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http://vcj.sagepub.com/Visual Communication
http://vcj.sagepub.com/content/4/3/259The online version of this article can be found at:
DOI: 10.1177/1470357205055919
2005 4: 259Visual CommunicationDarren Newbury
Museum, Gold Reef City, and the Hector Pieterson Museum, Soweto'Lest we forget': photography and the presentation of history at the Apartheid
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A R T I C L E
Lest we forget:1photography and the
presentation of history at the Apartheid
Museum, Gold Reef City, and the Hector
Pieterson Museum, Soweto
D A R R E N N E W B U R Y
Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, University of Central England, UK
A B S T R A C T
Since the end of the apartheid dispensation in South Africa in 1994 there
have been many new memorials, exhibitions and museum displays that
have sought to represent and interpret the countrys recent history. This
article looks at two major and recently opened museums: the Apartheid
Museum at Gold Reef City in Johannesburg (opened in 2001), and the
Hector Pieterson Museum in Soweto (opened in 2002). The focus of the
article is the dominant role of photography in these museums, which is
itself an indication of photographys wider significance in South African
visual culture. The article also examines the visual economy of apartheid onwhich the museums depend, and the forms of photographic seeing
represented by the displays.
K E Y W O R D S
apartheid museums photography South Africa
I N T R O D U C T I O N
At a recent seminar on Photography, Politics and Ethics in Johannesburg,2Susan Sontag talked about being struck, on this her first visit to South Africa,
by the strong moral and ethical dimension within South African photography,
and the attention given to the politics of photographic representation. As an
outsider to South Africa I also share this interest in the close relationship
between the development of photography and social and political issues in
South Africa. This interest has two main aspects. First, there is a tradition of
photography developed in opposition to apartheid, which has a strong sense
of social and political responsibility, coupled with a refreshing lack of
cynicism.
3
Second, since 1994 photography has played an important role in
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Vol 4(3): 259295 [1470-3572(200510)4:3; 259295]
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articulating public histories of apartheid. Despite the critiques of humanism
and documentary realism that have become dominant in photographic
theory in recent years, there remains in South Africa a sense of the important
contribution photography can make, as part of a visual public sphere,
through its ability to tell stories about the past: a contribution that in another
context Eric Sandeen (1995) refers to as a faith in the revelatory powerof photography (p. 1). For contemporary South Africa, the power of
photography to tell the truth about the past is clearly linked to the process of
reconciliation. Jeremy Rose of Mashabane Rose Associates, architects for
both the Apartheid and Hector Pieterson Museums, explicitly links the
representation of the past to the purposes of the present when he argues that:
The stronger the negatives of the past are reflected, the more positive the
changes we are experiencing now seem to be (cited in Reilly, 2003: 15).
Photography is central to the presentation of historical narratives about
apartheid South Africa and is placed within a pedagogical framework,
educating a new generation of black South Africans about the history of thestruggle, and revealing what for many white South Africans were hidden
dimensions of the society in which they lived, both important tasks for the
building of a new South Africa.
Since the early 1990s, major museums, and some minor ones,4 have
been set up dedicated to remembering what happened in South Africa
between 1948 and 1994. Photography is a key, and in some cases the
dominant, element in these museum displays. This article focuses on two
relatively new museums the Apartheid Museum, Gold Reef City,
Johannesburg (opened in 2001) and the Hector Pieterson Museum, Soweto(opened in 2002). According to Coombes (2003), they represent a second
post-apartheid phase of national museum and monument construction, and
hence are the result of a far greater consensus than that represented in the
less resolved attempts at reinventing national history just prior to and after
the first democratic elections (p. 11). It is interesting nonetheless that in its
brochure the Apartheid Museum feels the need to announce that, It is an
unbiased and historically accurate accounting of modern 20th-century South
Africa, signalling the still contested nature of this terrain.
My primary reason for choosing to look at these two museums is for
the central role they give to photography. Both museums are dominated by,
and in fact inconceivable without, the photographic image. The museums
also represent substantial investments in public history for international and
local audiences. Although the relatively small number of local black Africans
who visit the museums has been a point of criticism, local school groups do
represent an important and sizeable constituency. The similarity in visual
design in both museums should also be noted; although they were funded
separately and have some differences, there is a great deal of consistency
between the two.
I want to do two things. First, to begin to unpack the visual economyof apartheid on which these museums rely. The notion of visual economy is
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developed from the work of Deborah Poole, and places emphasis on the
organization of the production and exchange of images, rather than relying
simply on an analysis of their visual content:
the word economy suggests that the field of vision is organised in
some systematic way. It is also clear that this organisation has as much
to do with social relationships, inequality, and power as with shared
meanings and community ... it also suggests that this organization
bears some not necessarily direct relationship to the political and
class structure of society. (Poole, 1997: 8)
For Poole, a visual economy has three levels: the organization of production,
encompassing both the individuals and the technologies that produce
images; the circulation of ... images and image-objects; and the cultural and
discursive systems through which graphic images are appraised, interpreted,
and assigned historical, scientific, and aesthetic worth (pp. 910). I do nothave space here for a comprehensive account of the visual economy of
apartheid; my purpose rather is to draw attention to the complex histories
of the photographs, and the implications of their original contexts of
production and circulation for an understanding of these museum displays.
Photographs from a range of different contexts are brought together in these
two museums in order to provide a unified narrative of apartheid and the
liberation struggle, which serves the purposes of commemoration and
reconciliation, and contributes to the creation of a new national identity. The
museums can be seen as sites of what James Young calls collected memory the many discrete memories that are gathered into common memorial
spaces and assigned common meaning. The approach taken here follows
Young, who uses the term in order to resist closure of meaning and to place a
greater emphasis on the work of collection and display: By maintaining a
sense of collected memories, we remain aware of their disparate sources ...
and of the ways our traditions and cultural forms continuously assign
common meaning to disparate memories (Young, 1993: xixii). By
removing the images from their original contexts of production and
circulation, for example the pages of illustrated magazines such as Drum or
anti-apartheid publications such as Sechaba or SASPU National,5 and placing
them on a museum wall, the visual economy that produced these images is
negated or obscured in favour of a more neutral sense of the photograph as
raw material or a window onto history.6 The museums represent new sites
for organizing the production and circulation of photographs. In their study
of the work of Leon Levson, Minkley and Rassool (1999) explore the way in
which Levsons work becomes repositioned, moving from native studies to
resistance documentary, as it is appropriated into a visual history of the real
conditions of social life of South Africa just before apartheid.7 Some of the
friction between these old and new economies, between the needs andexpectations of photographic practitioners and the projects represented by
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the museums, can be observed in the disputes over ownership and copyright
payments that have emerged in the creation of both museums.
