashion and use space
creatively, and to appreciate the meaning of the spatial forms created by
others" (Schwartz and James, 2003: 6). Harvey argued that it was a tool he
developed for social and spatial justice that people could use to compare
themselves not only to larger social structures but to see the similarities and
differences across spaces and times to fight various forms of oppression.
In the construction of place, the first aim of the geographical imagination is to
map, or seek a sense of place and belonging within a locale, landscape, city,
nation or group. A sense of place is a subjective feeling for, or attachment to,
a specific place. It is not the physical characteristics of a place, but rather the
ways in which individuals and groups ?see? or imagine place. Tilley (1994: 18)
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affirms that ?[p]lace is both ?internal? and ?external? to the human subject, a
personally embedded centre of meanings and a physical locus for action?.
Place ?must be a place on the ground? (Taun 1977: 153), but it is also a
mental location that contains histories and memories, and is ?sensed in a
chiaroscuro of setting, landscape, ritual, routine, other people, personal
experiences, care and concern for home, and in the context of other places"
(Relph, 1976: 29).
Maps, mapping processes and images of space are literal and symbolic
representations of the geographical imagination that portray both individual
and social spatial minds? eyes. We have an ability to carry information and
images of places mentally ? mental maps of our hometowns as well as the
places we want to visit or live in. It is these impressions and images of our
surroundings that geographers call mental maps. These maps are our interior
topography, which includes our memories, personal histories and experiences
in relation to places. By studying these mental maps, geographers can learn
how people perceive the world. Nedra Reynolds (2004: 84) writes: ?[Mental
maps] are a particular form of ?imagined geography? that illustrate the complex
relationship between the social and the spatial.? She goes on to argue that
studies of personal maps can be used to explore issues related to gender,
class, and personal identity (Reynolds, 2004: 84).
Irit Rogoff argues in her book Terra Infirma (2000: 8) that geography is as
much an ?epistemic category as gender or race, and that all three are indelibly
linked at every stage. All three categories share an engagement with
belonging, which plays out around dichotomies of self and other and around
strategies of ?emplacement? and ?displacement?. Geography therefore is a
system of classification, a mode of location, a site of collective, national,
cultural, linguistic and topographic histories.? Geography becomes a site
where multidimensional knowledge and identities are in a constant state of
flux. It is not limited to the physical ? as place or site ? but entails the same
kind of critical theorisation as gender or race, or any other body of knowledge.
Geography is then the relation between subjects and places that place makes
visible. Doreen Massey (1994: 212) emphasises that thinking about places in
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this way "implies that they are not so much bounded areas as open and
porous networks of social relations".
Place is where history, memory and the senses meet the natural world. Place,
a geographical concept, is then first of all a social space, where people
interact with each other and with the environment daily. It is where humans
develop their own personal or national geographical epistemology, which is
founded on personal or collective geographies composed of direct
experiences, memory, fantasy, present circumstances, and future purposes
(Relph, 1976: 4).
Place and space
The relations between subjects and places are seen through ?structures and
orders of belonging, whether through state-granted rights or the celebrations
of mutual heritages and customs? (Rogoff, 2000: 4). Geography is ultimately
about how humans experience and belong in place, space and landscape.
Where space is an abstract construct, place is a site for human activity. There
can be no space without place. We direct our intentions toward objects in
places; places then act as background for these objects of intention. Places
can be objects too and so act as focuses of intention. According to Relph
(1976: 43), the "essence of place lies in the largely unselfconscious
intentionality that defines places as profound centers of human existence".
Prior to democracy in South Africa in 1994, place and belonging were decided
and organised through political ideologies. Initially as a loosely formed cultural
group, Afrikaners had to create a community, they had to create a place to
belong to. My aim is to investigate the history of how early Afrikaner settlers
constructed place in landscape. I am interested in how they constructed a
sense of themselves and their position in the world through place. Concepts
such as racism, nation-building and multiculturalism are all linked to place and
an attachment to it.
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To have roots or an attachment to a specific place is a basic human need, it is
part of human nature. Relph (1976: 38) quotes Robert Coles, who argues:
It is utterly part of our nature to want roots, to need roots, to
struggle for roots, for a sense of belonging, for some place that
is recognised as mine, as yours, as ours. Nations, regions,
states, counties, cities, towns ? all of them have to do with
politics and geography and history; but they are more than that,
for they somehow reflect man's humanity, his need to stay
someplace and get to know ... other people.
In terms of the history of white South Africa, the Cape of Good Hope marked
the ?first place?, when Jan van Riebeeck established a halfway house or
provisioning station for the Dutch East India Company at Table Bay. This ?first
place? ? a settlement ? was perceived to be the first centre of human
existence. Soon Van Riebeeck began to trade with the nearby Khoihoi and in
1657 gave Europeans their own land. These "vryburgers" could obtain as
much land as they could plough (Coetzee, 2000: 7). These burghers formed
communities, struggling against drought and the Khoihoi. The first recorded
use of the word ?Afrikaner? for these burghers was in 1707, when Hendrik
Biebouw, after being ordered to leave by the landdrost in Stellenbosch,
shouted: ?I shall not leave, I am an Afrikaner?? (Giliomee, 2003: 22).
Historian Cornelius de Kiewiet wrote that ?in the long quietude of the
eighteenth century the Boer race was formed? (Gilliomee, 2003: 34). In the
formation of the Boers or Afrikaner common ground had to be sought to
construct not only a place of belonging, but also a base to start building a
new nation.
The interior of South Africa represented for the early Afrikaner a sense of
freedom from the disciplinary social space of the Dutch East India Company.
Resentment about being marginalised by the Dutch and later the English, as
well as a fear of ?gelykstelling? (social equality) of slaves, prompted them to
trek into the ?empty? interior. These settlers did not recognise that the country
had, in fact, been settled for centuries. The indigenous peoples they did
encounter were regarded simply as primitive, land was claimed, and
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questions of entitlement, intrusion and ownership were not considered. Space
was seen as ?empty?, devoid of histories and memories, and was imagined as
a ?nothingness, a simple surface for action, lacking depth" (Tilley, 1994: 9).
Space was impartial and in South Africa these early Afrikaners had to find a
new space to belong in. This understanding of space corresponds with earlier
theories in geography, which argued that space consisted ?in itself and for
itself? (Tilley, 1994: 9). In the past, space was seen as an abstract dimension,
an insignificant surface for activity, and thus a neutral repository, where
everywhere and everything was the same. Space existed as "external to and
indifferent to human affairs" (Tilley, 1994: 9). It served as a unitary backdrop,
never changing over time, where society could be studied and 'measured' by
geographers (Tilley, 1994: 9). Hegemony and local structures of power were
not taken into consideration, space in any society, any time in history,
remained homogeneous.
This ?exodus? of the Afrikaner was called the Groot Trek (great journey), and
began in 1820. Andries Stockenstrom, a widely respected landdrost in the
Graaff-Reinet district, reported that the burghers told him ?they no longer felt
at home in their own country? (Giliomee, 2003: 149). Trekking into the
unknown interior is described in a biography of Andrew Murray, the first
minister beyond the Orange River:
History had seldom witnessed a stranger and more moving
spectacle than that of well-to-do farmers, some in their first flush
of youth and others already bending under the weight of years,
forsaking their farms and homesteads, packing their families
with all the household goods into the unwieldy ox-wagon, driving
their flocks and herds before them and trekking away to the
distant, unknown interior (Gilliomee, 2003: 61).
The Afrikaner believed that the empty space of the interior had to be
?inscribed?, mapped and written on. Space had to be interpreted and
controlled, and by moving though it, imaginary traces were left behind, which
acted as inscriptions for an emotional connection to the land. Philosopher
Henri Lefebvre, who influenced human geography, argues that: ?Social space
21
is a social product ? the space produced in a certain manner serves as a tool
of thought and action. It is not only a means of production but also a means of
control, and hence of domination/power? (Mitchell, 1994: viii).
The perceived vacant space of the interior became the first site for the
Afrikaner. Seeing the land as ?empty?, ignoring native histories, for Afrikaners
space was an unoccupied area. The first ideal of this hegemonic group was to
find a common connection, to produce a new identity and a sense of
belonging. These migrating Afrikaners all had the same aim: to find a place
where they could farm the land and belong, without outside interferences and
political systems dominating them.
Place is essential in establishing individual, group or national identities.
Because places are socially constructed, created through experiences within
a location, there are ?as many identities of place as there are people" (Relph,
1976: 45). Places can also have an identity, a personality, which is often
complex and difficult to define. But what is more important is the identity a
group has with a particular place (Ibid: 45). Being familiar with a place, being
able to ?read? and interpret its signs, serves as a marker for a common
identity, a place where we can belong within a community. A place becomes
the embodiment of the belief and values of a community. Identity is as much
in the experience (sights, smells, etc.) as in the physical appearance of a city
or landscape. An attachment or rootedness to a place is formed through
experiencing the same kinds of objects and activities in places, or because
people are taught to perceive certain features in the same way by their
cultural group (Ibid: 45). For these Afrikaners the empty space of the area
became known as ?the veld?, that served as a collective term for place, a
wilderness that the Afrikaner could control and a place they knew intimately.
Geographer Yi-Fu Taun remarked in 1976: ?When space feels thoroughly
familiar to us, it has become place.? Only through the accumulation of
experiences do we attain a certain sense of belonging. Through daily rituals
and routines within a place, we learn how to decode its signs, and acquire its
?meaning, assurance and significance? to our lives (Tilley, 1994: 26). Lived
space, which Lefebvre (1991: 33) also calls ?representational space?, is
22
mediated through ?images and symbols? addressed to the imagination. This is
the space where we live and which we use to conduct our daily affairs.
Place is not only about daily rituals however, it is also the space through
which artists, writers and philosophers aspire to express their ideas. It is the
province of ?inhabitants? and ?users?, but also of some artists and a few writers
and philosophers who describe and aspire to do more than describe. ?This is
the dominated ? and hence passively experienced ? space which the
imagination seeks to change and appropriate? (Mitchell, 1994: ix-x). By
imaging space, it becomes place. We construct it ?creatively?, firstly to
understand it, and secondly to make it fit our desire to belong in its unlimited
vastness (Schwartz and James, 2003: 6).
Place and landscape
As place, landscapes are layered with experience, memories and histories,
and become a medium through which to explore belonging, attachment to
land, construction of identities and political ideologies (Stewart and Strathern,
2003: 10). Families and groups of Afrikaners left the Cape, trekking into the
interior. Afrikaner as a word did not denote a national identity, rather they
thought of themselves as Dutch settlers, or simply as Boers, which means
farmers. The Afrikaners had to organise themselves into a group and
construct new cultural images and narratives to affirm identity and belonging.
A fight for survival in what was seen as a hostile, barren land was understood
as a higher calling for the Afrikaner and a relationship with the landscape was
sought. The Afrikaner had to find ways to transform the landscape into place,
to control it and to assert ownership. JM Coetzee writes about the African
landscape: ??Africa, oldest of the continents? ? the task of the human
imagination is to conceive not a social order capable of domesticating the
landscape, but any kind of relation at all that consciousness can have with it?
(Coetzee, 1988: 6-7). In a landscape so different from the Cape or Europe,
these settlers were confronted with a new kind of beauty and harshness, ?an
uncertain landscape, filled with comfort and unease, renewal and destruction?
(Beningfield, 2006: 2). They had to adjust to the materiality of the terrain.
23
Because of the strangeness of the land, the Afrikaner needed to construct a
sense of place, and landscape played an important part in this. Simon Ryan
says in his book The Cartographic Eye. How explorers saw Australia, that the
?strange? landscape these explorers saw for the first time was so foreign that it
showed a lack in their use of words. The landscape was a ?threat to language,
revealing linguistic limitations by its novelty and strangeness? (Ryan, 1996:
71). In South Africa, to ensure ethnic survival ? not necessarily white survival -
a connectiveness to the land was paralleled by the emergence of the
Afrikaans language. Language then constructed a ?locale? for the Afrikaner;
they started ?Building a Nation from Words? (Hofmeyr in Giliomee, 2003: 17).
Through naming the landscape, finding a language to describe it, an intimacy
with the land was attained. JM Coetzee states in his book White Writing
(1988: 7) that the ?landscape remains alien, impenetrable, until a language is
found in which to win it, speak it, represent it?. The Afrikaans language was
seen as an authentic African language that could describe the harshness of
the landscape. Tilley (1994: 33) affirms that where language or narratives are
connected to the physical features of the landscape, ?it becomes symbolic in
the way that people or nations think of themselves?. The Afrikaans language
could ?speak? the land, the mountains, rocks, heavy droughts, as well as the
beauty of the flat, desert-like Karoo. Tilley notes that narratives that determine
a bond between people and the landscape create moral guidance for action.
He states: ?Both land and language are equally symbolic resources drawn on
to foster correct social behavior and values. In narratives geographical
features of the landscape act as mnemonic pegs on which moral teachings
hang? (Tilley, 1994: 33). To truly experience landscape it has to be felt and
then conveyed, ?talked about, recounted, or written and depicted? (Tilley,
1994: 31).
The physical flat surface of the land was confirmed by missionaries, already
settled in the interior, as an ?undifferentiated landscape?, a place with no limits
where space could be ordered through narration (Beningfield, 2006: 36).
Beningfield quotes Jean and John Comaroff, who analysed early encounters
between native tribes and missionaries:
24
This undifferentiated landscape was disconcerting. It defied
surveillance. The eye searched in vain for recognisable margins
and limits. Indeed, it was the very act of narration that imposed
an order of space and time that made the metaphorical leap,
linking the formless wastes to known cultural referents.
However, even after the Great Trek, families lived in isolation in the
countryside. Benedict Anderson, in his book Imagined Communities, explains
the phenomenon of an imagined political community such as the Afrikaner,
and states that a nation "is imagined because the members of even the
smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or
even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their
communion" (Anderson, 1983: 9).
The geographical imagination appropriated the farm as a place where the
Afrikaner could find a sense of place, a surface that could be written on. Taun
(1976: 198) argues: ?Being rooted in a place is a different kind of experience
from having and cultivating a ?sense of place? ? The effort to evoke a sense
of place and of the past is often deliberate and conscious. To the extent that
the effort is conscious it is the mind at work, and the mind ? if allowed its
imperial sway ? will annul the past by making all present knowledge?. The
farm became the ultimate place of belonging that embodied Afrikaner identity,
which kept him "close to the soil, committed to the earth, the soil that keeps
man on his knees? (Coetzee, 1988: 99).
The Afrikaans word ?grond? (meaning soil, ground or land) includes ownership
of land, farming, agriculture, pasture or physical soil. The word ?plaas?
