Today in History: Nelson Mandela walked out of prison a free man after 27 years

 

 

Jürgen Schadeberg: Nelson Mandela in his cell during a re-visit, Robben Island, 1994

On Feb 11, 1990 Nelson Mandela, the South African anti-apartheid activist walked out of prison a free man after 27 years behind bars.

Rise and Fall of Apartheid

 An anonymous photograph of the crowd at the opening day of the 1956 'Treason Trial', in which 156 anti-apartheid leaders were accused of treason. Photograph: Times Media Collection/Museum Africa, Johannesburg

Rise and Fall of Apartheid – review

Via The Guardian

Jason Farago

Friday 14 September 2012

 

An ambitious exhibition at New York's International Center of Photography documents the cruelties and absurdities of life in apartheid-era South Africa

 

South Africa has given the art world a good number of famous photographers – David Goldblatt, Santu Mofokeng, Roger Ballen – but the wider photographic history of the country remains almost unknown. That would be enough to make Rise and Fall of Apartheid, the extensive and strikingly ambitious exhibition now open at the International Center of Photography in New York, into an important event.

 What makes this show unmissable is something else: the forceful argument of its Nigerian-born curator, Okwui Enwezor, that apartheid-era South Africa was "essentially a neofascist culture", and photography, more than any other artistic medium, offered a means to reinforce it or to contest it.
It's a broadly chronological show, and its opening galleries show the speed with which South African photography was transformed from an ethnographic practice to an engaged, politicised one.

Photographic output exploded after the institution of apartheid in 1948, especially in the contested spaces of South Africa's cities. In one shot we see a bench marked Whites Only, where a young fair-haired girl sits while her black nanny hovers behind her. In another, an older white woman in pearls is sitting on a bench with the same repugnant text on it – but she's wearing a black sash, the symbol of the non-violent women's anti-apartheid organisation.

South Africa goes on trial, by Alf Khumalo, shows the scenes outside courts when three major sabotage trials started in Pretoria, Cape Town and Maritzburg in 1963. Photograph: Baileys Archives

Photography was never just a documentary tool in South Africa. It was also, especially for the black majority, a means of self-fashioning. Drum Magazine, founded in Johannesburg in 1951, modernised the image of the black South African from rural native to urban habitué. Photographers of all races contributed, and the magazine mixed reportage with fashion and arts photography: there's a killer shot by Jürgen Schadeberg of Miriam Makeba in a strapless dress, singing with her eyes closed. Elsewhere in the show there are grimly fascinating photographs by Billy Monk, a bouncer at a Cape Town nightclub in the 1960s, whose snaps of drunk white revellers necking liquor and groping each other are a far cry from National Party propaganda, or the arid fashion magazines Enwezor displays beneath them.

But as the apartheid regime grew more severe – with the banning of the ANC and the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela – the character of the photos changed. The photographers of this era were rarely on assignment: they were actors in the struggle. During the Soweto Uprising of 1976, Sam Nzima photographed a 12-year-old boy shot by police – and then bundled him into a car to take him to a clinic, where the boy was pronounced dead.

Funerals, in particular, frequently served as a key vehicle for black visibility and political action. Mourners gathered by the thousands after the Sharpeville massacre, Steve Biko lying in his open casket, Winnie Mandela alongside the mothers of assassinated activists: these images came to symbolise the apartheid struggle itself, and made racial separation into a matter of life and death.

Harriet Gavshon in Jan Smuts Ave, Johannesburg, by Gille de Vlieg. The image records part of a Black Sash protest stand on 19 July 1985 in which protesters had to stand alone, or be arrested as an illegal gathering. Photograph: Gille de Vlieg

By the 1980s, the anti-apartheid movement had gone global, and the art world took notice. Hans Haacke created fake advertisements for Alcan, the erstwhile Canadian mining giant with large holdings in South Africa, that featured Biko beaten to death. Adrian Piper defaced pages of the New York Times which featured reports on apartheid with grotesque charcoal drawings. And in turn South African artists, from William Kentridge to Zwelethu Mthethwa, gained international attention for work that exposed the cruelties and absurdities of life under the apartheid regime.

In the final gallery we see the famous photograph, shot by Graeme Williams, of Nelson Mandela emerging from prison, his fist raised in the air. But Enwezor refuses to sound a falsely triumphant note at the end of this commanding exhibition. There are no images of happily queuing black South Africans voting in the 1994 election – but bodies dead in the street, or graves being dug for the victims of political violence that continued even after apartheid's end. And the young photographer Thabiso Sekgala shows us a scene from one of the former bantustans: scorched grass, stunted trees, barbed wire, a rusting car, a shack made of plywood and corrugated iron. There is little sign that anyone will ever live here again. The photograph is called "Inheritance."

More on this story

Rise and Fall of Apartheid: photography captures the protests and prejudice – in pictures
A new photographic exhibition in New York examines the legacy of the apartheid system through nearly 500 photographs, films, books, magazines and newspapers, covering more than 60 years of South African history

Selections from People Get Ready: The Struggle for Human Rights

Grey Villet: Sam Mali at gravesites, South Africa, 1985

South Africa, 1985, during the darkest days of apartheid. Nelson Mandela still languished in a cell on Robben Island. The burning issue to Americans was “disinvestment” – were American companies propping up the racist regime by doing business there? And how to tell that story in pictures? We flailed about – and then discovered a 38-year-old black man who seemed to embody many of the contradictions at work in South Africa. By day Sam Mali had an enviable job as foreman of a General Motors plant in Port Elizabeth, supervising a crew that included whites; by night he was a kaffir, required to carry an ID card, banned from areas marked ‘whites only’. He was forced to live with other blacks in a squalid township without power or running water.

 Sam Mali was profoundly torn - between his livelihood, and “the struggle.” He felt compelled to attend the funerals of activists killed by the police – but risked his job and his life by doing so. It was an act of courage or madness to allow himself to be photographed for the entire world to see. Grey Villet's essay on Sam Mali was duly published. When I returned to South Africa a few months later, I was abruptly summoned to the state capitol in Pretoria. There I was confronted by the furious deputy foreign minister of the ruling racist government. Redfaced, he brandished a copy of LIFE – waving it in the air. “These are lies,” he shouted, “and you know they are!”--Chris Whipple



Related: American Nazi Party Demonstration, District of Columbia Stadium,

Washington, DC, October 1, 1961