Second, I want to analyse and comment on the significance of the
style of visual and photographic display. The article focuses on the visual
dimension of the museums, and considers some of the different visual genres
and practices that they draw upon in the presentation of apartheid history.Both museums have been influenced by the forms of display developed in
Holocaust museums. Like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington, DC, these displays were created out of a need to narrate a
traumatic past in a highly charged contemporary context, where many
people still alive today have first-hand experience of the events concerned.
Also like the Holocaust museums, these museums were based on a
conceptual and narrative framework rather than a significant collection of
artefacts. Indeed, the creation of an artefact collection has become a
secondary role of the museums as they developed:
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum is a narrative historical
museum. Unlike most historical museums, it is based on a narrative
rather than on a collection of works of art and artefacts relating to
history. (Weinberg and Elieli, 1995: 49, original emphasis)
Its primary purpose is to communicate concepts, complex informa-
tion and knowledge, rather than merely to display objects of the
Holocaust. (Jeshajahu Weinberg, Director of US Holocaust Memorial
Museum, in Berenbaum, 1993: xiv)
Like the Holocaust museums, the apartheid museums are heavily
dependent on photographs to convey information and stories. It is these uses
of photography that I want to explore here through these two examples; just
as photographs are not simply raw material for creating histories, neither are
the forms of display themselves neutral. My intention is to develop an
understanding of the relationship between the photographs as products of a
particular social and cultural context and their representation in these
museums. A further issue of theoretical significance is the degree of
organized photographic and cultural activity that was part of the anti-apartheid struggle. This is not directly dealt with in these museums, but
clearly has an impact on the images that were available for selection.
In conclusion, the article reflects on some of the questions raised by
the museums re-use of images from the past, and how this relates to
contemporary photography in South Africa. Does the incorporation of
humanist documentary into these museums perhaps represent the final
destination of this particular style of photography?
T H E V I S U A L E C O N O M Y O F A P A R T H E I D
Photography was an important presence in the struggle against apartheid
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an individual; Omar Badsha ... is a product of the collective movement of
recent years (p. 60). The emphasis shifted away from valuing the individual
vision and creativity of the photographer, to asking how photography could
be used as a tool of struggle. For example, speaking for photography at the
Culture and Resistance festival, Peter McKenzie (1982) argued that: No
photographer can lay claim to any individual artistic merit in an oppressedsociety (p. 17). Although some may have been ambivalent or even hostile to
the title, this is often seen as the period of struggle photography, where the
photography itself was subservient to the needs of the movement. As Cedric
Nunn recalls: we were working in concert with the liberation movement, we
were focusing on issues that were issuing out of the United Democratic
Front.13 More dramatically, Peter McKenzie notes, I always used to say I
didnt have an AK, I had a Zenit B.14 Of course, this tension between the
individual and the collective, and the creative and the political, does not
disappear; in the post-struggle period it re-emerges strongly and in
interesting ways. As with Drum, though more explicitly, the emphasis ontraining black South Africans to be photographers, film-makers and so on is
also an important part of this practice there wasnt one photographic
darkroom in the township at that time ... our strategy was to actually create
infrastructure and a production base for the development of knowledge ...
for people to produce newsletters, for people to produce posters. In this way,
culture as well as photography can be viewed as a conceptual liberated
zone ... culture was a liberated zone, we controlled culture.15
I also consider a third source of archival material from the
photographic collection built up in London by the International Defence andAid Fund (IDAF).16 The collection contains work by Leon Levson, who
photographed in South Africa during the 1940s (see Minkley and Rassool,
1999), and Eli Weinberg, a trade union activist, photographing from the
1950s. In Weinbergs work one can see the earliest examples of struggle
photography: photographs, staged for the camera, of Nelson Mandela and
Walter Sisulu burning their passes, or of Walter Sisulu reading the speech of
the banned African National Congress (ANC) leader Albert Luthuli at a
meeting in Sophiatown in 1954.17 The photographic collection was part of
IDAFs publicity programme, the main aim of which was to keep the
conscience of the world alive to the issues at stake in South Africa,18 and
much of the day-to-day work was disseminating images of current events in
South Africa to the anti-apartheid movement across the world, and through
the international press. The aims of IDAF were political, and it did not have
an aesthetic agenda. Nevertheless, in their article on Levson, Minkley and
Rassool note how they were struck by the ways that the photographs often
implied a fascination and a delight in the act of photographic representation
itself (Minkley and Rassool, 1999). Similarly, Paddy Donnelly, who ran the
day-to-day business of the collection during the mid- to late 1980s, recalls
the impact of seeing the work of Eli Weinberg when it first arrived at theIDAF offices:
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It was just completely thrilling, because everyone was working in
35mm and the whole IDAF collection was pretty grotty 35 at best.
Sometimes original negs, and here were these fucking pristine 21/4
sharp, sharp, sharp, tonally beautiful. They were just so nice to print
out they felt so fresh you know ... I think he was an exceptional
photographer. Maybe not exceptional but certainly ... thank you for
using larger format you know, his quality of stuff was great.
In 1990 with the unbanning of the ANC and other anti-apartheid
organizations the IDAF photographic collection was returned to South
Africa, where it is now housed at the Mayibuye Centre, University of the
Western Cape. The archive has been used to create photographic
exhibitions19 as well as supplying images to a number of museums.
T H E A PA R T H E ID M U S E U M , G O L D R E EF C I T Y,
J O H A N N E S B U R G
A white person is one who in appearance is, or who is generally
accepted as, a white person, but does not include a person who,
although in appearance obviously a white person, is generally
accepted as a coloured person. (Population Registration Act 1950,
cited in the Apartheid Museum)
If anyone was in any doubt as to the importance of the visual to the
functioning of apartheid, and arguably perhaps to its ultimate demise, then a
visit to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg should very quickly dispelany uncertainty. The convoluted thinking in this quotation from the
Population Registration Act 1950, which refers to a test applied in the
classification of persons into racial categories by the apartheid system,
indicates both the significance of visual difference to apartheid and at the
same time the difficulties implementing such a system created in practice. It
is perhaps fitting that the experience of the museum for any visitor is both
overwhelming and overwhelmingly visual; it is this visual experience that I
want to consider.
The Apartheid Museum at Gold Reef City opened in November 2001
(Figure 1). The museum is a significant venue in the presentation of the
history of apartheid South Africa, both for tourists and for the South African
population. The process that led to the creation of the museum began when
the holding company Akani Egoli bid for a casino licence for Gold Reef City.