(meaning farm) derives from the Latin ?platea?, meaning an open space. An
open space that needs to be acted on. For the Afrikaner, the farm acted as
landscape and place. Liz Gunner (1996: 134) asserts: ?In the aesthetics of
naming ? the land frequently becomes the person, and becomes part of the
body?s text; the social and the historical self is perceived through the land?.
Later descendants of these farmers, not necessarily owning land, also saw
themselves as part of the land. The association between the farm and the
25
veld formed ?part of the imagination of South Africa and of its lingering
association with the Voortrekkers? (Beningfield, 2006: 33).
Narratives about the landscape and the Afrikaners connectedness to land
only began to appear after the South African War (1899 ? 1902) and
especially after the Union of 1910. The South African War fought against the
British and further discussed in chapter 2, reduced the landscape to almost a
waste land. Afrikaners were again homeless, as a result of the British
scorched-earth policy. Many farms were burnt and men exiled. Antjie Krog, in
her book A Change of Tongue (2003: 76), describes the predicament of the
Afrikaners, for ?whom land, over years and generations, has become a
mythical idea representing the ultimate land therefore I am. It is not for nothing
that the old Afrikaans literature is filled with poetry and novels about land and
landscape?. Leaders, writers and poets, in the aftermath of the war, started to
construct a new Afrikaner identity, relying heavily on past narratives.
From 1902 to 1930 the Afrikaner was again homeless. In the 1930s and the
Great Depression, most Afrikaners lost their farms and either movied to cities,
or became ?bywoners?, living and working on other farms. Fearing the end of
the Afrikaner as a nation, Afrikaners still yearned for the farm, as it
represented the utopian home. Afrikaans writers, especially CM van den
Heever (1902 ? 1957), in his book Laat Vrugte (late fruit), wrote that to live in
a city meant that, as an Afrikaner, one could never belong. To lose the bond
between the individual and nature (farm) would destroy one?s identity. Seeing
this in the historical context of 1930-1935, van den Heever declared that only
by contact with the soil could one attain belonging. At the commemoration of
Blood River on 16 December 1938, Dr DF Malan referred to the fast-growing
cities as the ?new Blood River?, where the conflict now moved from the veld to
the cities (van der Watt, 1997).
The pastoral novel was important as it conjured up feelings of the Afrikaner?s
connectedness to the farm. It imagined the land as a place where the
Afrikaner could belong, even when living in cities. The farm became an
imagined place, in the landscape, where national identity was inscribed. Land
was again converted into the farm, and nature into culture in the imagination
26
of the Afrikaner. Tilley (1994: 26) acknowledges that the physicality of the land
is important; it acts as a place of assurance and gives meaning to their lives,
which give rise to feelings of belonging. Pastoral literature emphasised the
organic relationship between land, farm, language and Afrikaner people.
The poet and writer CJ Langenhoven wrote: ?Afrikaans is the language of the
farm and the home, breathing the spirit of the inexorable expanse of the
sunburnt veld, charged with the memories of primitive appliances and self-
help. It is interwoven with the fibre of their national character, the language
they have learned at their mother?s knee, the language of the farewells of their
dying lips? (Giliomee, 2003: 368). This connects the Afrikaans language with
the land. Through naming and toiling the land, a spiritual relationship
developed between the farmer and his land. He entered into a kind of
marriage, which symbolised the bond with his lineage. If he tends to and loves
the soil, it will repay him and his family bountifully, but the farmer must also
stand by the land through hard times. These narratives described the
Afrikaner farmer and the land as one.
According to Tilley (1994: 32), ?Narrative is a means of understanding and
describing the world in relation to agency?. Apart from the farm, narratives
centred around suffering. Writer and historian Gustav Preller (1875-1943) in
his writings on the story of the Voortrekkers, focused on the violence directed
at the ?innocent? Voortrekkers at the battle of Blood River. These narratives
gave the Afrikaner the notion that they deserved to own and rule the land, that
it was paid for by their anchestors. Isabel Hofmeyr (1988: 533) states that
?much of [Preller's] work generally met with wide acclaim precisely because it
popularised violence?. Virtually all Preller's texts read as an inventory of
atrocities which eventually calcify into a set of almost legendary codes: the
battered baby skulls, the dead women, the drifting fathers and so on. All these
shorthand images in turn acquire the status of implicit historical explanation
and justification. Poet JD du Toit (Totius), after the South African War,
depicted the Afrikaner as a thorn tree, crushed by the English. The damaged
tree acts as a metaphor for the Afrikaner nation as they suffered tremendous
loss, but the tree crushed by the English wagon would grow and become
27
strong again. These mental images of landscape and the connectedness to
land were seen as representing the national character of the Afrikaner.
The narrative of the Great Trek was also revisited by writers and poets and
imagined as a ?national epic ? formal proof of God?s election and that they
had a special destiny? (Moodie, 1975: 3). Previous invisible traces and paths
of the wagon wheels drawn onto the land were imagined as the taming of the
landscape, the first attempt to construct place. Mitchell (1994: x) writes:
?Landscape could be seen as the first cognitive encounter with a place, and
an apprehension of its spatial vectors (thus, an appreciation of landscape may
well include a reading of ? or an inability to read ? its narrative tracks or
symbolic features?. For the Afrikaner these imagined Voortrekker wagon
wheels became ?drawing instruments which were fundamental to the
inscription of the landscape? (Beningfield, 2006: 45). These tracks and paths
acted as mental maps that crossed the South African landscape. Tilley (1994:
31) states that a path can be ?a paradigmatic cultural act?, by following in the
steps inscribed by others, they show the??best way to go?.
In 1938, the Voortrekker Monument was built to commemorate the Great
Trek. By building the monument, the narrative of the Afrikaner was re-enacted
to assert themselves again as the people worthy of inheriting the land. For the
centenary celebrations and laying of the foundation stone at the Voortrekker
Monument, traces were revisited and reinscribed in the form of physically
trekking with oxwagons through the landscape. These wagons? wheels were
rolled into wet cement while travelling from Cape Town to the centenary
celebrations in Pretoria; Afrikaners dressed in Voortrekker-style clothes, thus
creating a ?kind of surrogacy in which the present stood in for and even
supplanted an incomplete past? (Beningfield, 2006: 49). A series of maps was
published during the centenary year, retracing the routes the Voortrekkers
took and acted as ?evidence? to affirm Afrikaner identity and give depth to the
history of the Great Trek. Beningfield (2006: 46) states: ?Together with the re-
enactment, these maps were represented as bringing to the surface content
that was already present in the landscape?. In 1959, these routes were
reproduced in cement at the monument, which made them ?permanent?,
28
people could walk along the route that Piet Retief, who died at Blood River,
took through the interior. Narrative, history and ideology merged physically
with the land in the building of the Voortrekker Monument.
The monument was erected outside Pretoria on a hill overlooking the
landscape, symbolising not only their connectedness with the land, but also a
nation looking into the future, preparing ?for the task which still waits?
(Beningfield, 2006: 62). Incorporated into the museum were friezes and
tapestries that depicted events such as the Great Trek, the Day of the
Covenant and the Battle of Blood River, where the Boers were seen as the
chosen people, taking the light of civilisation into the ?dark? interior. Beningfield
(2006: 55) writes that the monument sought to ?consolidate the narrative into
a single building, or document, of the Great Trek which had symbolic legal
status spreading over the entire country?. The chairperson of the Historical
Monuments Commission described what monuments must represent in the
landscape: ?Monuments must speak to the heart of the volk. They must
remind the volk of their rich past. They must depict not only difficulties
and suffering. They must be an inspiration for nation building?
(Beningfield, 2006: 62).
Following independence from England, an uneasy power-sharing between the
two groups held sway until the 1940s, when the Afrikaner National Party was
able to gain a strong majority. Strategists in the National Party invented
apartheid as a means to cement their control over the economic and social
system. Initially, the aim of apartheid was to maintain white domination while
extending racial separation. Legislation was implemented to ensure
ownership and segregation of land, prior to 1948.
The Land Act of 1913 had huge influences on South African resistance
politics, and formed the backdrop to one of South Africa's great political
books, Native Life in South Africa by Sol T Plaatje (2004). It begins with the
words: "On 20 June 1913 every native woke up to find himself a pariah in the
land of his birth?. Land ownership now was irrevocably in the hands of whites,
leaving black people homeless to wander the land, being exploited as cheap
labourers. From 1923, under the Native Urban Areas Act, the Afrikaner
29
maintained political power by controlling movement through the landscape,
especially in cities. Restricting the movement of black people meant they were
effectively rendered all but invisible. Townships were built outside cities, and
black people could only ?silently? move in and out to work, either on the mines
or in white households. With the enactment of apartheid laws in 1948 by the
National Party, every aspect of black social life was affected. People were
classified according to skin colour and marriage between non-whites and
whites was prohibited. By the late 1950s, the National Party had consolidated
the areas formed after the Land Act of 1913, and declared they would now be
called ?homelands?, which effectively meant that black men and women could
only belong where they were placed, and not on the ancestral soil of the
Voortrekker, ?paid for in blood? (Beningfield, 2006: 123). All political rights,
including voting, held by a black person were restricted. The idea was that
black people were citizens of the homeland, and not of South Africa. Black
people living in the homelands needed passports (dompas) to enter South
Africa and were aliens in their own country.
30
Chapter 2
Photography and Place
In 1839, when Louis Jacques Mand? Daguerre perfected the process of
producing an image on a silver-coated copper plate, and William Henry Fox
Talbot announced that he had invented a positive-negative process on paper,
the world gained a powerful tool to establish ?place? in the geographical
imaginations of people. ?Through photographs, we see, we remember, we
imagine: we ?picture place? ? (Schwartz and James, 2003: 1). Since the
invention of photography, the medium's popularity was irretrievably connected
with world-shaping forces.
The desire to photograph, to fix an image, was to a large extent a product of
the western obsession to acquire, order and propagate the things of the world,
and not only of a few inventors. It was framed through the big ideas of
western thought: ?seeing and knowing; nature and culture; originality and
knowledge; reality and illusion? (Marien, 2002: xiv). Basic knowledge about
light-sensitive chemicals had been available since 1720, but it was the desire
of the age, or what Foucault calls ?a positive unconscious of knowledge?, that
propelled the urgency to record and fix nature through photography. He wrote
that the positive unconscious of knowledge is a ?level that eludes the
consciousness of the scientist and yet is part of scientific discourse?
(Foucault, 1988: 101). Photography was regarded as a tool to document the
world, not only as an art form, but also ?a craft wedded to science?, and
images published in newspapers and magazines were called an ?art-science?
(Marien, 2002: 26).
Few areas of this modern age did not find some use for the medium, as it was
?ideally suited to empiricism and the nineteenth-century passion for collecting,
classifying and controlling facts? (Schwartz and James, 2003: 2). Or, as
Abigail Solomon-Godeau (1991: 155) states, in this era of "taxonomies,
inventories and physiologies, photography was understood to be the agent
31
par excellence for listing, knowing and possessing, as it were, the things of
the world". Fields predicted to profit from photography ranged from
engineering to astronomy, botany, Egyptology, geology, military operations,
law, medicine and more.
Photography, despite being no more than a physical and chemical process
that fixes light on to a photosensitive surface, changed the way we look at and
perceive the world forever (Stuart in Peres, 2007:179). Photographs of places
and landscapes, mysterious spaces unknown visually by most people in the
1800s, facilitated the ?transformation of space on the ground to place in the
mind" (Wells, 1997: 67-8). It was the era of exploration, as man began
increasingly to study himself and his relationship to the world around him.
At a time of steamships, the telegraph and railways, an age of vision and
knowledge, space and time underwent a profound transformation. Scenes of
places could be reproduced and distributed and images of places became
visually and conceptually more accessible. It influenced the ?geographical
imagination? of individuals and nations (Taun, 2004: 3). The desire to capture
and record places was expressed by Romantic poet William Wordsworth.
Taun (2004: 26) affirms that: ?Wordsworth, crossing the Alps, very much
wanted to retain images of the many scenes that enthralled him, but couldn?t.
Understandably, for without the images and pauses ? without these places ? it
is as though we have not made the trip?.
English photographer Francis Frith (1822-1898) photographed ancient places
like Egypt and Italy, using glass negatives coated with collodion that could be
reproduced, instead of the non-reproducible daguerreotype. The
daguerreotype was a fragile mercury image on a silver-plated copper sheet.
The image was chemically etched onto the photosensitive surface, and did
not produce a negative. Frith?s new method could be reproduced and was
published as stereocards in books and distributed worldwide. These
stereocards were viewed through a stereoscope, which gave the viewer a
three-dimensional vision, instead of two-dimensional, which produced a sense
of ?being there?. They were claimed to ?produce an appearance of reality
which cheats the senses with its seeming truth? (Schwartz, 1996: 17-20).
32
Through the daguerreotype, the stereoscope and paper prints hand-tipped
into books, people could visit sites and scenes leading them ?before the ruins
of antique architecture, illustrating the historical records of former and lost
civilizations; the genius, taste and power of past ages?, with which they
became as familiar as if they had visited them (Schwartz, 1996: 20).
Geographically, the emphasis now shifted from physically mapping sites to
mapping the world visually. The aim of geography has always been to render
the earth visible, to record, to ?describe? or ?write? the earth, as noted in
chapter 1. Both maps (cartography) and photographs share the ability to
depict or write the surface of the earth as two-dimensional, and it was noted
early in the 18th century that photographs aided geographical science. The
word originates from the Greek ?photos?, meaning ?light?, and ?graphein?
meaning ?to draw?, a coinage that corresponds with the meaning of the word
geography. Geography and photography both assisted in the making of place,
as they marked and inscribed the things of the world.
Englishman Sir John FW Herschel wrote in 1861 that a ?perfect descriptive
geography should ?exhibit? a true and faithful picture, a sort of daguerreotype? ?
(Ryan, 1997: 24). Visually mapping the ?things of the world? through
photographs allowed people to think visually and geographically, as
photographs of unknown, exotic places were made ?familiar? and ?brought in
intense reality to our very hearths? (Schwartz and James, 2003: 3). More
importantly for this dissertation, the eye of the camera explored, surveyed and
acted as a witness to the British Empire?s progress, which will be discussed
later in this chapter.
The technology of photography entered the world when increasing importance
was placed on representational practice; photographs were thought of as
conveying the ?truth? (Hight and Sampson, 2002: 174). Photography?s ability to
capture scenes ?truthfully? fascinated the imagination of the age. Joan
Schwartz (1996: 18) writes that the Victorian era was ?marked by the rise of
the professional photographer, the commercialisation of photographic
practice, the proliferation of photographic applications and the widespread
33
consumption of photographic images. It was during these first decades that
the relationship between an increasingly visual society and an evolving
photographic technology established new ways of seeing the world?.