Gold Reef City is the site of a former gold mine just south of Johannesburg,
not far from Soweto. Redeveloped in the 1990s, it now has a theme park, a
casino and a number of restaurants, as well as the museum. In order to
get the casino licence, Akani Egoli was also obliged to finance a social
responsibility project. Although the initial idea was for the creation of a
cultural village on this site, the proposal evolved over an 18-month periodinto what is now the Apartheid Museum.20 The company financed the
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creation of the museum and provided two years operating costs. Following
the end of the two-year period the museum now exists as an independent
not-for-profit company, with Akani Egoli providing a nominal contribution.
However, although now independent, the museums association with the
casino remains an issue. The origins of the museum and its siting in the
context of a casino and a theme park have led to criticism of the lack ofseriousness afforded the subject matter by this context (Sean OToole, 2002,
describes the museum as a mandatory conscience foisted on a pleasure
seeking public), the inappropriateness of consumer capitalism as a sponsor
of the museum, and its exclusivity as a place for mainly middle-class South
Africans and international visitors.21 The architects were aware of the
dissonance created by the setting as they sought to ensure a dignified and
deeply contemplative experience:
Analogous to a deep gash or cut in the landscape, the strong forms of
the building are partially submerged into the ground, the grass-
covered roof (recalling the veld that existed before gold was
unearthed in Johannesburg) and earthed terraces concealing the
theme park setting in favour of a more considered view of the city.
(Castle, 2003: 49).
The lack of connection with black South African communities has
also been a point of criticism; as Joseph OReilly (2004) notes, the museum
was assembled and organised by a multidisciplinary team of curators,
V i s u a l C o m m u n i c a t i o n 4 ( 3 )266
Figure 1 Exterior view of the Apartheid Museum, Gold Reef City, Johannesburg.All
photographs by Darren Newbury. Photographs of Apartheid Museum used withpermission of the museum.
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historians, film-makers and designers, little or no attempt was made to
involve outside communities in its development or display (p. 30). The
museum is addressing some of these criticisms: staff would point to
the number of school groups that now visit the museum, and in 2003 the
museum entered into an agreement with the Gauteng province education
department.
22
There is also the perception amongst museum staff thatassociation of the museum with the casino is a criticism that emanates more
from a cultural elite than from ordinary visitors. In one way, the context of
the museum is not inappropriate as it is in precisely this context that, as a
contemporary museum, it will have to compete. Both of the museums
discussed here are committed to encouraging the growth of a culture of
museum-going amongst black South Africans. Inevitably this will take place
in a context where other popular cultural attractions are also targeting the
same audience. Furthermore, there are strong arguments for seeing popular
forms of cultural display as part of the same field as more traditional
museums. Witz et al. (2000) argue that popular culture the festival, thetourist spectacle, television productions, visual landscapes, dramatic
performances and their scripts should be the concern of historians, and
that rather than burying oneself in a morass of despair and pessimism,
South African historians should seize the opportunity, visualize their work in
the public domain and proclaim a new historiographical school (pp. 267).
Whatever one thinks of its origins and context, the museum does demand to
be taken seriously.
At the heart of the museums strategy is a faith in the documentary
tradition to enable visitors to see and experience history for themselves; thevisual and experiential is central to the way in which the museum presents
itself to its visitors:
Using documentary pieces of film, texts, audio and live accounts you
will experience for yourself the early part of the last century ... Feelthe
plight of a people subjected to forced removals, political executions
and imprisonment. Witness the beginning and increase of black
consciousness in South Africa and see the consequences of the 1976
Soweto student uprising. (Apartheid Museum brochure, emphasis
added)
In this way, the rhetoric of the display echoes that of the anti-apartheid
photography discussed earlier: to serve as a witness to events,23 and to impact
on the conscience of those who saw the images. It is worth noting that this
process of fostering in the visitor an emotional identification with the victims
of apartheid assumes an audience who have not experienced apartheid first
hand, and for whom the museum is an educational experience. This
approach is comparable with that developed at the US Holocaust Memorial
Museum: Visitors project themselves into the story and thus experience itlike insiders while at the same time remaining at a distance, with the
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intellectual perspective of outsiders (Weinberg and Elieli, 1995: 49). At the
same time, there is an inevitable ambivalence about this approach; as in the
context of Holocaust representations, the process of fostering identification
with the experience of those involved is both necessary, but always
insufficient.24 The orientation, in the Apartheid Museum brochure, to the
education of visitors who have little experience of the events described might
be contrasted with some of the exhibits at District Six Museum in Cape
Town (where there is also a considerably more intimate and vernacularphotographic aesthetic), which imply an active participation on the part of
those forcibly removed (Coombes, 2003: 11648).25
The Apartheid Museum is extensive and requires the visitor to spend
the best part of a day, in fact it probably requires several visits to really do it
justice. I intend here to draw attention to a number of important visual
elements.
The initial processing of visitors provides a form of psychological
preparation for what follows, and invites identification with the victims of
the apartheid system. At the ticket office, visitors are handed on a randombasis an entrance card labelled in the terminology of apartheid as either
V i s u a l C o m m u n i c a t i o n 4 ( 3 )268
Figure 2Segregated
entrance to the
museum.
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blankes (white) or a nie-blankes (non-white) that determines which of the
two turnstiles must be used to enter the main part of the museum.26 For
first-time visitors to the museum, this causes mild disorientation as one is
not sure where others in the group are going or for how long you will be
separated, and provides a lesson, albeit a gentle one, in the system of
apartheid that is the museums subject. Once through this segregated
entrance, one enters a short, narrow passage, made of the steel mesh used
throughout the museum, lined with enlarged images of identity passes(Figure 2); at the end of the passage, where the separate pathways come
together once more, there is a life-size photograph of the Classification
Board, an imposing image showing four white men sitting behind a table
facing the viewer (Figure 3). By implication they are there to decide upon
racial classification and hence the life chances of those who stand before
them. Although the original source is not acknowledged here, the image
(cropped differently) was originally used in Drum magazine (July 1956),
telling the story of Thomas Holyoake, a coloured man who was reclassified
as a native, and then on appeal proved his coloured status.27
The absurdityof apartheid was an ongoing theme in Drum, though it is interesting to note
N e w b u r y : P h o t o g r a p h y a n d t h e p r e se n t a t i o n o f a p a r t h e i d h i st o r y 269
Figure 3 The
Classification
Board. Original
image reproduced
courtesy of Bailey
African HistoryArchives.
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that the kind of ironic humour that defined Drums style is here replaced by a
more serious treatment.
Leaving the Classification Board display, one is then led outside once
more, where there is a ramp leading up to the main museum building
(Figure 4). Two contrasting visual points are made here. First, the ramp is
occupied by several full-length mirrors with images of people (a diversegroup of contemporary South Africans), challenging the visitor to confront
his or her own identity (Castle, 2003: 50). Second, off to the right-hand side
are small alcoves with images from the colonial period, including a group of
South African Bushmen28 (prisoners forced to do hard labour) photographed
in Cape Town in the late 19th century (Figure 5), as well as rock art drawings,
some of which show white settlers in a characteristic pose with hands on
hips. The number of different ways of seeing encountered just in this
introductory section of the museum, and the interplay between them, alerts
one to the significance of different visual genres. What might be thought of
as the surveillance gaze of 19th-century colonial photography or of theClassification Board with its power of visual scrutiny is turned back on itself
in the stylized depictions of white settlers, or in the irony of the Classification
Board image originally used in an article in a magazine for black Africans
pointing out the absurdity of the classification process.
Inside the main building there is an opportunity to see a short film on
the colonial history of South Africa, ending in the election victory by the
Nationalist party in 1948 and the beginning of the apartheid system. One is
therefore primed to leave the auditorium to continue this story. The
V i s u a l C o m m u n i c a t i o n 4 ( 3 )270
Figure 4 The ramp leading up to the main museum building.
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circulation path of the museum is organized by the timeline of apartheid
from 194894, and at the time of my visit (April 2003) space had been
allocated for a new display on the work of the Truth and Reconciliation
Committee. The museum depends heavily on still photography, many images
for example from Baileys African History Archives, and monitors showing
film footage from the 1940s on, as well as more recent television newscoverage (much of which would not have been seen in South Africa at the
time). Towards the latter part of the narrative the austere black-and-white
footage gives way to a visual celebration of struggle culture, with a colourful
array of T-shirts, posters and banners:
What you saw happening after UDF [United Democratic Front] was
incredibly rich ... thousands of posters and T-shirts ... I mean it was
amazing I think for white people to actually come to the notion that a
T-shirt can make actually a hell of a difference, because white people
didnt actually understand that for a black person to wear a T-shirtthat says down with Apartheid was an incredible act of defiance.
(Gordon Metz, 21 February 2004)
The centrepiece of the museum photographically is the room devoted
to reproductions from Ernest Coles House of Bondage (1968) (Figures 6
and 7). Born in 1940 in Eersterust, a black township to the east of Pretoria,
Cole began photographing in the mid-1950s, and worked for Drum
magazine for a period from 1958. According to Cole, seeing the work of
N e w b u r y : P h o t o g r a p h y a n d t h e p r e se n t a t i o n o f a p a r t h e i d h i st o r y 271
Figure 5 South African Bushmen photographed in Cape Town in the 19th century.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson inspired him to work on a book. The images were
made from the mid-1950s up until Cole left South Africa in 1966, taking hispictures with him to be published for the first time in New York by Random
House the following year. The book is a substantial and powerful
contribution to this documentary genre, and the equal of any of the
publications that came out of the more frequently referenced American
Depression work. Following its publication it was banned in South Africa,
although several copies did find their way back into the country to friends of
Coles,29 as well as to those interested in photography. It is therefore pleasing
to see one of the major photographic critiques of apartheid given such
prominence. The museum display reproduces pages from the book as large
image and text panels. Given that the negatives are lost and the whereabouts
of the prints uncertain, as well as the scarcity of the book itself (another
edition was published in London in 1968, but it has not been reprinted
since), this was perhaps a logical choice. But it is not an uncontroversial one.
The book is divided into 15 sections (e.g. The Mines, Police and Passes,
Whites Only) each accompanied with text written in collaboration with Life
editor Thomas Flaherty, and with an introduction by journalist Joseph
Lelyveld. Coles voice and vision is therefore mediated. It is not clear precisely
how Cole would have liked the work to be displayed; however, it seems quite
likely that he would have preferred a photographic display without the textfrom the book.30
V i s u a l C o m m u n i c a t i o n 4 ( 3 )272
Figure 6 Entrance to the exhibition of Ernest Coles House of Bondage. Original image
reproduced courtesy of the Ernest Cole Trust.
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Both here and in the Hector Pieterson Museum, which I discuss later,
there is a literal and symbolic appropriation of ways of seeing in the form of
the surveillance footage produced by the security services. Although anti-
apartheid photography provides a substantial proportion of the photography,
film and video footage in the museum, material from government sources
also became available after the fully democratic elections in 1994. In the
centre of the museum is one of the few artefacts a yellow Casspir armoured
vehicle of the kind that security forces frequently used in the townships. The
visitor is invited into the back of the vehicle to view footage as seen through
the eyes of the security forces patrolling a township. Once more, the power
associated with particular ways of seeing is invoked and at the same time
reconfigured.The exhibition ends with a series of monitors showing ordinary
contemporary South Africans talking to camera about aspects of their lives
or reflecting on the recent history of the country (Figure 8). This section
illustrates the idea of diversity and reconciliation. Visually it is worth noting
that the black-and-white social documentary style of the earlier period
(within which the role of the photographer as a witness to social and political
events is crucial) gives way, as the display turns its attention to the new
post-1994 South Africa, to a more personal and confessional mode of
documentary.
31
From here one exits into the quiet and solitude of themuseum gardens (Figure 9).
N e w b u r y : P h o t o g r a p h y a n d t h e p r e se n t a t i o n o f a p a r t h e i d h i st o r y 273
Figure 7 Exhibition of Ernest Coles House of Bondage. Original images reproduced
courtesy of the Ernest Cole Trust.
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memorial to the anti-apartheid struggle. Although the Soweto uprising and
the death of Hector Pieterson (and others like him) clearly warrants
commemoration, without Sam Nzimas photograph32 of the 13-year-old
Hector being carried through the streets, the museum would not take the
form it does (Figure 11). Pieterson was not the first to die on 16 June; that
was Hastings Ndlovu who was shot as he crossed Orlando West bridge witha group of students on the morning of June 16 (Hector Pieterson Museum).
But the power of the photographic image means that it is Pieterson rather
than Hastings Ndlovu who is remembered.33 The image of Pieterson very
quickly became an icon of the Soweto uprising. Peter McKenzie (8 March
2004) attributes to this image his decision to become a photographer, in large
part because it showed him the political value of images.
Prior to the museum opening in 2002, the site had already been used
for an exhibition in memory of the 1976 Soweto uprising. On the 10th
anniversary, a temporary exhibition of photographs by Peter Magubane and
many other photographers was held in a number of containers.34 Accordingto curator Ali Hlongwane, these earlier exhibitions helped to create an
awareness of the need for a more permanent memorial.35 In 1992, a
memorial was also erected at the site by the ANC Youth League (Figure 12).