Concepts of positivist science influenced the way that photography, as a new
technology, was regarded. Positivism involved the belief that empirical truths
could be established through visual evidence. An empirical truth was
perceived as something that could be proven by repeating the same
experiment with matching results, as it was thought that the scientist?s own
subjectivity would influence the objectivity of the experiment. The camera,
rather than the pen or paintbrush, was therefore taken as a scientific tool for
registering reality. The photograph represented the world more accurately
than any hand-rendered representations, as it was thought to convey an
unmediated copy of the real world. The photographer, then, was seen as
objectively pressing the shutter, recording ?what has been? at a certain place
in time. We know that was not the case however, as the photographer chose
the angle and subject to be photographed. But the image contained a trace,
impression, or index of the real. Susan Sontag (Evans and Hall, 1999: 80)
theorised: ?A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an
interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the
real, like a footprint or a death mask?. Allan Sekula (1989) describes the
essence of photography as ?trace?: ?for the word itself simultaneously
designates both a mark and the act of marking, both a path and its traversal,
both the original inscription and its copy, both that which is and that which is
left behind, both a plan and its decipherment?.
People started to think differently about the world and their place within it,
which gave way to modern sciences such as photography, ethnography and
anthropology. Scientists in the latter two disciplines, and many others, began
to record their work photographically, and created historical and research
archives. In the British Journal of Photography (1889), Cosmo Burton
suggested that a permanent record be made of the world in photographs, that
photographic societies should "keep a library of great albums containing a
record as complete as it can be made, and in permanent photographs only of
34
the present state of the world". Photography surveyed and mapped the
surface of the earth, encountered new geographical formations, new flora and
fauna and new peoples; it was an exploration into the unknown and the
exotic, and nature herself, through visual images.
The fascination to preserve and fix nature through the process of photography
is clear from the early writings of Daguerre, Talbot and inventor Nic?phore
Ni?pce about the process of photography. They argued that the photographic
process was the writing of nature. Daguerre described it as ?the spontaneous
reproduction of the images of nature received in the camera obscura?, and
wanted to make ?a perfect image of nature? or ?the imprint of nature?. But he
concluded: ?The daguerreotype is not merely an instrument which serves to
draw nature; on the contrary it is a chemical and physical process which gives
her the power to reproduce herself? (Batchen: 1999: 66). Ni?pce stated that
his desire was to copy the ?views of nature? or to produce ?a faithful image of
nature? (Ibid). American poet and writer Edgar Allan Poe wrote of photography
in 1849 that it is a ?positively perfect mirror?, and ?is infinitely more accurate in
its representation than any painting by human hands? (Marien, 2002: 28).
Painting and photography adhered to the aesthetic theory known as the
picturesque, a certain way of constructing landscape, which had been very
important in England since the late 18th century. This comprised a ?set of
conventions and aesthetic standards by which to make and judge landscape
images? (Batchen, 1999: 69). Nature, in the early and mid-1800s was
perceived as divine, or the ?art of God?. By the late 1800s thinkers, poets and
writers such as Darwin, Kant, Coleridge and Constable challenged this view,
which greatly influenced artists and photographers. Nature, according to those
mentioned, was disorderly: a living, energetic organism. Coleridge, who
influenced fellow Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth, John Keats,
and Percy Bysshe Shelley, believed there was an interactive and constitutive
relation between nature and culture. Nature was no longer perceived as a
stable entity to be admired; a method had to be found to reproduce ?the
presumed order of the world by relentlessly organising its signs and
representations according to that same order? (Ibid 58). Art historian Geoffrey
35
Batchen (1999: 76) quotes the Reverend William Gilpin, who published
various writings on the picturesque and believed that nature had to be
composed and ordered. Gilpin wrote: ?I am so attached to my picturesque
rules, that if nature gets it wrong, I cannot help putting her right ? The picture
is not so much the ultimate end, as it is the medium, through which the
ravishing scenes of nature are excited in the imagination.? The picturesque
suggested ?pleasing the eye?, an aesthetic category between the beautiful and
the sublime (Schwartz and James, 2003: 123). Most painters composed their
images by looking through a camera obscura. This device primarily acted as a
drawing aid; the camera obscura presented a fixed framing and viewing
position to draw from, to order nature for the artist?s eye. It was a particular
and emotional way of looking at the world; it had to be learned and required
historical and artistic knowledge (Schwartz and James, 2003: 123).
Around 1850, the English landscape was incorporated and embraced as a
national symbol (Schwartz and James, 2003: 188). With the onset of industrial
capitalism, and the creation of a new middle class in England, people started
to move to cities, losing their sense of place in the world. The photograph
acted as an observable image of a new personal identity; rural natural
landscapes emerged as sentimental and nostalgic subjects, documented to
assert a sense of belonging. In the formation of identity, landscape played a
significant role, as it was believed that the land ?formed the national character?
(Schwartz and James, 2003: 131). People photographed landscape and
historical monuments in the British countryside, which formed part of a wider
cultural movement that served to create a British identity (Ibid: 122).
Landscape was thus seen as a national icon, a stable place, and a place to
belong to within a cultural group.
When it came to making images of landscape and place, James Ryan
(1997: 214) argues:
Despite claims for its accuracy and trustworthiness ...
photography did not so much record the real as signify and
construct it. Through various rhetorical and pictorial devices,
from ideas of the picturesque to schemes of scientific
36
classification, and different visual themes, from landscapes to
?racial types?, photographers represented the imaginative
geographies of Empire. Indeed, as a practice of representation,
photography did more than merely familiarise Victorians with
foreign views: it enabled them symbolically to travel through,
explore and even possess those spaces.
Imperial Britain produced and projected its imaginative geography through
photography. Detailed case studies of specific people, places and practices
linking these broader themes and ideological framework were photographed.
A new way of seeing place, space and landscape was constructed that had a
profound impact on the formation of the British imagination.
The imperial eye
Edward Said (1994: 7) believed that:
Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is
completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle
is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers
and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images
and imaginings.
To analyse the place of photography in the discourse of geography, one
needs to look at how it contributed and maintained the ideals of the empire.
People, through photography, could now ?picture? their surroundings in the
mind?s eye (Brunn and Cutter, 2004: 235). Photography not only documented
the places people traveled to, but served as an ?indispensable record of the
progress and achievements of empire? (Ryan, 1997: 11). In particular, for the
purpose of this study, I examine how geography and photography shaped the
geographical imagination of people in Britain in areas explored and conquered
during British imperialist expansion. The British imperial ?way of seeing? is
specifically relevant because of the impact it had on the formation of the
geographical imaginations of people in South Africa.
37
The camera?s instant success and affordability resulted in it becoming ?the
travelling eye? for middle class British people (Macdonald, 1980: 34). The
photograph conveyed a sense of ?being there?, and with the invention of the
inexpensive Kodak Brownie camera in 1897, people could now photograph
their families and travels. Tourists were advised to take snapshots of the
?natives and their primitive surroundings? (Hight and Sampson, 2002: 176).
Kodak also advertised that ?[s]howing is better than telling when it comes to
what you say and did abroad? (Ibid). Even for the armchair traveller, the
photographs of foreign places and their inhabitants created a feeling that they
were experiencing it firsthand. Schwartz, in her essay The Geography Lesson
(1996: 32), writes:
Images of foreign people and far-off places became part of the
pre-text which supplied a geographical structure and a cultural
framework by which to put beliefs into perspective and confirm
one?s place in the world. Perceived to be a tool by which to
explore new lands and foreign ways, the photograph was, in
reality, a cipher by which to reconcile what was new or strange
or different in an ever-expanding world. Travel photographs
provided a visual ground which anchored the observer,
demonstrated cultural difference, shaped experience, and
turned facts into knowledge.
Places that remained invisible for previous generations could now be
photographed. Commercial photographers published their images in
newspapers and magazines. People who still had little idea what the world
looked like outside their city or village observed the Middle East, familiar to
the western mind only through Bible stories. Images first made by Englishman
Francis Frith on his expedition to Egypt in 1856 had an enormous impact on
the world, and now rank among the world?s most instantly recognisable
images (Macdonald, 1980: 34).
The eye of the camera, despite the heaviness of the equipment, recorded
places such as Italy, Greece, Egypt, Palestine, China, the Himalayas and
Japan. Explorers such as Frith, Samuel Bourne and John Thomson conveyed
38
the notion that they were discovering the unknown, and had to endure
hardships to bring these photographs of places to the people at home. Ryan
(1997: 29) points out:
Just as there was a complex array of motives behind Victorian
exploration, including romantic adventure, commercial
prospecting, military conquest, geographical discovery and the
pursuit of scientific knowledge, photography was deployed for a
correspondingly wide range of purposes and effects. However,
despite their rhetoric of adventure and discovery, explorers were
seldom representing something entirely new. Rather, they were
employing new ways of representing the unfamiliar.
Photographs resulted in viewers becoming used to looking at photographs,
and beginning to see photographically (Szarkowski, 2007: 11). The British
government?s drive to educate the people of Britain assisted in creating a
sizeable demand for photographs of distant places, as knowledge was
attained by looking at photographs. Lady Elizabeth Eastlake wrote in 1857
that photographic images fed what she perceived as the ?craving or rather
necessity for cheap, prompt, and correct facts? (Marien, 2002: xiv).
The Royal Geographical Society (RGS) played an influential role in
commissioning photographers and explorers to collect and preserve scientific
and geographical knowledge. Susan Sontag, in her book On Photography
(1977: 3), declared ?... to collect photographs is to collect the world?. The RGS
was an ?academic archive, scientific club and imperial museum? (Ryan, 1997:
22). From 1860 to 1930, the society preserved and collected 75 000
photographic prints and 26 000 lantern-slides from expeditions it organised.
The camera became a tool for surveillance, and during imperial explorations
an ?ideological [apparatus] in the maintenance and reproduction of the
capitalist system? (Tagg, 1979: 165?6). Explorers and photographers were
encouraged to roam the surface of the earth for images that would help Britain
?complete the mental map of the world [it was] soon to dominate? (Marien,
2002: 22).
39
Art historian John Tagg (1979: 165?6) explains:
... what I am trying to stress here is the absolute continuity of the
photograph?s ideological existence with their existence as
material objects whose ?currency? and ?value? arise in certain
distinct and historically specific social practices and are
ultimately a function of the state ? While it is also used as a tool
in the major educational, cultural and communications
apparatus, photography is itself an apparatus of ideological
control under central harmonising authority of the ideology of the
class which, openly or through alliance, holds state power and
wields the state apparatus.
The government sent military engineers to carry out numerous surveys
around the world. These surveys had various purposes, such as scouting
routes for railways, recording archaeological or architectural sites, transcribing
the geology of an area. Landscapes were surveyed for their commercial and
political potentials. People like Henry Egerton, who in 1864 not only
photographed the Hamta Pass in the region of Spiti, India, but also charted
and measured it precisely to assist later explorers. Explorer and commercial
photographer John Thomson (1837 ? 1921) called for ?geographical
photography?, arguing:
Where truth and all that is abiding are concerned, photography
is absolutely trustworthy, and the work now being done is a
forecast of a future of great usefulness in every branch of
science. We are now making history and the sun picture
supplies the means of passing down a record of what we are,
and what we have achieved in this nineteenth century of our
progress (Ryan, 1997: 24).
The images produced were expected to convey ?a record of what we are? and
?what we have achieved?, meaning that these photographs highlighted
common British interest, forming British identity. These images were defined
by western needs, beliefs and expectations, where distant facts were
transformed into western fictions (Schwartz, 1996: 30).
40
As Susan Sontag (1977: 23) acknowledges, ?Photography implies that we
know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it?. By believing
what the photograph conveys, we are less curious about the events around it.
Photographs give us mental pictures of things and places, but they mostly
conceal more than they reveal, as one only looks at a cropped frame,
excluding the rest of the event. Indeed, John Tagg, influenced by the
structuralist Marxism of French philosopher Louis Althusser affirms that a
photograph is never neutral or innocent. The power an image wields is
?vested with particular authority to arrest, picture and transform daily life; a
power to see and record; a power of surveillance? (Wells, 2003: 257-60).
British and European publishers assisted in shaping (and censoring) the
geographical imagination of a nation by editing photographs that did not
conform or represent imperial ideas. Schwartz quotes Kathleen Stewart
Howe, who points out that of the 214 successful negatives brought back from
Egypt by traveller and photographer Maxime Du Camp in 1851, most were of
Arab villages. However, Gide et Baudry, publishers of the pictures, ?insisted
that the views of ancient Egypt were of more interest to readers and rejected
the Egypt of its current inhabitants?. Howe also wrote of a travel writer in 1856
who stated that contemporary Egypt was ?not the world we are seeking on
Egyptian soil? (Schwartz, 1996: 30). Publishers were thus excluding certain
scenes, and could not ? whatever the popular beliefs of the time to the
contrary ? be seen as objective.
Not only geographical information, but also photographs of ethnographic data
were seen as objective. Photography played an important part in systems of
human classification. People were ordered by certain criteria, including skin
colour and the shape of the head. Ryan (1997: 147) states: ?The language
and imagery of ?race? occupied a central place within Victorian culture where it
was used variously as a measure of bodily difference and as a description of
national identity?. The photograph was seen to encapsulate and project
feelings, and was perceived to capture the spirit and the character of people.
The photographs seen by the British public ignored individuality: a photograph
of a person depicted a ?type?, and differences in language and culture were
41
ignored. Photography thus confirmed cultural difference, and reinforced ideas
of European superiority, to justify colonial rule and exploration (Schwartz,
1996:16-45).
Photography and Landscape in South Africa
The Cape became a British colony in 1806, and photography as a technology
was discovered in 1839. The earliest surviving photograph made in southern
Africa is a daguerreotype. The subject is of a black African female chief from
Mozambique, taken by the French photographer E Thiesson in 1845, now in
the Eastman Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York. The very worn
inscription on the front of the daguerreotype reads: ?Naturelle de Sofala,
Monomo[tapa], ag?e de 30 ans. Quoique jeune encore celle femme a
cheveux presque entierement blancs. (Native woman from Sofala,
Monomotapa, aged 30 years. Although still young this woman?s hair is almost
entirely white)? (Buerger and Clark, 1989: 91). Although taken by a
Frenchman, the imperial way of seeing influenced the way South Africa was
perceived by the British public. These perceptions had a huge impact on the
construction of apartheid?s ideologies.