In contrast to the Apartheid Museum, which is located in a clearly defined
recreational space on the edge of Johannesburg, the Hector Pieterson
Museum is situated in Soweto.36 This is an important difference and
something one might contrast to the purely imaginative identification
N e w b u r y : P h o t o g r a p h y a n d t h e p r e se n t a t i o n o f a p a r t h e i d h i st o r y 275
Figure 10 Outside Hector Pieterson Museum, Orlando West, Soweto.
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provided by the entrance procedure at the Apartheid Museum: tourists
visiting this museum have at least to acknowledge the reality of
contemporary South Africa, and recognize that the legacy of apartheid has
not simply disappeared, though I suspect the brown heritage-style signposts
that indicate the route to the museum provide a reassuring sense of
familiarity to international visitors and tourists. However, as well as needing
to attract international visitors, the relationship of the museum to the localcommunity is also an important concern:
V i s u a l C o m m u n i c a t i o n 4 ( 3 )276
Figure 11 Hector Pieterson. Photograph by Sam Nzima. Photographs of the Hector
Pieterson Museum used with permission of the museum.
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The bigger challenge is the ordinary person who lives across [from]
here, who passes all the time to go to the shop ... there are twoattitudes to it. One attitude tends to say its for tourists ... the other
attitude is we know it, we were there, we saw it, and then the
challenge for us is how do we bring that person to it even if he knows
this story, all of us can say we know the story, but ... whats new in the
story ... How do we capture that memory? (Ali Hlongwane, 5 March
2004)
In contrast to the Apartheid Museum, for those who run the Hector
Pieterson Museum its relationship to the local community was an issue that
was keenly felt, and which has some very clear practical implications for thesafety of visitors and respect for the building. The location of the museum in
Orlando West means that it must continually make and remake this
relationship.37 As part of this process, the museum runs a programme of
workshops, lectures and events. Nevertheless, tourists clearly remain central,
and the museum is now part of most Soweto township tours.
In its architectural style the red brick building reflecting the
materials used in Soweto and many South African townships38 and in
the design of the displays, the Hector Pieterson Museum is very similar to the
Apartheid Museum. This is unsurprising given that the same architects anddesigners were used for both projects. The main difference between the two
N e w b u r y : P h o t o g r a p h y a n d t h e p r e se n t a t i o n o f a p a r t h e i d h i st o r y 277
Figure 12 Hector Pieterson Memorial and photograph.
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is the opportunity afforded to the Hector Pieterson Museum for acknowledging
and exploiting its location visually. At the entrance to the museum the
visitors gaze is directed along a thin line of indigenous rooigras (red grass),
which extends from the museum entrance towards the spot where Hector
Pieterson was shot (Figure 13). This positioning implicates the visitor in the
scene and prompts reflection on what it means to look along a line of sightand then shoot someone, or to witness that shooting as the photographer
did.39 Visitors, particularly white visitors, are therefore positioned
simultaneously as witness and perpetrator. Inside the museum, large
windows provide a view onto the surrounding area, significant elements of
which are identified, revealing the layers of history (Ali Hlongwane, 5 March
2004) and their contribution to an understanding of the events of 1976
(Figures 14 and 15). This is the most powerful aspect of the museums visual
display, and signals what is a recurring theme: the appropriation of the
visual.My main interest here lies in the different visualphotographic genres
V i s u a l C o m m u n i c a t i o n 4 ( 3 )278
Figure 13 The line
in the ground joins
the entrance of the
Museum to
the point where the
clash with policeoccurred and
Hector Pieterson
was shot. Hector
Pieterson Museum.
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that the museum draws upon, and the way this is shaped into an overall
scheme, but it is also important to understand the narrative construction of
the museum display. The aim of the museum is to narrate the run-up to the
events of 16 June 1976 and the events that followed from that day. However,
the perspective from which those events are told is important. One of the key
issues for this museum, as with many other new museums in South Africa, is
the relationship of the narrative to contemporary politics.40 Many
participants in the events of 1976 later became important figures in the ANC,
and the museum was therefore very conscious of the dangers of the narrative
being read as a party political one. To avoid this perception, the curatorial
team decided to focus on the stories of the students and the particular issue
of Afrikaans teaching that provided the point of confrontation:
There was a likelihood that the story could be told from a party
political point of view and we consciously said this is not a story ofparty politics, it is the story of students ... they were grappling with
N e w b u r y : P h o t o g r a p h y a n d t h e p r e se n t a t i o n o f a p a r t h e i d h i st o r y 279
Figure 14View of
Soweto from
Hector Pieterson
Museum.
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the problem of Afrikaans in class, they knew nothing about Lenin and
Karl Marx, and never even knew about ANC or PAC. It was just the
realities they were faced with as young people at the time ... students
were concerned with the immediate issue that was affecting them.
They had exams coming, they had to suddenly start reading Afrikaansin mathematics and in history, and that just didnt make sense. The
very teachers that were supposed to be teaching them Afrikaans were
themselves grappling with the language as they had never used it as a
medium of instruction. (Ali Hlongwane, 5 March 2004)
The museum therefore foregrounds a humanist perspective the
story of individuals who are within a particular context (Ali Hlongwane, 5
March 2004) rather than making an explicitly political analysis. This is
supported and informed by the photography; the style of its presentation
reinforces the association with the humanist paradigm in photography which
was very influential on the work of photographers such as Peter Magubane
and Alf Kumalo, whose work is strongly represented in the museum.
Like its counterpart at Gold Reef City, the Hector Pieterson Museum
draws on a range of different photographic genres in the construction of its
narrative. In this process of decontextualization and recontextualization, the
particular photographic practices recede in favour of an emphasis on the
content of the image. A majority of the photographs are printed to large sizes
and mounted directly onto the wall; there is no framing. This style of display
makes the most of photographic reproducibility and maximizes their impactas images (Figures 16 and 17), whilst at the same time it minimizes any sense
V i s u a l C o m m u n i c a t i o n 4 ( 3 )280
Figure 15View of Soweto from Hector Pieterson Museum.
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N e w b u r y : P h o t o g r a p h y a n d t h e p r e se n t a t i o n o f a p a r t h e i d h i st o r y 281
Figure 16 Hector Pieterson Museum.
Figure 17 Hector Pieterson Museum.
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of the photograph as an artefact with a particular history. This form of
photographic display also serves the pedagogical purpose of the museum; the
large images provide the opportunity for groups of schoolchildren to study
the picture while a teacher or guide talks to them.41 The photographs are
conspicuously not treated as artefacts. It is significant that the image around
which the museum is constructed is not shown in any of its original contextsof publication, and, other than being credited, there is very little information
in the museum about Sam Nzima or the other photographers whose work is
on display. This was a quite deliberate strategy: the photographers were
important witnesses to what was happening, but we deliberately left them
out to try and go for the actors (Ali Hlongwane, 5 March 2004). It also
contrasts with the exhibition on the Treason Trial at MuseumAfrica,
Newtown, Johannesburg, where there is a room devoted entirely to the
photographers who covered the trial (mostly for Drum magazine and Golden
City Post).
It is useful at this point to consider the main photographic genres thatthe museum deploys. The dominant genre is unsurprisingly the black-and-
white documentary or photojournalistic style of photography. The museum
space is dominated by very large wall-mounted and unframed reproductions.
Although some of this work is taken from international press coverage
(which itself has a small section), the strength of the display comes in part at
least from the work of black photographers and the access they had to the
townships to record the protests and the violence. Peter Magubane and Alf
Kumalo are particularly important photographers in this respect. They had
started their photographic careers at Drum and Golden City Post, and in 1976were both working for the mainstream press (to a large extent the white press
depended on images supplied by black photojournalists). Both were involved
in the early discussions about the museum. In addition to images of street
protests, there are other documentary style images, for example a photo-
essay on the security services,42 and a powerful photograph of a classroom of
black schoolchildren. The latter is among the largest reproductions in the
display and derives its power from the tension between the humanism of a
shared moment of reading and the oppression represented by the sparsely
furnished classroom (the children sat three to a desk and sharing books) and
the issue of language, which was the catalyst for the Soweto uprising. There is
also a small alcove with a window overlooking the site of the shooting, and a
photograph of a student who has had to use a wheelchair since being shot
in 1976 visiting Pietersons grave (Figure 18).
Working in relation to this dominant narrative of the immediate
protests are a number of other photographic genres. The early struggle
photography of Eli Weinberg is referenced on one of the monitor displays,
which includes an image from 1953 of a protest against the planned forced
removals from Sophiatown and its redevelopment as a white suburb. The
photograph is of a staged ANC protest showing a coffin which bears a bannerwith the phrase we mourn the death of Sophiatown on its side (contact
V i s u a l C o m m u n i c a t i o n 4 ( 3 )282
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Photograph[y] is ... very popular with the African communities ...
people always want to see themselves, their reflections of themselves,
and if you go to peoples homes you get quite a lot of pictures that ...
they took of themselves, and we do have quite a few images of people
... we also try to pick up photographs where people then pose for
pictures, and say how do they project themselves outside of their
objective, which ... reflects people, what they hoped to be in the future
in life.
Life in Soweto ... that attempts to say that, in spite of the fact that
there was oppression, they still got married, people still had birthday
parties, people had those things, and you can see that reflected in
photographs that really were taken also by just ordinary photographers
not professional people who had a market or a newspaper market in
mind. On the left, where we show the origins of Soweto, contrasts
people in the slums and underground in the mines, with photographs
like people who went into the studio and say I would like to take a
picture. (Ali Hlongwane, 5 March 2004)
Many of these still images are presented as sequences on video monitors.
V i s u a l C o m m u n i c a t i o n 4 ( 3 )284
Figure 19 Life in
Soweto, still
photograph
sequence. Hector
Pieterson Museum.
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As in the Apartheid Museum, there is an appropriation of visual
images produced from the other side of the conflict. A number of artefacts in
the museum come from government archives, for example placards used in
the protests (Figure 20). The museum includes photographs taken on behalf
of insurance agencies (for whom the Soweto uprising was a story of the
destruction of property) and photographs from the police archives, inparticular aerial photographs. In the visual research in the police archives, the
museum researchers also noticed where the camera had been used to follow
particular individuals; some of these individuals had later been shot (Ali
Hlongwane, 5 March 2004). This is represented visually in the museum by a
photograph of an unmarked car used by police as a sniper vehicle. The
display itself to a large degree ignores or obscures the different photographic
practices these represent in favour of providing an overall narrative.
Although a credits board appears at the end of the museum, very little
information is provided alongside the images themselves.
There are also a number of other elements in the display that appearless resolved. For example, the museum has a small auditorium showing a
performance of the poem Africa My Beginning by the poet Ingoapele
Madingoane, filmed at the Soweto YMCA around 1976. Although the arts
played an important part in the liberation struggle, especially in the 1970s
and 1980s, this is the only element of this kind in the museum.
One particularly interesting element is the section on Life in White
N e w b u r y : P h o t o g r a p h y a n d t h e p r e se n t a t i o n o f a p a r t h e i d h i st o r y 285
Figure 20 One of the few artefacts in the museum. Hector Pieterson Museum.
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ending of apartheid, this has led to numerous disputes between photographers
and the archive, which is privately owned by the Bailey family (Jim Bailey
was the original proprietor), about who owns the negatives, who is able to
grant permission to use the images and what level of payment is appropriate.
Similarly, in the 1980s, when Afrapix photographers were sending images to
IDAF in London, and supplying them for use in ANC publications, imageswere not credited and there was no direct payment involved. Should such
images produced in the service of the liberation struggle continue to be free
for use in the post-apartheid period? The level of payment was one of the
main subjects of discussion between photographers and the Hector Pieterson
Museum.43 The need to balance the public historical value of these images
with the rights, and in some cases economic needs, of photographers and
their families is an ongoing issue for South African photography and for
museums such as these.
Finally, what do these museums tell us about the future of photography
in South Africa? There are two issues: the fate of humanist documentary in aSouth African context and the necessity of a new photographic aesthetic after
the austerity of struggle documentary.
Both museums draw extensively on the kind of photojournalism and
documentary photography that developed in an international context during
the 1930s and 1940s, and which took root, at least in part through Drum
magazine, in South Africa during the 1950s. Although the particular
articulation of this photographic humanism in the South African context
deserves greater consideration than I have space for here, the faith in
photography as a means of telling the truth about society, the emotional andmoral appeal to the viewer, the idea of the photographer as witness and the
twin focus on the lives of ordinary people and major political events are all
aspects of these museum displays. The displays draw visually on photographic
modernism with an emphasis on reproducibility and the manipulation of
size. Images are enlarged and mounted unframed onto the wall, or shown as
sequences on video monitors. The particular contexts within which
photographs were originally made and shown are subservient to an overall
message, one that is characterized by reconciliation, a sense of hope for the
future and faith in humanity. The trust Edward Steichen placed in
photography when he created the Family of Man exhibition is echoed here44
I believe it is potentially the best medium for explaining man to himself
and to his fellow man.45
However, at the same time, perhaps these museums represent the last
expression of humanist photography as an important presence in the public
sphere? The peculiar circumstances of South Africa under apartheid the
cultural boycott, the late arrival of television, and the dehumanization of
apartheid itself provided a context in which photographic humanism led a
protected existence, where its moral force was a necessary corollary of the
goal of citizenship and where the criticisms of passivity and sentimentalismthat were levelled elsewhere did not apply.