Early explorer David Livingstone (1813 ? 1873) documented and
photographed the African landscape and its people. He concluded that it was
a place of disorder, disease, barbarism and death. Africa was described by
British explorers, like Livingstone as the ?dark continent?, an empty place with
no history and a place that ?could be read as a blank space for improvement?
(Ryan, 1997: 42). According to the British, Africa needed the light of
civilization. This view of Africa corresponds with how the Afrikaner viewed the
interior of South Africa, as discussed in chapter 1.
The Afrikaners and the Hottentots were both described in early English writing
as ?indolent?, ?lazy? and ?idle?. Coetzee (1988: 26) points out that the Afrikaner
had access to unrestricted land and labour, something the British valued. But
the Afrikaner did not realise European values of accumulation, consumption
and enrichment through work; they chose not to (Pratt, 1992: 62). Coetzee
42
(1998: 26) quotes OF Menzel, who spent the years between 1732 and 1741
at the Cape, and compared the Afrikaner to the Hottentot, saying that the
Boers ?have accustomed themselves to such an extent to the carefree life, the
indifference, the lazy days and the association with slaves and Hottentots,
that not much difference may be discerned between the former and the latter?.
Burrows?s writings homogenise not only the Afrikaner and the Hottentots, but
also the Bushmen ?into a collective they? (Pratt, 1986: 64).
Not many examples of landscape photography remain as a result of heavy
and expensive equipment. It was not until George Eastman introduced the
Pocket Kodak, or ?Brownie? (1897) that photography became more accessible
for amateurs. In 1894 the new photographic or illustrated postcard was
introduced. Newspapers were still unable to print photographs, but in 1896
Alfred Harmsworth had introduced the London Daily Mail as the first popular
mass-circulation newspaper. The establishment in 1898 of the Imperial
Penny Post made it possible for letters to be sent virtually anywhere in the
empire. Photo-relief techniques that reduced the cost and increased the
speed of both line and tonal images became the norm in the periodical from
the mid-1890s.
At the end of the 19th century the South African territory was divided; the
British possessed the Cape and Natal colonies and the Boers the Orange
Free State and the Transvaal (ZAR, South African Republic). The discovery of
diamonds and gold in the interior of the country dramatically changed the
situation for the British. Tensions escalated in the Transvaal, where the
richest goldfields lay. Under the guise of protecting British citizens in the
Transvaal, the British exploited these tensions, which resulted in the
declaration of war. Magazines, such as The Transvaal Special, The War
Illustrated, Under the Union Jack, and With the Flag in Pretoria, were
launched to cover the South African War that broke out between the Boer
republics and Britain in 1899.
It was an extremely visible war and would later be branded as the first ?media
war? (Morgan, 2002: 8). Although photographers and journalists had been
sent to the Crimean and American Civil wars, professional photographers
43
mostly documented these wars. Aided by new technologies, journalists,
illustrators and photographers, as well as the soldiers themselves could
document the war photographically. This meant that the South African War
could be reported in a manner and on a scale not seen before in history
(Pound and Harmsworth, 1959: 193-286).
The expectations of these journalists and photographers of what the war
would look like were based on images of previous conflicts such as the
Crimean War. They were in search of dramatic and picturesque scenes, full of
heroic deeds, but the British were dressed in drab khaki to blend in with the
South African veld. The war, at first expected to last a few months, dragged
on for three years. The lack of definite victory saw guerilla tactics being
employed by the Boers in the final stages of the war.
As modern warfare became progressively more complex, the media focused
on the image of the individual soldier, war heroes and regiments, as
photographers and war artists could not capture large-scale battle scenes.
The British press rarely depicted the disastrous effects of war, the
psychological or physical change wrought on the individual. Earlier
photographs of Roger Fenton and James Robertson during the Crimean War,
and Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner during the American Civil War,
prepared official viewers at home and the public, to some extent, for images
of dead soldiers. But photographs taken of dead soldiers of Spioen Kop,
published in The King, proved too realistic for English viewers and brought the
reader disturbingly close to the war; these photographs were seen as too
sensationalist. Rather, the normal soldier, ?the face of a British hero?, was
emphasised through photography (Carter, 1900: 24). Photographic images
comprised mostly portraits, and the everyday life of soldiers ? cooking,
washing and images of camp life. In the imagination of the British viewer, this
conveyed a comforting image of national harmony in the South African veld.
Scenes were thus constructed for the viewer back home.
Photography did however bring home the atrocities of the war, helping to
stimulate anti-war sentiment. Emily Hobhouse?s detailed accounts of
44
concentration camps in South Africa were reported in the Manchester
Guardian, the Speaker and other liberal journals and had a huge impact on
British public opinion (Balme, 1984: 220). Under Kitchener, soldiers were
instructed to burn farmhouses and send Afrikaner women and children to
concentration camps. Hobhouse reported that thousands of not only Afrikaner
women and children, but also British soldiers, were dying of disease.
Photographs of the British scorched-earth policy, together with images of
hardships endured by women and children in the concentration camps, came
as a tremendous shock to the British public. Through the media and
photographs, ?imperialism lost the moral high ground? (Morgan, 2002: 11), as
images of children dying of starvation and disease reached the British public.
The war would eventually be described as one that employed the methods of
barbarism (Alberts, 2003: 11).
After the South African War, divisions between the English and Afrikaner
became more pronounced. The British had destroyed farms, livestock, dams
and infrastructure during the war. The Afrikaner was displaced and scattered
over the country. Most prisoners of war came back from abroad and found
that their land was reclaimed by black clans, who argued that it was
wrongfully taken from them. For some Boers who still had farms it was difficult
to continue without money. A fierce hatred of British imperialism lasted for
decades among the Boers. (Foster, 2008:20)
South Africa, after the war, was a state before a nation, a complicated
situation for constructing place and a sense of belonging. The geographical
terrain did not have clearly defined borders, the minority of the country was
recently at war with itself, and sense of belonging to the land was based on
language (Afrikaans) and the only true peasantry of the country ignored. ?The
new nation was moreover of a kind never been seen before: an independent,
predominantly European society in Africa with strong ties to Britain? (Foster,
2008: 18). With the Union of South Africa established in 1910, a new sense of
belonging had to be constructed in a unified South Africa that had integrated
the different regions and cultural groups into one state.
45
Jeremy Foster (2008: 19) comments on the South African War, stating:
The conflict transformed the European geographical imagination
of the region and helped bring about the politicisation of the
relationship between people and place. It also introduced
notions of territoriality where there had previously mostly been
notions of locality, and left a legacy of place- and space-based
memories that would, indirectly and directly, be used to anchor
and shape identities in the postwar period.
Rapid industrialisation after 1910 forced most Afrikaners to live in the cities;
some discarded their ethnic identity, some underemphasised it and others
revived the narratives of the Voortrekkers. Generals Botha and Smuts, the
leaders of the left-wing South African Party, in 1911, thought that Afrikaans
and English-speaking people could coexist and ?flow together as one stream?.
Botha believed they could ?create from all present elements a nationality;
whoever had chosen South Africa as a home should regard themselves as
children of one family and be known as South Africans? (Gilliomee in Beinart
and Dubow, 1995: 191). But most Afrikaners aspired to self-determination and
English-speaking South Africans still saw themselves as British citizens. A
cultural medium had to be constructed to find a common sense of belonging
for the Afrikaner and the British.
The South African Railways and Harbours Magazine, was published by the
South African Railways and Harbours (SAR&H) after the Union was created in
1910. The SAR&H, through photography, aimed to create a new mental map
for an ?imagined community?, a country that could be shared and understood
by both the Afrikaner and the English. Forster (2003: 658) speaks of the
importance of photography in this ?imagined community?, saying:
[The] ability for cultural groups to imagine themselves as such
through a shared subjectivity towards geographical space, is
usually assumed to be dependent on discourses that help define
the boundaries of individual spatial experience. The form of
discourse most often associated with this process involves
46
production and circulation of visual images of the shared
territory. Smoothing out the world's inconsistencies, aberrations
and contradictions, and privileging that which is picturable over
that which is not, such imagery offers a confirmation of
nationhood, and renders a national territory visible to all through
reproduction and circulation ... It is precisely readily produced
images that allow fractured or threatened polities to imagine
themselves as single nations.
The SAR&H was the largest employer on the subcontinent, and became
directly or indirectly involved in reconstructing a region that had been laid
waste by the 1899-1902 South African War. It was solely responsible for
promoting settlement, investment and tourism in the new country. (Schwartz
and James, 2003: 142) The publicity department, responsible for these tasks,
also became the major commissioner, publisher and purveyor of images of
South Africa. These images consisted of lantern slides, posters, films and,
especially, black and white photographs of landscapes.
The landscape was romanticised as a place where one could find a sense of
identity as an individual. The assurance that an Afrikaans and English person
could belong and be a ?true South African? was highlighted in these magazine
essays through photographs of landscapes. William Beinart (2003: 5) writes of
the idea of landscape at the time:
Landscape ideas were also important in constructions of settler
identity. For example, settlers from diverse backgrounds could
be invited to unite around a love of ?wilderness? or an idealised
rural background. Politicians could invoke landscape as the
foundation for an inclusive South African settler identity that
would unite both British and Afrikaner settlers.
Photography became the perfect tool to convey this feeling, as it could
?describe? the landscape without words in a country were Afrikaans language
was perceived as native to Africa. But despite this, there was assurance that
the English could find a sense of belonging within the South African
landscape.
47
By 1920, when ties with Britain began to loosen, so the image and
understanding of landscape was being re-imagined, let loose from the
ordering and classifying eye of imperialism. The empty landscape was
imagined as ?unspoilt by the emblems of modernity? and black and white
photographs in the SAR&H magazine depicting these spaces often were often
shot out of the train window, captioned only as ?the veld? (figure 1). Black and
white photography had the ?ability to condense and abstract landscapes with
little visual detail made it an admirable medium to capture landscapes
reduced to nothing more than earth and sky, and perhaps a few sheep?
(Foster, 2008: 228). The South African War had popularised the Afrikaans
word ?veld? deriving from Dutch, in Britain. It was as much an ?imaginary
construct as a description of a specific terrain or region ? that ?veld? came to
be shorthand for a quintessential and universal South African landscape, one
that in effect is everywhere and nowhere? (Ibid: 229).
For the English-speaking South Africans possessing most of the land, these
photographs of the empty veld invited them to imagine economic progress
and space waiting to be filled. For the Afrikaner it acted as a place of loss, a
nostalgic site, a ?failed garden? on which narratives could be written to
construct a sense of belonging (Beningfield, 2006: 82). Older imaginings of
the land were revisited by the Afrikaner and adjusted to suit current
ideologies. Narratives of the Great Trek and South African War were revisited,
as discussed in chapter 1, resulting in a shared memory and a common
identity. Reconciliation between the Afrikaner and the British was difficult; they
could not find a common narrative.
Figure 1: Unidentified photographer, ?The veld?, July 1925
48
The landscapes photographed for the SAR&H magazine did not include
emotional historical sites of the South African War, but depicted a vast empty
country where a new nation could be constructed. Foster (2008: 230) states
that the landscape was ?not so much a physical space waiting to be filled as a
particular spatiality and subjectivity engendered by inhabiting that landscape ?
that transcended ethnic roots, individual ownership, or historic period.?
Ironically, not only the landscape, but also racial fear united white South
Africans. Numbers of black people increased in urban areas and insecurity
and fear persisted that black farmers would take over the land. It was
perceived that with the black people?s uneconomic approach to farming, the
country would relapse into ?barbarism?. This sentiment masked the
dependency of white farmers and mostly English mining houses on black
labourers. Afrikaners perceived the large black population as the ?swart
gevaar? (black danger), a force that could, given the slightest chance,
destabilise the white landscape. ?This shift exemplified the complex ways in
which race, class and economics were becoming intertwined in South Africa
and inscribed in the country?s physical landscape? (Foster, 2008: 34).
The National Party was set up in 1914, with the aim of protecting the interest
of the Afrikaner. Jan Hertzog became prime minister in 1924 and in 1948 the
National Party won the general election in South Africa. The prime minister Dr
DF Malan, appointed an all-Afrikaner cabinet, and began to introduce the
system of ?apartheid?, the Afrikaner word for separateness.
During the apartheid years, mapping and photography played an important
role in the establishment and control of segregated areas. Under the
Population Registration Act of 1950, all citizens had to be classified by race,
and placed accordingly in the landscape. Photography and maps were a way
to imagine and to plan the future for a segregated society. Before the act of
1950, maps of the landscape pictured areas by physically colouring areas in
black or white spots on the paper. Black dots represented black-owned land in
white areas, and vice versa. Whites claimed the right to land in the most fertile
areas, depicted in green areas drawn on maps, in contrast to dry and dusty
areas, farmed by black people. These ?black spot? areas where recorded
49
through arial photography and then rephotographed after the black farmers
were removed.
The ambition of the Afrikaner to control land for economic and political gain
was extended to the cities, where labourers ? mainly black, Indian and
?coloured? or mixed-raced people ? lived on the peripheries of city spaces. The
landscape was split into two imagined spaces ? urban and tribal ? where the
urban was perceived as the place of the ?white man?, a place of modernity,
and tribal ? where the black man should belong, as Africans were not
equipped to function in a city environment. The rural black was seen ?as the
?good native?, physically, culturally and psychologically healthy and well
adjusted? (Robins, 1998: 459). The black rural African was represented in
colonial discourse as living in an idyllic, stable pastoral space, while the black
city dweller was associated with disorder and disease. ?It was believed that
the exposure of ?detribalised? Africans to the alien urban environment would
result in physical, moral, cultural and psychological decline and degeneration?
(Ibid: 459)
The ideology of the ?great divide?, as Robins (1998: 459) describes apartheid,
was fuelled by scholars, anthropologists and supporters of segregationist
policies in that they saw the black city dweller as a person dislocated from his
?natural? environment. They argued that it was harmful for black people to live
in cities, as they tended to become ?westernised?. These ideas played an
important role in the construction of apartheid and separate living areas for
black and white communities.
However, both Sophiatown, close to the central business district of
Johannesburg, and District Six, close to Cape Town?s centre, had long been
multiracial areas. Photographs in Drum Magazine, published in the 1950s,
portrayed Sophiatown as a lively, multicultural place challenging existing
myths of black people ideally suited for rural life. Journalists and
photographers at Drum portrayed a dynamic culture, from everyday street life
to black jazz singers and gangsters. Sophiatown embodied a mixed culture, a
way of life and an identity shared in an urban space that was portrayed
through photography. J?rgen Schadeberg, photographer for Drum,
50
photographed Sophiatown extensively in the 1950s and 1960s, along with
Peter Magubane and Bob Gosani and others. Okwui Enwezor remarked of
photography during that era that ?the work of the Drum photographers exists
beyond the realm of the visual and assumes an important ideological function?
of transgression and defiance (Artthrob, no 43: March 2001).