N e w b u r y : P h o t o g r a p h y a n d t h e p r e se n t a t i o n o f a p a r t h e i d h i st o r y 287
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In the new South Africa, photography is finding a new rationale, and
for many photographers this lies in a more personal and subjective direction
and a renewed interest in aesthetic experimentation. The personal and
subjective narrative documentary mode is one of the defining features of
post-struggle photography. For example, former struggle photographer
Cedric Nunns most recent project has involved an exploration of familyhistory (Van der Merwe and Faber, 2003). Similarly, Peter McKenzie
describes his approach to photography after 1994, when he started working
exclusively in colour, as trying to jerk myself out of this documentary
mentality and try to do documentary but in another way (Cedric Nunn, 26
February 2004; Peter McKenzie, 8 March 2004). This is echoed in the
museums themselves, in the video monitors with their talking heads at the
Apartheid Museum or the archaeology of urban African vernacular
photography at the Hector Pieterson Museum. The subjective documentary
mode is also developed in the work of many contemporary South African
photographers, as for example in Zwelethu Methethwas rich and colourfulphotographs of informal settlements in Crossroads, Cape Town. What these
developments signal is the dissipation of the grand narratives of apartheid
and liberation, and of the photography that reflected these concerns, and a
reworking of photographic humanism to serve more multiple, diverse and
conflicting stories.
A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S
This article is part of a research project on South African photography, which
has received support from the United Kingdom Arts and HumanitiesResearch Board and Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, University of
Central England. The South African National Research Foundation also
funded research visits to South Africa in 2002 and 2003. I must thank Rolf
Gaede, Heidi Saayman, Nick Stanley and the anonymous reviewers for
reading and commenting on earlier versions of this article. They do not of
course bear any responsibility for any inaccuracies or faults that remain. I
must also thank Gail Behrmann for assistance with copyright permissions.
An earlier version of the article was delivered at the 2nd International
Language Comunication Culture Conference, 247 November, InstitutoSuperior Politcnico, Beja, Portugal.
N O T E S
1. Front cover, Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum brochure.
2. Photography, Politics and Ethics, 12 March 2004, University of the
Witwatersrand.
3. I do not wish to overstate the case, and there are alternative positions
which have also developed in South Africa. For example, it is
arguable that during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the townshipsof South Africa provided something of a training ground for
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photojournalists of conflict. For some of these photographers, mainly
young white men, the commitment was to an adrenalin-driven
practice of photography; these photographers primarily serve an
international news agenda, and are to some degree detached from
any political commitment, sense of social justice or human interest.
It is indicative perhaps that Paul Velasco places photographing town-ship violence in the same context as photographing motorsports: I
had been doing Formula One; a week later I was in the township of
Boipathong doing a hectic funeral of a massacre of people who were
killed (Paul Velasco interviewed by Heidi Saayman, Parkmore,
Johannesburg, 5 March 2004). I am grateful to Heidi Saayman for
sharing transcripts from her doctoral research of recent interviews
with South African photographers. See also Marinovich and Silva
(2001).
4. In photography, for example, Alf Kumalo has bought his former
house in Diepkloof, Soweto, and turned it into a museum andworkshop with a permanent exhibition of his images and a facility
for running short courses in photography with young people from
Soweto.
5. Drum was an illustrated magazine for urban Africans first published
in 1951, Sechaba was an official African National Congress
publication, and SASPU National was the South African Students
Press Union National Newspaper; the latter two publications were
banned by the South African government.
6. For a sophisticated reflection on the rawness of photographs andthe implications of this for museum display, see Edwards (2001):
Photographs are very literally raw histories in both senses of the
word the unprocessed and the painful (p. 5).
7. This appropriation has been confirmed in the regular appearance
of Levsons images in exhibitions, posters, publications which seek
to depict the social conditions of black people in South Africa. This
transferral of genre and shifts in meaning from the paradigm of
native studies, to that of African agency occurred in the ritualized
and performative settings of resistance archives (from IDAF to
Mayibuye, and soon to the Robben Island Museum) (Minkley and
Rassool, 1999).
8. More recently, and inspired by the original Drum, Paul Boakye
has set up a new Drum published in London. See .
9. Despite the volume of republication, the visual dimension ofDrum
(unlike the literary component) has not received a great deal of
critical cultural analysis. For some of the critical writing, mainly on
Drum literature, see Chapman (1989), Clowes (2001, 2003), Dodson
(1974), Driver (1996), Fenwick (1996).
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10. I am particularly grateful to archivist Jacqui Masiza for her
assistance with my research in these archives.
11. Patricia Hayes and Fazanah Badsha at the University of the Western
Cape are currently conducting research into the history of Afrapix.
12. The photographers who exhibited in Botswana were: Paul Alberts,
Joe Alfers, Vicki Alhaderf, Omar Badsha, Bee Berman, Tessa Colvin,Ivan Gieson, David Goldblatt, Jenny Gordon, Glynn Griffiths,
George Hallett, Mike Kahn, Lesley Lawson, Ashley LeGrange, Peter
McKenzie, Glenn Masokoane, Jimmi Matthews, Mxolisi Moyo,
Judas Ngwenya, Jon Paisley, Biddy Partridge, Myron Peters, Sam
Peterson, Wendy Schwegman, Robert Tshabalala, Paul Weinberg, J.
Wolverstone, Gisell Wulfson and Morris Zwi. (Art Toward Social
Development: An Exhibition of South African Art, 10 June10
August 1982 at National Museum and Art Gallery, Gaborone,
Botswana [MCH233, Mayibuye Centre Archive, University of the
Western Cape]).13. Cedric Nunn, interviewed by Darren Newbury, Melville,
Johannesburg, 26 February 2004. The United Democratic Front was
a coalition of anti-apartheid organizations formed in 1983.
14. Peter McKenzie, interviewed by Darren Newbury, Melville,
Johannesburg, 8 March 2004. AK refers to the AK 47 Russian assault
rifle and the Zenit B refers to a Russian 35mm camera. The origins
are of course significant given the support for the ANC provided by
the Soviet Union.
15. Gordon Metz, interviewed by Darren Newbury, Cape Town, 21February 2004.
16. My information on the photographic collection of IDAF comes
primarily from interviews with Paddy Donnelly, London, 31
October 2003 and Gordon Metz, Cape Town, 21 February 2004.
17. These images come from contact sheets EW14 and EW60,
respectively, of the Mayibuye Centre collection.