In 1950, both Sophiatown and District Six were declared ?white? areas under
the Group Areas Act. Aerial photographs produced by the Land Survey and
Mapping Office, which formed part of a project to map and document the
entire surface of South Africa, documented the removal of 3.5 million people
between 1954 and 1980. These photographs, usually taken at midday, gave a
dispassionate view of an area, mapping boundaries and inspecting the terrain
for possible change. They also recorded human interaction with the
landscape, such as footpaths and buildings, and helped town planners map
areas ?to implement racial segregation? (Beningfield, 2006: 238).
Forced removals had a huge impact, not only on the physical landscape, as
the debris was used to construct the new suburb of Triomf, the old
Sophiatown, but also on communities and place. People were removed from
the familiar; a sense of place and community built over time, and so suffered
an extreme loss of home, and a lack of belonging within the landscape.
Beningfield (2006: 257) quotes Stan Abrahams describing the loss of place
and home:
The loss was serious. It was a loss of home, a loss of friendship
that one took for granted, a loss of a neighbourhood. The loss
was total. For others, moving to places in the Cape Flats was
entering a hostile environment away from the safety of their
homes ? Dispossessed, the loss of place, of neighbours, of
Table Mountain. We must recover our memory. This is the only
way to healing and justice.
These places remained only in the imagination of the people: the landscape
merely becoming a memory of oral histories and photographs. ?History has
left next to nothing by way of physical landscape. What we have of District Six
51
are photographs, providing some transference of remembered social images
to the present, and a scattering of streets and place names ? urban
archaeological material from the 1950s? (Beningfield, 2006; 277). Sophiatown
and District Six each became an ?imagined community?, ?a state of mind? or an
?attitude?, a place that remained in people?s imagination long after they had
been moved to the Cape Flats and Soweto; a place that relies solely on
memory (Beningfield, 2006: 258). Or as Ulf Hannerz (1996: 171) asserts: ?The
mythical community is still there, claiming its place?. These two places are
now linked, although they remain physically very different, through their
common history and the fact that both are only accessible in the
minds/memories of people.
Photography, experience and memory are connected to these sites, and
remain the only means of remembering them, as the memories cannot be
retained in the physicality of the landscape itself. Tilley (1994: 27) comments
on how places are formed in the imaginations of people:
Places are always ?read? or understood in relation to others.
While places and movement between them are intimately
related to the formation of personal biographies, places
themselves may be said to acquire a history, sedimented layers
of meaning by virtue of the actions and events that take place in
them. Personal biographies, social identities and a biography of
place are intimately connected.
Taun (1977: 186) believes that ?people look back for various reasons, but
shared by all is the need to acquire a sense of self and of identity?.
Today, memories of District Six are contained in a museum where, through
the use of old photographs of landmarks, people can retrace where they lived.
Ex-residents are encouraged to write their names on empty spaces provided,
on to sites where their homes used to be. Berger (1980: 57) states: "While all
photographs are relics of the past, the living can take that past upon
themselves, giving all photographs a living context, a continued existence?.
52
The physical act of negotiating and tracing a now-different area on a map and
through photographs creates a surrogate landscape for remembering; a
site/landscape ?loaded with meaning?, that exists only in the imagination
(Beningfield, 2006: 280).
The apartheid government went to great lengths to conceal the realities of the
landscape and how people inhabited it. Analysing how ideologies manipulate
visual discourse, Bill Nichols (1981: 1) writes, ?Ideology uses the fabrication of
images and the processes of representation to persuade us that how things
are is how they ought to be and that the place provided for us is the place we
ought to be?. By the late 1960s, the government was sponsoring a magazine
called South African Panorama, which celebrated the aesthetics of the
achievements of apartheid. These glossy pages often depicted the beauty of
the South African landscape, as well as progress in the forms of irrigation
dams and vast townships. It represented a peaceful landscape with white
sandy beaches and contented natives, a place where one could live a ?good
life?, devoid of black people.
South Africans lived separate lives, in which the state controlled and censored
visual media, such as television broadcasts, cinema and books. The
photograph of the dying Hector Petersen, being carried by a fellow student
during the Soweto uprising on 16 June 1976, caught the world?s attention and
changed the course of South African history. Petersen, age 12, was killed
when police opened fire on protesting students. Although it was probably 15-
year-old Hastings Ndlovu that first died in this uprising, it was the photograph
of Petersen taken by Sam Nzima, who became the iconic image. ?I was the
only photographer there at the time, other photographers came when they
heard shots,? he says 2.
2 (http://www.southafrica.info/about/history/hector-pieterson.htm, accessed 06/09/2007)
53
This photograph heralded the new phase, both visually and politically. The
camera increasingly became a weapon against apartheid and documentary
photography the dominant practice. In the use of documentary photography,
as Graham Clarke (1997: 145) affirms, the camera becomes extremely
powerful and radical. Bester and Pierre (1998: 14) state:
Anti-apartheid documentary photography has, understandably,
dominated photographic practice in South Africa. During the
apartheid era, documentary photography became a tool for not
only the violence and brutality of South African society, but also
exposing the oppressiveness of a political system. Along with
visual arts and a number of other cultural practices,
documentary photography played a crucial role in asserting the
need for an ?alternative? South Africa, and the actual realisation
of the dream of a free and democratic nation.
In 1982 photographers Omar Badsha, Paul Weinberg, Cedric Nunn and Peter
Mackenzie formed Afrapix, a photographic agency that collectively
photographed and distributed images of the liberation struggle all over the
world. Afrapix acted as a picture library, photographing funerals, marches,
riots and everyday life in the townships. A new generation of documentary
photographers later joined Afrapix, such as Paul Alberts, Santu Mofokeng,
Gideon Mendel and Eric Miller. In the 1990s, a group of press photographers
Ken Oosterbroek, Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva ? later
named the Bang Bang Club by Oosterbroek ? actively photographed the
struggle and unrest in townships. These images were rarely published in
South African newspapers, but resulted in international pressure on the
government to end the violence and work toward a democratic country.
Collectively these documentary photographers played a key role in bringing
about the downfall of the apartheid state.
Through images that leaked into the South African left-wing press daily,
ordinary South Africans could see what was happening outside the imposed
barriers ? images that the apartheid state had tried to conceal at all cost. In a
54
country where perceptions were informed by politics, the imagination of
ordinary white citizens could start to comprehend how black people were
living in appalling conditions enforced by government policies. Archbishop
Desmond Tutu wrote in Omar Badsha?s South Africa: the Cordoned Heart:
?We are not dealing with sets of statistics. We are talking about people of
flesh and blood, who laugh and cry, who love and hate, who enjoy being
cuddled. We are talking about men who want to be with their families,
husbands who just want to be able to feed their children? (Wilson and Badsha,
1986: xiv). This quote accentuates ?the multiple ghettoes of the apartheid
imagination?, how white people perceived black men and women as less
human, perceptions that accumulated over time. (Sachs: 1990) Documentary
photographs not only served as evidence of events, but also told tales of
human experience and disaster during apartheid.
After the1994 elections a new space opened up for photography, in which it
played an important, yet different, role. The ANC government set up the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission, which took place between 1997 and 1999,
and whose aim was to tell the stories of individual victims and perpetrators of
apartheid. Photography aided in this process, in recreating and documenting
events past and present. Press photographer Leon Muller photographed
policeman Jeffery Benzien while he demonstrated the ?wet-bag? method of
torture during the hearings. The wet-bag method consisted of tying a man
down and placing a wet bag over his face (Krog, 1998: 90). The photograph
made history visual, but also became a substitute for past events. Through
these images white South Africans could start to imagine the past, atrocities
which were to a certain extent concealed by the government. Annie Coombes
writes, ?As such, South Africa?s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC),
marked the potential transformation of the figure of the settler in to the figure
of the citizen. It confronted whites with the awareness that, in the new context,
belonging could not be assumed; rather, a process of mutual negation had to
be replaced by one of mutual recognition, one which could lead to belonging?
(Coombes, 2006: 246).
After the TRC, not only white South Africans but also photographers had to
55
reassess their role in society. South African documentary photographers
faced a creative crisis during this period, and some were ?deprived of the
central focus of their work?, as photographer David Goldblatt described it
(Dubow, 1998: 25). Michael Godby (2004) points out that many
photographers lost their work when liberation came, as the world press
became less focused on South Africa. Bester and Pierre (1998: 15), in
Democracy?s Images: Photography and Visual Art After Apartheid, comment:
Significantly, the collectivity, the shared sense of a struggle that
was so much part of the anti-apartheid era is gone. The process
of democratisation has not only afforded artists and
photographers who have worked so long within politics of
resistance to reflect [sic] on issues of personal identity, but has
raised the notion of self-identity as crucial to politics of national
identity in South Africa.
During the struggle, photographers were frowned on if they did not contribute
to the ?cause?, but as travel restrictions and cultural boycotts were lifted, they
now had the freedom to explore other issues. The focus shifted away from
advocacy, the need for direct public address, towards an exploration of the
complexities of history, memory, identity and the self. Examples included Paul
Alberts, who published Back to Land (1986), in which he investigated how
people dealt with issues such as land restitution; Eric Miller continued working
for press agencies, such as Reuters and Associated Press, and covered the
genocide in Rwanda and famine in Sudan, as well as human-interest stories
such as women?s boxing and dance productions and Paul Weinberg
photographed his home town, Pietermaritzburg, and published Going Home in
the early 1990s, going on to document the San living in Namibia, and to
investigate HIV and Aids. Photographer Cedric Nunn acknowledges:
In a country that was socially manipulated as South Africa was,
we are all having to find ourselves again, in ways that are not as
prescribed as they were in the past, when we accepted certain
identities because they were part of the political scenario. We
56
now have the ability to embark on more personal and more self-
exploratory journeys, and you have to do this if you really want
to know who you are ? for all sorts of reasons, but probably
mostly to do with identity. And people?s sense of identity is
shifting rapidly throughout the world, but particularly in South
Africa. 3
There is a sense, not only for these photographers, but also for South
Africans in general, of the need to rediscover ?who we are? and how we belong
within the political landscape. History has concentrated on the narratives that
connected white people to land. The possibility never existed in the
imagination of whites, especially the Afrikaner, that black people and other
cultural groups in South Africa might have a similar connection to the
landscape.
3 http://library.duke.edu/exhibits/thenandnow/photos/nunn/now/index.html, accessed
05/11/2008)
57
Chapter 3
Santu Mofokeng
?We feel at home ? or homeless ? physically, emotionally and ideologically?
(Richards, 2003).
Santu Mofokeng?s photographic career began in 1973 when he started
working as a street photographer. After witnessing Sharpeville on 16 June
1976 and seeing the images photographers took throughout this period, he
came to understand the subversive potential of the photographic image. He
embarked on a career in documentary photography, joining Afrapix Collective
in 1985. Afrapix acted as an independent photographic agency whose aim
was to document political resistance against apartheid. He also worked as a
darkroom assistant and photographer for New Nation newspaper. At the end
of the 1980s, Mofokeng left the ?aesthetics of flags and fists? behind and
started photographing shebeens, street soccer and everyday life in the
township. In the essays ?Trajectory of a Street Photographer? and The Black
Albums in ?The View from Africa? (Mofokeng, Granta 92: 2005), Mofokeng
writes about his own development as a photographer and how owning a
camera gave him, as a shy young man, a sense of belonging within the
community.
In 1989, Mofokeng began to collect 19th century colonial portraits of black
middle-class South African families, which resulted in a body of work called
The Black Photo Album/Look at Me (figure 2), exhibited as a projection piece
on the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale in 1997. It comprised a series of
photographs showing families and individuals dressed in Victorian clothes.
Some of these photographs were of black landowners and their families
before the Land Act of 1913. Strangely, this archive had not found its way into
the public realm; it had not registered in research, education or museums. It
was as if this generation was lost, ignored by history.
58
Mofokeng states:
The Black Photo Album is a story that nobody was interested
in at first. In the heat of the struggle, I couldn?t talk about these
images. Nobody understood where the people in the
photographs came from, they didn?t realise that while their
manner and dress were similar to colonial Europeans, they still
challenged the racism of colonial policies. I want to show how
their marginalisation came about, how the photographs were
dismissed as images and evidence of bourgeois delusionism
(Christopher, 2007).
For Mofokeng, as the title The Black Photo Album/Look at Me implies, these
photographs acted as an investigation into personal and cultural identity,
themes not explored during this time.
Figure 2: Black Photo Album
59
Mofokeng?s work deals with landscape and belonging/unbelonging. I am
particularly interested in Mofokeng?s statement that by photographing
landscape, he aims to reclaim the land for himself and his people. Throughout
South African history, the black people?s connectedness to the land has been
ignored; this has prompted Mofokeng?s search for personal and collective
identity. Although he has photographed landscapes of trauma in Europe
(Auschwitz) and Asia (Vietnam) in an attempt to investigate how countries
deal with ?spectacular events of horror? (Christopher, 2005: 101) my
investigation will focus on landscapes photographed in southern Africa. I have
selected three works to focus my discussion on place, belonging and home;
these are Inside Motouleng Cave (1996), Concentration Camp for ?natives?,
Free State SA (1999), and The Namib: Where did the road lead when it lead
nowhere? Namibia (1997).
In his inauguration address in May 1994, Nelson Mandela affirmed the
importance of landscape in South Africa for all South Africans. He explained
that ?each of us is as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as
are the famous jacaranda trees of Pretoria and the mimosa trees of the
bushveld.? He commented that the
[S]piritual and physical oneness we all share with this common
homeland explains the depth of the pain we all carried in our
hearts as we saw our country tear itself apart in a terrible
conflict, and as we saw it spurned, outlawed and isolated by
the peoples of the world, precisely because it has become the
universal base of the pernicious ideology and practice of
racism and racial oppression (Beningfield, 2006: 1).
In his speech, Mandela confirmed all South Africans? connection to the
landscape, the same landscape that historically had been configured for the
expression of white identity.
One of the intentions of apartheid was the alienation of individuals and
communities from the land, particularly black and coloured communities,
resulting in a loss of identity and belonging. Traditional attachment to the land
60
was severed through various policies, such as the Land Act of 1913, and the
Group Areas Act of 1950, to name a few, which later resulted in blatant forced
removals. Black histories were ignored, as the Afrikaner appropriated
narratives connected to the land. Mofokeng (2008) writes about this
predicament saying:
Democratic South Africa is yet to take psychic ownership of
the land it has inherited from the Apartheid ancestor. In South
Africa formal landscape appreciation is fraught, so is the
history. If one were to ask, who owns the South African
landscape? A cacophony of sounds, narratives and narrations,
a delirious, rather, a deleterious mix of claims will be the
response, many more than there are colours in a rainbow. To
be sure, until 1994 Afrikaner authority and sense of propriety
superseded all other narratives. You see this in the literature in
libraries (Herman Charles Bosman), in art institutions and
museums (Pierneef), in monuments and memorials
(Voortrekker Monument) and in the nomenclature (meerkats)
and place names (Karoo). Under Apartheid my movements
within the republic were proscribed.
It is somewhat ironic to note that one of the ?by-products? of apartheid?s history
is the view held by many black people that landscape is not something to be
admired or appreciated. Mofokeng states, ??socialism, as the ideological
weapon in the fight against apartheid capitalism, didn?t encourage bourgeois
delusions? (Lundstr?m and Pierre, 1998: 109). Admiring landscape was not
only frowned on by people, but moving freely through the landscape was
difficult, as country hotels, where Mofokeng tried to stay were always
suddenly fully booked. He describes the landscape as a ?very hostile
environment? (Ibid: 109).
61
The aim of his work, according to Mofokeng, is to reclaim land for himself and
his people. He writes (2008):
We (darkies) have lost the land and its imagination of it. We
appropriate (lost) spaces, which we define as holy. But we
don?t claim ownership. In my pictures I want to appropriate the
imagination of another ownership of ?our land?. Scape ? the
visions of land, which goes beyond the land rights of law,
possession and exclusion (of the ones who don?t possess).
Searching for ?No mad?s[sic] land?. I don?t own, I don?t
possess, but I see. I go to the forgotten spaces, to find what I
lost/the scape, what was taken away from me and my people.
The desire to reclaim land, or to ?know? the land, stems from a loss of
intimacy, a sense of unbelonging with a familiar landscape. Irit Rogoff reminds
us that this kind of landscape is an uncanny geography: ?uncanny in Freud?s
sense of ?the class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and
long familiar?.? She explains that the ?uncanny? is actually Freud?s unheimlich,
a feeling of not being at home, but a feeling that also contains familiarity
(Rogoff, 2000: 7). The unheimlich is a sensation produced by time and
remembrance; it describes the flood of repressed memories that fill the
subject with dread as he encounters some seemingly unrelated object,
person, place or landscape. The heimlich is both familiar and secret always
bearing within itself the quality of the unheimlich.
Within South African history, this feeling of heimlich and unheimlich plays an
important role. After colonialism and years of apartheid different scenarios of
belonging are coming into play, such as the right to land and land claims. This
brings into question the fiction created long ago of narratives of community
and identity connected to landscape. This unheimlich produces anxieties over
societal boundaries, which are both repressed and made evident in
nationalism (Richards, 2003). Freud states that the ?uncanny? or unheimlich is
?nothing new or alien, but something that is familiar and old-established in the
mind and that has become alienated from it only through the process of
repression? (Blocker, 1999: 72).
62
Both Homi Bhabha (1994) in Nation and Narration and Julia Kristeva (1991) in
Strangers to Ourselves suggest that the uncanny is a fundamental element of
the ambivalent narrative of a nation. Bhabha states that, ?The unhomely
moment creeps up in you stealthily as your own shadow [?]. The recesses of
the domestic space become sites for history?s most intricate invasions. In that
displacement the borders between home and world become confused; and
uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon
us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting? (Bhabha, 1994: 1-7).
The concept of home became disrupted during apartheid. Colin Richards
writes that home in South Africa is the ?stuff of life, death and the disturbed
desires in between. In a country and continent ? a place of forced homelands
? where habitation, movement and association have, in living memory, been
so deeply traumatic, where violent displacement has been so intense, and
recurrent, home must be important? (Richards, 2003).
Mofokeng acknowledges that home is important but states that, ?Home is
appropriated space, it does not exist objectively in reality. The notion of
?home? is a fiction we create out of a need to belong (Judin, Hilton and
Vladislavic, 2002: B8). In the work of Mofokeng, a certain sense of nostalgia
persists. Nostalgia can also be a longing for an imagined place. Landscape
becomes the object of mourning for something that is lost. Mofokeng states,
?What my work has always been about is a search, a search for home?
(Christopher, 2005: 101).
Irit Rogoff believes that people have lost the ?ability to represent any form of
stable geographical knowledge as a set of guidelines regarding identity,
belonging and rights?. She goes on to argue that politics and the state have
??limited and shut down our capacity to understand and thematise issues of
belonging?? (Rogoff, 2000: 5). Through his photographs, Mofokeng was
searching for these guidelines, markers from which to investigate personal
and collective identity and belonging. Around 1996 he started to look at how
communities still engaged with the land, as they were at that stage so
disconnected from the landscape that they could not appreciate the beauty of
the land. He states, ?I want to explore the traditions that have withstood the
63
influence of missionaries, but have been modified to accommodate change?
(Lundstr?m and Pierre, 1998: 108).
In Inside Motouleng Cave, Mofokeng documents the relationship between
landscape, memory and religion. He photographed a cave that contains the
bones of the prophetess Mmantsoupa, which acts as a gateway between
everyday life and the world of the ancestors. This grainy black and white
photograph shows a big cave, with light streaming in from the left, piercing the
darkness. In the distance, the worshippers are barely visible. In the
foreground, one can see the physical floor of the cave. The overhanging roof
becomes a black ?cut-out?, with no detail. Photographed from afar, one gets
the impression that the photographer is an outsider, detached from what is
happening in the cave. Mofokeng confirms that when he visited the spiritual
site (Motouleng Cave) outside Clarens in the Free State the landscape made
him confront his own past; a past he had forgotten and was even
embarrassed about.
In black South African writing, there is a sense that if one loses the connection
with the land, ties with the ancestors are severed, resulting in a feeling of
Figure 3: Inside Motouleng Cave, 1996
64
isolation. In her article Sacred and Profane Ground: The Work of Santu
Mofokeng, Bronwyn Law-Viljoen (2004) quotes Achille Mbembe in his essay
?African Modes of Self-Writing? that: ?In the prose of nativism, a quasi-
equivalence is established between race and geography ? geography
becoming the privileged site at which the (black) race?s institutions and power
are supposed to be embodied? (Art South Africa, 3: 37).
The Motouleng Cave photographs developed into bodies of work called
Chasing Shadows and Lunarscapes, where Mofokeng explores his own
?shadow? and that of his people. The ?shadow? in Mofokeng?s language
translates to a person?s seriti or thunzi (shadow) meaning an aura, essence or
presence. He explains:
In South Africa, many black people spend their lives chasing
shadows. While the expression 'chasing shadows' has quixotic
connotations in English, in indigenous languages the
expression represents the pursuit of something real,
something capable of action, of causing effects ? a chase
perhaps joined in order to forestall a threat or danger. Seriti in
Sesotho (my mother tongue) does not readily translate. The
word is often translated only as 'shadow', unwittingly
combining the meanings of moriti and seriti. The word seriti
overlaps the word meaning 'shadow', but the absence of light
is not all there is to seriti. In everyday usage seriti can mean
anything from aura, presence, dignity, confidence, spirit,
essence, status, wellbeing and power ? power to attract good
fortune and to ward off bad luck and disease? (Mofokeng,
Invoice, 2007).
The words haunting, ghosts and shadows are frequently used in narratives of
the past, when people who have confronted the traumas of history attempt to
tell us about their genealogy, national history and themselves. Fragments
lodged in memory can at some critical moments be brought together by
individuals seeking to fill in the gaps of history that attest their identity. In
Mofokeng?s earlier work, where he documented the lives of ordinary people in
65
Soweto, his aim was to investigate ?the erosion of dignity ? the killing of the
capacity to dream by the authorities? (Christopher, 2004: 2), in other words
the wearing down their ?shadows?. This personal and spiritual journey resulted
in his comment that he was ?chasing shadows? (Ibid: 2), which we can
interpret as trying to find a place of wellbeing, comfort or a home.
For Mofokeng, the search for a way to belong to the land requires the act of
remembering. Landscape maps and shelters memory, setting up social and
individual histories in space. Landscape, for Mofokeng, acts as a mnemonic
device, a place where we remember. He explains: ?The word 'remember'
needs elaboration. Re/member is a process by which we restore to the body
forgotten memories. The body in this case is the landscape ? on whose skin
and belly histories and myths are projected ? which is central to forging
national identity? (Mofokeng, Invoice exhibition statement 2007). Memory
functions on many levels within society: individual or group memory, as well
?common? or ?collective? memory associated with nationalism and building
collective national identities. Memories help us make sense of the world we
live in.
In the past, land for the rural African signified an unbounded place, where one
acted as a custodian: the land owned the person, rather than the reverse.
Home is where one is born, the place where the child?s umbilical cord is
buried, where after death the body is buried. Writer Jennifer Beningfield
quotes Nhlanhla Thwala at the School of Oriental and African Studies in
London, who states that the concept of home changes if people move. He
affirms that forced removals during apartheid severed the traditional sense of
place and the meaning of home with the land. But identity and a sense of
belonging are connected to the place where you were born; most black
people will ask you where you come from and where your umbilical cord is
buried. When a child is born, the umbilical cord is buried next to the house,
and on death, the body is buried in the same place; the earth acts as a
unifying place. ?The sense that the connection to the land is something
fundamental, and that the physical body is irrevocably tied to the land through
birth, can therefore persist even with urbanisation and changes to the society
66
over time? (Beningfield, 2006: 4-5). The soil around our birthplace acted as a
place where we remembered our home, and much of our ability to remember
depends on places as well as images while we are growing up.
Edward Casey writes, ?As much as body or brain, mind or language, place is
the keeper of memories ? one of the main ways by which the past comes to
be secured in the present, held in things before us and around us? (Casey,
1987: 213).
Mofokeng believes that landscape activates or makes memory visible, thus
brings the past into the present and feeds identity. Memory is embedded in
complicated class, gender and power relations. These relations determine
what is remembered or forgotten, by whom, and for what end (Gills, 1994: 3).
Mofokeng states, ?I have many other questions about who remembers, and
why, or what do they remember, and when do they access this memory ? this
is my project. And, how we remember who we are? (Christopher, 2004: 101).
Liz Stanley (2006), writing about history and memory in her book Mourning
becomes ?Post/memory, commemoration and the concentration camps of
the South African War, notes that memory and history have always had an
uneasy relationship. Memory is internally fractured and contested, resulting in
opposing understandings. The things we remember are not necessarily what
happened in the past. The past can be a perception. In turn, history is only
perceived, a general narrative certified by historians. History is subjective,
much like memory, as history unfolds according to the person telling the story.
For some analysts, history triumphs over memory as it suggests an overriding
narrative of how the past is seen and understood (Stanley, 2006: 87).
In Mofokeng?s photographs, one is emotionally drawn to linger, to discover
why he photographed those particular places. Photographs do spur memory;
places and people are photographed to supplement oral testimony and failing
recollections. In his work memory and history unite in the photographic image.
Colin Richards (2003) writes: ?? photography holds the promise to secure
time and place simultaneously into a relic and into a piece of historical
evidence?.
67
Barthes (1981) in his book Camera Lucida believes there are two genres of
documentary photographs: family photographs and news photographs. They
both contain the studium and the punctum: The studium which conveys and
puts us in the picture, and the punctum that makes us look again. The
punctum is to view an image in an emotional way, which makes us linger in
front of the image. This echoes Yi-Fu Taun (1977: 6) who notes that to pause
is to assert place. For Barthes (1981) the punctum serves to reintroduce that
space of uncertainty. Jane Crisp (2000: 121) in her book Deciphering Culture
quotes hooks4 who writes: ?Such is the power of the photograph, of the
image, that it can give back and take away, that it can bind.?
Mofokeng photographs the landscape in an attempt to deal with the memory
of the past (Mofokeng, 2005). He states that the journey began at home
where he not only photographed Motouleng Cave, but also concentration
camp sites and burial grounds around Middelburg and Brandfort. Although the
South African War was primarily between the British and the Boers, other
population groups in South Africa ? like the Xhosa, Shangaan, Zulu and
Basotho ? became involved. The British and the Boers employed a large
number of black people as workers and scouts. After the scorched-earth
policy, black workers were removed from the farms and sent to separate
concentration camps to prevent the Boers from obtaining supplies and
assistance. Conditions were appalling: no sanitation was provided, and no
material made available for proper housing. It is estimated that more than
20 000 blacks died of diseases and starvation.
4 bell hooks (nee Gloria Watkins),a feminist thinker. hooks/Watkins use of a pseudonym is
intended to honor both her grandmother (whose name she took) and her mother, as well as
provide her the opportunity to establish a separate voice from the person Gloria Watkins.
68
In the work Concentration Camp for ?natives?, Free State SA (1999),
Mofokeng photographed the cemetery that was ?discovered? and
commemorated after 1994 at Brandfort. No camp graves survived, and ?new?
graves were made in the landscape. The black and white photograph was
taken at midday, resulting in a sun-drenched, desolate feeling. In the
foreground, one sees mounds of roughly placed stones with shrubs growing
between the graves. A white path leads the eye to a nearby koppie and white
picket fence. Once on the path, one cannot stray to look at the graves.
The white concentration camp cemetery close by comprises a memorial
garden commemorating the death of 1200 white adults and children during
the South African War. In contrast the ?native? cemetery on the farm
Nooitgedacht, which means never thought about, was forgotten or ignored by
the apartheid government. The black cemetery had no gravestones, and no
names of the dead were memorialised until 2000, when the area was
landscaped, trees planted and graves ?made? on the site. The rough-hewn
stones contrast the polished marble of the neighboring white cemetery.
Figure 4: Concentration Camp for ?natives?, Free State SA (1999)
69
Mofokeng states that, ?One can?t travel far within this country before coming
upon shadowed ground of negative remembrances of violence and tragedy?
(Invoice, 2007). These shadowed grounds became ?sad landscapes? under
the heading of what Mofokeng calls metaphorical biography, where he
explores places of trauma, to discover how we as South Africans can deal
with our own past. By photographing these sites, Mofokeng aims to evoke the
past, where histories can be remembered and confronted.
In his work The Namib: Where did the road lead when it lead nowhere?
Namibia (1997), Mofokeng photographed an area where German colonial
forces killed 65 000 Hereros in 1904; it was the first genocide of the 20th
century. The photograph evokes early colonial photography in Africa, where
the landscape was depicted devoid of inhabitants, a place perceived as empty
with no previous history. It is a silent landscape, which leads the eye to the
horizon, trying in vain to search for signs of recognisable human traces. The
photograph condenses the tragedy of history into a single image, asks the
question of how the memory of genocide survives for future generations when
Figure 5: The Namib: Where did the road lead when it lead nowhere? Namibia (1997)
70
both political interest and the passage of time itself collaborate to erase its
traces from the landscape.