18. IDAF had four programmes: (1) funding legal aid for those who
were victims of unjust legislation and oppressive and arbitrary
procedures; (2) support for their families: Programme [sic] Three
and Four worked together to keep the conscience of the world alive
to the issues at stake through research [3] and the publication and
dissemination of information [4] (IDAF Archive Index W.H.
Frankel 1991, Mayibuye Centre Archive, University of the Western
Cape). See also Herbstein (2004).
19. For example, Margins to Mainstream: Lost South African
Photographers (Ernest Cole, Bob Gosani, Leon Levson, Willie de
Klerk, Ranjith Kally, Eli Weinberg), a Mayibuye Centre exhibition,
curated by Gordon Metz (1994).
20. Personal communication, Wayde Davy, Operations and PublicProgrammes Manager, Apartheid Museum, 23 April 2003.
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21. When I visited in 2003/4 the entrance fee was R25, relatively cheap
by international standards, but expensive for a majority of black
South Africans.
22. Personal communication, Wayde Davy.
23. The notion of witnessing which is so central to South African
documentary and struggle photography, and documentary morewidely, deserves detailed consideration.
24. Survivors often say that those who were not there will never
understand. Not even the most imaginative description of the
Holocaust can truly reflect the horror of those days. No description
can re-enact the emotions of victims and survivors. And still,
even survivors who emphasise the inability of any narrative to
fully portray their sufferings, even they wanted the story to be
told, in spite of all the inevitable shortcomings in the narrative
reflection of historical truth. (Weinberg and Elieli, 1995: 17)
25. There are a number of distinctions at work here, betweengenerations, between white and black South African audiences, and
between South African and international audiences. In a discussion
of the Holocaust monument in Berlin, Gay (2003) refers to the
transition from communicative to cultural memory and from real
environments of memory to symbolic ones (p. 157). Although the
museums discussed here intend to serve all these audiences, the
Apartheid Museum has the strongest emphasis on the symbolic and
the presentation of history for others, with the Hector Pieterson and
also the District Six museums having a stronger sense of being anactive locus for remembering by those who lived through these
events.
26. This compares with the device at the US Holocaust Museum of
providing visitors with an ID card of someone caught up in the
Holocaust, which is carried through the museum, until eventually
finding out their fate. I am grateful to Nick Stanley for pointing out
this parallel.
27. A Native by Mistake!, Drum, July 1956.
28. There is considerable debate in South Africa regarding the
appropriate terms for the hunter-gatherer communities of southern
Africa (see Coombes, 2003: 208). The term Bushmen was introduced
by Europeans; I have used it here because it is the term used in the
caption for this image at the museum.
29. Geoff Mphakati interviewed by Darren Newbury, Mamelodi West, 3
March 2004.
30. Geoff Mphakati, 3 March 2004. Geoff Mphakati, a life-long friend
of Coles, was involved in the discussions with the museum,
although his primary concern was ensuring a fair deal for Coles
family. This in itself raises an important ethical issue about there-use of photographs from the apartheid era, for which many
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photographers or their families do not control copyright. I have not
been able to fully clarify the controversy concerning the text in the
book, although it seems clear that either the process of editing
and/or the final result was not entirely as Cole would have wanted
it. I am also grateful to Patricia Hayes for drawing my attention to
the issue of Coles dissatisfaction with the text.31. See Van der Merwe and Faber (2003). The video pieces in this
display also echo the style of the BBC Video Nation series, and the
style of digital storytelling being developed by Daniel Meadows
(2003).
32. There are in fact several images rather than a single one. Two
versions are used at the museum: a closer cropped portrait image
outside, and a wider shot, showing the crowds behind, inside.
33. A slightly out-of-focus and faded family portrait of Hastings
Ndlovu is also displayed in the museum.
34. Metal shipping containers which can be seen around Soweto, forexample used to house telephone booths.
35. Ali Hlongwane interviewed by Darren Newbury, Hector Pieterson
Museum, Soweto, 5 March 2004.
36. The architects, Mashabane Rose Associates (Phillemon Mashabane
and Jeremy Rose), worked with the Soweto Heritage Trust to secure
funds for the project, which was eventually funded by the Depart-
ment of Environment and Tourism (R16 million), Johannesburg
City Council (R8 million) and Standard Bank of South Africa (R4
million). However, local developers had wanted to build a hotel,retail centre and shebeen on the site (Reilly, 2003: 14).
37. Press coverage of the museum makes much of the fact that
Antoinette Sithole, Hector Pietersons sister who is beside him in the
photograph from 1976, now works at the museum. However,
clearly, for her, this position is ambivalent and in general she would
prefer to remain anonymous when talking to visitors. See Mawson
(2004).
38. The Orlando West community was consulted on what they
wanted the museum to look like. The consensus was that it
should look like the township houses around the site (small,
uniform, red brick) so as not to stand out from them. (Phillemon
Mashabane cited in Castle, 2003: 52)
39. The aggressiveness of the photographic act of shooting also
contributes to the ambivalence here. Similarly, Reilly (2003) notes
that one of the museum windows uses this metaphor, directing the
viewers gaze out towards the Orlando Police Station, a place of key
significance in the uprising: Welded on either side of the window
outside the building are steel plates, directing the view towards the
police station and giving the feeling of a gun sight, aiming back atthe station (p. 15).
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40. The dominance of the African National Congress (ANC), con-
firmed by the 2004 election results, is an issue that those involved in
representing the history of the liberation struggle are acutely
conscious of, and there is a concern not to retrospectively erase
other perspectives from history.
41. I am grateful to Rolf Gaede for this observation.42. This picture story was done for Drum at around this time, although
the archivist was not able to identify the photographer or locate the
original story.
43. The museum negotiated a fee of R20,000 for the use of the Sam
Nzima photograph, with other photographs typically costing
between R3000 and R4000 (Ali Hlongwane, 5 March 2004).
44. As a comparison one might look at the use of photography in the
District Six Museum, Cape Town, which employs a more vernacular
and intimate, and much less precious, visual aesthetic.
45. A common response to the museum by white South Africans is thatit is an education on an aspect of their own society about which
they knew very little at the time. Personal communication, Wayde
Davy.
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B I O G R A P H I C A L N O T E
DARREN NEWBURY is a Reader in Photography at Birmingham Institute of
Art and Design, University of Central England. He is editor of the journal
Visual Studies and the electronic publication series Research Issues in Art,
Design and Media. Current research interests include photographic theory,
practice and pedagogy, visual research methods, and research education and
training in art, design and media.
Address: Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, University of Central
England, Gosta Green, Birmingham B4 7DX, UK.
[email: [email protected]]