In a lecture in Dijon France (2005), Mofokeng speaks about nature?s
indifference to human suffering. He states, ?In my travels through Europe and
Asia I am left wondering whether we South Africans can ever learn anything
from there on how to deal with our own terrible memories. Can we not learn
anything from nature?? Part of the title Where did the road lead when it lead
nowhere? refers to Paul Celan?s poem written in 1997.
In Celan?s poem, the cycle of nature becomes a cycle of memory, an ?infinite
script, an inexhaustible reservoir of memory? and from Celan?s perspective,
the place where he comes from, his ?home?, is a landscape wounded during
World War II and the Holocaust (Lauterwein, 2007: 136). Ulrich Bear (2000:
211) writes in his book Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of
modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan, that the landscape of
Celan?s origin ?has paradoxically found a home in ahistoricity, nestled itself
into detachment, permanently found refuge in a state of deportation, exile,
and irremediable loss.? This landscape, as with Mofokeng?s work, portrays a
place to which one cannot return, as it has been irrefutably changed by
trauma. Mofokeng invites us to probe intensely how place came into being
through its narratives. Sam Raditlhalo (2001: 68) writes about Mofokeng in
Taxi-004, ?For Mofokeng, landscapes are not mere mute and blank witness to
human struggles and toil but places invested with memories and narratives.?
During a public tour of the exhibit Homeland Security (2008), Mofokeng stated
that he is not a photographer, but a narrator. Narratives play a critical role in
making place; we come to know a place through its stories, which in turn
shape the landscape. Patricia Price (2004: 23) in her book Dry Place:
Landscapes of Belonging and Exclusion asserts: ?Landscapes are scripts that
discursively construct particular understanding of place. As with stories,
landscapes render a series of things, be they events or physical features,
meaningful.? Narratives accumulate as layers of history and in ?various ways,
stories ?take place?? (Potteiger, 1998: ix). Roland Barthes (1982: 251) points
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out narratives are ubiquitous features of human societies; it is thus
unsurprising that narrativity shapes human understandings of their place in
the world: ?Narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it
begins with the very history of mankind and there is nor has been a people
without narrative.?
Mofokeng is the narrator/communicator of history and memories of places,
where he photographs the narratives of events, fiction and myths ?written into?
the physical form of the landscape. Narratives are a way for Mofokeng to map
the landscape, to link time, events, experiences, memory and other
intangibles to the more concrete aspects of place. His photographs remind us
what has transpired on the landscape, in an attempt to re-examine identity
and to find a home.
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Chapter 4
Place in the world
A few years ago, I became interested in the concept ?motherland? and how we
understand it in terms of our sense of belonging to the country of our birth. But
I was also interested in the contradiction; mother implies nurturing and
protection, but the South African landscape remains a harsh mother plagued
by history, violence and poverty. Yi-Fu Taun (1977: 154) states:
This profound attachment to the homeland appears to be a
worldwide phenomenon. It is not limited to any particular culture
and economy. It is known to literate and nonliterate peoples,
hunter-gatherers, and sedentary farmers, as well as city
dwellers. The city or land is viewed as mother, and it nourishes;
place is an archive of fond memories and splendid
achievements that inspire the present; place is permanent and
hence reassuring to man, who sees frailty in himself and change
and flux everywhere.
I grew up in Kimberley, not far from Magersfontein, the site of my present
works. A place surrounded by milky white grassland, interrupted only by thorn
trees and brown anthills. When I photographed the landscape around
Magersfontein it felt very familiar. Edward Relph (1976: 5) wrote: ??we
should recognise that geographical reality is first of all the place where
someone is, and perhaps the places and landscapes which they remember??
My grandfather loved the area. He went hunting every year to this area that
he loved. He would sit and wait for game under the thorn trees in a barren
winter landscape. Because he died when I was seven, I only remember
certain things about him. He would walk, marking the ground with arrows,
which I had to follow to find him in the veld.
These games with my grandfather reminded me of how the landscape is
marked through memory and history. I started to look at the landscape as a
?site?, a surface that could be investigated for possible traces of the past that
are sensed, rather than seen. This view would regard landscape conceptually,
73
a space of shifts and changes rather than that of physical place. This resulted
in what Kitty Hauser (2007: 2) calls the ?archaeological imagination?, a way of
seeing landscape.
To belong is to have a sense of place. This is a geographical concept
explored, especially by humanist geographers, in an attempt to find out how
and why we belong. As with geography, which ?writes? the earth, memory,
history, narratives and photography inscribe the silent landscape. Sensed
traces on the landscape are the manifestation of narratives that have been
fixed into collective memory. By investigating the historical landscape, we can
explore the ongoing process of identity formation in relation to places.
Identities are layered onto landscape; it is framed and informed by this
relationship with the land. Joan Schwartz (2003: 141) quotes J Hillis Miller
who believes ?The landscape is not a pre-existing thing in itself. It is made into
a landscape, that is, into a humanly meaningful space by the living which
takes place within it.? In that way, landscape is a carrier of memory; a place
interwoven with stories we grew up with and one which provides a template
from which we create, form, transform and reclaim our identity.
I started to question whether my own connectedness to the landscape in
South Africa was ?authentic?, whether it was truly my own connectedness or
construction made up of Afrikaner ideologies. This prompted me to investigate
the role of cultural memory, history and narrative in the formation of group
identity, in an attempt to reassess my own sense of belonging.
These concepts which underpin my practical work are closely related to
discussions in the theoretical component, particularly those around how
landscape figured for the Afrikaner as a cultural group in constructing a sense
of belonging. And this led to an exploration, into a search for my roots. Taun
(2004: 41) writes that to go back to one?s roots is to go back to one?s
homeplace, ?where group belongingness matters more than an individual?s
sense of who he or she is. Much yearning for roots in the modern and post-
modern world is, thus, not so much a yearning for a greater sense of self as a
yearning to numb one?s troubled self-awareness in group identity.?
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In my first images I looked at burnt landscapes, suggesting trauma and a
sense of discomfort. The fire and its incredible heat burned away the top
layer, exposing the skin of the land. This evolved into reading skin as
landscape and vice versa. Both landscape and skin are surface; they act as
boundaries, containing the internal, shielding the external. Skin could also be
seen as a geography, inscribed with a similar epistemology to that of
landscape. Traces on the land manifest in the form of roads, rivers, farms and
earthworks; these mark human presence and effectively alter the landscape.
Inscribed with personal ? and collective ? histories, these spaces become
invested with the specifics of place. Similarly, marks on the skin trace the
body?s experience over time, measuring injury, age and death.
Later I began photographing actual historical sites, such as Magersfontein. I
had read that the South African War trench still existed. The trench was
overgrown with grass and difficult to see in some places, which I cleared in
certain areas. Standing in the trench produced a feeling both of protection and
immersion into the landscape. I was aware of how close my face was to the
crust of the earth. The sensed traces of the past resulted in the trench
becoming a ?place? within the landscape, interwoven with stories I grew up
with ? a surface that contains my own internal topography. What I was looking
for was to ?see? the landscape in a different way, as a site, embedded with
memory and history. I wanted to make the traces of the imagined landscape
visible.
I explored a way of working that parallelled my interest in and view of
landscape; a process that worked with layering, similar to the way in which
history and memory accumulate in the landscape. But how does one
photograph history, or memory, especially when few traces are to be found?
I chose to photograph with a medium-format camera, which produces a larger
square negative and, when printed, an image/photograph that is extremely
rich in detail. I photographed the burned landscape around Pringle Bay and
the site at Magersfontein as if to record it forensically. I experimented with
close-ups and different angles of the terrain. The site and trench were
75
photographed from the vantage point the Boers would have seen when
looking out from it, as well as close-ups of soil, rocks and earth.
In the darkroom, after the films were developed, I printed a number of contact
sheets. I selected certain images and placed them together to refigure the
landscape, as memory and history tend to do in our imaginations. But I found
the physical surfaces of these photographic prints rather monotonous so I
started to layer negatives on top of each other in a single print. I became quite
interested in the images this process produced, it was a way to insert depth
into the photographic print. I constructed a landscape out of several views,
some of the panorama combined with images taken close-up from different
angles of the trench, changing the viewer?s experience by changing vantage
points. In the final photograph, such as Magersfontein I (figure 12) you
experience the earth as if your face was pushed up close to the soil, at the
same time as if being viewed from above.
I then printed the accumulation of small images larger on fiber-based paper.
Exposing two negatives in the darkroom resulted in a longer printing time, as
light through the dense negative becomes difficult. This layering of negatives,
light and chemicals results in a print that appears to uphold the conventions of
?straight? photography. And while it does in fact acknowledge the photograph?s
function as a trace of the real, on closer inspection this becomes less stable.
In a further attempt to embody memory and history, I started looking at
historical photographs, especially those taken during the South African War,
as it still figures in the Afrikaner?s collective memory. In re-photographing
these images, and layering them onto the present landscape, it became a way
to literally layer images of history. Layering images also conveys the fact that
place is constructed through the accumulation of memories. Rory Bester
(2008: 10) writes in the catalogue for my exhibition, ?the work scratches and
frames the land in the bits and pieces that are her photographic fragments.
But she goes beyond this initial act on the surface, compositing and layering
images together and over each other, to create a series of strata that connect
different landscapes through memory, archive and belonging.?
76
I produced a grid-like impression by placing multiple square prints together.
This invokes geography?s most elementary graphic form, the grid, used as a
mapping device to measure, record and order the world. Today, satellite
navigation and surveillance technologies organise the way in which the
physical world is encountered according to the logic of the grid. During the
Renaissance, the grid was used for perspective studies: it served as an
ordering system to depict objects or space as realistically as possible.
In the early part of the 20th century, the grid became the figure of modernism,
and appeared in French, Russian and Dutch art. The grid of the modernist
movement was a way of thinking. New York art critic Rosalind Krauss
(1985: 12) calls the grid one of the creation myths of modernism and its
ingrained avant-garde thinking: the grid codifies the silence of the avant-garde
artist as a refusal to speak.
The grid in my work acts as a mapping device, an attempt to structure
narrative. It is a way of understanding, grasping and bringing order to history
and memory layered onto the landscape. The fragments of the grid structure
how the site is sensed and remembered. Edward S Casey (2005) describes
this as ?earth-mapping?, a way that artists such as Robert Smithson, Sandy
Gills and Michelle Stuart incorporated mapping techniques into their artworks.
He writes about forms of mapping and specifically ?mapping with/in?,
describing it as being with or in a place and ?mapping out? as a way to convey
the experience with others. The way the landscape is photographed and
assembled into squares resembles mapping, but also an archaeological dig.
Rory Bester (2008: 9) writes that these images become ?archaeological in
their search for a visual strategy that allows her to dig photographically and
visually within a landscape.?
77
Belonging
The exhibition space comprised two rooms. In the main gallery, at the
entrance, I placed the Veld series (figures 16 ? 22), Absence III (figure 10)
and Untitled I (figure 14). The viewers had to walk through this space to
enter the second room, where Magersfontein I (figure 12), Magersfontein II
(figure 13), and Absence I and II (figures 6 and 7) were hung.
Magersfontein I comprises 35 hand-printed black and white square
photographs which, mounted together, form a landscape. The horizon is
faintly visible, and the trench is reconstructed, running from the top to the left
hand side of the work.
The trench, dug by the Boers during the South African War still exists at
Magersfontein. I became interested in the trench as it not only hid the Boers
from the advancing British, but also acted as an intimate safe place within the
landscape. What struck me about the Battle of Magersfontein and the South
African War in general, was the fact that the Boers remain an unseen, elusive
enemy hiding in the flat landscape. Accounts by British soldiers mentioned
that in this even landscape they were surprised at how they were incessantly
trekking uphill and downhill. The landscape of the interior of South Africa
contained folds and valleys in which the Boers concealed themselves. I found
it interesting that the Boers physically dug themselves into the landscape, the
earth thus acting as a safe intimate place.
The Battle of Magersfontein was fought on 11 December 1899 about 30km
from Kimberley. In the early days of the war, the Boers laid siege to
Kimberley, then the diamond centre of South Africa. The British 1st division,
under Lord Methuen began their march to relieve Kimberley ? coming face to
face with the Boers at the Modder and Riet rivers. The Boers retreated to
Magersfontein after losing the battle at the two rivers. Boer general, Koos De
La Rey, ordered a trench dug in front of the hill of Magersfontein. Historian
Thomas Pakenham (1992: 200) writes, ?The main trench itself ran for about a
thousand yards along the foot of the Magersfontein ridge. It was three to five
feet deep, and only three feet wide, giving much better protection than any
78
equivalent British shelter trenches of the period.? Methuen?s planned night
march and attack at first dawn was hampered by rain. Given the poor visibility,
the British were totally unaware of the Boers in the trench 400 yards in front of
them, as a storm of lead burst over the heads of the Highland Brigade. The
Battle of Magersfontein cost the British nearly 1000 men.
On display in the Magerfontein museum and restaurant are old photographs
taken during and after the battle. In these photographs, I was struck by the
barrenness of the landscape, totally devoid of any vegetation (I later learned
that both the British and the Boers used the grass as fire fuel).
This led me to look at historical material taken during the South African War.
Paul Alberts (2003: 10) states in the book Suffering of War that more than
30 photographers documented the war, and that most images were taken
after the battles. Some photographers accompanied the British as they
burned and raided the farms, leaving Boer women and children to wander the
land. Alberts says, ?Such work established forever the important role of
photography in the traumas of war. A century after the Anglo-Boer War [sic],
we can look at those photographs and be horrified by their contents.?
In Magerfontein II (figure 13), I reconstructed the ?koppie? of Magersfontein by
rephotographing historical images, especially landscapes taken during the
war, and layered them onto my photographs of the present landscape. This
resulted in a work where the landscape becomes faintly inscribed with
historical traces. I concentrated on the Battle of Spioenkop (1900), where
1075 British were killed, pressumed dead or missing. My aim was to show
how ? after the battle ? dead British soldiers were buried in the trench that
was suppose to protect them.
The Veld series (figures 16-22) comprised eight single prints, in which I
attempted to reconstruct historical events and memories connected to
landscape.
In Jeremy Foster?s essay (in Schwartz, 2003: 152) on photographic practices
around 1920, he writes that a new genre of photographs appeared alongside
tourist images in a drive to promote the landscape for South Africans and
79
tourists. The photographs recorded the landscape from train windows and all
were given the generic title ?Veld?, interpreting the landscape as empty and
?unspoilt by the emblem of modernity?. Foster argues that this depiction was
highly problematic, given that in 1913 the Native Land Act was implemented.
During this time black farmers were evicted from their land, cattle sold to
whites and the black owners became workers on their own farms. These
landscape images were published in the South African Railways and
Harbours Magazine. Foster asserts that seeing the landscape through ?eyes
accustomed to the European landscape?s complexity and richness of detail,
South Africa did seem strikingly empty and unpopulated at this time. To this
day, the country?s interior is a terrain vast in scale, poor in physiographical
incident, and virtually devoid of trees? (Ibid).
Two worlds are juxtaposed in the Veld series ? one depicting the present
landscape, the other the hidden, ghost-like landscape of memory, where
history has layered itself onto and underneath the land. In Veld I (figure 16)
the figure of a woman is embedded. In the original archival photograph, a
woman is standing outside her burning home; she is dressed in black and
presents a lonely figure in a desolate landscape, surrounded by her meagre
possessions. In the final work where the two images are integrated, the
woman becomes a ghost-like figure with a road that passes, severing the
image in two.
Veld II and III (figures 17, 18) comprise the trench and landscape at
Magersfontein layered with dead bodies from photographs of the Battle at
Spioenkop. I was interested in an account of a British soldier who stated that
as he got into the trench, he had to lie down beside bodies without heads or
arms: ?Headless bodies, trunks of bodies? (Pakenham, 1992: 294). A trunk
can also mean a box, coffer or crate, and in this photograph the trench
becomes a container, conveying the notion that the physical soil and
landscape can never be represented as an innocent piece of veld.
Veld V, VI and Veld VII contemplate the landscape as burial ground and
repository of suffering. In Veld V (figure 20), I have inserted images
associated with the suffering of the Afrikaner. In the image we can faintly
80
detect a container, a dead horse on the left, and a man standing behind the
thorn tree. The image that emerges in Veld VI (figure 21) and Veld VII (figure
22) depicts concentration camp tents under a thorn tree.
The theory exists (Foster, 2008: 14-22) that the post-memory of the
concentrations camps and war resulted in a new kind of Afrikaner nationalism.
The concentration camp sites around South Africa map a cultural history,
places and place names were etched into the collective memory of the
Afrikaner. The historical photographs used to construct this image were taken
at Norval concentration camp. In February 1901 Captain Wynne laid out the
Norval's Pont concentration camp, about 1,6km from the station on a slope
surrounded by hills. It was a well-laid out camp with rows and streets. Each
family was housed in a bell tent that was numbered, which was not the case
in other camps. For example in Brandfort, in the Free State, conditions were
so appalling that more than 1200 people, 1000 of them children, died.
Magersfonten I and II, and the Veld series focused on the process of
rethinking my personal connection to these historical narratives, and I wanted
to ?reinscribe? the landscape with mourning and shame. This resulted in
another work, Absence III (figure 10), which I placed close to the Veld series
in the gallery. Working with the landscape of Magersfontein, I flipped the
negatives to invert the trench, to reverse history. This image rendered the
trench as a light ash-like impression running through the middle of the image,
leaving the top and lower parts darker, embedded with ?skeletons?. In both
Magersfontein and Veld I interrogated and in a certain sense, condemned the
past, but I knew I could never repudiate the layers of the past, as this forms
part of the land and part of my identity.
Antjie Krog?s book Country of my Skull, which she wrote after she covered the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) for the South African
Broadcasting Company, corresponds with my feelings around mourning and
shame. She mentions that she ?abhors and cares? (Krog, 1998: 97) for these
Afrikaner perpetrators and asks how do we as Afrikaners and South Africans,
negotiate the future: ?What does one do with this load of decrowned
skeletons, origins, shame and ash?? (Ibid: 128) In her writing Krog asks for
81
?amnesty? for the Afrikaner, a cultural group that rendered black people
invisible; not only killed and removed people to separate areas, but also
overlooked their suffering. Afrikaners, still today, when confronted with
remorselessness during and after apartheid, often will resort to the suffering of
women and children during the Battle of Blood River and the South African
War, as philosopher Johan Snyman writes: ?With the current [1999] centenary
commemoration of the Anglo-Boer War the overly topically moral point of such
a comparison is sadly missed, namely, that in commemorating the suffering of
Afrikaner women and children, Afrikaners should not only have vowed that
such suffering may never happen to them again, but that they themselves
may never become party to the infliction of any such suffering in the future?
(Snyman, 1999: 291).
In her book Kleur kom nooit alleen nie (2000) (colour never comes alone)
Antjie Krog focuses on belonging with regard to landscape, the land of her
birth, endemic with history and memory. In these poems she explores her
personal and collective identity as a white Afrikaans woman in South Africa in
Africa, she considers the role of landscape, language and race, and the idea
that national identity is rooted in the notion of land. The book begins with a
medical quote: ?Wondherstel is die herstel van die integriteit van beseerde
weefsel? (wound-reparation is the restoration of the integrity of injured tissue)
which then is divided into three volumes: ?Mondweefsel? (mouth tissue),
Wondweefsel (scar tissue) and Bindweefsel (connective tissue). The
landscape is a wounded body where scars mark the surface.
Absence I and II were displayed opposite Magersfontein I and II. I
photographed around Rooi Els and Pringle Bay in the Western Cape. It was a
desolate stretch of land when I photographed it. A burnt landscape, as many
kilometres of fynbos and indigenous shrubland were destroyed. Although the
area has little historical importance in terms of my project, I was attracted to
the physicality of the burned earth, the burned foliage contrasting with white
sand. I envisioned constructing an ephemeral landscape, floating above
ground, not attached to history or politics, a place of origin from which to
imagine one?s own identity. I was interested in the tension between
82
absence and presence in the landscape, and how the notion of burning
could evoke both.
During this time I investigated and photographed places associated with my
own family history and by chance read about the farm Doornbult, in the
Hopetown district of the Northern Cape. The farm is close to Orange River
Station, the site of General Methuen?s headquarters prior to his march to
Magersfontein in an attempt to relieve Kimberley. It turned out that it was the
du Toit family farm on which my grandfather grew up and the site of the
Orange River concentration camp. The British established the concentration
camp in April 1901 where white women, children and their black servants
were taken in open cattle trucks after Lord Roberts and General Kitchener
applied their scorched-earth policy, burning 3000 farmsteads and more than
40 towns in the Orange Free State. The remains of the concentration camp
can be seen as can the British military camps and fortifications.
What is interesting about this site is that various items used during this period,
such as cooking utensils, toys, tins, uniform buttons of soldiers, inkbottles etc,
are still present on the landscape. It is an unofficial open-air museum. I visited
the museum and went walking with the owner Rina Wiid on the site. She
explained what every object was used for; these objects serve as clues to
how the British and the Afrikaner women and children lived and died on this
bleak landscape. The concentration camp area also includes remains of tent
floors, where women placed small stones on the earth to protect themselves
and their children from the wet earth. By August 1901 there were more than
1600 people in the camp, where up to 12 people had to sleep in tents that
only had place for five. These tents had no floors and because the camp was
situated on a pan, heavy rains resulted in women standing through many
nights with their children on their hips. Women had to create cooking and
eating utensils out of wire and black metal, children fashioned toys out of tins
and anthills were used as ovens.
When children and women died they were buried in an improvised graveyard.
The women carried ironstones from a distant koppie to place over the graves,
bordering it with chalkstones. The chalkstones look like lace around these
83
black graves. It is unclear how many women and children were buried, as
wood was scarce ? in the beginning these women made small coffins, but
later buried their children in blankets. Only three black graves are visible in
the cemetery; these consist only of rough slate slabs placed loosely over the
graves. These black servants were not given any clothes, only blankets by the
English, during their stay. When Rina Wiid discovered the graveyard,
everything was in disarray, no graves were marked and loose stones lay
everywhere. She found small tin markers, which she reconciled with the lists
that still survived. The lists stated that 237 people died during this time, but
other lists confirmed that there were 432 deaths including stillborn babies and
black women and children. At present, alongside archeologists who are busy
digging to see how many people were buried, are mongoose, looking for
bulbs, and bringing bones to the surface. I found these tunnels extremely
interesting, as they reminded me of tunnels and trenches used in World War I.
I wanted to convey the feeling of digging for traces underneath the soil, a
silent place of origin, where I could hide from politics and our history. This
resulted in Untitled I (figure 14), a big mural-scale work, which comprises
126 hand-printed blocks, mounted together to form layers of bedrock. The
work is a combination of all the sites I photographed. Embedded within are
the holes the mongoose dug into the graves at Doornbult; objects used by
the women and children; the darkness of the trenches at Magersfontein: and
stone, earth and sand at Pringle Bay. Untitled I is a meditation on memory,
identity, mourning, suffering, concealment and the earth as refuge.
Hide I to VI (figures 23-28) extends the idea of surface and landscape. These
six colour works are photographs of a gemsbok skin, which I photographed in
the Kalahari. The images are shot close-up, to create a view of the skin
becoming topography. Both landscape and skin are surface; they act as
boundaries, containing the internal, shielding the external. Traces on the land
manifest in the form of roads, rivers, farms and earthworks; these mark
human presence and effectively alter the landscape. Inscribed with personal ?
and collective ? histories, these spaces become invested with the specifics of
84
place. Similarly, marks on the skin trace the body?s experience over time,
measuring injury, age and death.
For the exhibition, the smaller printed Veld series, which hung together, acted
as keys/clues to read the bigger works, such as Magersfontein I and
Magersfontein II, Untitled I and the Absence series. Collectively these works
acted as place where faint traces of the past and the present merge.
85
Conclusion
During the 20th century the landscape became a powerful signifier of
belonging for white South Africans. Today land ownership and rights to land
remain important and sensitive issues; land is a finite resource that both binds
and divides people in South Africa.
Historically landscape acted as a symbol of intimacy, a layered network of
meanings, and a place where a sense of belonging and cultural identity could
be inscribed and imagined. The traces of colonialism and apartheid are still
present on the South African landscape, ?an interlocking of presents, past and
futures, each age bearing, altering, and maintaining the previous ones?
(Mbembe, 2001: 16), a landscape littered with political ideologies that inform
our identities. In particular Afrikaner identities were bound up with patriarchal,
authoritarian institutions of family, religion and the National Party.
Since 1994, with the dismantling of apartheid and transition to democracy, a
new space has opened up where, after years of concentrating on being
?apart?, Afrikaans people can now start to explore and re-examine their
personal stories and histories. Still there is a sense that Afrikaners have not
fully confronted their past, and that the wounds of history lie just below the
surface in post-apartheid South Africa. Perceptions that were formed more
than a century ago are still present today.
According to Professor Johan Snyman (1999: 284), the radical change from
?a social system of legally enforced injustice to a political culture founded on
universal rights? will take years to be understood. He argues it will be
especially difficult for the Afrikaner as a cultural group to overcome an ?ethos
of remorselessness? and ?to reinscribe remorse on a landscape, to stop the
expansion of a moral and intellectual desert?. Snyman notes that if memory is
suppressed, it does not ?sit easy with identity?. Snyman quotes David
Lowenthal, who states that if this transpires the past will remain a ?foreign
country? (Lowenthal in Snyman, 1999: 287).
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By photographing the landscape, I realised the importance of addressing the
discrepancies of the past connected with land. Although landscape has over
the decades acted as a means for white South Africans to develop a cohesive
identity, it still remains a place of exclusion.
As South Africans, all 48 million of us, we have to find a common narrative
within the landscape. But this must be a landscape that embraces all the
histories of its entire people ? where memory meshes with identity ? and not a
symbol of exclusion.
By understanding and acknowledging the layers that make up our landscapes
? real or remembered or both ? we can begin to excavate history through
landscape. We can begin to reimagine and remake the imagination of
landscape, to find a new common sense of belonging.
87
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Illustrations
Belonging images
Figure 6: Absence I, hand-printed fiber based silver gelatin prints, 47 by 138 cm (2006)
Figure 7: Absence II, hand-printed fiber based silver gelatin prints, 47 by 140 cm (2006)
Figure 8: Absence I (small) hand-printed silver gelatin prints, 5.5 by 6.5 cm (2006)
Figure 9: Absence II (small) hand-printed silver gelatin prints, 5 by 22 cm (2006)
99
Figure 10: Absense III, hand-printed fiber based silver gelatin prints, 95 by 200 cm (2006)
Figure 11: Absense III (small) hand-printed siver gelatin prints, 20 by 20 cm (2006)
100
Figure 12: Magersfontein I, hand-printed fiber based silver gelatine prints, 188 by 265 cm (2007)
101
Figure 13: Magersfontein II, hand-printed fiber based silver gelatin prints, 188 by 226 cm (2007)
102
Figure 14: Untitled I, hand-printed fiber based silver gelatine prints, 342 by 556 cm (2008)
Figure 15: Untitled Grid
II, hand-printed silver
gelatin prints, 20.5 by
20.5 cm (2006)
103
Figure 16: Veld I, hand-printed fiber based silver gelatin print, 30 by 30 cm (2007)
104
Figure 17: Veld II, hand-printed fiber based silver gelatin print, 30 by 30 cm (2007)
105
Figure 18: Veld III, hand-printed fiber based silver gelatin print, 30 by 30 cm (2007)
106
Figure 19: Veld IV, hand-printed fiber based silver gelatin print, 30 by 30 cm (2007)
107
Figure 20: Veld V, hand-printed fiber based silver gelatin print, 30 by 30 cm (2007)
108
Figure 21: Veld VI, hand-printed fiber based silver gelatin print, 30 by 30 cm. (2007)
109
Figure 22: Veld VII, hand-printed fiber based silver gelatin print, 30 by 30 cm (2007)
110
Figure 23: Hide I, digital inkjet print, 52 by 42 cm (2008)
Figure 24: Hide II, digital inkjet print, 52 by 42 cm (2008)
111
Figure 25: Hide III, digital inkjet print, 52 by 42 cm (2008)
Figure 26: Hide IV, digital inkjet print, 52 by 42 cm (2008)
112
Figure 27: Hide V, digital inkjet print, 52 by 42 cm (2008)
Figure 28: Hide VI, digital inkjet print, 52 by 42 cm (2008)
113
Figure 29: Land I, hand-printed
silver gelatin prints, 5.5 by 6cm
(2006)
Figure 30: Land II, hand-printed silver gelatin prints, 5.5 by 6cm
(2006)
Figure 31: Land III, hand-printed silver gelatin prints, 5.5 by 6cm
(2006)
114
Experimental works
These works as reference to some of my thought processes and early
explorations.
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